In its report, “The Incredible Disappearing Office: Making Telework Work,” The Conference Board finds that the advancements in home networking over the last decade have been accompanied by teleworking gains among a number of these technology-reliant professions, including insurance underwriters 4.5 percent, up 275 percent since 2001-2003 and computer software developers 6.1 percent, up 127 percent.
via Teleworking Triples Over the Last Decade – Insurance Networking News.
GEICO Hiring Hundreds – Insurance Networking News.
Finally some good news on the insurance employment front.
The Internet, and all it has come to include, is the most powerful interruption technology ever invented. It slices and dices our focus, fractures and distracts it, gives us less and less of more and more. It prompts us to skim, scan, and skip rather than immerse ourselves in any one thing.
Technology has no business setting our agenda, but it has turned into our dominatrix. Masochistically — but all too willingly — we submit to it. Emailing, texting and tweeting, searching Google, checking Facebook, and surfing websites not only consumes our time and energy, it also diminishes our capacity to pay attention to anything for very long — or to resist the next digital temptation.
via You Are Not A Computer (Try As You May) – Tony Schwartz – Harvard Business Review.
Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click-thrus, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice. Pizza Delicious got close to twenty times the number of Facebook fans they usually get in two days. The guys were stoked.
via Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How’d They Do? : Planet Money : NPR.
I’ll cut to the chase so you don’t have to read or listen to the entire article. It didn’t work.
After a long night of asking every single customer where they found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.
Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It’s still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.
Update –
I read the article first, then listened to the podcast. Listen to the podcast, it’s funnier than hell.
The performance of anyone doing anything will exhibit regression to the mean. If you do well at something, it’s because of some combination of skill and luck.
via Regression to the Mean, JPMorgan Edition | The Baseline Scenario.
I’ve been reading lots of press about the JP Morgan trading loss. This article from The Baseline Scenario paints a different and most interesting perspective.
The job cuts included “fewer than 40 in Richmond and fewer than 30 in Lynchburg,” company spokesman Tom Topinka said in the statement. The cuts affected the company’s life insurance and information-technology units.
via Genworth cuts some jobs in Richmond, Lynchburg | Richmond Times-Dispatch.
You can always tell which direction sales is headed by keeping tabs on who gets laid off.
A new study released Thursday by the University of California, Irvine, which was co-written with United States Army researchers, found that people who do not look at e-mail on a regular basis at work are less stressed and more productive.
via Taking E-Mail Vacations Can Reduce Stress, Study Says – NYTimes.com.
Did we really need a study to tell us this?
The company has reduced its total workforce by 730 positions, or almost 10 percent, over the past four years, mainly by attrition.
via American Family Information Services Department Incurs 87 Layoffs – Insurance Networking News.
Short articles like this make me wonder what’s really happening. We don’t know the total number of staff in the company’s IT department so we cannot know what percentage of the entire staff was affected. So I went online and found the following:
The cut positions included 85 people based at the company headquarters at 6000 American Parkway and its other Madison location, off Milwaukee Street, plus two people outside Madison. There are 850 people remaining in the company’s information services division, making the job reductions equal to about a 10 percent cut there.
Exchange of Services and Adding New Business Lines: I have a good friend who is a young MD type doctor. He was loaded down with student loans and he operates his own office in Encino, CA, a fairly wealthy area. It costs him $225 per hour to keep his office doors open. He had to do hospital rounds at night to survive. Radio time is now going begging. So, I worked a deal for him with a local radio station. He gets advertising air time and even has his own medical “show” on that station. He is also now the personal doctor for the station owner and the few employees. This was an exchange of services. I did not charge for putting this deal together but it lead to a new business line for him that I proposed and share in that revenue. He is located in a wealthy area. There are a lot of wealthy older people in the area who do not like going to see the doctor but from time to time, need medical help and attention. So we set up a medical concierge service that also gets advertised on that radio station. We make house calls and the fee is not cheap. We now have eight doctors on call and business is brisk.
via Opportunities EVERYWHERE Market Sniper – Slope Of Hope with Tim Knight.
The example above is one of the real life money making opportunities highlighted in the article. Go read the rest. This is tremendous food for thought.
I started to think about my own business after reading the article. A while ago I recognized my opportunities were similar to the ones described by Knight. I began to understand that I had started working at the intersection of disciplines. Underwriting and law. Auditing and underwriting. Technology and underwriting.
Can you take your expertise to the intersections of disciplines to meet unmet needs?
HT – Michael Panzner at Financial Armageddon
The largest open long-term care insurance claim has reached $1.7 million in paid benefits, according to a just-released report from the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance (www.AALTCI.org). The claimant, a woman, purchased coverage at age 43, paying an annual premium of $881. Three years later her long term care insurance claim began and has continued for almost 15 years.
lifeunderwriter.net 
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