Admit it! You’ve used the Internet to self-diagnose a medical problem, and you probably used WebMD. For some of you it was to convince yourself that you’re not going to die tomorrow, and for some of you it was probably the opposite. It’s great having access to so much information, but it’s kind of dangerous when you a) can’t verify its accuracy and b) have no idea how to use it properly. Running to the doctor for every little issue is ridiculous, so there needs to be a better way to get medical information online. Luckily my little sister (who is awesome because she went to art school and then decided she wanted to go to med school, so she’s doing a postbac now) let me know about HealthTap. They’re a Palo Alto, CA based company that provides “free online and mobile answers from thousands of the best physicians in the U.S.” It’s kind of like Yahoo! Answers for medicine, but the people responding to your questions aren’t complete morons.
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I think it’s pretty mind blowing how interconnected the world economies have become during my lifetime. While international trade has existed for many thousands of years, never before have people had to rely so heavily on the production of others half way around the world. I generally think this is a great thing, but many issues come along with the growth. The World Economic Forum is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab in Geneva, Switzerland to be “committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” The World Economic Forum, which also has offices in New York, NY and Beijing, China, is probably best known for its annual meeting at Davos where they bring together some of the world’s most important leaders to engage on some of the most pressing issues.
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Since we celebrated National Pancake Day yesterday, we’re not going to make a big deal about Leap Day, but if you’re looking for a leapy post, you may want to read our profiles on LeapFrog and TicketLeap. Instead of the calendar, we’re going to talk about family history. I’m lucky in that my family has done a great job of documenting our history. One of the best stories from my family’s past is about William Ker Muir (my Great Great Great Grandfather), who at 24 left his homeland of Scotland to take a job in Canada’s burgeoning railroad industry. Four years later in 1859, he was riding in the last seat of the last car on a train from Toronto to Hamilton. He heard a crash at the front of the train and jumped out the back door. He landed safely on the track as the Desjardins Bridge collapsed and the train fell into an icy gorge killing or injuring most of the passengers and crew. Without those quick reflexes, I wouldn’t be here. It’s stories like those that make investigating genealogy worthwhile, and if you’re going to do that, online tools like those provided by Provo, UT based Ancestry.com can be a huge help. It’s “the world’s largest online resource for family history, with more than 1.7 million paying subscribers around the world.”
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Amy and I are going to the International Kennel Club of Chicago Dog Show today. We’re not thinking about getting a dog yet, but we’re thinking about thinking about it. Since dogs are on my mind today, I figured I’d look for an animal friendly non-profit. You’d be hard pressed to find an organization more animal friendly than The Humane Society of the United States. They are “the nation’s largest and most effective animal protection organization” with support from more than 11 million people in the U.S. Their national headquarters is based in Washington, DC, but you’re probably familiar with local humane societies. While the local societies are not directly connected with The Humane Society of the United States, they do get support from it.
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Mid-February is a great time for a vacation. It’s typically still really cold, but it’s late enough in the winter that you can reasonably expect that it might feel like spring when you get back home. Unfortunately, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, but if I was, I’d really like to use Inspirato. It’s a super high-end vacation club that offers members access to amazing residences in fantastic locations. The company is based in Denver, CO, but they have long-term leases on properties in places like St. Barts, Paris, Patagonia, Jackson Hole, Kenya, and Tuscany. For a meager $15,000 initiation fee and a $2,500 annual fee, you can access any of these properties. You still have to pay a nightly rate, but it’s well below what’d you pay if you were renting a similar property on your own (the average nightly rate is $650).
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As of today pitchers and catchers have reported to Spring Training for every team except for the White Sox, Marlins, and Rangers. Baseball is here, and I couldn’t be happier. Last year I went to games at Wrigley, U.S. Cellular, and Yankee Stadium, and every time I paid under face value for my tickets. How’d I do that? I use StubHub and wait until 3-4 hours before the game starts and buy while people are trying to dump tickets that will soon be worth nothing. Markets work best when you have many buyers and sellers, and that’s why I’m able to get such good deals. The big loser in all this is the original ticketing agent. Because their prices are set many months in advance, they can’t react to market conditions. Usually they end up sitting on a ton of unsold tickets, but even when an event sells out, they lose. If they had priced properly, they could have extracted much more value out of the tickets (instead the scalpers get the surplus value). Yesterday, I read an article about how a company called Qcue is changing all of this. They’re based in Austin, TX, and they’ve developed technology that helps teams price their tickets dynamically.
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Because I’m a tech savvy kind of guy, I often get asked a lot of computer and Internet related questions. One of the most common questions that I get is: “How do I see how much traffic a website gets?” This is useful information whether you want to check to see if a startup is really as popular as they claim or if you want to size a market, but it’s not easy information to come by. The best answer is get the login and password to the site’s Google Analytics account. Considering that’s difficult and likely illegal, your next best bet is to you use some of the competitive research tools that are available. The free ones include Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and Google Trends for Websites. Unfortunately, none of these are particularly reliable or accurate, and they’re especially bad for sites that get less than hundreds of thousands of visitors a month. The gold standard for this kind of information is offered comScore, but it comes with a hefty subscription fee. The Reston, VA calls itself “a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence,” so paying those fees will get you a lot more than just traffic estimates for websites.
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“Yo I’m a Raptor doin’ what I can gonna eat everything till the appearance of man. Yo yo yo, see me, I’m living below the soil, I’ll be back but I’m comin’ as oil!” That has to be one of my favorite lines from Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie that I saw dozens of time as a kid. I thought it was funny even though I had no idea what it meant (probably because Robin Williams saying anything is funny). Mrs. Doubtfire was on tv recently, and I saw the scene for the first time in a long time and finally got it. Disappointingly, petroleum doesn’t actually come from dinosaurs, but from decomposed single-celled organisms that existed 10s or 100s of millions of years ago. That means that oil is a non-renewable resource… or at least it used to be. Solazyme is a San Francisco, CA based company that has “pioneered an industrial biotechnology platform that harnesses the prolific oil-producing ability of micro algae.” Yes, they are actually synthesizing real oil that can be refined and used to power things. They feed the algae sugar, so as long you can keep growing sugar (from a variety of sources), you can keep producing oil.
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Despite my outdoorsiness, I was never a boy scout. I’ll admit that I was a little jealous of the other kids when they came into school with their uniforms covered in patches, but I’m sure I earned plenty of patches as a kid–even if I never actually got patches (now I can buy them from Best Made Company). Still, I have a ton of respect for Boy Scouts of America. They’re an organization that has lasted more than a century by staying focused on a core set of values. They believe “that helping youth is a key to building a more conscientious, responsible, and productive society,” and they’ve continuously adapted the way that they’ve helped you to keep current. Boy Scouts of America is headquartered in Irving, TX, but they operate (and have job opportunities) all across the country.
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It’s amazing how a good snowfall can quiet a city down. It may not be as serene as a natural landscape, but it reminds you that nature still exists in a setting that has been almost completely altered by man. It’s easy to forget about the environment when you live in a city, but I’m sure that’s not a problem for the people at the Environmental Law Institute. It’s a Washington, DC based non-profit organization that “makes law work for people, places, and the planet.” That’s an important role because environmental health is a public good that can be ruined by the actions of a few. Environmental changes can have all kinds of externalities, so it’s important that our legal system is set up in a way that promotes “a healthy environment, prosperous economies, and vibrant communities.”
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For the most part illness is an individual problem. You get sick, you go to a doctor if it’s serious enough, and it eventually gets better with or without treatment. But sometimes your illness can be a public health issue. If you get something like influenza or food poisoning, there’s a good chance that information about your illness could help lots of other people stay healthy. At times like these “when new health risks emerge or well-known problems re-emerge, it is public health laboratories that analyze the threat and provide the answers needed to mount an effective response.” The Association of Public Health Laboratories is a non-profit organization based in Silver Spring, MD that “works to strengthen laboratories serving the public’s health in the US and globally.” The organization’s membership spans across all kinds of laboratories ranging from the public health labs mentioned in their name to environmental and agricultural labs. Many are government labs, but there are also corporate and non-profit labs included.
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We’re finally getting our first snow storm of the winter here in Chicago. I’m not traveling anywhere, I don’t have a commute, and I know well enough not to drive on Lakeshore Drive today (this is what happened last year), so I’m excited and watching the weather hoping for a lot of accumulation (even though there are no sledding hills nearby). I don’t have a favorite weather site, so I keep my eyes on a number of them including Accuweather. I guess it’s a bit of an understatement to call Accuweather a site–they’ve been around since 1962 and they call themselves “the World’s Weather Authority.” They’re based in State College, PA (with an office in New York, NY) where they’re stockpiling meteorologists there (the most in any location in the world). They need these weather guys and girls because they provide “products and services to more than 175,000 paying customers in media, business, government and institutions.”
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Last night I started watching Planet Earth and ended up staying awake later than I intended. This morning the same channel was on, and I ended up watching documentaries on Yellowstone. There aren’t many things that I find more fascinating than nature, so it’s easy for me to get caught up in these kinds of shows. It’s also why I think the work of The Nature Conservancy is so important. They’re an international non-profit organization based in Arlington, VA that is “the leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people.” The Nature Conservancy was founded in 1951, and since then they have grown their membership to more than 1 million people. The organization’s huge size gives it a ton of power and has enabled it to do some really amazing work.
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When I first learned about Google Trends, I was shocked to see how much Internet search traffic is driven by television. It’s pretty clear that browsing the web and watching the tube go hand in hand, which is great news for both marketers and tv content producers. Since its inception tv’s biggest problem has been that it is a one way medium with no real feedback loop. That’s changed, and Bluefin Labs “has accomplished a breakthrough in this field by applying cognitive science research combined with large scale computing techniques to successfully and automatically link TV to social media.” If all goes as planned, the Cambridge, MA will make traditional tv ratings obsolete. Who cares how many people are watching when you can know who’s watching and what they’re saying?
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I don’t know about you, but some days I feel sharper than others. Whether I’m trying to spike a volleyball or write a piece of code for this site, I have my good days and my bad days. There are a ton of factors that can affect how you perform on a given task from day to day, and many of them are hard to control. But the best way to overcome these fluctuations is to improve your overall skill through practice. This is pretty straightforward when you’re talking about specific tasks, but what if you are just aiming to improve your mental sharpness? As I’ve learned from reading Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything memory is a skill that can be trained just like any other skill. That’s why I was intrigued when I saw a commercial for Lumosity. They’re a San Francisco, CA based company that has used cutting edge science to develop “the most effective online tool for cognitive enhancement.” I’m skeptical of a lot of the claims in favor of brain teaser games, but Lumosity has actually built their products based on research from top neuroscientists at places like Stanford, UCSF, Harvard, and Columbia. It’s hard to argue with that.
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Yesterday, I was watching a tv news segment on holiday etiquette, and a viewer e-mailed in a question about how to deal with throwing a party when nearly every guest has submitted “dietary restrictions.” The “expert” responded that the host should just serve what she wants to serve considering that none of her friends are likely at risk for starvation. My guess is that a lot of the guests don’t really have dietary restrictions but dietary preferences; however, there seems to be an increasing number of people whose health is significantly affected by eating certain things. A lot of these reactions are caused by autoimmune diseases, which are caused by “an overactive immune response of the body against substances and tissues normally present in the body.” I’m not sure if autoimmune diseases are becoming more prevalent or if they’re just getting more attention, but IMMCO Diagnostics based in Buffalo, NY has built its business on battling autoimmune diseases. They incorporate “innovative medical devices, diagnostic laboratory testing expertise and pioneering research for a comprehensive solution to autoimmune disease diagnostics.”
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No matter what you majored in, it’s tough out there right now (ok, computer science might be an exception), but chances are that there’s some sort of entry level job somewhere that will get you on a career path that you’re happy with. That’s not so for a lot of artists. That’s not to say that there aren’t some amazing job opportunities for Arts majors, but where do you work if you actually want to make a living selling your art? (No, the punchline isn’t Starbucks.) You have to be an entrepreneur, and that’s not easy–especially when you also have to put as much energy as you can into creating. Fractured Atlas is a New York, NY based non-profit organization that facilitates “the creation of art by offering vital support to the artists who produce it.” It’s about providing artists with services, programs, and information that will help them to achieve financial security and enable them to keep creating.
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One of my favorite classes at Cornell was Animal Science 290, which was better known as “Meat Science” or “Meats.” We did pretty much everything including slaughtering, butchering, curing, cooking, and eating, but, even better, we learned all about the scientific reasons for why we were doing what we did. Everything about the class was great (especially the eating), but one of the unexpected benefits was getting to interact with an entirely different group of students than I was accustomed to. A lot of the kids in the class actually grew up on real, working farms, and I don’t think that I had ever met anyone my age who grew up on a farm before Cornell. They were the kind of kids I assumed did 4-H in high school. It turns out that my view of 4-H was a bit narrow, as it’s much more than an organization for farm kids–it’s a non-profit that “empowers youth to reach their full potential, working and learning in partnership with caring adults” in all environments. 4-H is based in Chevy Chase, MD, and it’s pretty clear from their website that they’re trying to build an image that goes beyond agriculture. Still, 4-H is administered by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture of the United States Department of Agriculture and works through the Cooperative Extension of “America’s 109 land-grant universities,” so agriculture remains extremely important within the organization.
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On Saturday I’m heading to Aruba for two weeks! (Don’t worry, you’ll still get your daily e-mails–even on Christmas Day.) I booked well in advance, so I got a decent fare, but it’s still about four times more expensive than traveling at a different time of year. If you want to travel during the holidays, you’re probably going to have to pay through the nose. Still, it’s worth looking for a deal, and there’s no better place to do that than Travelzoo. They’re a New York, NY based company (with 23 other offices all across the world) that has perfected the art of the travel deal. They don’t just go out and find low rates–they actually “research, evaluate, and test thousands of deals to find those with true value.” Although it’s not exactly the same, they kind of do for travel deals what I do for jobs: curate. Though they have 250 experts working on it, which is 249 more than we have.
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For most people health is a deeply personal issue that is only to be talked about with close friends, family, and medical professionals, yet “public health” is a term that you hear used more and more. It’s because health isn’t an independent outcome–it’s closely tied to the health of others in your community. You’re better off if your peers are healthy, which is why governments and non-profits direct so many resources to improving public health. One of the organizations that does this work in New York, NY is Public Health Solutions. They are an “organization that develops, implements and advocates dynamic solutions to prevent disease and improve community health.” They were founded in 1957, and since then they’ve been building upon a “foundation of rigorous scientific research to link research and practice in dynamic ways to improve the health of communities.”
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The job search is a vulnerable time for most people, and that results in a lot of people trying to take advantage of those who are looking for work. This makes me very angry, which is why I always do my best to stick my neck out for job seekers. I won’t hesitate to turn down sponsors who seem even a little sketchy, and I’ve put a lot of effort into exposing job and internship scams and pushing for employers to pay their interns. I guess you could call these the ethical duties of my job, and I take them extremely seriously. Josephson Institute for Ethics is a Los Angeles, CA based non-profit organization that also takes ethics extremely seriously (in case you couldn’t tell by their name). Their mission is to “improve the ethical quality of society by changing personal and organizational decision making and behavior.”
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When I was a kid, there were two kinds of visits to the doctor’s office: ones where I had to get a shot and ones where I didn’t. Children will never be able to understand how lucky they are to have the opportunity to get poked in the arm with a needle so that they can be vaccinated. Tomorrow’s kids will be even luckier to get poked if Liquidia Technologies keeps innovating. They’re a Research Triangle Park, NC based company that is “developing engineered particle-based vaccines and therapeutics that have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of human life.” Liquidia Technologies was founded in 2004 based on discoveries made by a Professor Joseph DeSimone of UNC, and since then they’ve raised a ton of financing.
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When I was a kid, I had my own chemistry set. It was pretty cool–I could do things like change the color of a liquid by mixing a few different powders. Ok, so it wasn’t that exciting, especially after I learned that my Dad would make his own gunpowder and blow stuff up when he was a kid. After having a watered down chemistry set as a kid, I ended up having a completely inept chemistry teacher in high school. It should be no surprise that my interest in chemistry fizzled out, but if I wanted to get the reaction going again, I might look to the Chemical Heritage Foundation. They’re a Philadelphia, PA based non-profit organization that “fosters an understanding of chemistry’s impact on society” by “inspiring a passion for chemistry; highlighting chemistry’s role in meeting current social challenges; and preserving the story of chemistry and its technologies and industries across centuries.”
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Now that I’ve lived in Chicago for three years, I’m starting to feel more like a part of the Chicago business community. And a big piece of being a part of a community is keeping up on your local news. I rely a lot of sources, but I’ve found that Crain’s Chicago Business consistently does great reporting on the Chicago business scene. Crain’s Chicago Business is published by Crain Communications, which is “one of the largest privately owned business publishers in the U.S., with more than 27 leading business, trade and consumer publications and related websites in North America, Europe and Asia.” Crain is headquartered in Detroit, MI, but their publications are headquartered in a variety of places. Crain was founded in 1916 by GD Crain Jr., and it remains a family owned business to this day despite a few bumps in the road that would be expected for any company in the publishing industry (like layoffs a couple of years ago).
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Life isn’t nearly as exciting with no new Harry Potter books or movies coming out. I’m pretty bummed about it, but probably not nearly as bummed as the people who hang out on MuggleNet. In case you’ve never heard of it, MuggleNet is “the world’s #1 Harry Potter site.” It was started by Emerson Spartz when he was 12 years old, and it quickly started generating a ton of traffic. And with that traffic came some serious revenue opportunities. As MuggleNet turned into a real business, Emerson rolled it into a company called Spartz Media and started launching new entertainment focused sites. Some of the bigger names include OMG Facts, Gives Me Hope, and SmartphOWNED. Spartz Media is located in Chicago, IL (about 3 blocks from me), and they’re reaching more than 8.5 million people every month through their web properties. They’ve been at it since 2009, though MuggleNet has actually been around since 1999.
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Yesterday I picked my parents up from the airport. Because of traffic, I ended up spending more time in the car to do a roundtrip of about 35 miles then than they spent on the plane flying from New York City to Chicago. It’s amazing how far we’ve come in terms of transportation over the course of human history, but we still have a long way to go. Society still has a ton to gain economically and environmentally through innovation in transportation. That’s why the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy exists. They’re a New York, NY based non-profit organization that “works with cities worldwide to bring about sustainable transport solutions that cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce poverty, and improve the quality of urban life.” They have offices in Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, so it’s clear that their mission is as much about international development as it is about transportation.
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In the good old days companies would print a 1-800 number on their products soliciting “Questions, Comments, and Concerns.” My guess is that they got a lot of calls from 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds, and not many from people in between. This was ok for a long time, but brands are slowly coming around to the idea that interacting with their customers is probably a good thing. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are helping, but most brands still use them to push information instead of engaging with consumers. Crowdtap is a New York, NY based company that has developed its own network that “allows marketers to easily collaborate with and mobilize their targeted brand crowd of influential consumers for real-time research, collaboration or powerful word-of-mouth marketing.”
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When I think of the energy industry, I think of big machines like oil drills, windmills, and coal elevators. Microbes and genetics just don’t come to mind. Synthetic Genomics is a company that is aiming to change that. Energy is just one of the industries that they are working to disrupt as they develop “breakthrough genomic-driven solutions for major global issues.” Right now Synthetic Genomics, which is based in La Jolla, CA, has put a heavy emphasis on working with the energy and chemical industries because there is so much potential for gain–especially in terms of the environment; however, they’re also working on things like food production, human health, and water availability. It’s all about “turning novel science into life-changing solutions.”
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Columbus Day isn’t much of a holiday anymore–it’s become yet another regular work and school day for many. It makes sense considering Christopher Columbus wasn’t really the guy that my 1st grade teacher taught me that he was. Still, I’m amazed by the feats of guys like Columbus (which is why I’ve written about Garmin and Facet Technology on past Columbus Days). Getting in a boat with an uncertain route to a far away destination still seems crazy to me, and these guys did it in a time when navigation equipment was quite basic. Their minds would be blown if they knew what kind of information the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency) has. The agency is headquartered in Springfield, VA and has major facilities in St. Louis, MO (I learned about them from one of my awesome interns whose boyfriend works for the NGA). They are part of the Department of Defense, and they are tasked with providing “timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security.”
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I’m starting to get settled in my new place. After living in two moderately new high-rises in downtown Chicago, I’ve moved into a more historic building–it was built in 1921 and served as a Chinese consulate at some point. Now that I’m starting my fourth year living in the city, I feel that it’s only appropriate for me to start learning a little more about the city’s history. That’s why I should probably make a visit to the Chicago History Museum, which is just a mile down the street from me. Ironically, the museum, having been founded in 1856, “is the city’s oldest cultural institution,” though they pretty much had to start over after the Great Fire destroyed their building and most of their collection in 1871. Three years later there was another fire that destroyed most of what remained. Luckily, there haven’t been any more fires, so the Chicago History Museum has had a decent amount of time to build a new collection.
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