I’m often frustrated by companies that use too many buzzwords. Social media companies can be some of the worst offenders–their business is about being ahead of the curve, so they want to sound like it. Just tell me what you do! That’s why I was refreshed when I ended up on the website for GasPedal, an Austin, TX based social media company that says what they do in big letters on their home page. They “teach businesses to be nicer to you.” They do this by running “fantastic communities,” hosting “thrilling events, and writing “about marketing ideas you can actually use.” There’s also a consulting and training part of the business that I’ll bet is pretty significant.
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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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user experience,
web development
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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My life is about as paperless as it gets. I avoid having to use a printer at all costs. Yet, I still think I know something about the paper and printing industry. It’s not because my mom is a graphic designer who dragged me along to pick up printing jobs when I was a kid. It’s because I watch The Office, obviously. Believe it or not, printing costs are still significant for most companies–“corporations spend $500 per employee annually on printing costs.” PrintEco is a Chicago, IL based company that claims they can cut 17% off of most companies’ printing expenses and help the environment at the same time. When you see how they do it, I think you’ll be pretty impressed.
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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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dating,
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production,
software development,
unpaid,
web development
It’s supposed to be in the 80s and sunny all weekend here in Chicago. This is the weather that we wait all year for, yet I”m starting to think this may have been a good weekend to get out of town. Why? The NATO Summit is in Chicago this weekend, and so are the protesters. If I was going to get out of town, I might try one of the services offered by Fareportal to book something. They’re a New York, NY based company that has a “technology platform which enables millions of travelers to book a myriad of travel products from almost every corner of the world.” They operate a number of consumer brands including CheapOair (I’ve used them at least once), CheapOstay, HotelPricer, and Clubmiles. Fareportal also has travel trade brands including Fare Buzz, Travelong, Fareportal Media Group, and Dukes Court Travel.
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travel,
web development
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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video,
web development
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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style,
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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 can’t tell you how many articles I’ve seen about dressing for interviews. Almost all of them can be summed up with three words: use common sense. If that’s not enough insight for you, how about this: look like you belong. There are way more important things to think about before your interview, but I do believe that most people perform better when they feel like they look good. If I had an interview coming up, my go to place to shop would be Bonobos. I’m not sure where I’d shop if I was female, but it looks like The Limited is a reasonable place to buy professional women’s clothing. The Limited is a Columbus, OH retailer of women’s clothing with a long and somewhat confusing 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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When I think of shopping malls, I instantly think of escalators, Auntie Anne’s pretzels, and overpriced gadget stores. Because I was never a teen/tween girl, my memories don’t include Claire’s. In case you’ve never heard of Claire’s, they are a retailer of “fashion trends, accessories and jewelry for young women.” They have more than 3,000 stores across the world and are in 95% of U.S. shopping malls. That’s a massive retail presence. While Claire’s is headquartered in Pembroke Pines, FL, they only have Customer Service and Investor Relations located there. Most of the action (and most of the jobs) seems to be at Claire’s Hoffman Estates, IL office.
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style
Local businesses are about as old school as you can get–many of them have continued to succeed doing the same thing that they’ve done for decades or even centuries. There have certainly been advances that have changed that–refrigeration, digital cash registers, and the Yellow Pages are just a few, but nothing even compares to the Internet–especially the mobile Internet. Local businesses are now able to reach and interact with customers and potential customers in a way that they only could have dreamed of a few years ago. CityGrid Media is a West Hollywood, CA based “leading media company connecting consumers and businesses everywhere local happens.” You’re probably familiar with at least one of their properties which include Citysearch, Insider Pages, and Urbanspoon.
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Washington,
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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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What have you done to improve your skills besides going to class? Nothing is not an acceptable answer. Self-improvement not only makes you immediately more employable, but it also signals to employers that you’re the kind of person that can grow in a company. There are plenty of ways to improve yourself as a candidate, but one of the easiest is computer training. In a short period of time you can significantly expand the number of jobs that you can apply for. TrainSignal is a Schaumburg, IL based company that offers video training for software from Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix, VMWare, CompTIA, and more. They provide both online video and physical media, and they serve both individuals and businesses of all sizes.
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Earth Day is a contrived holiday. It was designed as a day of teach-ins across the country to educate students about environmental evils. April 22 was chosen as the date because it fit perfectly between spring break and final exams. If you want to maximize on-campus student activity, this is the time of year to do it. It’s worked. Earth Day now has more than 40 years of history behind it, and it continues to be a great way to rally people for environmental causes. Earth Day Network is a Washington, DC based non-profit organization that organizes Earth Day activities across the world while also focusing on environmental causes year round. In the past they’ve “executed successful environmental campaigns on issues ranging from climate change and drinking water to voter registration and saving the whale.”
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unpaid,
Washington DC
When I see my friends from Jelly Chicago (a co-working group), we often bounce ridiculous startup ideas off of each other. For some reason, many are centered around online dating. It’s a really fun space to think about because there’s a simple problem with limitless solutions–just look at all of the different dating sites out there. Most of them require your searching through profiles and contacting people (or waiting to be contacted). Others propose matches based on fancy algorithms. MeetMoi is a mobile dating company that uses push technology to help you meet new people, and it’s all based on where you are right now. MeetMoi is located in New York, NY, but you can use it anywhere (well anywhere that they have a critical mass of users). Basically, all you have to do is fill out a profile and get out of the house. MeetMoi will find people with similar interests and push messages to your phone when you’re near each other. You can initiate a chat and decide to meet immediately, another time or not at all. It’s a little creepy, but people said that about online dating not so long ago.
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I remember when I used to get excited about catalogs coming in the mail. The ones from Orvis were always my favorite. They had great photos, interesting stories, and products that I was dying to buy. As the catalog business has moved online, a lot of the art has been lost. It’s not that the web isn’t capable of offering a wonderful catalog experience, it’s just that the constraints of selling on the web (SEO, conversion rate optimization, content management systems, etc) push companies to take a different approach. Luckily for those of us who care, the catalog isn’t dead. Zmags is a Boston, MA based company that has built “the only rich media platform that brings commerce into the digital catalog.” They enable brands to build interactive catalogs that offer an even better experience than paper catalogs–and they can be consumed on all kinds of technology including phones, tablets, and computers.
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I’m not big on writing online reviews. There’s something that feels wrong about generating free content for someone else to make money off of it. But I’m sure glad that there are plenty of people who have a different opinion. How would I know which restaurants to go to without Yelp? Or what books to buy without Amazon reviews? Reviews have proven time after time to be a great base on which to build an Internet business. That’s exactly what they’ve done at Expo, a New York, NY based company that has been aiming “to create the largest and most authentic base of product focused videos available” since 2005. They’ve built a platform for regular people to share “videopinions” on nearly any product under the sun.
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In my fiancée’s mind there is no better dessert than fresh berries and whipped cream. I’d probably add a piece of chocolate cake to that, but the biggest variable in the equation is almost always the berries. Good berries, whether they’re strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, or snozberries, taste better than candy, while bad berries often taste like dirt. Since I share Jerry Seinfeld’s feeling that fruit is a gamble, I’m not particularly brand conscious, but checking my refrigerator tells me that my most recently purchased strawberries are from Driscoll’s. They’re a Watsonville, CA based berry purveyor that has been family owned and operated for more than 100 years.
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botany,
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food,
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organic,
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Whether you’re giving or receiving, there’s nothing better than a unique, well thought out gift. Gift cards have a reputation for being the antithesis of that. But let’s be honest, it’s often better to be able to buy what you want than to be in a situation where you’re repeating the name of the gift just given to you (Seinfeld pointed this out, and it’s so true). GiftRocket is a San Francisco, CA based company that has made the gift card more flexible while also making it more personal. I know that seems impossible, but here’s how it works. When you buy someone a gift on GiftRocket, you can choose from a massive number of merchants. You can pick a specific one like your favorite neighborhood pizza joint, or you can leave it up to your recipient to choose where he or she wants to spend the money.
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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 $25 off your first order. My gift to you.
I have no idea where people went to ask embarrassing health questions before the Internet. I guess you could have gone to a doctor, but it’s really nice to pre-educate yourself before you ask a professional. That’s why there’s ridiculous demand for health-related information online. Everyday Health is a company that has been reacting to this demand since they started in 2002. They are a New York, NY based company that provides “consumers, healthcare professionals, and brands with content and advertising-based services across a broad portfolio of over 25 websites that span the health spectrum.” If you ask Google and embarrassing health question, there’s a really good chance that you’ll end up on one of their sites. In 2010 they were averaging 26.5 million monthly unique visitor, which is just a massive amount of traffic–especially in a niche as valuable as health related information.
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Just a few days ago I mentioned that computers are better than humans at math. That’s true for many math operations, but the ultimate combination is a smart human working with a fast computer and great software. MathWorks is a Natick, MA based company that makes this possible, as they are “the leading developer of mathematical computing software for engineers and scientists.” They’ve been around for nearly 30 years, which is a seriously long time in the software business. MathWorks is probably best known for MATLAB, which is “a programming environment for algorithm development, data analysis, visualization, and numeric computation.” It’s used everywhere from research in top universities to designing industrial machines. If advanced math is involved, there’s a good chance that MATLAB will be used.
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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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Wisconsin
Beauty isn’t usually one of my top priorities, but I do know that I look better when I’m tan (which is why working outside in the sun yesterday was so awesome). That’s about the only beauty tip that I can offer, so if you want more, you’ll have to look somewhere else… like one of the sites run by Total Beauty Media Group. They’re a Santa Monica, CA based company that runs TotalBeauty.com, BeautyRiot.com, LimeLife.com, and ModernMan.com. These four brands combine to help Total Beauty Media Group achieve their mission of inspiring “all consumers to live beautiful lives.” The company was founded in 2007 and it now gets 12 million unique visits a month across its network of sites.
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My last foreign language learning experience came in tenth grade French class. I found it mind numbingly boring even though we used French in Action, which was supposed to be a wonderful method for learning the language. If you can’t keep a student engaged, he or she will never learn the language. That’s why Voxy might be worth checking out for those of you who have had trouble learning languages through other methods. They’re based in New York, NY, and they offer “an exciting, award-winning way to learn a language from life.” How do they do this? They use web and mobile technologies to teach you a language while you’re doing things that you’d normally do–reading articles, playing games, or walking around your city. Not only does this make learning more fun, but it also makes it more useful. What you learn is based on the context of your life, so you’ll actually know why what you’re learning is useful.
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I remember when getting a new catalog in the mail made for an exciting day. My favorite catalog had to be Things You Never Knew Existed, but most of the ones I got were focused on baseball or fishing. I don’t know why I remember this, but I was always jealous of a friend who got the Eastbay catalog. It was filled with all kind of sporting goods and apparel, and for some reason I never thought to sign up to get it. While Eastbay, which is based in Wausau, WI, still has a catalog business, they’ve unsurprisingly moved a lot of what they do online. To me the coolest thing about Eastbay is their story. According to Wikipedia, they were founded in 1980 to “to meet the performance needs of local high school and college athletes within Central Wisconsin.” By 1995 they had grown big enough to go public. A few years later they were bought out by Woolworth’s, which became Foot Locker, Inc. It just shows how big a company can get even if they start by serving a small niche market.
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