One of my favorite daily activities during college was doing the crossword puzzle in The Cornell Daily Sun. It was a nice diversion during lunch (or an especially boring class). One of the best things that you can do while working on a crossword puzzle is to get one of the large horizontal words in the middle of the puzzle. These words are often 32 or 33 across, which is where 33Across got their name. They’re a company that “uses social graph data to dramatically improve online marketing” and “unlock the puzzle of social connections.” In other words, they have built a platform that targets advertising to people whose online connections already use the products or services that are being advertised. 33Across is based in New York, NY, and they have another major office in Sunnyvale, CA. Social advertising really is a lot like 33 across on a crossword puzzle–it’s really tough to solve, but when you do it opens a world of opportunities.
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Usually I try to tell you about internships at cool startups before they get big, but I missed the boat with Foursquare, which is based in New York, NY. I guess I was too busy checking in everywhere to remember to look at their internships. For a while I was really into the location-based social network. I used it to run into friends who were nearby, get free stuff from restaurants, and even meet some new people. Eventually, though, I got sick of telling my Foursquare friends and Twitter followers where I was no matter how boring the place might be. But for old time’s sake I’ll tell you where I am right now. I’m at Cool Beans in Bellefonte, PA. They don’t have any Foursquare specials, but they have free wi-fi and a nice atmosphere, which is exactly what I was looking for in a pitstop as I drive from Connecticut back to Chicago today. I doubt my check-in today will lead to my meeting someone interesting, but you never know.
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These days it’s hard to find an advertisement where a brand isn’t encouraging you to Like them on Facebook or Follow them on Twitter. (And since I mentioned it, you should Like Us, Follow Me, and Join our LinkedIn Group.) I’m still not convinced that it’s a better idea to send traffic to your presence on someone else’s site than it is to send people to your own site, but everybody is doing it. And if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. Involver is a company that “provides marketers with everything they need to create rich experiences across the social web.” They’re based in San Francisco, CA, but they’re adding offices rapidly. So far they also have locations in New York, NY; Austin, TX; Los Angeles, CA; and Chicago, IL. To put it more simply, Involver has built a platform on top of the major social media platforms. By using Involver, you can more simply craft an exceptional user experience within the framework of sites like Facebook and Twitter.
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Texas,
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Have you ever heard of a company or industry that wants you to use less of their product? Doesn’t really make sense, does it? It does if you’re in the power industry, at least to some extent. Some of the biggest proponents of energy efficiency are the utilities themselves. The reason for this is decoupling, or the “disassociation of a utility’s profits from its sales of the energy commodity.” It’s a tactic used by many states to create positive incentives for energy companies to be more green. Still, promoting energy efficiency to consumers is no easy task. That’s where OPOWER comes in. They’re based in Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA, and they use “cutting edge behavioral science and patent-pending data analytics” to enable “utilities to connect with their customers in a highly targeted fashion, motivating reductions in energy use, increased program participation and overall customer satisfaction.” It’s all about helping consumers make better informed decisions (which usually are also better decisions for the environment).
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I like writing about companies that I find interesting, which isn’t hard because I have very broad interests. However, I occasionally come across a company that I know is interesting, but it just doesn’t resonate with me. That’s definitely the case with Shecky’s. They’re a New York, NY based company that makes it their “mission to create social experiences that empower and reward women to discover and socialize with their girlfriends.” I think you can understand why that doesn’t resonate with me, but you’ll impressed to learn that Shecky’s was actually founded in 1998 by a Wall Street executive named Chris Hoffman. Despite the potentially ambiguous first name, Chris is a man who is apparently very in touch with “what women want.” He started by publishing the 1st Shecky’s Bar, Club & Lounge Guide in 1998, and then moved on to hosting hosts the “1st Girls Night Out” in New York City in 2001. In 2002 Chris found Claudia Chan and made her president after merging her company into Shecky’s. The business has continued to grow with a focus on improving the interactions that women have with their girlfriends, and I’m sure having a woman at the helm who understands the market better than any man ever could is a big reason for that.
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I love Opening Day! (Check out all of our baseball related internships.) It’s like Christmas in April…or late March (I really don’t like having the season start before April Fool’s Day). I try to watch as many Yankees games as I possibly can, so today represents a big change in my daily routine. When I first moved to Chicago, I had to rely on the MLB At Bat app on my iPhone to listen to games. Then I got DirecTV with MLB Extra Innings so that I could watch all of the games in HD. Now I’m using MLB.tv for viewing games on my phone, laptop, and television through an AppleTV (I’ve already watched quite a few spring training games). However, nothing beats watching my favorite team in person. Unfortunately, when the Yankees come to Chicago to play the Cubs at Wrigley this year, I’m going to be out of town. But last year when they came to play the White Sox, getting tickets through StubHub was a cinch. The San Francisco, CA based company is an eBay subsidiary, and they enable people to buy and sell tickets to all sorts of events–from baseball to rock concerts.
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We’re extremely lucky to be coming of age in a time when the Internet is opening up so many economic opportunities. When I graduated from college, I had no idea what was possible. As I became more and more frustrated with my job search, I started to look at online business models. Five years later I’ve built a profitable business that has helped people land awesome jobs and internships. Without today’s technology, I never could have built what I did so cheaply, which is why I’m convinced that making new technologies available to the masses at affordable prices is the key to economic growth. That’s why I’m so interested by the Washington, DC based One Economy Corporation. They’re “a global non-profit organization that leverages the power of technology and connects underserved communities around the world to vital information that will improve their lives.”
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Did you know that there’s a wild coyote population that lives in downtown Chicago? I’ve heard plenty about suburban coyotes (my dog was attacked by one a while back), but you don’t hear much about urban coyotes. I even saw one running through the streets once, but I assumed it was someone’s German Shepherd that got loose until I learned about Chi-town’s coyotes and their affinity for eating vermin. Anyway, there are also coyotes on the North Shore–Lake Forest, IL to be specific, but I’m not talking about wild dogs. I’m talking about Coyote Logistics, a logistics firm that was referred to me by a reader and that came in at #6 on the Inc. 500 last year with 13,847% three-year growth to $249.8 million in revenue. Since many of you probably know less about logistics than you do about urban coyotes (now that I’ve told you all about them), I’m going to enlighten you with a definition straight from Wikipedia. Logistics is “the management of the flow of goods and services between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet the requirements of customers,” and it “involves the integration of information, transportation, inventory, warehousing, material handling, and packaging, and occasionally security.”
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You know what’s a pain in the butt? Collecting money from people. Maybe you’re the captain of your intramural team and need to collect entry fees from your teammates (my volleyball league starts on Sunday!) or your group of friends want to do the “pitch in” and buy The Drake a big-screen tv (yes, that’s a Seinfeld reference). Maybe you want to easily collect donations or collect money from your 9 deadbeat roommates who never pay the cable bill. (Or maybe you’re collecting money for an NCAA Tournament bracket that may or may not be violating gambling laws.) You can collect cash, checks, or try to use PayPal. No matter what you do, it’s probably going to be frustrating. WePay is a Palo Alto, CA based company that wants to change that. They’ve built the “best way to collect money from other people.” Their site allows you to “send bills, sell tickets, and accept donations” while easily tracking payments and managing money. It’s essentially a group bank account (you can even get a debit card for it)
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Ever tried a Craisin? You probably ate about 100 of them, right? The only ingredients are sugar and cranberries (hopefully not in that order), but I’m convinced they’re adding something else that makes them highly addictive. Ocean Spray has made a name for itself by consistently finding new ways to market the fruit that they produce.They’re an agricultural cooperative (I figured some monster corporation owned the brand), which means that they’re “owned by large group of cranberry growers throughout North America.” The large majority of the 600 members are cranberry growers, but that number also includes about 50 Florida grapefruit growers. This means that Ocean Spray is all about finding new ways to increase demand for the two tart, but delightful fruits that their growers grow. The company is based in Lakeville-Middleboro, MA, and they’ve been “the leading producer of canned and bottled juice drinks in North America” since 1981.
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I ran a music fan site as my first online business. It wasn’t crazy successful, but I loved getting the occasional $100-$200 check from advertisers while I was in high school. Back then the Internet was still unfamiliar territory. Most artists had their own web presences, but they were usually outdated and low on real information. The best fans sites were better than the official sites, but most of the fan sites died off as musicians, sports teams, comedians, and other fan-worthy acts started to get more serious about interacting with fans online. However, fans aren’t just for mega stars who have huge budgets to pay agencies to take care of managing fan relationships. Anyone can have fans, but it’s hard to be fan-worthy if you spend all of your time managing fan relationships. FanBridge is a New York, NY based company that has built a platform for managing and leveraging fan lists. FanBridge makes keeping fans engaged easy so that their customers can keep doing what they do best–whether it’s playing music, making jokes, or baking cupcakes.
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I don’t think that you’ll ever catch me watching an awards show (or at least admitting to it), but I know that they’re a major event for a lot of people. While I’m screaming at my tv over a missed call during a baseball game, I know that there are just as many people who scream at their tvs over a favorite actor or actress not winning an award. When I first heard about the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation (also known as The Emmys Foundation), I assumed that they were all about award shows. I was wrong, but they are all about television. They organization is based in Los Angeles, CA, and they’re the charitable arm of the Television Academy (the organization that puts on the Emmys). The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation is “dedicated to using the artistry of television to preserve and celebrate the history of television, and educate those who will shape its future.”
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casting,
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writing
Because I started my business without any post-graduation work experience, I’ve had to rely on free resources to learn the tricks of the trade. Sites like Hacker News, SEOmoz, Mixergy have been unbelievably valuable to me. But you can only get so much for free. Fortune 500 companies budget millions and millions of dollars to ensure that their leadership teams are well informed and well advised. One place that 80% of Fortune 500 companies go for advice is The Corporate Executive Board. They are an Arlington, VA based company that helps “senior executives at the world’s leading organizations… and their teams with actionable insights, analytic tools, and advisory support to quickly and confidently focus efforts on what they need to know, and do, next.” The Corporate Executive Board spun off from The Advisory Board Company (they focus only on healthcare and higher education) in the late 90’s, and that was later followed up with an initial public offering.
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Ever curious about the business behind One Day, One Job and One Day, One Internship? Read this interview I did with The Startup Foundry.
I never took an Accounting class, but I do run a business, so I need some knowledge of keeping the books. I may have never learned the formal definition of “accounts receivable,” but I certainly know it in practice. Right now there are 7 businesses that owe me money for advertising. That’s an asset worth something, but it’s not quite as valuable as actually having the money in the bank. Luckily, running this business is cheap, so cash flow is never an issue. For many other types of businesses, cash is vital. The month or two that they give debtors to pay invoices can be extremely costly (in terms of risk and the time-value of money) because it limits the businesses’ ability to make short-term investments like buying products wholesale to sell retail, paying for advertising, or making payroll. The Receivables Exchange is a New Orleans, LA (headquarters) and New York, NY based company that fixes this problem. They allow business to auction off their accounts receivable for cash. Businesses obviously have to pay a premium for the cash that they get, but it allows them to make short-term investments that should be far more valuable than the fees they pay to the buyers of their accounts receivable.
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The Washington Media Scholars Program Case Competition opens today! Get all of the details here.
Now, I haven’t heard of any internship seekers who use flashcards for interviews, but I’m sure there are some out there. I haven’t touched a flashcard since I stopped taking French, and that was a long time ago. I don’t miss them at all. It’s probably because my French teachers forced me to write hundreds of flashcards for homework. If I could have found a way to use a computer to automate the process, I would have. But those teachers wanted to see a handwritten flashcard. Today’s students probably don’t feel my pain. That’s because you can make all of your flashcards online, share them with friends, and use them on your smartphone thanks to Quizlet. They’re a San Francisco, CA based company that aims to “creatively harness technology to provide powerful, free learning capabilities to hundreds of millions of people.”
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Want a career in Strategic Media Research, Planning and Management? Enter the the Washington Media Scholars Case Competition for the chance at amazing networking opportunities and a $3,000 scholarship.
If you’ve been a reader for a while, you probably know that I love using magazine lists to find interesting companies. I just found out that Fast Company released their list of Most Innovative Companies. It’s led by names like Apple, Twitter, and Facebook, but there are also some unfamiliar names on there–and that’s what we’re looking for. One of the names on the list that caught my eye was Voxiva. They’re a Washington, DC based company that delivers “interactive mobile health services.” They’ve been around since 2001, and they offer patient engagement services that “combine multiple technologies – SMS text messaging, interactive voice, email, mobile apps, devices, and the web – to support prevention and wellness, disease management, adherence, and more.”
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project management,
public health,
sales,
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Washington DC,
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Washington Media Scholars Foundation is our sponsor this week. They have an awesome case competition for students interested in Media careers. You can win a $3,000 scholarship, so find out more here.
Tracking people down isn’t all that hard anymore. If you want to find someone, there’s a really good chance that a simple Google search will give you a good enough lead to find some contact information. You should know all about this if you’re going about your internship search properly. If you haven’t tracked down someone at a company that you want to intern for and offered to buy him or her lunch, then what are you wasting your time doing? You should be able to get by with free tools, but sometimes you need something a little more powerful. ZoomInfo is a Waltham, MA based company that offers “continuously updated, multi-sourced, highly relevant business information and unrivalled tools to quickly pinpoint contacts and accelerate success.” ZoomInfo’s database “spans five million businesses and 50 million employees,” so if you’re looking for a company or a person, there’s a good chance that they have info on them.
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Interested in Strategic Media Research, Planning and Management. Check out the Washington Media Scholars’ Case Competition.
Since I moved to Chicago in October of 2008, I’ve been getting more and more involved with the local startup scene. I’ve met a lot of cool people ranging from founders of some of the city’s most successful startups to the awesome people at Jelly Chicago (it’s a co-working group, and you should join us). One of the better events that I’ve been to was midVentures Launch. I even got to introduce myself to the guy who makes me feel bad every time I go to the gym because he a) always seems to be there no matter when I go b) is always doing ridiculously difficult workouts. That may seem completely irrelevant, but it turns out that he’s a Project Manager at Sandbox Industries, which is a Chicago, IL based venture capital firm. They have three distinct areas of focus: their incubator, the Sandbox Venture Fund, and the BlueCross BlueShield Venture Fund. As I was doing my daily browsing for interesting opportunities, I came across some postings from Sandbox Industries, so I figured that it was time to take a closer look at them.
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finance,
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incubator,
Internships,
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marketing,
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project management,
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unpaid,
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web development,
writing
Good news! We’re switching e-mail providers today. We have a sponsored e-mail (with awesome opportunities) coming later today, and that should come from our new provider, Aweber. You probably won’t notice any changes right away (forgive us if we run into any glitches), but it’s going to help us offer you a much better e-mail experience in the long run.
A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from a high school friend saying that she’s collecting “class notes” for our school’s newsletter. She didn’t suppress the recipient list, so it’s been a big reply all fest (luckily my graduating class was only 46). It’s truly interesting to see where all of my friends and what they’re doing 9 years after graduating high school. Beyond that, it’s a great source of new ideas for companies to feature. One of my friends is currently working at Clickable, a New York, NY based company that offers a “live Web platform to make online advertising Simple, Sophisticated and Profitable.” Chances are that you’ve never dabbled in online advertising (though maybe you should), but I can assure you that it gets complex very quickly–especially when you are running ads through platforms like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Microsoft AdCenter. Clickable offers a software solution that makes everything way simpler.
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I know it’s hard to believe right now, but it actually gets warm in Chicago sometimes. And during those warm months I try to play as much beach volleyball as I possibly can. There’s a group of guys that I often play with, and we organize via text message. The problem is that one guy controls the text list, and it’s always unclear how many people are going to show up. I actually think that e-mail is a much better alternative, but for some reason people love SMS, which is a terrible platform for group messaging. At least it was. GroupMe is a New York, NY based startup that “lets you effortlessly group text with the people in your life that are important to you.” It’s a free service that works on any phone (ok probably not a rotary phone).
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New York,
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In just the past year and a half, I’ve lost two important people in my life to cancer. Chances are that you’ve been similarly affected by the disease considering that 1 in 4 deaths in this country are caused by cancer and that there were more than 1.5 million new cancer cases last year. The numbers sound grim, but every year we’re getting better and better at treating cancer. One of the major trends that I keep hearing about is that doctors are starting to see cancers as individual diseases instead of as one disease that affects many areas of the body. Precision Therapeutics is a Pittsburgh, PA based company that is taking this idea once step further. They believe that cancer should be treated at an individual level. In other words, they see every single case of cancer as potentially unique, and they want to help doctors and patients find the best way to treat it.
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medicine,
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The other day I read a fascinating article about a Canadian guy who figured out how to determine whether scratch-off lottery tickets would be winners… without scratching them off. He decided not to take advantage of his discovery, because he realized he made more money as a statistician then he would have made taking advantage of the flaw. When he tried to tell the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, they thought he was some crackpot and ignored him. Finally, he got their attention when he sent them 20 tickets with predictions of their outcomes—he was right on 19 out of 20 of them. The article mentioned the names of a few U.S. based companies that work in the scratch-off lottery games, and I instantly wondered whether they had any internship. One of those companies is Scientific Games, which is headquartered in New York, NY but appears to be operationally based in Alpharetta, GA. Lotteries in the U.S. are a $50 billion market, and Scientific Games is “the primary instant ticket provider for 8 of the top 10 U.S. lotteries.” It may not seem as though there is a lot of room for innovation in lottery games, but Scientific Games has consistently proved otherwise.
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There’s been a big uproar in the startup community because I Can Has Cheezburger just took on $30 million in venture capital funding. Now, I’m not qualified to determine whether that’s a smart investment, but I’m wary of people who are too quick to judge it. A lot of people have trouble differentiating between serious businesses and businesses that sell serious products. There’s a lot of room for fun on the Internet, and there are lots of companies that are profiting by providing fun. One of them is Mindspark, which is an IAC company. Mindspark is based in White Plains, NY with additional offices in New York City and Ra’anana, Israel. They manage a number of social and entertainment web properties including Zwinky, and Zwinky Cuties, IWON, Retrogamer, MyWebFace, and GirlSense. Mindspark also offers interactive communication products like Webfetti, My Fun Cards, SmileyCentral, Smiley Creator, Cursor Mania, Popular Screensavers and Kazulah. Additionally, Mindspark also runs Excite and DailyBurn. As you can tell by the names, this isn’t the most serious collection of sites.
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account management,
advertising,
business development,
California,
community management,
customer service,
fitness,
flash,
Internships,
marketing,
mobile,
New York,
public relations,
sales,
software development,
training,
video games,
web development
I don’t know about you, but I try to recycle when its convenient. Like the time my college roommates threw a huge party and I stole all of the empty cans and returned them for the nickel deposits. It was easy money. But I must also admit that I’ve thrown away plenty of recyclables when there wasn’t a proper receptacle for them. Environmentalism is great; however, people respond to incentives, and a healthy Earth a century down the road isn’t much of an incentive for the average person. People need a push, and that’s exactly what RecycleBank does. They’re a New York, NY based company that rewards people for “taking positive green actions.” By doing things like recycling at home, you can earn RecycleBank points. Those points can be redeemed for rewards ranging from Amazon Gift Cards to museum memberships, with lots and lots of other options in between—you can even donate your points.
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advertising,
business development,
design,
environmental,
finance,
green,
Internships,
local,
local marketing,
marketing,
New York,
outreach,
recycling,
sales,
social media,
software development,
sustainability
I’m always amazed by how lame job and internship postings are (why do you think I started doing this?). If a Marketing department tried to sell products the way HR departments sell jobs and internships, they’d have been fired a long time ago. Even the postings that I consider to be good are pretty mediocre in the grand scheme of things—and they look a lot like other “good” postings. Yesterday I came across a job posting that really stood out from any others that I’ve seen lately—maybe it’s because the “Entry Level Hustler” position is pretty unique on its own. But first let’s talk about the company offering the position (they have internships too). They’re called SpeakerText, and they’re a San Francisco, CA based startup that offers “a premium service for video publishers that turns video into text so that it can be searched, shared and accessed by everyone.” We’ve all become accustomed to being able to search text (I know I get aggravated at not being able to search a hard copy book). But now that video is so popular, we have this new mass of online information that can’t be searched. SpeakerText is trying to solve this problem through crowdsourcing.
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business development,
California,
customer service,
design,
finance,
Internships,
marketing,
online marketing,
sales,
social media,
software development,
user experience,
video,
web development
Remember when you had to pay big bucks for software? You’d buy a CD, install it on your computer, and then you finally got to use it. Now it’s way easier. Lots of startups have created online productivity suites akin to Microsoft Office, and Google Apps has really changed the way that a lot of people work on their computers. But what if you want to edit an image, song, movie, or do some other creative endeavor? Software for that kind of stuff is still really expensive, right? Nope. Aviary is a New York City based company that “is on a mission to make creation accessible to artists of all genres, from graphic design to audio editing.” They provide a suite of free online tools that are way more powerful than most cloud-based software that you’re used to.
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Tagged as:
arts,
business development,
design,
New York,
software development,
web development
Last night I went out to dinner with my girlfriend and her family. It was a restaurant that I’d never been to before, so I looked it up online to see what I should expect. The user experience on the restaurant’s website was pretty terrible. It was built in flash, and had a splash page that took forever to load. The menu was an image instead of HTML, and I never could load any pictures of the food. This doesn’t surprise me, because restaurants aren’t web businesses. They should excel at being a restaurant and leave the web stuff to someone else. That’s where SinglePlatform comes in. They’re a New York City based company that “provides restaurants one stop to manage their digital presence and gain customers.” SinglePlatform not only enables restaurants to publish all of the information that they want to share, but it also syndicates the restaurant’s content throughout a publisher network of “review sites, mobile applications, and related local guides.”
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Tagged as:
advertising,
business development,
food,
Internships,
local,
local marketing,
New York,
online marketing,
paid,
restaurants,
sales,
seo,
social media
In the past 15 days there have been 762 spam comments left on One Day, One Internship. Luckily, I have software that identifies most of them, so that I only have to look at 5 or so a day and decide for myself whether they are spam or not. Spammers are constantly looking for ways to pitch their wares, and most of what they do is completely automated. That means that one of the best ways to conquer spam is to verify that the person leaving a comment, signing up for a site, or sending a message is actually a human and not a computer pretending to be a human. One of the most successful ways to combat automated spam these days is called the CAPTCHA (here’s the Wikipedia entry) or “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” I’m sure you’re familiar with CAPTCHAs, and you probably hate them. Unfortunately, they’re a way of life, even if they feel like a waste of time. Solve Media is a Philadelphia, PA based company that is putting the CAPTCHA to work. Yes, they think that they can make money off of the CAPTCHA, and I think they can too.
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Tagged as:
advertising,
business development,
Internships,
marketing,
New York,
Pennsylvania,
sales
Social networks are great. They help us maintain relationships more easily, while also introducing us to new people. The cool thing is that we’ve just scratched the surface with social networking. There’s a lot more value to come, and one of the things that I’m most excited about is social recommendations. Whether I’m looking for a restaurant, hotel, pair of shoes, or car, I want to be able to leverage the collective knowledge of my friends. Hunch is a New York City based startup that is doing exactly that. They’re “personalizing the Internet” by building “a ‘taste graph’ of the entire web, connecting every person on the web with their affinity for anything, from books to electronic gadgets to fashion or vacation spots.” They leverage the information that you’ve already added to your social profiles on Twitter and Facebook, and they also ask you a number of seemingly irrlevant questions to get a feel for what you might like.
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Tagged as:
business development,
e-commerce,
interactive media,
Internships,
marketing,
New York,
online media,
paid,
social media,
social networking,
software development,
web development
If you’re up on tech and startup news, then you probably heard about how Groupon spurned an estimated $6 billion buyout from Google and how LivingSocial just took on a $150 million investment from Amazon. Daily deals are huge business, while daily jobs are… growing. I’m not really a big fan of all of the “me too” startups in the daily deal space, but I came across one this morning that impressed me. It’s called JungleCents, and it’s based in San Francisco. While Groupon and LivingSocial have become so valuable because of their ability to develop relationships with local business, JungleCents is using lessons learned from these two giants but staying away from local markets. Once a week JungleCents offers a discounted gift card to an online retailer—it could be a major name or lesser known online boutique. You can get a gift card at a huge discount, and JungleCents takes a cut too.
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Tagged as:
business development,
California,
e-commerce,
Internships,
marketing,
sales,
software development,
unpaid,
video,
web development
