Digital Underwriter

Everybody probably encountered an underwriter -- somebody who underwrites an insurance, a loan, or whatever. But are those people really signing papers all day or are they using digital signatures? The search on Google (the new authority on everything) returns 406,000 results for the term "underwriter digital signature " -- so they must do it that way. Now, who is sure that his underwriter is a real person and not some computer system?

Mark-to-Market Marker

If you own a car you can go to Kelley Blue Book and figure out what your car is worth -- but can you actually sell it for that price. What if you have a hummer? In that case a guestimator comes in and figures out the fair market value of your car -- so if you are a rental company you do that every month and have what people call the "book value" -- that's what all your cars are worth -- because this is kind of silly the most businesses use deprecation (like a car is loosing 10% of it's value each year).

Now enter Jeff Skilling from Enron: What happens if after deprecating over a couple of years it turns out you did a good purchase and your car is worth more than you have on the books? Some lesser executive who came in after you might reap that windfall and get a gigantic bonus. That's where mark-to-market was invented to figure out what's going on right now and to prevent lesser executives from reaping fat bonuses.

Bonuses -- they are paid on Wall Street and so mark-to-market is an important measure there. But what happens if your boss looks at the dealer price to buy your car instead of the dealer price to sell it -- your bonus might be much smaller. So this is all up to interpretation and depneding on who you ask mark-to-market is a different value. In comes the marker (usually employed by one of the big-4-accounting firms) who determines a definite value based on the current political climate (so people with weatherman experience preferred). So one day Fanny Mac is capitalized ok and if you add up some different numbers they look bankrupt. One day your Hummer is worth $40K and the other $20K -- depending which dealer you are shopping it to and what new car you are gonna buy...

Stanford MBA

[to have a successful startup] "you hire a CEO with a Stanford MBA" (Javaposse #195 - not the website but in the podcast)

That sums up how things are -- if your CEO is not from Stanford you gotta switch companies...

Avatarist

he, who adds 3d chat to his web site, blog, or anything. An avatarist used Google's Lively or similar technology to add 3d chat capabilities to web sites. This title is related to the Online Cartographer and often the same person has both titles.

Senior Free Ticket Give Away Manager

Just won a free ticket to NFJS -- a courtesy of Altlassian (they once gave me free beer at ApacheCon). I am really excited and so I started thinking about the people giving away free tickets. This needs to be organized, budgeted, accounted for, and so on -- so it's probably a management position to give away free tickets and you probably need some marketing reps forging partnerships with all the conferences you wanna give free tickets to go to. Throw in some evangelists, a marketing strategist, somebody from strategic planing and the whole thing is getting big.

So, yea, it needs a manager to handle that:-)

Student Group CEO

Any organization has a president, a treasurer and a secretary -- those are the ones who have the authority to sign contracts, checks, or anything. A CEO is some kind of fantasy title which does not have any legal meaning nor any authority -- that's why in most corporations the CEO is also the president (or the president acts as the CEO) and some corporations have fantasy titles (I still prefer King)

Usually a student group has a president to stay in line with how things are in the real world. But some students feel it gives their resume more cachet if they are the CEO of a group -- especially business plan competitions call their head honchos CEO in the hope this will help them to sway more influcence in the venture scene. This just confuses from the real issue -- who is calling the shots - who is the president?

By the way I am the Chief Blogging Officer, King, CEO and everything else of titleoftheday.blogspot.com -- if I would add that to my resume would you hire me? So why are you going after some CEO of some student group to better cafeteria food?

Serialized Entrepreneur

In business a serial entrepreneur is somebody who starts a lot of businesses (Wikipedia) -- a serialized entrepreneur is somebody who submits his business plan to as many student business plan competitions as possible. You have a cousin at South Dakota State? Add him to the team, submit your plan, and split the proceeds...

Usually adding somebody from a top-notch business school (see out upcoming article on Harvard MBAs) gives the submission more credibility and glamour and ultimately increases your chances. So a good serialized entrepreneur will add also some cousins from Harvard and MIT to the team -- just to make sure...