Job Market
Effectively Promoting Your Job Skills: Still the bottom line of how people get hired, even in this age of electronic resumes and personal Web sites.
Film
Frightening Yourself Into a New Life: How one horror fan turned his love of being spooked into a career in the scary movie industry. His advice for going fan to pro: Get educated about your chosen field and practice, practice, practice.
Economics/Geekonomics
European Unemployment at 11 Year High: And our own economy can't make a complete recovery until our international trade partners are out of the woods as well. And while we're thinking along those lines, fears have arisen that the collapse of Dubai World may have greater worldwide financial repercussions, since international investors were involved.
Technology
Ten Predictions For the E-Reader/E-Book Market: Among them, the Kindle and Nook may find their greatest competition isn't each other, but E-reader software on netbooks and smartphones – but the E-readers will also start sprouting phone-like apps.
Google Gears' Days May be Numbered: The company may be scaling back support for the system, which allows some Web apps to be used outside a browser, because it looks like such technology may be includied in the next generation of HTML. HTML5 is definitely worth paying attention to, even if you're not a programmer, because it sounds like it may be a big leap forward for computing in general.
Worldwide Sales of Semiconductor Chips Up in October: And this is encouraging, as chip sales are considered a bellweather for the overall economy.
Video Games
Nintendo Sells 1.5 Million Game Systems During Holiday Weekend: This includes the Wii and the DS. Microsoft also reports selling twice as many Xbox360 units Thanksgiving week as the week before, spurred by special bundles including a package that features Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, while Sony says it had an "all-time high" week for Playstation 3. Not surprising, considering that game consoles are being considered "value for money," not to mention increasingly evolving into total lifestyle devices.
Ubisoft Suffers $73 Million Loss: But it was indicated in the company's earnings forecast, so it came as no shock. The company is hoping to turn its fortunes around with cross-marketing: they're releasing the video game tie-in to James Cameron's Avatar and their own game, Prince of Persia, is scheduled to become a movie next year. (Given the past track record of games based on movies and movies based on games, though, Ubi is taking a big gamble here – let's hope for the sake of future job-seekers there that both game and movie buck past trends!)
Publishing
More than 14K Newspaper Jobs Lost This Year: But this may not be as bleak as it looks for writers and editors, as this includes jobs in all segments of newspaper employment, including circulation and mailroom laborers (E-mail and increasing digital distribution would mean cuts in these areas anyway).
Springer Press Forms Partnership With On Demand Printer: The publisher puts out technical books for use in specific industries, such as science, medicine and law, and is using on-demand publisher CreateSpace for its paperback editions. A smart move for a very specialized company, as it eliminates warehousing and overhead for books that have small print runs anyway, and it points toward the future of small-press publishing.
- Bonnie