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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.
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I’ve been a devoted Apple fanboy since 1990, yet I didn’t watch the liveblogs for their Education Event yesterday. It’s hard to get excited about digital textbooks when you never intend to read a textbook again, but I have to say that I’m looking forward to seeing how much technology will change the ways that future generations learn. Apple pushed a lot of people forward yesterday, but there’s a lot more to education than the content. Communication between teachers and students is essential, and technology can play an amazing role in this relationship. Coursekit is a New York, NY based company that offers “instructors and students amazingly designed tools to manage their courses – calendaring, file management” while making “it unbelievably easy to interact with one another.” It may kill a lot of your excuses for why you didn’t do your homework, but I think that the benefits are pretty obvious.
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I can’t tell you how many bad careers sites I’ve seen over the past 4+ years. Companies with beautiful, easy to use websites often have jobs pages that make you want to poke your eyes out. Even the simple ones that just have a few paragraphs about the company and a listing of jobs are disappointing. Why can’t companies actually put some effort into convincing you to work for them? 360i certainly puts in the effort. I recently landed on their newly relaunched careers page via a link from Twitter, and I was thoroughly impressed. 360i is a digital marketing agency, and it’s pretty clear that they’ve actually put some of their in-house talent to work on the 360i Careers page. It tells a story; it provides a great user experience; it introduces you to the company before throwing job postings at you; and it actually makes you want to work at 360i (they have offices in New York, NY; Atlanta, GA; Detroit, MI; San Francisco, CA; and Chicago, IL).. This should be expected, but instead it’s the exception.
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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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Last night as I was falling asleep, I kept thinking about chopping wood. It’s something that I really enjoy doing because it’s mentally relaxing, yet physically exhausting. Then I started thinking about these awesome axes that I saw on Gilt Groupe and how I wish I had bought one, but I realized that the fact that I live in downtown Chicago means that I’d be more likely to use the ax for home defense than for chopping wood. This morning I decided to look those axes up, and I ended up on the Best Made Company site. They’re a New York, NY based company that “is dedicated to equipping customers with quality tools and dependable information that they can use and pass down for generations.”
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It’s hard to be involved with social media without having heard Gary Vaynerchuk’s name. He made a name for himself with his daily wine video blog called Wine Library TV, and that led to his writing a best-selling book called Crush It!. He has consistently made social media work for him, which is why he started an agency called VaynerMedia to “help brands to best leverage online platforms to build engaged communities that support their online marketing endeavors.” There are a lot of buzzwords in there, but they’re at least put together in a way that makes sense. VaynerMedia is located in New York, NY, and I got the idea to feature them from a reader who landed a job there.
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E-mail is supposed to be simple: you send a message and the recipient gets it nearly instantly. That’s the way it usually works for most people, but there are those rare instances where a message gets caught in a spam folder or bounces back to the sender. Those problems get much bigger when you start to send a lot of e-mail; in fact, I recently had to deal with an issue that resulted in some of our daily e-mails that were sent on a Friday being received the following Wednesday. Because I send nearly 400,000 e-mails a month, I use one of the top providers in the business, and this still happened. E-mail is a complicated beast, which is why companies that send multiple orders of magnitude more e-mail than I do need help to overcome the fact that “20% of emails sent by web applications either go missing or they get caught by spam filters.” SendGrid is a Boulder, CO based company that specializes in e-mail delivery. They’ve delivered more than 20 billion e-mails for clients that include Foursquare, SlideShare, and GetSatisfaction, so I think they must do a lot better than 80%.
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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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Over the past two days I’ve been talking about how important it is for your career to be building something. This means generating new ideas and taking action on them. That’s what Behance is all about. They’re a New York, NY based company that “develops products and services that empower creative professinals to make ideas happen.” I’ve heard about Behance a lot before–probably because founder Scott Belsky is a fellow Cornellian, but it seems as though their name keeps coming up lately. I guess it’s easy to generate a buzz when you’ve developed a line of products that helps creatives overcome “inefficiency, disorganization, and careers at the mercy of bureaucracy.”
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For me water is all about recreation. It’s a place to fish, swim, kayak, and hopefully one day learn how to surf. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy drinking water–I’ve had servers at restaurant tell me that I drink more water than any other customer they’ve served–but it’s mostly an afterthought. Unfortunately, for nearly a billion people across the globe water is neither fun nor an afterthought. “Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.” charity: water is a non-profit organization that is “bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.” They’re based in New York, NY, but they’re doing work all over the world. One of the most interesting things about charity: water is that they’re able to put 100% of the public donations that they receive towards clean water projects. This is possible because a small group of private donors has committed to covering the organization’s operating expenses.
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There’s one reason that I’m not a “social gamer.” If my friends found out how much time I spent playing games like Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds, I’d be totally embarrassed. If only we all could admit to each other that we’re compulsive gamers and start talking openly about it. That’s what Heyzap is all about. They’re a San Francisco, CA based “social discovery platform for mobile and online games and the largest social network for mobile gamers.” Through “check-in” functionality much like that of Foursquare they let you tell your friends what games you’re playing and show off to them about how skilled you are. Don’t you wish you had a similar social network for your job search? “Hey everyone! Look! I applied for this job and I got rejected in a record time! 2 minutes flat.”
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While I’m not a serious gamer, I definitely enjoy playing casual games on my iPhone and iPad. Although the App Store does offer recommendations, I find that it’s still hard to find good games. Instead I rely on getting recommendations from people I know–namely my girlfriend’s 10 year old sister. I watch what she’s playing, and if it looks fun, I buy the app. Then I can try to top her score and talk smack even though I can’t come close. Games are inherently social (even though gaming can become super anti-social), so it’s no surprise that gaming companies are bringing mobile and social gaming together. One of the big players in the industry is ngmoco. They’re based in San Francisco, CA, and their name is pronounced “en-gee mo-ko” (apparently it’s an acronym for Next Generation Mobile Company). ngmoco is all about building a social entertainment company in a time when “there will be more iOS/Android devices shipped than PCs/notebooks.” It makes sense.
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The Internet is an amazing platform for learning, and we’re just touching the surface of its potential. However, there are still a ton of things that are much better learned offline. That’s why it should be no surprise that we’re seeing a number of companies pop up that create online marketplaces for classes in any topic you can imagine. One of the leaders in the space is Skillshare. They’re based in New York, NY, and they are helping “make the exchange of knowledge easy, enriching, collaborative, and fun.” You can pretty much learn anything from anyone, or you can teach people something and make some money on the side (a great way to pay the bills while you’re job searching and build your resume at the same time). It’s a simple idea, but Skillshare seems to have it right. By handling all of the logistics they allow their users to focus on what they’re best at–teaching and learning.
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Want to be part of the One Day, One Job/Internship team? Here’s your chance!
I’m about to head over to TechWeek to check out midVenturesLAUNCH. It’s an event for new startups to launch and release new products. I figure it’s a good scouting opportunity for finding companies to tell you about. As I was looking over the website for the event, I realized there were a bunch of sponsors that probably have job opportunities. One that caught my eye was ReTargeter, which is an online advertising company based in San Francisco, CA. Last week we looked at RadiumOne and their social targeting technology. Today we’re going to look at ReTargeter and their approach to targeting. Retargeting is all about showing ads to people who have already shown interest in something. I actually started seeing ads for TechWeek all over the Internet after I visited their site a few times. That’s retargeting. (We covered the topic previously in our post about FetchBack.)
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If you’re like me and wear t-shirts sometimes, then you know the value of a good one. Despite the fact that I have dozens of t-shirts in my dresser drawers, I wear the same few over and over again. My favorite is a Cornell Athletics t-shirt that has seen better days, but for many of you it might be a shirt from Threadless. They’re a brand/company of skinnyCorp that uses community-inspired designs to make awesome t-shirts. It’s hard to explain exactly what skinnyCorp is, but they’re all about using technology to facilitate collaboration within creative communities. Threadless is by far skinnyCorp’s most successful project (others include Threadless Kids, Naked & Angry, I Park Like An Idiot, and ExtraTasty). The company was founded in 2000 in Chicago, IL, and they also have an office in Boulder, CO. They’ve done a lot in that time, including being named “the most innovative small company in America” by Inc. Magazine.
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As someone who started a bootstrapped business straight out of college, I’ve had to rely on free resources to learn the tricks of the trade. Sites like Hacker News, SEOmoz, Mixergy have been invaluable to me. But you can only get so much for free. Fortune 500 companies often spend many millions of dollars to ensure that their executives are well informed and well advised. One place that 80% of Fortune 500 companies go for advice is The Corporate Executive Board. They are an Arlington, VA based company that helps “senior executives at the world’s leading organizations… and their teams with actionable insights, analytic tools, and advisory support to quickly and confidently focus efforts on what they need to know, and do, next.” The Corporate Executive Board spun off from The Advisory Board Company (they focus only on healthcare and higher education) in 1997 and has since IPO’d.
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The past few years have brought the Internet to our phones. It seems most of us have phones that can do more than what our laptops could do just a few years ago. But what about bringing the power of the telephone to the Internet? It doesn’t sound all that interesting at first, but after you take a look at Twilio you’ll change your tone. They’re a “cloud communications” startup located in San Francisco, CA, and they’ve been generating a ton of buzz lately. Why? Because they’ve built a platform that enables people to interact with web applications through the phone. For instance I could build an application that calls me if my site ever goes down. Or I could use someone else’s application to order pizza from any pizzeria in the U.S. Survey Monkey is using Twilio to automate phone surveys and StubHub is using it to confirm purchases instantly via SMS.
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Yesterday our e-mail provider failed to send out our daily e-mail about Organic Motion. You can find that post here. We’re working on changing providers to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
If you’re not spending at least 15 minutes a week reading Wikipedia articles, you’re selling yourself short. As a job seeker you need to be constantly learning about new stuff. Wikipedia is an amazing, free resource for learning about general concepts, but what if you are seeking more specific knowledge? The Wiki format is great, but that’s not what Wikipedia is about. Luckily, there are all kinds of Wiki-powered communities that cover niche topics “ranging from video games, TV shows and movies to food, fashion, and environmental sustainability.” Wikia is a San Francisco, CA based company that provides the platform for many of these Wiki-based communities. The company was founded by Jimmy Wales, who also founded Wikipedia (he’s the creepy guy who stares at you and asks for donations on all of their pages). Both sites use very similar technology, but Wikia is a place for more focused communities that may or may not have a commercial purpose.
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There’s been a big uproar in the startup community because I Can Has Cheezburger just took on $30 million in venture capital funding. Now, I’m not qualified to determine whether that’s a smart investment, but I’m wary of people who are too quick to judge it. A lot of people have trouble differentiating between serious businesses and businesses that sell serious products. There’s a lot of room for fun on the Internet, and there are lots of companies that are profiting by providing fun. One of them is Mindspark, which is an IAC company. Mindspark is based in White Plains, NY with additional offices in New York City and Ra’anana, Israel. They manage a number of social and entertainment web properties including Zwinky, and Zwinky Cuties, IWON, Retrogamer, MyWebFace, and GirlSense. Mindspark also offers interactive communication products like Webfetti, My Fun Cards, SmileyCentral, Smiley Creator, Cursor Mania, Popular Screensavers and Kazulah. Additionally, Mindspark also runs Excite and DailyBurn. As you can tell by the names, this isn’t the most serious collection of sites.
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Think back to Christmas morning when you were a kid (or on your birthday or whenever you received gifts). You get that present that you’ve been begging your parents for, you open it, and you start playing. And you just can’t get it to work properly. The instructions are confusing, and calling the number on the box just leads to a phone tree. There has to be a better way to interact with the company. That’s where Get Satisfaction comes in. They’re a San Francisco, CA based company that provides an online platform for customer communities. Companies can have official Get Satisfaction pages where they interact with their customers, or customers can create a Get Satisfaction page for any company to start interacting with other customers (and hopefully force the company’s hand to start participating in the community). Often another customer will be able to fix your problem, and if they can’t, there’s a good chance that the company’s employees will chime in.
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I may be 26 years old, but I still love getting toys for Christmas. I don’t mean expensive gadgets—I mean real toys. In past years I received gifts like a Marshmallow Shooter
and a Fisher-Price T.M.X. Tickle Me Elmo
(only entertaining for about five minutes), and this year I got the most awesome remote control helicopter ever
. It’s not an Air Hogs helicopter, but I’ve always been impressed with that particular brand. They do some pretty cool stuff when it comes to flying toys, so I thought that my Christmas List could help your job search. Spin Master is the Toronto, CA based company (with locations in the US) that owns the Air Hogs brand in addition to other toy brands like Aquadoodle, Bugville, Flick Trix, Liv, Moon Dough, Zoobles, and plenty of others. They make all kinds of stuff that you and I are too old to play with, but I guess you’d have an excuse if you worked for them.
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Do you know what I hated most about college? Group projects. Even if I had a good group (and I usually had at least one slacker and one know it all), getting everyone together and communicating about who was doing what over the course of the project was a pain in the butt. Technology has come a long way in the five years since I graduated college, but I’m sure that group projects are still a pain. Now, imagine doing it in a corporate environment on a daily basis with some outdated technology platform that you’re required to use. There is some really cool stuff happening at the nexus of work, technology, and relationships, but most companies are missing out on the potential gains. Dachis Group is a company headquartered in Austin, TX that helps “businesses to create and capture value from emerging trends in technology, society and the workplace.” They do “social business design,” and they do it well.
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Yesterday we took a look at a performance marketing firm called Prospectiv that specializes in helping brands reach women online. Today we’re going to continue with the female focus and take a look at BlogHer, a Belmont, CA based community and media company for women. In fact, they’re the “largest community of women who blog” with more than 23 million unique visitors per month. The company was founded in 2005, and since then its vision has been to “create opportunities for women who blog to gain exposure, education, community and economic empowerment.” Believe it or not, blogging is a big business, and BlogHer is leveraging the size of its community to create amazing opportunities for all of its members.
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It’s 8 AM on Black Friday, and I haven’t bought anything yet. I guess that I’m more interested in Cyber Monday when I can find great deals online. On previous Black Fridays we’ve taken a look at jobs with companies like Amazon.com (should have saved it for Cyber Monday), Ernst & Young (because today is when companies are finally “in the black”), and Visa (since you’ll probably be swiping yours like crazy today). I wish I had been able to feature Slickdeals on a previous Black Friday, but they had some cool opportunities in August of 2009, so I jumped the gun. Today, our focus is going to be on Rockton, IL based Fatwallet, which is a very similar site to Slickdeals—both focus on saving you money when you shop. Fatwallet puts a pretty big emphasis on Black Friday Deals, but what makes the site great is that they help shoppers find amazing deals every day.
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The job search is all about your future, so it’s not really something that you want to associate with death. Still, you can find opportunity in even the saddest situations, and that’s exactly what 1000Memories has done. They’re a San Francisco, CA based startup that offers an online “place to remember loved ones.” They’ve built a truly impressive platform for doing so, and they’re offering it for free. Their business model doesn’t appear to have been hammered out completely yet, but it seems that they’re leaning towards a freemium/upsell model. The site was created by three friends who had lost loved ones, so they are their users and they’re fully committed to building “a better way to bring people together and build something special in their [loved ones'] memory.”
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When is the last time that you felt that you made a difference? For me it was yesterday when I got an e-mail about how a number of recent grads landed jobs with an employer I featured a few months back. Hopefully it wasn’t too long ago for you either, but if it was, you might want to check out Citizen Effect. They’re a Washington, DC based non-profit that “connects Citizen Philanthropists to the poorest of the poor communities around the world.” What’s a “Citizen Philantrhopist?” It’s someone who isn’t happy just making a donation, but wants to do more. They don’t have to be rich, but they do have to be willing to dig in for the cause. Citizen Effect “allows people to identify a project they believe in, raise capital through a variety of innovative tools, and maintain a direct and lasting relationship with their partner communities.” Sounds like a good idea to me.
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I’ve been a Mac user since the early 90s. No joke. I remember the days of trading floppy disks with shareware on them back before the Internet. There weren’t a lot of Mac users, so we had to band together. In fact, I used an Apple IIe before I had a Macintosh, so I’ve been through all of the ups and downs with Apple. It’s a great feeling to walk into a college library and see more Macs than PCs. Even when I was here at Cornell, PCs were still dominant with college kids. Obviously the Internet along with the insane growth of Apple’s market share has made Mac software way easier to find, but Apple still doesn’t have an “app store” for programs to run on your desktop/laptop. That’s where MacUpdate comes in. They are “the number one, Mac-only software website on the Internet.” They not only make it easy to find great software for your Mac, but they also have software that automates updates to third-party applications.
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Today’s company is one of the stranger ones that I’ve come across recently, but I guess that makes sense considering that their name is Quirky. They’re a New York City based product development startup meets social network. That’s right—they’re doing for products what Threadless did for t-shirts. You submit an idea (at a cost, which is weird), and the community decides whether they produce it or not. Everybody has a product idea, but how many people actually take the initiative (and have the ability) to have their idea turned into a real product? Not many. Quirky will do the hard work for you, and they’ll only produce ideas that have been validated by enough pre-sales to make the project worthwhile.
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When I was growing up, I suffered from a pretty bad case of asthma. I didn’t have scary attacks like some people do, but I had triggers that would have me wheezing for hours. Running always did it. So did cigarette smoke. Sometimes it was freshly cut grass, or some other unknown allergen. If I caught a cold, it was significantly worse because of the way my lungs reacted. I saw doctors, I got tests (I was apparently operating at half of normal lung capacity), and I tried medications. Nothing really helped, and a lot of the medications had side effects that made me feel even worse. Luckily, I eventually outgrew my asthma, but I wonder if I could have dealt with it more effectively if I had the opportunity to interact with other kids who were in a similar situation. A site like PatientsLikeMe would have been perfect. Put simply, it’s an online community for patients with similar conditions, doctors, and organizations to interact and share experiences. The Cambridge, MA based company was started in 2004 by 3 MIT engineers who had their lives touched by ALS, and it’s the kind of “healthcare reform” that nobody can argue against—by the patients and for the patients.
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health care,
Massachusetts,
medicine,
research,
social media,
social networking
Today’s post came from a reader recommendation (thanks Derek!), which is awesome because I was on the company’s site a few days ago and never would have imagined that they offer jobs (or even considered them a company as opposed to a website). The reason that I was on the site was that I was reading the story of Epic Beard Man (it is tagged NSFW), which is another one of those ridiculous things that has become popular on the Internet. The term that many use to describe these phenomena is meme. Know Your Meme is a website that organizes all of the world’s memes. Let’s say that you’re looking for the story behind Rickroll because you have no idea why people think it’s so funny. Know Your Meme, which is based in New York City, will not only explain the meme to you, but it will also detail the history of how the meme became popular and how it evolved. To some Know Your Meme may seem frivolous, but in many ways it’s the Historical Society of the Interwebs.
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all employers,
apparel,
blogging,
community management,
design,
humor,
merchandising,
New York,
research,
social media,
software development,
web development,
writing
