On Friday I visited one my Dad’s college friends at his workshop. He makes sails for traditional boats, and he’s been doing it for a long time. He doesn’t get a lot of incoming calls from potential clients (it’s a pretty niche business), but when he does, he almost always makes the sale (no pun intended). It’s because he has developed a process that shows potential customers that he’s undoubtedly the best guy for the job. He does it all by hand (even to the point of writing a personal letter), but it’s essentially automated. He spends about 15 minutes on it every morning, and that’s it. While that approach won’t work in a lot of business, nearly every company can benefit from automating parts of their marketing. Pardot is a company that provides software to do exactly that. They’re based in Atlanta, GA, and they came in at #172 on the Inc. 500 with 2,001% three-year growth and $7.4 million in revenue.
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I never really had a use for URL shortening services until I started using Twitter, but now that I’m trying to cram messages into 140 characters, I use them all the time. Honestly, I almost always use TinyURL.com, but I should be using Bit.ly. Their service is more user friendly, and they allow you to track your links to see how many clicks they get. That can be pretty useful – especially for Internet marketers, but I’m still not sure what Bit.ly, which is based out of New York City, looks like as a business. URL shortening has a ton of users, but what’s the revenue model? I don’t know, but it’s not my job to know. Some people whose job it is to know have invested $2 million in Bit.ly, so I wouldn’t be too worried. Maybe, as ReadWriteWeb suggests, it’s all about the data that Bit.ly collects.
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I’m an iPhone guy, so I tend to feel sorry for people who are constantly thumbing away on their BlackBerries. That’s just my being a smug Apple user though. I realize that a lot of people love their BlackBerries and for good reason. They’re pretty remarkable devices, and they’re perfectly tailored for business use. (Although not as perfectly tailored as my iPhone! Ok, I’m done.) That’s why Research In Motion, the company that makes BlackBerries, has a 16.6% share of the smartphone market. They seem to have hit a bit of a rough spot lately (at least their stock price makes it look like they have), but their market position is still very strong. That’s why it’s no surprise that they appear to have a huge internship program; however, the real reason that I wanted to feature Research In Motion here is that they chose an unfortunate, yet inappropriately hilarious domain name for their Jobs site (it redirects now, but I think that you can figure it out).
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I love Apple products, and I have for almost 20 years. My first computer was an Apple IIe, and now One Day, One Internship, One Day, One Job, and Found Your Career are all run from a MacBook Pro and an iPhone (ok, we have a server that is not a Mac). I’m constantly amazed by the innovation that comes out of Apple, and I’m probably unreasonable about how much I prefer Apple products. I mean, I sit in front of my computer and watch live blog updates whenever they’re making product announcements. In my mind there’s no cooler company than Apple, so it’s surprising that it took me this long to feature their internships.
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