Every now and again, Facebook shows me an ad that I feel compelled to click, simply because I can’t believe what I’m seeing and need to know more. The latest of these ads is for the product pictured above: the AutoExec AECRATE-15, which retails at Home Depot for…
$300.
More precisely, it retails for $296.93, which rounds up to $300, but to my mind, that seems pretty exorbitant for a milk crate with a power inverter and stands for a tablet and smartphone. The manufacturer doesn’t even attempt to hide this fact: it’s listed as “Milk Crate Vehicle and Mobile Office Work Station with Phone Mount, Tablet Mount and Power Inverter”.
I’ve designed and developed mobile apps who primary users are people that work in their cars and trucks, so I understand the usefulness of the AECRATE-15, with its ability to support and charge your electronic office equipment and store your paperwork.
Surely this is something that you could put together for considerably less than three “Benjamins”.
Component
Price
Bestek 300W Power Inverter (Plugs into your car’s “cigarette lighter” outlet and provides two household-style electrical outlets and 2 USB electrical outlets)
Juggernaut storage milk crate (Assuming you don’t simply grab one from behind a convenience store, just like every university student building makeshift furnishings or any self-respecting DJ)
An evening covering the overview of wireless defense. We will discuss the challenges you may face protecting your wireless networks. We will also talk about some of tools available for defending your networks. The evening will wrap up with strategies you can implement based on information gained in practical testing . As always we will run through “live” demonstrations as the demo Gods allow.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, February 21 through Sunday, February 27, 2022.
This list is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog,Global Nerdy! For almost five years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
The mandatory omicron variant announcement
Prior to the omicron variant, there was still a pretty good chance that you didn’t personally know someone who’d caught COVID. Today, thanks to its contagiousness, omicron has made it so much more likely that someone you personally know has caught it — and probably has it now.
Omicron’s out there, and it’s not as “mild” as some people have described it. Be smart and responsible — get your booster, mask up in crowds, favor outdoor and online events, and we can get back to what passes for normal sooner!
This week’s events
I try to keep this list up-to-date. I add new events as soon as I hear about them, so be sure to check this list’s page on Global Nerdy often!
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
It’s the time of the year when the New York Times Magazine publishes its “Future of Work” issue, and this year’s edition features an article titled Tech Companies Face a Fresh Crisis: Hiring. It tells the story of the current tech job market from the recruiter’s point of view.
It also contains three things that you should learn if you’re on the job market…
#1: It’s a tech job-seeker’s market, and 20 times more so for cybersecurity.
The article reports the following unemployment numbers:
For the general economy — that is, all work in all industries — the unemployment rate, which has been trending downward over the past year, is about 4%.
If you limit the unemployment rate to tech workers — the article doesn’t specify what counts as “tech” — the unemployment rate is less than half of the general rate: 1.7%.
If your area of specialization is cybersecurity, the unemployment rate is about a tenth of that for tech: 0.2%.
#2: Be nice to tech recruiters; it’ll make you stand out.
In a world of remote work and (hopefully temporary) reduced in-person contact, having good relations with at least a handful of recruiters can extend your reach and bring new opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise have.
At the same time, I’ve seen that people tend to ignore recruiters as long as they have work, and come running to them once they need a job. As the article puts it:
Tech employees today tire of the attention from recruiters, the friendly hellos on LinkedIn, the cold calls (which Dyba does not make). “They think we’re like used-car salesmen,” Dyba said of her quarry. To be a recruiter in tech is to be an in-demand commodity for those companies doing the hiring but to feel like something of a nuisance — like an essential gear that emits a loud, irritating noise.
This tendency to treat recruiters transactionally won’t endear you to them, and doesn’t give them any incentive to stand up for you when you really need them.
Many recruiters who reach out to techies get answered with silence or one of those LinkedIn auto-replies:
Want to make an impression on a recruiter whose help you might need in the future? Reply to their message, even if it’s just to say “Hey, I’m happy where I am right now, but let’s stay in touch in case things change.”
Here’s something that’s worked for me: Go through your inbox and look for recruiters whose messages went unanswered and answer them. I’ve done this and emailed recruiters that I forgot to reply to. They often see no response at all, and they appreciate it when someone gets back to them.
There’s a lot of advice to hold off on answering questions about your salary expectations. There needs to be more advice about waiting to ask about how much the job will pay, if these excerpts from the article is any indicator:
“If you wouldn’t mind kind of talking me through your background, I would love to hear a little bit more about you and what you’ve been doing,” she said. The young man on the other end of the phone was lovely and polite, with a Master of Science degree in business analytics. Dyba [the recruiter featured in the story] was immediately charmed, if only because — unlike so many tech recruits — he didn’t start the conversation by asking, within the first six minutes, what the compensation was.
…
Another recruiter said that when she sends out mass blasts, she often gets back emails that say only three words: “Rate? Remote? Client?”
Bloomberg’s story on Ericsson. Click the photo to read the article.
If you’ve recently been caught or called out for doing something you shouldn’t have been doing, you might be able to console yourself with the fact that whatever you did probably isn’t as bad as what the Swedish telecom and networking company Ericsson did: they may have paid ISIS — yes, that ISIS — for access to transport routes in Iraq.
In an interview with the Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri (“Today’s Industry”), Ericsson’s CEO said that the company noticed what he called “unusual expenses” in Iraq that go back to 2018, and that they haven’t yet determined the final recipient of the money.
The “money quote” (pardon the pun) is:
“What we are seeing is that transport routes have been purchased through areas that have been controlled by terrorist organizations, including ISIS.”
After investigating, they decided that it wasn’t a big enough deal to make public:
“The materiality of our findings did not pass our threshold to make a disclosure. That was our judgment when we completed the investigation two years ago.”
This is the latest in a series of humiliating episodes for the company, who are still coming out from under a major corruption probe (they had to plead guilty to a campaign of corruption and bribery across China, Djibouti, Indonesia, Kuwait, and Vietnam from 2000 to 2016), and from paying a settlement for over $1.2 billion to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Last October, the DOJ accused them of breaching the settlement agreement by failing to provide certain documents.
As you may have guessed, Ericsson’s share prices have dropped in the wake of this news. The reported drops range from 11 to 15%, depending on the news source.
Many of the headlines refer to the fact that Ericsson may have given money to ISIS for favors, which reminds me of this scene from Arrested Development:
It’s another Tampa Bay success story: Tampa-based Peerfit, who refer to themselves as a corporate wellness platform, have been acquired by FitOn, the mobile health and fitness app known for its exercise classes led by celebrities.
Peerfit have been growing in leaps and bounds, amassing customers and funding, including a $10 million round in January 2020 that was led by Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and NoCal-based Virgo Investment Group. Peerfit connects employers to fitness and wellness services, acting as a provider for companies that provide wellness benefits — they’re currently used by 13,000 employers. CEO Ed Buckley will remain in charge of Peerfit, and their team (about 50 people, according to Tampa Bay Business Journal) all plan to stay on.
FitOn’s story is one of a good product that had great timing. Launched in 2019, the app provides at-home workouts led by celebrities including Halle Berry, Gabrielle Union-Wade, Lindsay Vonn and Julianne Hough. When the pandemic forced gyms to close, their user base grew to over 10 million, and 80% of their users livestreamed workouts in 2020.
Is this a good thing for Peerfit? For the Tampa Bay scene?
My opinion is yes, and for now, I’ll keep my answers to bullet points:
It’s good for Peerfit, part 1: When you create a business with “startup” ambitions (as opposed to having the goal of creating a so-called “lifestyle business”, a model that is unfairly mocked and deserves more respect), your goal is to exit. In general, there are three kinds of exits:
You fail. This could be closing up shop, or getting acquired at a “clearance” price.
You IPO. Typically, to do this, you first have to become a unicorn — a private company with a valuation of over $1 billion. Shareholders are generally ecstatic, and employees generally do really well. This is the least likely scenario; there are just over 1,000 of them in the world.
You get acquired. Shareholders are generally pleased, and employees generally do pretty nicely. This is the most likely scenario, as 97% of exits are an M&A-type transaction. It’s also usually the best outcome for a small- to medium-sized startup, which is where Peerfit fits.
It’s good for Peerfit, part 2: FitOn and Peerfit are complementary: one’s provides wherever-you-happen-to-be workouts, and the other provides fitness benefits to companies. FitOn provides capital, reach, and an app in the top 20 in the App Store, and with a 4.9 rating (from almost 230K ratings!). Peerfit can take the FitOn app to corporate customers.
It’s good for the Tampa Bay tech scene: It takes more than evangelizing the benefits of choosing Tampa Bay as a place where you’ll live, work, and play to build our tech scene. That’s just telling. Telling helps, but we also need to show, and success stories such as Peerfit are exactly what we need.
