slamboard

This post is pretty peppy:

Lymabean is a social networking-ish website for college students. The best way to get a feel for what we’re doing is to watch the demo video we’ve put up. It’s at: http://beta.lymabean.com - and if you’re a student, you can sign up and try it out.

We’re looking for a talented marketing student with some guts. Working in a startup means you get to do a lot of different things, and your ideas can help build the company. The site is brand new – launching with the start of the fall semester – so it’s a pretty sweet time to get in on the action.

Interns will be directly involved with the large-scale launch, including planning and running the launch at your particular school. It’ll help if you’re outgoing and fearless, since our goal is to get out into the public eye. We’ll also be finishing and refining the Lymabean site itself, so we’re looking for someone with experience in Facebook, MySpace, etc., and opinions about how to improve on them.

The biggest thing we’re looking for, though, is ideas for rolling out Lymabean to campuses everywhere – viral-style, guerilla-style, internet-style, whatever new and cool ways we can spread the Bean love. You’ll report directly to the CEO, and your ideas will actually be used (as long as they don’t suck).

We’re in California, and you’re probably not, but that’s cool. We’re looking to get talented people from anywhere – so if you’re graduating and can come out here, or will be spending some time out here for any reason, let us know. We’re not terribly rigid. Plus, our office is literally minutes from the beach. It’s a good place to end up.

Hours are very flexible, and we have a very relaxed and fun office – and we get a lot done because of it. We’re bringing in interns to get new, fresh ideas, and because the company is growing faster than we’re able to keep up with it. What we need most is people who can capture the vision of the Bean, and run with it.

Contact:

Jeff Wurtz, Lymabean CEO

jwurtz@lymabean.com

(714) 856-2762

Interns can be an asset to a company. I have spidey senses telling me that this startup is a dog project that isn’t attracting any money and that they NEED interns if they want to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Or they could be pedophiles. You have to watch out for that in startups.

Ok, so I am being a bit harsh. I checked out the enterprise and it seems to be a going concern. Could it be possible that there are enough anti-facebook university students to make this model profitable?

I was able to find an article stating that founder Jeff Wurtz was ‘closing in’ on some seven figure angel investment. Captain TechCrunch stopped short of calling it dead in the water when he reviewed it back in February. That may be because it is not in the water yet (still in beta) or he may have been PAID to say it looked pretty.

Some people find it hard to get ripped of by scammers, so they have to take out their own ad calling attention to their own stupidity…

if there is any one who has sucessfully set up a marketing or any kind of ineternet base income i am willing to join if it is properly explained. ive tried several and get it but still need a physical person to guide me.

I am presently administering an employment related site that is new. I am working on creating a blacklist to help weed out inappropriate listings from our automated feed pulling thingy (I am such a techy). Anyway, I am stuck actually reading hundreds or thousands of postings. I figured I should get a little blog material out of it, so I am going to quote some of the interesting stuff that I find. This one speaks for itself (with a lot of derision):

Attention Graphic Designers:

I am local designer new to Craigs List. I have to say it is disgusting to see what people are looking to pay for design and it’s even more disgusting to see designers giving in to it.

BUSINESS OWNERS: When you hire cheap and unprofessional design, keep in mind, that is how people will look at your business. When you hire a talented designer, they become an asset to your company. If you choose to hire an amateur for less money, they become an expense. You can spend $300 with an amateur and loose it all, or spend $500 with professional and make money. You decide what you would rather have.

Designers: If you can’t get contract work without charging less than at least $40/hr, you obviously are in the wrong profession. Find something that you are good at. Not only that, you are taking work away from people who ARE talented and who CAN charge more than that. Also, you are completely devaluing our profession.

This guy should abandon Craiglist and try oDesk or Elance.

From Rueters…

More than 50 dissident Catholic groups published an unusually frank open letter to Pope Benedict on Friday saying the Church’s ban on contraception had been “catastrophic” and urging him to lift it.

The letter was published as a paid half-page advertisement in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest newspaper, on the 40th anniversary of the late Pope Paul VI’s controversial encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” which enshrined the ban.

I agree with the sentiment of the letter. Hopefully Pope Benedict will go for it. As an aside, Italy has become a much more secular society over the last 40 years and I would credit the inflexibility of church doctrine as a major factor.

Here are some condom ads that are entertaining and instructive…

Check out this link to a news item from a few years ago. The pope was adamant that condoms were not the answer to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. He suggested abstinence as a better alternative. Maybe he could have gone a bit further with that logic and offered the strategy of not peeing as a way to combat the detrimental effects of drought.

Multi-level Marketing is a perfectly legal business model. Pyramid schemes are illegal. The FTC and similar bodies around the work draw a clear distinction between the two. Some marketers use very inventive strategies to blur that line.

Both types of marketing can chug along making many people lots of money for an indeterminate period of time. They can both potentially fall apart when the limits of a finite market are reached or when people have their confidence shaken, leaving the vast majority of people in a losing situation. The illegal ones can come to a VERY abrupt end leaving the vast majority of people in a losing situation.

The FTC has a fact sheet advising people on how to identify and avoid Pyramid Schemes.

The information in my title is a statistic taken from AmeriPlan’s® own disclosure page. They use ‘text as image’ for anything discouraging that they are obligated to disclose. This means that they meet their obligation without having to worry about the facts showing up in any kind of diligent search by someone who is considering working with AmeriPlan® .

I was not considering Ameriplan® , I was weeding through work at home scams and I had to look very closely at their business model in order to figure it out. It was hard, because the company and its IBO’s do everything they can to obscure two things. First, the product being sold is designed to look like a viable alternative to medical insurance but it is not. Second, the whole thing is an MLM.

If you are not risk averse and if you don’t have a problem selling people on something that may not be of much use to them, you might want to consider AmeriPlan® . You will, of course have to convince several other people that it is a good idea in order to ever see any money for your efforts.

I am going to ignore the Olympics, with one small exception. I am going to try to find out who the major sponsors are so I can try to Boycott them too…

Human Rights Watch has a list of companies that they were pressuring ever since 2001 when Beijing was awarded the games. General Motors and Xerox, Heineken NV from the Netherlands, Fuji Photo Film from Japan, Australia’s Telstra, Coca Cola, Schlumberger/Sema, John Hancock, Kodak, McDonald’s, Panasonic, Samsung, TimeWarner, and Visa. I don’t think I can get away with Boycotting Visa. The rest should be easy.

Edit: It looks like quite a few big sponsors did opt out of this Olympic cycle. GM is the most notable.

I want you to watch a bizarre interview that Dali gave to Mike Wallace. The most absurd part is Mike Wallace prefacing the interview with a straight faced and impassioned endorsement of a brand of cigarettes.

The cigarettes are said to filter out more tar and nicotine than any other cigarette on the market. The video is from 1958, long before Nixon would sign into law the The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act that banned electronic advertising of cigarettes. Broadcasters were very much on the side of tobacco.

If you have a lot of time to kill, the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library is worth a look. There is copious documentation showing that the tobacco companies knew that their product was addictive and carcinogenic during much of the period when they were insisting to the public that they were neither. I don’t know if Mike Wallace was in on it.

Legal transcription jobs have been outsourced from the USA to India for a long time. A new trend is emerging with lawyers that live in India are carrying out litigation support for American firms. It is a good fit because both countries base their legal system on the British model and both countries carry out legal proceedings in the English language. This industry is growing by 60% per year. This doesn’t translate to a decline in business for American law firms. Laws passed in the US in 2006 created a huge demand for electronic recording of legal proceedings. It was not just a matter of getting the work done cheaply, firms in the US were swamped with work as a result of the “e-discovery laws.”

The Washington Post interviewed a recent graduate from an Indian law school who was much happier in an air conditioned office doing prep work for a US firm than he would have been working in the domestic court system. This has me wondering if you can add ‘virtual brain drain’ to the litany of other criticisms leveled against the institution of outsourcing. If India’s brightest and best can enjoy a better quality of life working remotely for Americans, that will leave those in the bottom of the graduating classes to fill the vacancies in the Indian legal system. One of the most important figures in modern history was a mediocre Indian lawyer.

I can’t pinpoint when this happened, but these days advertisers use sex to sell things that have very little to do with sex and they no longer have the old veneer of subtly.