ReadWriteWeb

In a post last week about how to measure the effectiveness of startup employees, we mentioned that perhaps the number of hours worked isn't the best metric. With that said, this weekend was Labor Day weekend in the U.S., one of the more popular get-out-of-town weekends of the entire calendar, but does that apply for entrepreneurs and startups? Certainly there were some die-hards out there that refused to leave their desks this weekend, but we still wanted to know - do startups labor on labor day? I polled Twitter over the weekend and got some interesting responses. Here's what you had to say.

Montreal-based entrepreneur and blogger Ben Yoskovitz knows a thing or two about hiring employees at startups. Yoskovitz formerly founded his own company, Standout Jobs - a tool designed to improve hiring and recruiting techniques for small businesses on the Web. Needless to say, the hiring and performance tracking of employees at the SMB level is a topic of interest for Yoskovitz. One of the items he recently wrote about is whether startups should hire workaholics expected to work 80+ hours each week, and some interesting arguments against this doctrine emerged.

The businesses of the 21st century are rapidly evolving to incorporate radical new methods of running a business and managing employees, and no group knows this better than the startup community. Startups have been at the cutting edge of innovation not only in the products they create, but in the way they run their companies and treat their workers. In this week's Weekend Reading selection, we look into how years of scientific research has uncovered what motivates people to be outstanding employees and how successful companies are incorporating these methods.

Earlier in the week we mentioned a preview of a presentation Steve Blank is giving this Friday at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in which he describes how startups and larger companies are unique and have differing needs. One of the ways they distinguish themselves from one another is that the roles of executives play out in very different ways, and sometimes startups make the mistake of hiring execs that would fit in better with a larger company. Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz wrote recently on this very topic and provided some hints to startups looking to hire execs.

Okay, so you'll have to file this one under "future weekend reading" because this book isn't out yet, but I thought I would provide a bit of a heads-up post in anticipation of what should be a very interesting read. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose is written by Tony Hsieh (pronounced "Shay"), CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos, and lands in bookstores in early June. Hsieh helped to create one of the most successful online retailers which was well known for its stellar customer service and which eventually was acquired by Amazon.

How would you feel if your employer constantly tracked your activity on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter in real time? If it's up to Teneros, your employer will soon use the company's new Social Sentry service to follow your every move on social media sites in real time. As Teneros points out, more than 70% of white collar workers have Facebook accounts - which they regularly access during work hours - and a number of corporations like Domino's Pizza and British Airways have recently suffered major damage to their carefully constructed brand images because of their employees' actions on social networks.

For entrepreneurs trying to form a startup, one of the first challenges they face that persists throughout the businesses life is how to find and keep talented partners and employees. From finding that first co-founder to finding the prolific programmers to fill your ranks later down the line, talent acquisition is always a major step in any business. Just look at some of the deals that have gone down in the Valley; Facebook didn't buy FriendFeed for their technology, that deal was mostly about getting FriendFeed's talented employees on the Facebook team.

FaceTime Communications, the makers of hardware solutions for security, management, and compliance, have collected live traffic data from more than 80 mid to large commercially deployed networks worldwide - data representing the daily web-based activities of more than 100,000 corporate workers. At the same time, they surveyed I.T. managers on a number of topics, including how many Web 2.0 applications they believed were in use on their networks. They then compared the two sets of findings. The conclusion? On a day-to-day basis, it seems I.T. managers don't know what their employees are doing - or what web apps they're using.

Marvel Entertainment - home to characters like Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, and the Hulk - has announced plans to release a series of "motion comics" via iTunes. Introduced at New York Comic Con, the new format would have the iPod- and iPhone-bound digital books taking on characteristics of both print and animation with audio and motion enhancing the typical panel-based format of print.

It's been a week since the Android Market - the primary location for downloading applications for the Google G1 Android mobile handset - opened its doors for business. And while the noise surrounding the opening of a marketplace for Android applications hasn't met with the same cacophonous reverberations of the handset it hopes to unseat, adoption of Android applications is showing steady growth, according to a recent report released by Medialets.