Idea for Playboy March Issue: Women in Tech

Yesterday Playboy came up with an interesting initiative to draw attention to the global financial crisis and help us look at the situation with at least some humor now that it’s obviously needed. The adult entertainment magazine has announced an idea for women of Wall Street special feature for the February 2009 issue to help at least 20 these women survive the crisis. Applications to pose are accepted from women from various Wall Street financial institutions - both still employed and already unemployed.

The 20 women are supposed to get some attention, visibility and promotion that could obviously help those unemployed continue with their careers in some other industry. There will also be some remuneration but the amount has not been determined yet.

So I have an idea that could provide quite a number of topics for future Playboy issues given the state the internet industry now is in and the gloomy predictions for the future. Over the last weekend we discussed Jason Calacanis predicting 50-80% of all startups will be killed by the economic downturn within the next 18 months. We have already heard rumors of pending mass job cuts in Yahoo (with predictions as high as 20% of the entire personnel) and only today we have got to know about b5 media significantly changing their payment scheme that will also negatively affect revenues of hundreds of bloggers working for the network.

It is quite obvious that we will hear tons of bad news in the future as well so Playboy could easily find numerous models within the startups world now that VC funds will rarely invest in risky projects (or worse any projects at all which is very probable). I believe the first idea could be Women of Yahoo for March issue and maybe Women of AOL for April with further ideas to arrive pretty soon. And while I’m not suggesting Sue Decker herself, I think there are plenty of women to be left unemployed if the rumors we hear are true.

One thing is for sure - people will continue to buy Playboy or at least visit the magazine’s website no matter how deep the crisis is and so it could offer some pretty nice promotion opportunities to many of the females in the tech industry left without their geeky jobs. But while this is an opportunity for women exclusively, those broke male startup CEOs and owners instead of coding for food could opt to produce some frivolous websites that will probably still draw traffic and hopefully money instead of coding yet another free and ad-supported super poking application for Facebook. How about a site to sell photos of naked girls with their laptops or iPhones? Or maybe naked gadget review subscription-based sites? Grab the idea until it is too late to implement.