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.
Internships in User Experience
Looking for more internships in User Experience? Check out the most recent internship postings in User Experience.
Below you'll find all of the companies that we've covered that may offer internships in User Experience. You can also look at entry level jobs in User Experience.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m extremely excited for the season premiere of Mad Men on March 25th. It’s one of the best shows on tv, and you can actually learn some meaningful business lessons from watching it. One of the downsides of the show is that it overglamorizes the idea. Maybe it’s because the show is set in the 60s and things were easier then, but an idea isn’t enough for success today whether you’re talking about a startup or an advertisement. MediaMath is a New York, NY based company that has “built the tools that enable and empower [a] new breed of marketing professional”–the Math Men and Women. Ideas will always be important in advertising, but data and analytics are how you turn ideas into successes. MediaMath’s “TerminalOne platform allows agencies and advertisers to plan, execute, optimize, and analyze marketing programs across the digital landscape.”
I did an interview with The 99% (they have nothing to do with Occupy Wall Street) on job search and entrepreneurship that was published today. Read it, share it, Facebook it, Tweet it.
How can you not love daily deals? Great stuff at a great price. Unfortunately, everybody and their brother thought it was a good idea to knock off Groupon and start a daily deals site. This irritated merchants who were getting pitched incessantly, and it overwhelmed consumers with all of the options. While many of the copycats have died off, one company avoided a similar fate by taking a very different approach to riding the daily deal wave. YipIt is based in New York, NY, and they’re a daily deal aggregator. Every month they gather more than 30,000 deals from more than 800 sites and share them with their audience. They make money through advertising and affiliate fees paid by the daily deal sites, but there’s more to the story.
In case you missed our e-mail from last week, Kembrel loved the response from our post about them so they’re offering a free VIP card (usually 20 bucks) to all ODOI readers and $5 in store credit. Sign up here.
On Monday we took a look at Vertive, a company that builds internet properties to help people save money. Today we’re going to look at a company with a similar model of building and buying websites, but a much broader approach. Internet Brands is based in El Segundo, CA and started as CarsDirect.com in 1998. It was a successful brand for them, but in 2005 they realized that the platform they had built could be applied to other verticals. Now Internet Brands operates more than 100 websites that reach over a billion visitors every year. Amazingly, they’ve been able to generate almost all of this traffic organically (without buying advertising). This is all because of the platform that they’ve developed and the ability to share resources across brands. Internet Brands is a case study of how economies of scale can work on the web.
I have a simple investment strategy: Buy AAPL. I’ve had a few other winners, but Apple is the reason that my portfolio is up over the past 5 years. I’m not much of a trader, so I typically buy a stock and hold it indefinitely. If I took a different approach to investing, I might want to spend time on Benzinga. It’s “an innovative news and analysis service that focuses on global markets” and is intended for developing “actionable trading ideas.” Benzinga has offices in Chicago, IL and Dover, DE, but it’s very clear from their Careers page that everything important happens in the Southfield, MI office… very clear. There’s something about Benzinga’s site that reminds me of a social gaming site, which I guess is appropriate since stock trading is the ultimate social game.
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.
You probably should have already purchased and given all your gifts for the holiday season, but if you haven’t, it’s a wonderful time to get deals. Retailers are eager to grab a few more dollars from all of the people returning ugly sweaters and books they’ll never read, so they’re offering deals. And if you’re looking for deals, you’ll likely end up on some WhaleShark Media properties. They’re an Austin, TX based company that runs “the world’s leading marketplace for coupons and deals.” Their sites include RetailMeNot.com (one of my favorites), Deals.com, CheapStingyBargains.com, CouponShare.com, and a lot of others. I’m not exactly sure what separates these sites from each other, but they seem to do really well in search rankings and that is why they reach more than 265 million visitors every year.
When I was a kid, I had eyes like a hawk. At my best I had 20/12 vision. Then in high school things started getting blurry, and I eventually had to get contact lenses. Luckily, humans have spent a ton of time and energy in developing technology that helps us see better. Whether you want to see something really small, far away, or in the dark, there’s optical equipment that can help you out. The thing is that microscopes, binoculars, night vision goggles, and even glasses aren’t something that you buy casually–you want to buy from someone who knows his or her stuff. OpticsPlanet is a Northbrook, IL based company that employs a whole bunch of those people. They are “one of the world’s leading online retailers of a wide selection of sport optics, tactical and military gear, scientific products, hunting gear, professional grade products and eyewear.” I get excited when I get a new contact lens prescription, so I bet getting to play with some of OptcisPlanet’s offerings would make me giddy.
When people ask me what I do, I tell them that “I run websites that help college students find jobs and internships.” About half the time, I get, “Oh, so you’re like a recruiter?” That’s pretty far off, so I try to provide an explanation that includes the term “online media.” That usually gets the point across. We live in a time where nearly anyone can build their own media property. Technology is so cheap and easy to use that the hardest problems in online media usually come down to content creation, marketing, and monetization. Say Media is a company that brings together the technology with the media savvy. They’re based in San Francisco, CA, and they’ve been built out of two companies that merged: Six Apart and VideoEgg. Six Apart worked mostly on the technology side, and VideoEgg was an advertising network. Together they’ve become a company that “empowers culturally relevant individuals with its publishing platform and media services designed to help them grow audience and earn a living.”
Want to try Proper Cloth? Use this link to get $25 off your first shirt. It’d probably help to have a shirt that fits when you’re interviewing.
I’m a big guy at 6’3. I typically enjoy the benefits of being tall, but there are disadvantages like having to knee myself in the face on airplanes and not being able to hear a single word that anyone under 5’8 says in a loud room. I’m not so tall that I need to shop at specialty stores for clothes, but I’m just at the point where clothes off the rack don’t fit all that well. I fixed my pants problem with Bonobos, but I have a ton of shirts (button downs, t-shirts, sweaters, and more) that fit beautifully until I start actually moving around–then they somehow bare my midriff like I’m a teenage girl. Nobody needs to see that, which is why I should probably start buying custom shirts from a place like Proper Cloth. They’re a New York, NY based company that makes it “super easy to buy stylish, quality dress shirts that fit.” I haven’t tried them yet, but it’s probably about time that I go custom.
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Every day within a few minutes of when I press send to deliver our daily e-mails, I get at least a few out of office replies. The names start to become familiar, as it’s often the same people–most of them work in career services. Lately, I’ve been noticing out of office replies from someone with a brunnerworks.com e-mail address. I didn’t make much of it until I went through some results from our survey and noticed someone recommended Brunner as a company that we should feature. I took a look at the Pittsburgh, PA and Atlanta, GA advertising agency and quickly agreed. Brunner’s tagline is “Ideas for a Smarter, Faster World,” and they seem to be living up to that with a Top 75 ranking among U.S. based ad agencies.
Happy Veterans Day. Thank you to those of you who served or are serving our country. If you’d like to use today for internship search inspiration, you may want to check out internships at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Every job has its perks (even unpaid internships). Sometimes you have to look hard to find them, and sometimes they’re made apparent to you on your first day. A big part of the reason that I decided to intern at Orvis was that I knew I’d get a 50% discount off of everything they sold. It was awesome for someone as addicted to fly fishing as I am. As I proved, perks can be a huge recruiting tool for employers. Yet a lot of employers do a terrible job organizing, managing, and letting their employees know about perks. What’s the point in offering something if employees don’t even know it’s available to them? PerkSpot is a Chicago, IL based company that helps employers solve this problem. They have built a “proprietary technology platform” that provides “employees with a single point of access for specialty benefits, personal insurance products, and discounts on consumer goods and services.” It’s all online and in one place.