Virtually Reality

One of the buzz terms in the 80's was "virtual reality", where a user interacted with computer simulated environments to experience the surreal, an experience so immaculately developed that it was infinitesimally close to reality. People could land on Mars and Mercury, scale Mt. Everest on the treadmill, save the world from aliens and even rescue beautiful princesses from tyrants and marry them! (Yes, I am talking about Prince of Persia). The .com boom in the 90's saw the emergence of Amazon and eBay that opened up virtual malls and window shopping was soon replaced by browsing on deals2buy.com or xpbargains.com. The last 5 years the web has seen yet another development that could have a much more seminal impact than any of the phenomenons discussed above - "virtual communities". MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut and the like, have changed the way people interact with each other, something that was not tampered with since the big bang theory (or the days of Adam and Eve, depending on your perspective).

Virtual Communities are slowly becoming the primary way people interact with each other, be it chat rooms in Yahoo, IMs in Google or scraps in Orkut . Members of these communities create Avatars (yet another Sanskrit word sneaking into the English lexicon after Yoga and Karma), which are essentially virtual clones of the users, and interact with other avatars. Blogs are in the process of replacing newspapers as the dominant source of information exchange, so much so that newspaper sites share the same technology as blogs and news reporters are increasingly indistinguishable from bloggers. Even job search and career changes are done through professional networks via LinkedIn or Doostang. Wikipedia has become the go-to site for information on anything, from Paris Hilton to the Hilton in Paris, replacing the big fat volumes that used to adorn our bookshelves.

So, what is news? What is opinion? How do we filter the facts from the subjective analyses? Who are our friends - the profiles and avatars that exist in Orkut and MySpace or the homosapiens that reside in realms of reality. What happened to god old fashioned meet-and-greet or phone-chats. In short, what is real? What is virtual? Have we tampered so much with 0's and 1's that all there exists is virtual reality?

Get Paid to get Interviewed - NotchUp!

I got an invitation from a friend of mine last week to join yet another exclusive, membership-by-invite-only, networking site called NotchUp. Having been an active member of LinkedIn, a successful and widely accepted business networking site, for the past 3 years I can vouch that it is very impressive when it comes to professional networking, job postings, referrals and forum discussions and I found it to be very useful when I was looking to change jobs last year. I have since gotten invites for similar sites like Doostang, Plaxo etc, but I am of the firm belief that when it comes to email addresses, credit cards, networking sites and girlfriends (or wives!), two is one too many to maintain!

NotchUp has a slightly unique selling point in that it is trying to replace pricey headhunters by actually paying people hundreds of dollars to interview. They are in a lot of ways the eBay of business networking, which seems to be the way entrepreneurs are going these days - adapt the successful eBay business model to various industries. Start-ups like Prosper are good examples of using an eBay-style P2P auction platform in financial credit services, rather successfully so far.

NotchUp is free to join, and you can even estimate how much you should ask for an interview with their calculator. For the type of professionals that they are targeting, I would actually say the price is about right. Since they seem to be different than the run of the mill networking site, I decided to sign up just to see how the model works.

From this article at NetworkWorld:

You say you wouldn’t interview with Company X if they paid you?

A startup called NotchUp is betting that’s a bluff.

Debuting this morning at Network World’s DEMO 08 in Palm Desert, Calif., NotchUp founders Jim Ambras and Rob Ellis tell me that 15,000 people a day are signing up for their new eBay-like employment service - based solely on word of mouth. The founders are convinced employers will pay hundreds of dollars directly to people they would like to interview — especially those not actively in the job market — because it will bring them better candidates faster.

So how does it work?

To get started, simply register, create a profile (which is similar to an online resume), and set an interview price. Your interview price is the price at which you’ll talk to prospective employers. Once you’ve created your profile, companies will search it and make you paid offers to interview if you have the skills and experience they’re looking for. Accept the offers you’re interested in, go to the interviews, and we’ll collect the money and transfer it to you.

Personally I feel, It’d be cool if this company merged with LinkedIn since this is complementary to what LinkedIn offers and it would definitely reduce the number of site memberships I have to maintain.