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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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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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 was in 9th grade I had to take a Health class. One day our teacher had us write letters to our future selves. She told us that she’d send them to us when we graduated high school. I never saw that letter again. I guess I’ll never know how I’m stacking up against the expectations of my 14 year old self. While many lessons from health class seem trite at the time, they can have life-long beneficial effects. Unfortunately, many public schools can’t afford to offer health education. This is a big problem because “teenagers today are engaging in risky behavior at alarming rates, harming their bodies and their futures.” Peer Health Exchange is a San Francisco, CA based non-profit organization (but they’re working across the country) that fixes this problem by recruiting, selecting, and training “college student volunteers to teach high school students a comprehensive health curriculum.” My sister is one of these volunteers, and she’s had a wonderful experience so far (which is why she has been bugging me to feature PHE).
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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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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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Considering a job in Sales but lacking experience? SinglePlatform is hiring and training 50 new grads.
Lifting weights is one of the best things that you can do for physical fitness. Strength training can have amazing effects on its own, but you can get extraordinary results when you combine your training with proper nutrition. There’s a next step if you really want to get serious: supplementation. There seems to be a supplement for everything, from gaining muscle to improving brain function. And if there’s a name that you think of when you think of supplements, it has to be GNC. They’re a Pittsburgh, PA based worldwide retailer of health and nutrition products that include vitamins, supplements, minerals, herbs, and more. If you’re looking to get more out of your body, there’s something at GNC that will at least claim to help you do it.
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SinglePlatform is hiring 50 new grads in New York City to help local businesses get discovered. Learn how you can be one of them.
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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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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If you’ve watched Mad Men from the beginning, you’ve probably noticed that research goes from completely irrelevant to getting marginal respect over just a few years. The progression has continued, and research has become a huge part of marketing and advertising. While Millward Brown hasn’t been around since the Mad Men days, the New York, NY based research agency has been “specializing in advertising, marketing communications, media and brand equity research” for the last 35 years. All of Millward Brown’s research is focused on building stronger brands, which is why their 82 offices across 52 countries are able to work with 90% of the world’s top 100 brands (not sure whose list they’re using).
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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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Reasoning Mind is an education focused non-profit that uses the web to teach kids math, and they’re hiring 30 new grads as Program Coordinators. Learn more about these amazing entry level opportunities.
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 “is 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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Reasoning Mind is an education focused non-profit that uses the web to teach kids math, and they’re hiring 30 new grads as Program Coordinators. Learn more about these amazing entry level opportunities.
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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Reasoning Mind is an education focused non-profit that uses the web to teach kids math, and they’re hiring 30 new grads as Program Coordinators. Learn more about these amazing entry level opportunities.
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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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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One of the best ways to land a job 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 job seeker pick up some sort of project to put who they are into product form. Getting a job 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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Are you an enthusiastic, reliable college grad who loves working with kids? SmartSitting is looking for full and part-time nannies and babysitters to join their network. They connect experienced childcare providers with the best jobs in NYC. Learn more by visiting SmartSitting.com. You can also view current opportunities and apply to join their network.
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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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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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.”
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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.
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I’ve never been great about eating breakfast, but when I do eat breakfast, I try to get as much protein into the meal as I can. My problem is that I find eggs completely unpalatable. One can only eat so much sausage and bacon, so I’ve had to find some other protein sources. Sometimes it’s a glass of milk and a scoop of peanut butter, and other times it’a bowl of yogurt. Yogurt’s certainly nothing new (it’s essentially been around since bacteria and milk mixed, but humans have been producing it for millennia), but it’s experienced quite a spike in popularity lately. Probiotics and Greek yogurt are probably the two biggest trends in the industry right now, and they’re part of the reason that Dannon is “one of the fastest growing consumer products companies in the U.S.” While based in White Plains, NY, Dannon is a subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar French company called Groupe Danone). That shouldn’t matter all that much to you, though, as Dannon seems to operate mostly independently.
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Much to most people’s chagrin, governments need to generate revenue. Without money, they can’t operate, so they’re always looking for new and better ways to get it. Sometimes that means levying new taxes or fees, but sometimes it just means taking a more efficient approach to collecting established revenue streams. One of the best ways to do this is through software, and that’s exactly what Grant Street Group does. They’re a Pittsburgh, PA based company that “develops, hosts and administers customized software applications used by government entities and financial institutions to support a variety of financial transactions related to revenue collection and auctions of fixed income instruments, tax deeds and real estate.” Auctions are an extremely effective way to eke out more revenue out of a resource, and software that automates the auction process is pretty much the ultimate in efficiency.
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There’s no doubt that Japanese companies have been and continue to be leaders in the gaming industry. Nintendo, Sega, and Sony are some of the names that you’re most likely to recognize, but it’s very clear that the old guard of gaming is facing stiff competition from upstarts like Zynga and ngmoco that are focusing on mobile and social gaming. While Japan has historically been big on console gaming, they’re not missing out on this trend. GREE is a Japanese that is fervently entering the U.S. market in order to grow a business that generated $1.7 billion in revenue last year. GREE is unique in that their U.S. based branding has been more about hiring than games. They’ve opened a San Francisco, CA office that they’re promoting heavily with billboards, referral bonuses, and even Google AdWords campaigns. They also acquired a company called OpenFeint to speed along the growth.
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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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I will never understand why Presidents’ Day is such a big retail holiday. I tried doing some research, and all I could find was that the Federal holiday is still known as Washington’s Birthday, but it’s commonly known as Presidents’ Day because so many retailers use the name. There’s no explanation for why the sales started happening in mid-February, and it’s even more puzzling that the sales are focused on durable goods like cars and mattresses. But that’s the way it is, and since we’re talking about mattresses, I think we should take a look at Sleepy’s. They are based in Hicksville, NY with 700+ showrooms across Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia. It all adds up to make them the “largest mattress retailer in the world.” Sleepy’s tv advertisements are ubiquitous, so it’s nearly impossible for me to think about mattresses with out thinking Sleepy’s (and hearing their jingle in my head).
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Rhode Island,
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Vermont,
Virginia,
West Virginia
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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