If you’ve been paying any attention to the Inc. 500 companies that we’ve been featuring over the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that the way people work is changing. The Internet is not only changing business models, but it’s also changing day to day operations. One good example is software like Central Desktop. They’re a Pasadena, CA that offers “a complete, pure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) social technology platform that allows business teams to communicate and collaborate more efficiently.” In other words, they enable people to work together more efficiently even if they’re on opposite ends of the world. It’s another growing business area, as Central Desktop has seen 1569% three-year growth to $2.6 million in annual revenue. There’s certainly money in helping people get work done more effectively.
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web development
Yesterday we talked about search engine optimization and how powerful it can be for driving new customers to businesses. Today we’re going to talk about Genius.com, a San Mateo, CA based company that helps businesses make the most of the leads that they get. Their software as a service solution provides “a complete sales and marketing solution including: email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, website tracking, instant alerts, and closed-loop reporting capabilities to manage and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, drive revenues and prove marketing ROI.” Yes, there are some buzzwords there, but Genius.com seems to be delivering on their promise—they’ve managed to increase their revenue by 1,842% over the past three years to $3 million.
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web development
Yesterday AT&T decided to e-mail their customers and ask for feedback in a centralized location: their Facebook page. It didn’t go quite as planned, as an “angry mob” was forced to “Like” the page before they could actually leave their rants. If you want to see the bloodbath for yourself, you can take a look at AT&T’s Facebook page. We all know that customer service is never an easy task; however, it’s become much more difficult to manage as the Internet has grown. Ten or twenty years ago, you had to write a letter or make a call to complain. Most people wouldn’t take the effort, so companies could manage feedback pretty well. Now most companies get feedback online, and they are often faced with more information than their staff can reliably read. That’s where Clarabridge comes in. They’re #101 on the Inc. 500, and they offer text mining software that helps companies with “customer experience management.” That means that Clarabridge, which is based in Reston, VA, enables companies to process tons of feedback with way less manpower.
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software development,
Virginia
I’m big on brand advocacy. I’m not just constantly plugging brands like Bonobos, Gilt Groupe, and Groupon because they have awesome referral programs (which they do). I plug them because I’ve always had great experiences with them, and I know that they’re perfect for career minded college students. Word of mouth marketing works well enough when it happens organically, but it really takes off when you give it a little push (like a referral program). SwarmBuilder is a Salt Lake City, UT based company that works “with Brands, Retailers and Member Organizations to build audiences of sales influencers and convert them into active armies of engaged Brand Advocates.” SwarmBuilder does this with three platforms: 3point5.com (for retail sales professionals), Promotive.com (for Pros, “Bros” and other VIPs), and BrandRiot.com (for vocal web collaborators). Each of these platforms enables its targeted audience to connect with brands and learn about their products while being incentivized to spread the word.
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software development,
Utah,
web development
Just because you’re a broke college student doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. Use Groupon to get awesome deals from local businesses. Who doesn’t like having fun at half the price?
Now that the holiday weekend is over, let’s get back to running through the Inc. 500 in our search for exciting entry level career opportunities. Today we’re going to talk about WiFi. Chances are that you’re using it to read this right now. When I started college, most people didn’t even have Wi-Fi. By the time I graduated it was in every off campus apartment. Now the idea of plugging in to an Internet connection means that you either have an ancient computer or you’re staying at one of those annoying hotels that forces you to plug in and then charges you $19.95 for a day of Internet access. There are a few other bastions of wired Internet left, and they’re often left that way because implementing large scale Wi-Fi networks isn’t easy. Having a single router plugged into a cable modem is basically a no-brainer, but offering uninterrupted Wi-Fi across a huge office building, conference center, or other large structure isn’t so easy. That’s where Xirrus comes in. They are a Thousand Oaks, CA based company that is aiming to “unwire the Enterprise with Wi-Fi that performs like a wired network.”
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There are a lot of things that you can do to get through college when money is tight. You can get a temporary job, you can do consulting, you can live with your parents, you can sell your blood, and you can even collect cans for the deposit money. But if you’re desperate for cash, you might as well start out with low hanging fruit. There’s a good chance that you have outdated electronics lying around your apartment or house. Maybe it’s a first generation iPhone or a video game system that you never play anymore. Why not sell it? You don’t even have to go to some sketchy neighborhood to find a pawn shop or meet some stranger from Craigslist. You just need to use Gazelle, a Boston based company that provides “a practical, responsible, rewarding way for consumers to get value for used electronics.” The are the “nation’s largest reCommerce company,” and they keep growing—they’re #24 on the Inc 500 list with a 7,119.7% three-year growth rate.
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web development
I just got back home to Chicago on Saturday, and I arrived to see the latest issue of Inc. Magazine waiting for me on the kitchen counter. It’s a big day for me because it’s the Inc. 500 issue where they list the 500 fastest growing private companies in the United States. It’s my absolute favorite tool for finding new companies to feature, which is why we’re going to take a look at ModCloth today. They came in at #2 on the list with 17,191% growth over the past three years to get to over $15 million in revenue. And all of that growth has been “built on a foundation of love for vintage and retro clothing.” The company, which is based in both San Francisco and Pittsburgh, was started by high school sweethearts Eric Koger and Susan Gregg Koger, and they aim to “provide a fun and engaging shopping atmosphere” for their customers by using social media to interact with them. ModCloth is big on democracy, so customers actually get some say in the direction the company’s buyers take.
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California,
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merchandising,
Pennsylvania,
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user experience,
web development
My family is in Colorado Springs this week, and we’re staying at an amazing ranch on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. Yesterday we went back to civilization for the first time, and we decided to visit Cripple Creek—an old mining town that was home to “the last great Colorado gold rush” and more than half a billion dollars in gold ore. Unfortunately gold mining can only last so long, and Cripple Creek eventually became a ghost town. In 1991 voters legalized gambling in Cripple Creek, and the city was reinvigorated, albeit with most of the storefronts inhabited with gaming establishments. Our visit was interrupted by a massive hail storm, so we waited in the car until it let up a bit and ran into the first restaurant we could find. Turns out that it was a restaurant inside of a casino, and we had to walk past a bunch of slots and other machines to get a bite to eat. Of course, I couldn’t make it past the Game King video poker machine without playing, and luckily I came away from “lunch” 90 bucks richer. That gave me the idea to take a look at IGT (International Game Technology), the Reno, NV based gaming company that designs and manufactures the Game King machine among many other casino machines.
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Nevada,
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strategy,
training,
video games
I think that some of the biggest innovation yet to come in the Internet space is going to be in the form of payment processing. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day in the future we pay for almost everything by logging into our Facebook/Google/Amazon accounts. That still seems pretty far off though. The lag in easy online payments can probably be attributed to the need for extremely high levels of security. As soon as it’s ridiculously simple to send a friend money to chip in for a group gift, it’s also going to be ridiculously simple for a hacker to take you for all you’re worth. In the meantime there are some companies that are working to develop transitional solutions for payment processing. San Francisco’s Square is one of them. They have developed a software platform that allows anyone to accept credit card payments. It all started when a glass artist was unable to make a sale because he couldn’t accept credit cards. Now, all you need is an iPhone/iPad or an Android device to do just that.
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This morning I sent out the following tweet: “I entered the Bonobos/Tucker Blair Wardrobe Giveaway! for a chance to win 5 pants/5 belts/5 polos: http://wfi.re/1sy9s.” (By the way, you can follow me @willyf.)I usually get annoyed when I see tweets like that, but every person who enters through my link gives me another entry, and I want to win. I also wanted to take it as an opportunity to learn a little bit more about Wildfire Interactive. They are a Palo Alto, CA based company that has built an amazing web-based software platform to enable “interactive promotions for brand marketing.” For a very affordable price, you can use Wildfire to run sweepstakes, contests, give-aways, incentive-based surveys, and more. I’ve struggled putting together online contests in the past, and Wildfire is exactly the kind of app that would have made my life a lot easier. They’re like a self-service, web 2.0 Don Jagoda Associates (and they shouldn’t be confused with WeTheCitizens which renamed itself to Wildfire Platform).
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user experience,
web development
I’m an unabashed Groupon fan. How can I not support the Chicago based company that started the group-buying frenzy? Moreover, I’m just flabbergasted at the amount of value that they’ve been able to build in such a short time. The only problem with creating an extremely lucrative new market when you have little or no IP is that the competitors come out in droves. There are a lot of Groupon wannabes. A lot. Many of them will fall by the wayside as they realize that they’re not capable of building out the kind of sales/business development team needed to grow a group-buying business, but there are a few competitors that seem to be doing quite well. One of them is LivingSocial, which is based in Washington, DC (maybe they should focus on group-bribing of politicians, or is that called lobbying?). They now offer daily deals in 52 cities, and they have nearly $50 million in venture funding. They weren’t profitable yet as of March, but you have to think that they’ll get there soon.
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Washington DC,
writing
Guys, need some great fitting pants to wear to an interview? Check out Bonobos! They make the best pants that I’ve ever worn (I have something like 12 pairs) and they’ll give you $50 off your first order. Just e-mail me at willy@onedayonejob.com, and I’ll send you the coupon code.
Occasionally I’ll realize that I’ve covered a company on One Day, One Job, but that I haven’t let all of the current students know about the company’s internships. That’s the case with Eventbrite, a San Francisco based events management company. Odds are that you’ve used Eventbrite to register for some sort of event or even to put one on yourself. They make ticketing and registration stupid simple. Seriously, any idiot can put on an event with Eventbrite. If you’re putting on a free event, they’ll let you do everything for free. And if you’re charging for an event, Eventbrite will take a 2.5% cut. With over 14 million tickets sold to date, it’s quite clear that Eventbrite isn’t just some startup without a revenue model. They’re already generating revenue and delivering an awesome product experience.
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events,
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research,
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web development
You’d think that a company that was founded in 1998 and survived the Internet bust was started with a pretty solid idea, right? Or maybe they came up with a great idea that allowed them to adapt as the economy changed. It may be hard to judge the quality of the ideas that led to ON24, but there’s no doubt that the people behind the San Francisco based company have been persistent. According to Wikipedia they started as Newsource with a focus on being a “distribution center for Internet-based video press releases.” Then they pivoted in 1999 to become ON24, “an online financial news streaming media source.” Neither of those ideas seemed to work out, but the technology behind them seemed to be what kept the company alive. In 2003 it all finally came together as ON24 “introduced a web-based video publishing platform that enables users to self-produce live and on-demand webcasts.” The 3rd time was a charm, as that’s what ON24 continues to do to this day.
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Ever wondered if an internship posting that you found online was a scam? Here’s the rundown on scam internships and how to avoid them.
So, I don’t think that I’ve taken note of Earth Day since elementary school… or last year when I wrote a post about New Leaf Paper. Yes, I may seem a bit ambivalent about a holiday started by hippies, but I really do care about the environment (so much though that I’m taking a few days off next week to head out into the woods and go fishing). Today is the 40th Earth Day, and I have to say it’s amazing how far we’ve come in fighting pollution. In fact, we’ve come so far that we’re now more concerned with the gas that we all exhale than toxic waste and acid rain. A big portion of the environmentalist movement’s attention now seems to be focused on finding alternative sources of energy, which seems to make sense. One company that is enabling environmentalist consumers to make more conscious choices about energy consumption is Austin, TX based Green Mountain Energy. Now, let’s be honest, most of you have never paid an electric bill. But when you do, wouldn’t you like to be able to choose a clean energy alternative or purchase carbon offsets? That’s what Green Mountain Energy is offering in both regulated and deregulated markets.
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energy,
green,
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Texas
Consultants are typically seen as hired mercenaries. Sometimes they get a bad rap, but at least they’re compensated well for it. I have to think that those who work at The Advisory Board Company have at least a somewhat better reputation since their company’s clients are all mission driven. What does mission driven mean? Well, most of The Advisory Board Company’s clients are in the healthcare industry (think hospitals and health systems, not insurance providers), but they’ve recently moved into working with universities too. I hadn’t heard of The Advisory Board Company until a One Day, One Job reader e-mailed me (you can reach me at willy@onedayonejob.com if you want to share a tip or success story) to tell me that he recently received a job offer from them. Apparently they do a ton of entry level hiring (along with some interns), and they’re continuing to grow well beyond the 5 employees that they started with in 1979. Since then they’ve grown to more than 1,000 employes, and they’ve served “more than 2,800 leading healthcare and higher education organizations.” Additionally, they’ve grown beyond their corporate headquarters in Washington, DC to having offices in Chicago, IL; San Francisco, CA; Austin, TX; Portland, OR; Nashville, TN; London, UK; and Chennai, India.
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united kingdom,
Washington DC
Today is possibly the biggest day in Cornell sports history (GO BIG RED!), and as an alum I am extremely excited. Our Men’s Basketball Team is facing off against Temple early this afternoon in the first round of the NCAA tourney, and our Men’s Hockey Team will take on Brown in the ECAC semifinals later this afternoon. We also have our wrestling team competing in the NCAA Championships and our Women’s Hockey taking on Mercyhurst in the Frozen Four semi-final this evening. I’m especially excited about this because I’ve been a good fan all year (do I sound like Andy Bernard yet?). I even plunked down $69.95 to be able to watch crappy quality Internet video of all of my favorite teams. I may have to strain my eyes to see the puck or to make out the numbers on the back of a basketball jersey, but it’s been worth watching all season. The company behind this crappy quality video is Syracuse, NY based Internet Consulting Services. They may have the most boring name ever, but they actually have a pretty cool business.
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New York,
paid,
software development,
sports,
video,
web development
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In past years we’ve looked at Shamrock Foods and Luck Stone to celebrate the holiday, but today we’re going to take a look at internships with Minneapolis, MN based General Mills because there’s no more authentic Irish breakfast than Lucky Charms. Now, it’s been a while since I last had a bowl of everybody’s favorite marshmallow-filled cereal—ok, it’s been a month—but it feels like it’s been much longer. Beyond Lucky Charms, General Mills’ brands include Cheerios, Pillsbury, Gushers, Haagen-Dazs, Betty Crocker, Cascadian Farm, and many more names that you’ll recognize from the center aisles in the grocery store. Most of them may have nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day, but add some green food coloring if that’s what you’re really concerned about.
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Minnesota,
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research,
sales
One of my new favorite sites is Mixergy.com. It’s kind of like One Day, One Internship for entrepreneurs. Nearly every day, Andrew Warner, the founder, does a video chat/interview with an entrepreneur. It’s a fantastic educational tool for aspiring entrepreneurs, and it’s also a pretty decent job search resource. One of the interviews that I watched recently was with Alex Algard, the founder of White Pages. He tells the story of how he started the Seattle, WA based company as a student with an initial $1,100 investment. White Pages is now a $57 million per year business. What do they do? They help people find people online. How have they made it so profitable? They’ve worked with the right advertisers from the start.
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public policy,
public relations,
software development,
Washington,
web development
Over on One Day, One Job I’ve been collecting user data over the past week to help me make the site more useful. So far the survey has received hundreds of responses, and there are a number of common themes that keep coming up. It’s amazing at how well an 8 question survey can tell me about what you students want in a job search tool. For companies that need a little more than an 8 question survey, there’s Communispace, a Watertown, MA based market research company. Their name probably wouldn’t have made them too popular during the cold war, but fear of communism has been replaced with community building—which is what Communispace is all about.
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community development,
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Massachusetts,
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research,
sales,
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social networking,
software development,
web development
Apparently my parents and sister have engaged in a never-ending series of online Scrabble games played via iPhone. I’m with my parents in Florida right now, and every five minutes they’re bugging each other to make the next move. It’s crazy. Free online gaming has hit the masses, and it isn’t pretty. There are tons of new online gaming companies, and while some are focusing on bringing new gamers to the market, others are more focused on gaining ground with serious gamers. Culver City, CA based Riot Games is a perfect example of the latter. They are behind League of Legends, a free online role-playing game that is set in an imaginative world. The game has been downloaded more than a million times, and Riot Games has received $20 million in venture capital investment based on the game. $8 million of that investment came from a Chinese gaming company that has a huge user base, so this is very much an international play.
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animation,
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California,
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web development
I’m a huge fan of open source software. I build all of my sites on the WordPress platform, and I am amazed at how powerful the blogging software has become over the years. Still, I know that it can’t do everything. If I get too much more advanced, I’ll probably have to move to a platform like Drupal—another open source content management system. The problem with that is that I’m not a programmer, and Drupal is a bit more complex than WordPress. Luckily, there’s a support option. Acquia is a Woburn, MA based company that provides “products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system.” They were founded by Dries Buytaert, the guy who created Drupal, so there’s no question about whether they’re the right people to offer Drupal support—they know the platform inside and out.
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web development
Whenever I get a new Facebook friend, he or she usually tells me that I have way too many pictures of me fishing. Since I let go nearly all of the fish that I catch, I love snapping a quick picture before the release—it gives me bragging material. That’s why I consider it important to have a fishing buddy who also knows how to take a decent photo. The problem is that I still spend a lot of time fishing alone, and trying to take a self-picture with a fish in the other hand is extremely awkward. Luckily I discovered the Gorillapod
, a small tripod that has flexible legs that wrap around nearly anything. It’s a fishing buddy that fits in vest’s pocket. The Gorillapod is made by Joby, a San Francisco based company, and it really is an ingenious product—it takes all of the hassle out of lugging around a tripod.
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I love boring businesses. It may not seem like it considering the fact that I’m often featuring startups that are on the cutting edge of technology, but I really do appreciate when a company is able to take an extremely simple idea and make it profitable. Uline is a perfect example. They are a Waukegan, IL based company that considers itself “the leading distributor of shipping, industrial, and packing materials to businesses throughout North America.” It all started in 1980 when Liz and Dick Uihlein identified a need for a local shipping supplies distributer. They started the business in their basement with the H-101 carton sizer, and now they have a product line that fills a 452 page catalog. That’s a lot of growth, and I expect it to continue as e-commerce and the shipping that results from it keep expanding (I have about a dozen boxes in my apartment from various holiday season shipments). And if for some reason the shipping business does slow down, Uline can always reorganize as a producer of forts for children—I always loved playing in cardboard boxes.
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Georgia,
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international,
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Mexico,
Minnesota,
operations,
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Pennsylvania,
sales,
Texas,
Washington
I’ve been building websites since 1998 (I think). Even back then, there were online services that made it easy to build a web site without any knowledge of HTML. The difference is that now there are services that enable you to make a website that looks good with no HTML knowledge. These website builders are extremely powerful, and server the purposes of most people who want a relatively simple website. Weebly is a company that offers the ability to create a free website and/or blog. They’re based in San Francisco, and they were named one of TIME’s 50 Best Websites of 2007. Weebly has some of the best names in the Venture Capital world behind them, and they’re actually profitable (based on the freemium model).
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It took long enough, but Internet video is everywhere. Yes, we had online video 10 years ago, but now it actually looks good—and works. The main reason for this is that end users (you and me) finally have technology in their homes that can handle playing online video. This means high speed Internet connections and computers with enough processing power to not crash when a website uses a Flash video player. The issue for content creators is that delivering video still poses some challenges. Sure, I was able to produce an online job search training course that relied heavily on video with little trouble, but I wasn’t delivering video to thousands or even millions of people (I wish I had the problem). As your use base increases, the challenge of delivering video increase exponentially. Moreover, managing video content in an organized fashion is a completely different challenge than organizing text and images. Brightcove is a Cambridge, MA based company that provides an online video platform for many of the worlds biggest brands.
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data,
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quality engineer,
sales,
software development,
training,
video,
web development
One of the more effective ways that I’ve found to teach online internship search tactics is to use screencasting. I do a number of screencasts in Found Your Career, and they seem to work really well when walking people through how to use sites like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook for job search. TechSmith is an Okemos, MI based company that is “the world’s #1 provider of screen capture and screen recording software for the individual and professional user.” They’ve been in the business since 1987—which is an insanely long time for a company in their industry, and they’ve actually been doing screen capture for most of that time. I’ve never used any of their products, but I’ve heard from a number of people who rave about Camtasia, TechSmith’s main screen recording software.
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Michigan,
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I think that I’ve mentioned before that my first experience with video chat was was with CU-SeeMe in an Internet cafe in the mid 90s. Back then the potential for social interaction over online video seemed pretty promising, but the potential for business uses (not that I thought about that when I was 13) was even greater. Real-time video has been slower to take hold on both the social and business fronts than I expected, but now that the quality is so good, we’re seeing more and more businesses embrace video conferencing. Tandberg is a company that is at the forefront of this movement. They have dual headquarters in Oslo, Norway and New York City, and they are both “the market share leader and the fastest growing company in the video conferencing industry.” Their 30% annualized revenue growth for the past 10 years may not be Inc. 5000 material, but it’s still hugely impressive.
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marketing,
New York,
operations,
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sales,
telecommunications,
video,
Virginia
We’ve already taken a look at Kiva, a San Francisco based microfinance non-profit, but today we’re going to take a look at Kiva Systems, a Woburn, MA based logistics and robotics company. They were ranked #6 on the Inc. 5000 this year by growing from $204,000 in revenue in 2005 to $21.4 million in revenue in 2008. That’s 10,399.0%, which is just insane. Their growth is coming from the online shopping revolution, even though they’re not an e-commerce company. This is due to the fact that their automated order fulfillment systems are huge efficiency boosters for warehouse operations. It’s hard to imagine how a Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System works, but once you see the video below, you’ll totally get it—and you will be amazed.
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Manufacturing,
Massachusetts,
robotics,
software development,
supply chain
Let’s say that you wanted to come visit me in Chicago. You’re not afraid to do touristy things, because you’re willing to accept the fact that you are a tourist. You’re going to visit the Art Institute, the Hancock Observatory, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Sears (now Willis) Tower. Then you want to take a ride on the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel followed by an Architecture Boat Tour. That’s a lot of separate admission fees (and an exhausting day). With a Go Chicago Card from Boston, MA based Smart Destinations, you can pay once and do all these things and more. The card will even get you a discount on your Lou Malnati’s deep dish pizza. Smart Destinations offers the same service in quite a few other cities, and it seems to be pretty popular. While the Travel industry is struggling with the economy, Smart Destinations has managed 424.7% revenue growth over the past 3 years and #652 on the Inc. 5000.
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Tagged as:
analytics,
business development,
customer service,
marketing,
Massachusetts,
paid,
sales,
seo,
social media,
software development,
travel
It’s funny how well respected brands that have been around forever will get swept up in a fad. Some, like Abercrombie & Fitch, will make it part of a new identity, while others like Burberry will enjoy the popularity but maintain their core image. Burberry is a British company that has been making quality garments since 1856, but they became especially trendy in the early 2000s, if I remember correctly. While most brands are recognized for their logo or a specific product, Burberry is known for their plaid. In fact, unless you’re a tartan freak, “Burberry Check” is probably the only plaid that you recognize by name. Over their 150 years Burberry has moved more towards luxury goods than outdoor garments, which is best evidenced by their new ad campaigns with Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame.
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Tagged as:
administrative,
apparel,
California,
communications,
customer service,
e-commerce,
fashion,
Internships,
Logistics,
New York,
operations,
sales,
supply chain,
unpaid
