I had some pretty awesome after-school activities when I was a kid. I played baseball and basketball, but I also did some sort of space/science class and participated in Odyssey of the Mind. Then there was the time on the computer, which didn’t seem all that important, but ended up shaping my career. Time out of school can be extremely important for educational outcomes, which is why BOOST Collaborative exists. They are a San Diego, CA based non-profit that “is committed to creating opportunities for change in educational and social services agencies serving youth in the out-of-school time hours.” While most organizations in this space focus on working directly with kids, BOOST Collaborative focuses on working with the people who work with kids.
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Sometimes a sign is the best marketing. It all started with paintings in caves and piles of rocks placed on trails, and we really haven’t moved too far beyond that. Yes, there has been some innovation in signs (video for instance), but many of the signs that are the most effective at grabbing people’s attention are pretty simple–just look at Burma-Shave or South of the Border. One of the most memorable signs that I’ve driven by is hand painted on rotting wood by some near Syracuse, NY. It ain’t pretty, but it gets its message across. Still, I don’t recommend that you follow that guy’s style guide. Instead you may want to check out BuildASign. They’re an Austin, TX based company that “has reinvented the way people buy signs” by offering an easy online interface for designing a sign and the ability to produce and ship finished products in days or even overnight.
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Guys. If you’re going to land an internship, you need pants. And shoes. And shirts. And maybe even a jacket and tie. Looking good is important, which is why you should outfit yourself in Bonobos like I do. Here’s $50 off your first order.
In your time on the Internet, you’ve probably seen some unfortunate ad placements. You may have seen them in newspapers or magazines. That kind of situation is pretty funny–unless you’re the advertiser. Where you advertise says a lot about your brand, yet on the Internet so many ad placements are automated without giving thought to what could go wrong. AdSafe Media is a company that protects brands from unfortunate placements while also improving performance. They’ve developed a “Content Rating System” that “scores and evaluates the brand safety and context of web pages on the individual page level.” This is an extremely valuable service to advertisers, which explains why the New York, NY based company is growing so rapidly.
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Believe it or not you can build a business finding interesting stuff for other people. That’s essentially what I’ve done, and I’m not even that cool. Maybe that’s why I focused on jobs and internships instead of design, style, travel, technology, culture, food, etc. (though I’ve definitely covered companies with jobs in all of those areas). Cool Hunting is a site that covers all of those areas and more. They “highlight creativity and innovation” and provide inspiration to those who are in search of all that is cool. The site became successful very quickly, and a company called Captain Lucas Inc was built around it in New York, NY. Because Cool Hunting was so successful with advertisers, they also built out an ad network/firm called Largetail.
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In case you haven’t noticed, content marketing is where it’s at. Whether you’re trying to reach new customers or increase engagement with current customers, your best bet is to offer them quality content that includes your messaging. Sounds easy. But creating content that people will actually consume isn’t easy. Most companies aren’t very good at it. Sometimes they hire advertising or marketing agencies to do that, but many of them aren’t very good at it either. If they want to get serious, they should go to a “custom content agency ” like Imagination Publishing in Chicago, IL. They “work with Fortune 500 brands, associations and non-profit organizations to help create and strengthen relationships with their customers using quality, targeted content.”
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I’ve read plenty of articles about how technology is making kids dumber. Video games, Facebook, and text messaging are usually the culprits. I’m more interested in how technology is making kids smarter. My expectations for kids who are currently in elementary school are through the roof because of the tools they and their teachers have access to. Wireless Generation is a Brooklyn, NY based company that is at the forefront of education technology. The company was founded by two Rhodes Scholars who “shared a passion for technology and an interest in what it could do for K-12 teachers.” Within ten years they built this passion into a company that was sold for $360 million. That’s what’s cool about the education market–you can feel like you’re doing good and still play in a market with big money.
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After I graduated, I decided to get my finances in order. I cashed out savings bonds, combined bank accounts, and opened a Scottrade account so that I could start investing. This had obvious benefits, but it was also a project for me to work on during my job search. By analyzing investment ideas and managing a (very small) portfolio, I was developing new skills while giving myself something to talk about during job interviews. I highly recommend doing something like this yourself, but if it’s just not for you, you may want to take a look at Betterment. They’re a New York, NY based company that helps “people make smart decisions with their money.” Actually, I’m not sure if that’s a good way to put it. They make investing frictionless and take away any excuse that you’ve been using not to invest (besides the “I have absolutely no money to invest” excuse).
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Today is my -1 year anniversary. In other words I’m getting married a year from today (and yes, we’re celebrating that). Amy and I have a wedding planner, and we’ve already made a lot of the big decisions (when/where/band/photographer). In a city like Chicago, you’re not going to get what you want if you don’t book things way in advance. Luckily, we have someone to guide us on these decisions, but if we didn’t we might turn to a resource like WeddingWire. It’s “the category leader in local business reviews (think “Yelp of Weddings”), offering the ability to search, compare and book over 200,000 recently reviewed wedding vendors.” The company is based in Bethesda, MD, and because they’ve been so successful in the wedding market, they’ve also gone after Bar Mitzvahs, Proms, and all kinds of other events.
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If there’s a driving holiday, it has to be Memorial Day. I didn’t spend much time in the car this year, but last year I was in a nasty traffic jam coming back from Michigan. The jam was exacerbated by some buffoon who decided to block off a lane for at least a mile by driving slowly (it was closed for construction ahead). If only there was a way to contact him and let him know that he should read Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). Then he’d know that full lane utilization with a zipper merge at the obstruction is the most efficient way to deal with a lane closure. BUMP is a La Jolla, CA based company that wants to create “the world’s largest communication, marketing, and safety network” by connecting license plate numbers with online profiles.
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The last time that I was involved with an incubator was in 5th grade when my class was hatching chicks. Between then and when I graduated college, the word incubator was irrelevant to me. Now it’s coming up all the time. I’ve been involved with and interested in startups for the past five or so years, and in that time I’ve seen the idea of the incubator blow up. Incubators typically provide capital, guidance, office space, and much more to help startups get off the ground. Cogo Labs (formerly Adverplex) is a Cambridge, MA based incubator that focuses on growing Boston based web companies. They offer a unique value to their portfolio companies in that they have an in house “platform of proprietary technologies for algorithmic marketing, data mining, and quantitative business analytics.”
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I’ve been off the market for almost 7 1/2 years, so I have no experience with online dating. But I do have a lot of friends who use the web to find dates, and I even have a few who are working on projects in the space. One of the sites I’ve been hearing a lot about lately is HowAboutWe, which is based in New York, NY. It’s a site that is more about getting people out on dates than finding them a perfect match. They don’t want you obsessing over profiles, sending lots of messages, and spending some of your best years in front of a computer screen. They want you to get out and do stuff with people who might end up being people you want to spend more time with.
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What have you done in the past week to make yourself a better candidate for the jobs that you’ll apply for after you graduate? E-mail me at willy@onedayonejob.com and tell me. Seriously. Developing new skills isn’t just about being better qualified for a job or internship–it’s also about showing employers that you’re constantly trying to better yourself and willing to invest time and money to do so. Companies love people who show a desire to grow into new roles. Luckily, there are more and more companies that offer online education with the purpose of actually teaching you applicable skills, not giving you a worthless piece of paper. One of these companies is Treehouse, which is based in Orlando, FL. Their “goal is to teach Web Design, Web Development and iOS, to everyone in the World who wants to learn.”
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Furniture shopping brings out the worst in me. I tend to revert back to my childhood when my sister and I would team up (by fighting of course) to make our parents miserable so that we could leave the furniture store sooner. Luckily, my fiancée loves going furniture shopping with me. She’s found that if she creates conditions for success (making sure that I’m in a good mood and have recently had a meal), I can actually act like a human being at places like Crate and Barrel. In case you’ve never been to a Crate and Barrel, it’s a giant furniture and housewares store that is essentially my worst nightmare. It all started with one store in downtown Chicago, but now Crate and Barrel is headquartered in Northbrook, IL and has more than 170 stores including CB2 and The Land of Nod locations.
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I do as much of my shopping online as possible, but that’s because I don’t really enjoy shopping. It’s all about minimizing my time doing something that I don’t want to do. For some people online shopping is great for the opposite reason–it allows them to spend even more time shopping (at work, on the train, walking down the street, on the couch, etc.). The big problem with online shopping is that the experience feels a bit homogenized–you’re typically buying from major retailers or e-commerce companies. Shoptiques is a New York, NY based company that is trying to make online shopping better by bringing boutiques to the web. Why boutiques? Boutiques offer the ultimate shopping experience: “beautiful hard-to-find hand-picked fashion and knowledgeable advice from the owners who know so much about style and how to make you look beautiful.” Boutiques are anything but homogenized, but their business models don’t translate well to the web–at least they didn’t until Shoptiques came along.
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These days it seems that just about everyone claims to be an expert on things like social media and SEO, but very few people have a track record that shows a repeated ability to deliver results. Why is that? Because online marketing is really hard. We see stupid things go viral and think that anyone can do it, but we overlook the fact that getting someone to look at something is very different from getting someone to buy something. Pop Labs is an interactive marketing agency in Houston, TX that is known for getting results. I’m not just talking about for their clients either. Pop Labs nearly tripled their revenue between 2007 and 2010, which shows that what they’re doing works for them as well as for their clients.
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I’m the last person that should be telling you anything about ballet. I can’t remember the last time I saw a ballet performance, but I guarantee you it was at something like a middle school talent show. Despite my knowing nothing about ballet, I can tell you that the New York City Ballet is a big deal. They train their own artists and produce their own works, and with 90 dancers, they are “the largest dance organization in America.” It all started with Lincoln Kirstein, who had a vision of “an American ballet where young native dancers could be trained and schooled under the guidance of the world’s greatest ballet masters to perform a new, modern repertory, rather than relying on touring groups of imported artists performing for American audiences.” He met a guy named George Balanchine in London in 1933 and invited him to help start the school. The rest is history.
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When you’re a kid, you think that teachers have an easy job. They have good hours, lots of vacation with summers off, and they get to stand in front of a room and tell you what to do. As you get older, you start to realize that teaching also includes grading papers, planning lessons, communicating with parents, writing comments for report cards, and a whole lot more. A grade book just isn’t a good hub for managing all of this. Teachers need something industrial-strength, and that’s what Instructure provides with their Canvas Learning Management System. The Sandy, UT based company offers a suite of tools that enable teachers to spend way less time on administrative stuff, and more time teaching and working directly with students. They serve educators at all levels–from Kindergarten to some of the world’s top universities, which shows you just how flexible the Canvas platform is.
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Ads make the Internet go ’round. Most of the content that you consume (including what you’re reading right now) wouldn’t be possible without advertising. The problem is that most ads are annoying–they interrupt you from doing what you want to do–so you start to ignore them. As you ignore more and more ads, advertisers are forced to find new ways to catch your attention. Sometimes that leads to ads that are actually interesting, and sometimes it leads to ads that are more interruptive. Spongecell is a New York, NY based company that allows advertisers to “transform standard banner ads into dynamic flash ads with rich media-like functionality.” That may sound more interruptive, but the ads that Spongecell enables are no bigger than a typical banner ad–they just come to life when you hover over them with your cursor.
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In college I studied Industrial and Labor Relations, which means that I spent four years focusing on the world of work. The curriculum covered everything from slavery and indentured servitude to unions and the movement of capital to find lower cost labor. The common theme was that the way that we define and think about work is constantly changing. Today’s trend is all about having a flexible workforce–people who can join on for a project form wherever they live and then move on to a new project with someone else. Work Market is a company that “give businesses access to an on-demand scalable work force along with tools to manage three categories of labor: employees, contractors and third parties.” Many businesses in this space focus on actually building the market where labor can find work, but Work Market takes it one step further and offers the software for businesses to build their own market.
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At some point you’ve probably participated in a fundraiser to help pay for someone’s medical costs. You may have organized a car wash, bought a candy bar, run in a race, or just made a simple donation. It’s one way that we take care of people in our communities when they’re in need. The problem with fundraisers is that they can be an organizational nightmare. GiveForward is a Chicago, IL based company that solves this problem by offering people online fundraising pages. I met Ethan Austin, one of the company’s founders, about three years ago, and since then I’ve watched GiveForward help people raise more than $13 million and grow as a company at the same time. Every time I see him again, it seems like there’s a new success.
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If I told you that I had 52 slaves working for me, you’d either think that I was making an offensive joke about unpaid internships or just being offensive. Unfortunately, it’s the truth. It’s nearly impossible for anyone living in our society not to benefit from modern slavery. So what do we do about it? Before you can take responsibility for your consumption, you have to understand your “slavery footprint.” Slavery Footprint is an Oakland, CA based non-profit organization that aims “to generate awareness and action for the issues of forced labor, slavery, and human trafficking.” They’ve done this through a film called Call + Response, a documentary with CNN, and an online survey that helps you calculate your slavery footprint based on what you consume and own.
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Lifting weights is one of the best things that you can do for physical fitness. Strength training can have amazing effects on its own, but you can get extraordinary results when you combine your training with proper nutrition. There’s a next step if you really want to get serious: supplementation. There seems to be a supplement for everything, from gaining muscle to improving brain function. And if there’s a name that you think of when you think of supplements, it has to be GNC. They’re a Pittsburgh, PA based worldwide retailer of health and nutrition products that include vitamins, supplements, minerals, herbs, and more. If you’re looking to get more out of your body, there’s something at GNC that will at least claim to help you do it.
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You’re not going to like this. You’ve paid a lot of money for a fancy education, and now some of the best universities in the world are giving it away for free. You still have to pay to get the piece of paper, but if you’re just looking for the knowledge, then you need to check out Coursera. They’re a Mountain View, CA based startup that is “partnering with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.” So far they’re working with Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, and UPenn. It doesn’t get much better than that. What makes Coursera unique from things like MIT’s OpenCourseWare is that these classes are specifically created to be consumed online.
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I hate stock photography–especially the kind that you find on many career related sites. It’s usually a group of moderately attractive, racially diverse people who are smiling while dressed in business suits and holding folios. It’s not real. These photos create an unrealistic view of what a work environment looks like. In the world of home design, the analog is the fruit bowl. Whether you’re looking through real estate listings or a home decor magazine, chances are that you’ll see lots of fruit bowls–and they’ll be in odd places like bathrooms and bedrooms. Dwell is a magazine that defines itself by focusing on real life, something that “has been conspicuous by its absence in most design and architecture magazines.” Fruit bowls are ok, but only if the owners eat fruit. And so are other things you may not see in similar magazines–things that “demonstrate that a home is truly livable” by showing “it as it is lived in.” Dwell is based in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA, and although they consider themselves Modernists, they’re “nice Modernists.”
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I love Easter. I get pretty amped about the candy, which is why in past years I’ve featured Just Born Quality Confections, Jelly Belly, Russell Stover, and the PMCA at Easter time (and Mars, The Hershey Company, NECCO, Charles Chocolates, and Vosges at other times of the year). But in my family it’s really all about the cash. We have an annual Easter Egg Hunt that is high stakes–elbows have been thrown. The eggs with candy are the duds. The heavy ones are ok because they have dollar coins. But the ones that you really want are light–they have bills in them. Over the past few years, I’ve been able to make Easter Egg Hunts pretty profitable, but it doesn’t come close to what Hatchlings has done. They run “the world’s largest egg hunt” via Facebook, and apparently the Des Moines, IA based company has been able to generate significant advertising revenue through their app.
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The health care situation in the United States is a mess. It’s hard to disagree with that, but it’s easy to disagree about how we can fix it. I think that technology is a big part of the answer. I don’t mean medical technology (though that will certainly help)–I’m talking about administrative technology. I know it’s not nearly as exciting, but if doctors can run their practices more efficiently, they’ll be able to deliver better care at a lower costs. That’s a big deal. Drchrono is a Mountain View, CA based company that is using the power of the iPad to change how medical practices are run. They’ve developed a software-based patient care platform that does everything from patient check-in to managing electronic health records to billing. It may not sound like it’s going to turn around the health care situation, but it’s a start.
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Behavioral change is hard. Really hard. Whether you’re trying to be more diligent about networking or trying to lose a few pounds, you have to understand your own psychological shortfalls. If you try to make 20 changes all at once, you are going to fail. That’s why I really like how Greatist approaches health and fitness. They are aiming to inspire “the world to make one healthier choice per week.” It doesn’t sound like much, but it really adds up. And once you’re committed to one healthy choice a week, it gets a heck of a lot easier to make another one… and another one. Greatist is based in New York, NY, and they pursue their mission by providing health and fitness related content on their website. There are a million other sites that do this, but Greatist has a unique approach, a targeted market of the “young, savvy, and social,” and drastically growing traffic. Those are all really good signs.
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One of the best ways to land an internship is to show an employer what you’ve done. That’s hard when you don’t have any experience, and that’s why I recommend that every college student pick up some sort of project to put who they are into product form. Getting an internship is a lot like landing an account for an agency, which is why HY Connect leads with their work. When you get on the Milwaukee, WI and Chicago, IL based company’s home page, you see the best of what they do best. While looking at an advertising campaign can tell you a lot, it doesn’t tell the whole story. HY Connect offers “integrated advertising, public relations and media solutions,” which means that their Services page includes a remarkably long list of things that they do well.
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This weekend I spent an equal amount of time watching sports on tv and playing sports outside. That didn’t leave a lot of time to read about sports online, but I’ll guarantee you that a lot of sports sites saw a ton of traffic this weekend (and will continue to see it over the next few weeks). One of those sites is SB Nation, which is a site that is focused on “reinventing the media model with profitable, high-quality, innovative coverage from passionate, talented creators.” SB Nation used to be a company on its own, but it’s been so successful that a larger company called Vox Media has been built around it. They’re based in Washington, DC, and they also run The Verge, a technology news site, and will be launching a gaming focused site soon. Word is that they just closed a big round of funding, and the expectation is that they’ll use the cash to build out into more verticals.
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This weather is insane. Yesterday it hit 80 degrees in Chicago. The 10-day forecast would be awesome for June… and it’s mid-March. As a result, all I want to do is be outside. But to be honest, even when the weather sucks, I still usually want to be outside. With the kind of gear that companies like Outdoor Research put out, there’s no excuse no matter what the weather. Outdoor Research is based in Seattle, WA, and they’re focused “on creating functional solutions for human powered adventure.” The company was founded in 1981 by a physicist named Ron Gregg. He was unhappy with how his gear performed on one of his outdoor adventures, so he decided to make a better version. They started with handwear, headwear, and gaiters, but after finding success in those areas started developing new product lines.
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