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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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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I know some people who research their purchases to death. They end up never buying anything because new versions of the products come out before they can make a decision. It’s a never-ending process. I’m all for doing my due diligence before buying something expensive, but I try to make it as quick as possible. FindTheBest is a site that makes comparing anything super easy. They’re a Santa Barbara, CA company that offers “a powerful tool for making quick and informed decisions.” Whether you’re looking for the best breed of dog for your lifestyle or the best financial advisor in your area, FindTheBest offers you just the facts “stripped of any marketing influence.”
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There are essentially two completely different jewelry businesses. There’s the high-end business that is centered around gold, platinum, diamonds, and other gemstones (I know all about that having recently bought an engagement ring). Then there’s the fashion focused business that is more about completing an outfit. The latter is where Chloe + Isabel is focusing. They are a New York, NY based startup that targets 18 to 28 year old women with jewelry in the $18 to $200 price range. That’s not all that unique. What is unique is that Chloe + Isabel is approaching this market by combining direct selling with web-based social technology. Essentially they’re bringing affiliate marketing to a group of people who may not even know what affiliate marketing is.
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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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Yesterday I almost got highlighted. I was in a boat, on a river, fishing with my Dad and a guide. A thunderstorm came up behind us, and we decided to tuck the boat in a cove under a bunch of trees and take cover. It wasn’t the best spot, but there wasn’t anywhere else for us to go. When it started hailing, I got a little nervous. And then BANG! A bolt of lightning hit the water about three feet to my right. You and I are both lucky that you’re reading this today. This story has nothing to do with today’s company except for the fact that yesterday’s near death experience made me want to regress back to being a little kid–the kind that reads Highlights. If you’re not familiar, Highlights is a Columbus, OH company that develops products for children with a common theme: “Fun with a Purpose.” It’s all about “wholesome fun” that “is dedicated to helping children grow in basic skills and knowledge, in creativeness, in ability to think and reason, in sensitivity to others, in high ideals and worthy ways of living.”
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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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After mentioning high school yesterday, I had a high school exam dream last night. It was a history test, and oddly enough I think I performed pretty well (though I woke up before I got a grade). If it was a Physics test, I think it might have been more of a nightmare. As much as I enjoyed AP Physics, it was definitely one of the hardest courses that I took at any level. That probably explains why I’m not a member of the American Institute of Physics, which is a College Park, MD based non-profit membership organization that promotes “the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics and its application to human welfare.” The group was founded in 1931 by “a group of American physical science societies joined forces to create an institute that would strengthen their response to the practical and philosophical uncertainties facing their field.”
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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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I’ve never been on a cruise ship, and I’m not looking to change that any time soon. I realize that cruises are the ultimate vacation for some people, but they’re just not for me (especially after hearing about food poisoning outbreaks and the Costa Concordia disaster). Still, I respect the brilliance of the cruise ship. Travelers can sample a variety of destinations without having to think about logistics or anything else really. When you can combine hospitality, transportation, and gambling all in one, you have pretty good foundation for a business. The second largest cruise company in the world is Royal Caribbean Cruises, which is based in Miami, FL and owns the following cruise lines: Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, Pullmantur Cruises, Azamara Club Cruises and CDF Croisières de France. Those all contribute to nearly $7 billion in annual revenue.
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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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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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100 years ago today the Titanic sank. It wasn’t the world’s first transportation disaster, nor was it the last, but it’s the one that continues to captivate people. As a kid I was absolutely fascinated by the story of the Titanic–the unsinkable ship that sank. I had a few books on the topic that I read over and over again. I learned about Alvin, the deep sea submersible, and Jason Jr., the underwater robot, and how they were used to explore the Titanic once it was discovered in 1985 (by essentially dragging video cameras just above the ocean floor). The discovery and expeditions were partially done by teams from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which is a Woods Hole, MA based “non-profit research and higher education facility dedicated to the study of all aspects of marine science and engineering and to the education of marine researchers.” If it has to do with ocean science and exploration, there’s an extremely good chance that the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is on top of it.
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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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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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Today’s kids better be smarter and taller than our generation. Why? iPads. They’re amazing educational tools, and now they’re replacing textbooks. That means that today’s students not only should learn more quickly, but they can carry around a single device that weighs less than a pound and a half instead of a 40+ pound backpack filled with textbooks (and finally get back to standing upright). Inkling is a company that is making this beautiful future happen more quickly. They’re based in San Francisco, CA, and they’re building “a better textbook: one that [is] interactive and engaging, one that [takes] advantage of the opportunities afforded by new media like iPad.” They’re tearing away the assumptions that people make about books and moving in many different directions–literally. Even though Inkling calls what they do “interactive textbooks” to take advantage of familiar language, they really are building something completely new.
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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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Yesterday we looked at a company with a terrible applicant tracking system (that’s the software that they use to post their jobs on their web site). If you’ve been job searching for any time at all, you’ve been frustrated to tears by how unusable some ATSs are. The companies that develop these terrible products obviously don’t use “customer experience analytics.” Or if they do, they’re focusing on the customers who are paying the bills (HR) and not the customers who are using the product. For companies that care a little bit more about how they interact with customers, there’s ForeSee Results, an Ann Arbor, MI based company that helps “clients deliver even greater satisfaction to their customers.” They do this by collecting “millions of satisfaction survey responses annually, quantifying voice of customer and putting it in context to support strategic and tactical decisions.”
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There are some things that computers are far better at than humans, like math. There are some things that humans are far better at than computers, like understanding nuance. Then there are a lot of things that fall somewhere in between, but we can be pretty certain that computers will do them better soon enough. One of these things is determining context. This is especially important in the world of advertising. Right now a human can do a much better job than a computer of determine which ads would fit best within the context of a website, but he or she will be much slower than a computer. PulsePoint is a New York, NY based company that is working to give the computer another win over humans with a technology platform that helps “marketers and publishers gain greater audience transparency and deeper engagement across digital channels at an unprecedented scale.”
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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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Job searching these days feels a lot like playing the lottery. There’s all this hope of being that one in a million winner, but in the end you slowly get demoralized as the odds play out. But there’s one surefire way to win the lottery. Be the lottery. (So I guess it follows that one surefire way to get a job is to be the employer. That’s what I did. Entrepreneurship FTW!) Or you can be contracted by the lottery. That’s what GTECH is. They’re a Providence, RI based “gaming technology and services company, providing innovative technology, creative content, and superior service delivery.” They call themselves “architects of gaming,” which seems pretty accurate considering that they’re involved in pretty much every part of designing and developing gaming products.
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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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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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