IA client Aaron Stahl hit onto something really very clever with Job Shadow, which provides first-hand accounts and “job shadows” of real people in real jobs.

It’s part education, part revelation, part entertainment.

Aside from being there in person, Stahl’s job shadows offer the best way to learn about a specific job or profession. They go into lots of detail including how much one can expect to make in a particular field. The subjects don’t hold back — they provide the nitty gritty about their jobs, good and bad.

Stahl, whose “day job” is president of P3 Waste Consulting (yes, he interviewed himself), is up to about 400 interviews on the site now, about 30 from Arkansas. He’s interviewed everyone from neurosurgeons to roughnecks. (His profile of an oil derrickman in North Dakota is fascinating.)

It’s a very informative site, and Stahl promises that big things are ahead for it.

We profiled his Fayetteville-based startup for Arkansas Business last summer.

His subjects include some IA clients — we love the client-on-client interaction — and prominent folks in the Arkansas startup scene. We’re gonna start sharing some of them in this space, beginning today.

Check out the Job Shadow profile of Rick West with IA client Field Agent here. In a nutshell, Field Agent provides mobile crowdsourcing. Here’s an excerpt:

How much time off do you get or take?

I am blessed to have a great family to support me.  Net – Family comes before work.  This being said, when you are in a start-up, your family is integrated into your work life as well.

So I take time when I need it, but I am never far away from my iPhone, iPad or Mac Book…

When I take a week of vacation, I manage my time to ensure that I have quality uninterrupted time with my family during the day and then get back into work early morning and late evenings.

What is a common misconception people have about what you or your company do?

They think that we were two guys in a basement who developed an app.  We are the opposite – we are business professionals that created a solution for the Industry and used technology  (iPhone app) to deliver the solution.

What are your goals/dreams for the future?

Picture a day when a business professional is able to get information from any country in the world without ever having to leave their office.

IA client firm StackSearch of Fayetteville has launched Qbox.io, a search feature for developers.

StackSearch provides e-commerce search features, and, you may recall, is not only an ARK Challenge alum but an ARK Challenge winner.

We’ll let the StackSearch crew take it from here:

STACKSEARCH LAUNCHES QBOX SEARCH-AS-A-SERVICE

New Search-as-a-Service for Developers Now Available

Fayetteville, AR – May 20, 2013 – StackSearch, Inc. today announced the availability of Qbox.io search-as-a-service.  Qbox, available via a tiered monthly subscription model, was built “by developers, for developers” and empowers developers to incorporate supported and fully managed ElasticSearch indexes into their apps without having to worry about the hassle of installing, maintaining, and scaling on-premise search infrastructure.

In introducing Qbox, StackSearch CTO and co-founder Sloan Ahrens said that the letter “q” in the Qbox brand stands for the standard html search form syntax.  He continued, “In roughly four years, ElasticSearch has become the standard, leading-edge open standard for fast search applications.  We’ve built a horizontally clustered, auto-scaling, auto-healing instance of ElasticSearch servers on the Rackspace cloud that can handle billions of rows of data before breaking a sweat, and if it did start breaking a sweat, we would just add a few more nodes.”

Mark Brandon, co-founder and CEO of StackSearch, added to Ahrens’ technical explanation and said, “What ObjectRocket is to MongoDB, or Cloudant is to CouchDB, Qbox will be for the ElasticSearch ecosystem.”  Qbox is appropriate for any application that needs to be searchable, filterable, scalable, and fast.  Brandon said that using Qbox enables developers to shave weeks off development time by eliminating the learning curve associated with maintaining an ElasticSearch cluster.

Search has been crucial to data-centric applications since the dawn of computing.  However, in the last few years, the sheer scale of data produced overwhelms traditional relational database (RDBMS) solutions.  “Meanwhile, the class of technologies known as NoSQL attempt to address RDBMS shortcomings.  They are great at storing, persisting, and mapping large data sets but leave something to be desired for search functionality,” Brandon said.  “This is where ElasticSearch comes in.  It is often used in conjunction with, and sometimes in place of, these other transformative technologies to create the fastest and most feature-rich search experience available.”

Leading market research provider Gartner announced in late 2012 that “big data” is driving rapid changes in infrastructure, with $29B in 2013 and $44B in 2016 spent on IT services spending related to search and using big data.  Brandon said we have only seen the tip of the iceberg with the explosion in data.  “Emerging contextual technologies like self-driving cars and wearable computing will make today’s flood of data seem like a trickle in a few years.”

About StackSearch, Inc.:  StackSearch, founded in 2012, is based in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  It provides search-as-a-service via middleware that is always “searchable, scalable, filterable, and brilliantly fast.”  StackSearch’s foundational service is Qbox, and the company also provides a product-search-as-a-service application for e-commerce merchants.

At a recent TED Talk in Long Beach, clinical psychologist (that sounds ominous, doesn’t it?) Meg Jay warned 20-somethings that 30 is not the new 20. Could our 20s really be our defining decade? (For some of us, perhaps that explains it…sigh)

ParadigMed, a University of Arkansas startup formed in Carol Reeves’ New Venture Development graduate course at the Walton Business College, won the Global Award at the LES Foundation International Graduate Student Business Plan Competition in Seattle by finishing second place overall.

ParadigMed has developed Circumex, a “patent-pending adult male circumcision device that offers a cost-effective, disposable, non-surgical alternative to current circumcision methods and can be used in an outpatient setting. Circumex addresses challenges associated with reducing the heterosexual transmission rate of HIV globally, primarily in Africa.”

According to the UA, the LES competition ”focuses on business plans that not only hinge on groundbreaking technologies and services, but that also emphasize intellectual property strategies that support business goals. The LES Foundation, a foundation of the Licensing Executives Society Inc., received nearly 60 business plan submissions from throughout the United States and Canada, as well as from Australia, Hong Kong, Italy, Korea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, and Thailand.”

ParadigMed, led by Stephen Kayode and Tara Mink, won the Global Award at LES and $5,000 for its second place finish over the weekend. Empire Robotics of Cornell University won the grand prize, and placing second with ParadigMed was MRS from the Universita del Salento, Italy.

Empire is developing a “platform robotics technology through its first product, a universal robot gripper.” MRS has developed technology to “increase the efficiency of PVD (Physical Vapour Deposition) processes used in the production of microchips, micro electro-mechanical systems, solar cells and other hi-tech devices.”

The Global Award at LES “is presented annually to the team whose plan best deals with intellectual property rights and their use in the global business environment,” according to the UA.

Earlier this year, ParadigMed made the finals of the prestigious Spirit of Enterprise Graduate Business Competition at the University of Cincinnati and the IBK Capital-Ivey Business Plan Competition at the University of Western Ontario. Business-plan teams from the UA have been experiencing success at national competitions and positioning themselves for success in the real business world.

Add ParadigMed to that list.