I’ve made a point of being more active in Cornell’s entrepreneurship community, so I like to think that I do a good job of keeping tabs on which other companies have been started by fellow alums. That’s why I was shocked to learn that the #2 online retailer of home furnishings and housewares was not only a company that I’d never heard of before, but a company founded by two Cornell grads. It’s called Wayfair–they’re based in Boston, MA and did $500 million in sales last year. The reason I hadn’t heard of them is that they were known as CSN Stores until last year (they were founded in 2002). CSN Stores was focused on building out 200+ product specific properties with generic domain names like Bedroomfurniture.com, Cookware.com, AirHockeyTables.com, and AllBarstools.com. Last year they decided to get serious about branding and started pulling all of their sites into the Wayfair brand.
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I really like the idea of push notifications, but I find that they’re often inconsistent in terms of being delivered. I also hate it when apps try to trick me into accepting push notifications that I will find annoying. Still, it seems pretty clear that push notifications are going to become an increasingly important part of our life (as sad as that may sound). As more and more apps start pushing us information, more companies are going to need to solve the technical challenges associated with delivering push notifications. Urban Airship is a Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA based company that provides technology that powers “mobile engagement, monetization and reporting.” Beyond push notifications, they also do subscriptions, in-app purchasing, and reporting.
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They say that you can’t forget how to ride a bike, but I’m giving it my best try. In elementary and early middle school I was constantly riding around town. I picked up inline skating for a year or two after that, and never got back on the bike. Now I tell people that I hate bike riding. I don’t actually hate it, but as I mentioned in my post on Niner Bikes, I love seeing people’s reactions to that statement. My twelve year old self would be disappointed that I don’t even own a bike, let alone a cool brand like a Cannondale or Specialized. Luckily for Specialized, they’ve been able to grow an impressive business without me as a customer. They’re based in Morgan Hill, CA, and from what I can gather their annual revenue is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars (but I can’t find a reliable source on that). That’s impressive considering that it all started in 1974 when founder Mike Sinyard sold his “old VW Microbus for $1,500 and used the money to fund a cycling trip through Europe.” That led to importing Italian bicycle parts into the United States, and a business was born.
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I don’t know about you, but I love the smell of gasoline–at least in limited doses. Oddly enough, I absolutely hate the smell of coffee, so I’m not sure how I’d do if I had to work at a RaceTrac. They’re an Atlanta, GA based chain of more than 525 gas stations and convenience stores that stretch across twelve southeastern states. The odd thing about them is that their home page puts more emphasis on their coffee than on the gas. I guess gas is pretty much the same at every gas station, but good coffee will actually bring people through the doors. Besides the coffee RaceTrac differentiates itself with its size–their stores are typically over 5,000 square feet with more than 4,000 items and 20-24 pumps. If I owned a chain of gas stations, I’d probably use clean bathrooms as a point of differentiation. I think it would be a goldmine, but RaceTrac’s $8 billion in annual revenue makes them the third largest private company in Atlanta, so maybe coffee is the right choice.
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I don’t mind flying; in fact, I kind of enjoy it–especially on smaller planes. Unfortunately, it’s not often that you can hop in a 6 seater and get a sweet view for the entire flight. Usually you are crammed into a 150-seater and spend most of the time looking at clouds. I guess most people are more comfortable with that, but not me. When I’m flying I’m not particularly brand conscious, so I mostly choose my airline by who has the cheapest fare. That means that I end up on flying all different airlines, but I’ve never flown Allegiant. They’re a low-cost carrier and travel company based in Enterprise, NV. They travel to 75 destinations with a fleet of 75 MD-83s and MD-87s. All of Allegiant’s routes begin or end in one of 9 hubs: Bellingham, WA; Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas, NV; Phoenix, AZ; Myrtle Beach, SC; Orlando, FL; Tampa Bay, FL; Fort Myers, FL; and Fort Lauderdale, FL.
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The University of Chicago has a number of entry level positions open right now. Check them out here.
Call me whatever you want, but I still buy incandescent light bulbs. I tried a few CFL bulbs in the past, but they were an utter disappointment–not very bright and a disgusting color of light. I paid more for them because they’re supposed to pay off in the long run, but they can’t save me money if I don’t use them. It’s going to take a more compelling energy efficient light bulb design to get me to switch. And that’s exactly what Switch has come up with. They’re a San Jose, CA based startup that is using LED technology to replicate the beautiful light of an incandescent bulb without wasting so much energy. They’re close to achieving the holy grail of light bulbs (and a big pay day), especially considering that there will essentially be a ban on incandescent bulbs by 2014. Now they just need to convince people to switch.
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In case you didn’t get the drift from out post on Best Made Company, artisan craftsmanship is in and mass manufacturing is out (unless it’s done by Apple). But what if you could combine the two? You’d have the technology of mass manufacturing, but the closeness to the process of something that is handmade. That’s what MakerBot Industries is making possible. They’re a New York, NY (Brooklyn) based company that has been “producing an open source 3D printer to democratize manufacturing.” All you need is a CAD drawing and one of their Thing-O-Matic 3D printers, and you can print pretty much whatever object you want in plastic. I think they might have finally figured out Santa’s trick.
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Whether you need something to wear for a job interview or a tropical vacation, Gilt is the place to get it at a good price. Here’s a link that will get you an additional 20% off.
In my previous life as the boyfriend of a management consultant, I would often spend my Thursday evenings using a flight tracking website to figure out when I’d be eating dinner. Those days are mostly over now that Amy is working at Groupon, but I had a bit of a flashback since she is traveling for work this week. My preferred flight tracking website is FlightAware, which tells me that she’s somewhere just south of the Great Salt Lake right now. I also know that she’s moving at 459 knots at an altitude of 35,000 feet. I can even see that the fares for her flight ranged from $50.03 to $3,365.92 with an average of $238.13. FlightAware is based in Houston, TX, and they provide “live flight data, airport information, weather maps, flight planning, and navigation charts, as well as aviation news and photos to over two million users a month.” I have no idea how they get all of their data, but it’s extremely useful and very easy to access.
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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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So far our survey says that you find the job search frustrating. Tell us more so that we can help.
When I was a kid I had this really cool electronics set that allowed me to build all kinds of devices just by connecting different wires to each other. It looked kind of like this. A friend and I even built our own radio transmitter and were able to transmit music about 20 feet to my mom’s car. It totally blew our 10-year old minds. Unfortunately, neither of us had any idea how it worked. littleBits is a New York, NY based company that has more than one-upped the electronic playground. They have developed “a growing library of pre-assembled circuits that snap together with tiny magnets.” Not only do littleBits look super cool, but they should be pretty intuitive considering that each piece has a unique electronic function. I think it would be hard to play with them and not understand how they’re working.
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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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Want to try TaskRabbit? Here’s $10 to get started. (The link only works if you’re setting up a task, but you can sign up and then use it.)
We all have stuff that we don’t want to do, don’t know how to do, or don’t have time to do. We’d love to pay someone to do it for us, but finding someone to hire to do it is on that list of stuff that we don’t want, know how, or have time to do. TaskRabbit is a company that wants to help people overcome this predicament. They’re based in San Francisco, CA, and they’ll get you “in touch with friendly, reliable people who can help you get just about anything you need done, and put some free time back into your life.” Through the power of the Internet, they’ve been able to build a network of “TaskRabbits” and connect them with people who need stuff done. It’s the same basic marketplace with a fee model that has made companies like eBay, Craigslist, and Airbnb huge successes. Here are the details on how TaskRabbit works.
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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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Advertising is all about targeting. The demographics of who sees an ad determine whether it costs $.50 or $50 to get it in front of 1,000 people (the cost to have an ad viewed by 1,000 people is called a CPM). But how do advertisers know that they’re actually getting what they paid for? They often have a hard enough time tracking whether or not a given campaign is successful, and tracking who the campaign reaches is even harder. That’s where DoubleVerify comes in. They’re a New York, NY based company that has built a system to ensure that “every ad impression is a quality impression, every impression is compliant, and every ad was served and displayed exactly as intended.” They can’t guarantee that an advertisers ads will have the desired effect, but they can verify that it’s reaching the people that it’s meant to reach.
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Yesterday we told you about Blue Chip Career, so here’s another reminder to check them out. They offer personalized guidance from seasoned executives to help you overcome your biggest job search challenges. Get paired with one of their experts and receive the inside scoop on how to land the job of your dreams.
My girlfriend and I are having a housewarming/birthday party this weekend. We invited people by e-mail, and we’re keeping of track of who is coming through a Google doc. That’s about as simple as it gets in terms of using software for event management. I don’t think our solution would cut it for companies like Verizon, Yahoo!, Walmart, and Oracle. They need something a little more… industrial strength. That’s what Cvent offers. They’re a McLean, VA based company that offers comprehensive event, survey, and eMarketing software solutions–exactly what large companies need to make sure that every little detail is taken care of when they put on an event.
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Columbus Day isn’t much of a holiday anymore–it’s become yet another regular work and school day for many. It makes sense considering Christopher Columbus wasn’t really the guy that my 1st grade teacher taught me that he was. Still, I’m amazed by the feats of guys like Columbus (which is why I’ve written about Garmin and Facet Technology on past Columbus Days). Getting in a boat with an uncertain route to a far away destination still seems crazy to me, and these guys did it in a time when navigation equipment was quite basic. Their minds would be blown if they knew what kind of information the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency) has. The agency is headquartered in Springfield, VA and has major facilities in St. Louis, MO (I learned about them from one of my awesome interns whose boyfriend works for the NGA). They are part of the Department of Defense, and they are tasked with providing “timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security.”
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Yesterday we talked about building stuff. I didn’t really dig into it, but I’m convinced that career success is often about being able to build a defined work product. It can be a real, tangible object that you make, but it can just as easily be a weekly analytics report, great writing, a superb customer experience, or something completely different. If you want to land a job and keep it, you need to be able to reliably deliver a quality product. And if you can’t (or would rather do something else), you better be able to sell the products that other people in your company are making. That’s what SalesCrunch is all about. They’re a New York, NY based company that “that takes sales from fuzzy art to repeatable process by capturing, measuring, tracking & training the sales process across the organization.” Most people (especially college students and recent grads) have no idea how important and valuable that really is.
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Ever since I was a kid I’ve liked building stuff. That’s why there’s a part of me that wishes that I had majored in Engineering. I’m ok with building non-physical things like a community, a website, and a business, but I still have an urge to actually use my hands to make something. There are a lot of people with that same urge, and luckily many of them are actually building stuff in their jobs or on their own. Octopart is a New York, NY based company that helps these people find the parts that they need to build what they’re building. In other words, Octopart has developed “search technology to help engineers and scientists build the next generation of electronic devices.”
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Humans are really good at destroying history. It’s not usually intentional, but it’s hard to know what will be historically significant before it’s historically significant. Since most of us are constantly running out of space for “stuff,” it’s nearly impossible not to replace the old with the new. It’s happened with architecture, cars, toys, books, nature, and pretty much everything else we’ve touched, but nowhere is it happening more quickly than on the Internet. Old information is constantly being replaced with new information. It seems like a good thing–and it generally is–but we need to start coming to terms with the fact that more and more of our history is happening online. Luckily, we have the Internet Archive. They are a San Francisco, CA based non-profit that has been “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form” since 1996. They’ve built an amazing resource, that you can access through the Wayback Machine. You can type in any URL and see what it looked like in the past. It’s amazingly cool, but a bit embarrassing for those of us who had websites back in the day.
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I lived in the Northeast for most of my life, and now that I’m in the Midwest I miss out on the fun of repeated blizzards, an earthquake, and a hurricane. Ok, natural disasters usually aren’t fun, but I can’t help but be amazed by how powerful nature can be. I’m sure a lot of you will never read this (or read it late) since there are 4 million people without power because of Hurricane Irene, but that’s not going to stop us from taking a look at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. They are “a non-profit consortium of more than 75 universities offering Ph.D.s in the atmospheric and related sciences.” UCAR is based in Boulder, CO and they also work with the National Science Foundation to run the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
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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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Baseball is considered a tough sport because even the greatest players fail about 60% of the time (taking a walk is never a failure!). I think that means if e-commerce were a sport, nobody would play it. Failing 97% of the time on average doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? (I guess that’s why a lot of people hate the job search.) If most e-commerce companies could get to even a 96% failure rate, they’d be thrilled. MyBuys is a company that aims to help online businesses sell to the 97% of people who don’t buy (they call them “Group97″). They’re headquartered in Redwood City, CA, and they also have a large presence in Ann Arbor, MI. MyBuys’ focus is on personalization. They believe that by learning more about customers every time that they don’t buy something, you can craft a personalized message or offer that is more likely to convince them to become buyers. What’s really cool is that MyBuys has developed technology to automate this.
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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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A few weeks ago in my post on SailThru, I urged you to consider e-mail marketing as a career option. It’s a field that provides an immense amount of value to businesses, yet it gets far too little attention–especially from college students and grads. One of the keys to doing well with e-mail marketing is finding great tools to use. I use Aweber to deliver our daily e-mails, but I’m constantly tempted to switch over to MailChimp. They’re an Atlanta, GA company that is growing at an insane rate. They offer a platform for e-mail marketing that just keeps on getting better for a user base that is climbing towards 1 million. MailChimp’s attention to design and detail has made them a standout in a space that is getting more and more crowded. Every day I seem to notice that another e-mail newsletter that I’m subscribed to has moved over to MailChimp.
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I’m headed to Atlanta for a wedding this weekend, so I decided to do a little searching for interesting companies in ATL. Pretty quickly (no pun intended) I came across Quickparts, and they stood out because I’ve never covered a business that does what they do before. The Atlanta, GA headquartered company that is “dedicated to providing [their] customers with an online e-commerce system to procure low-volume and high-volume custom manufactured parts.” What does that mean? You can upload CAD drawings for some sort of part or product to their site, and they will instantly offer a quote based on “the part geometry, the required materials, lead time, and quantity.” If the quote meets your specs, then you give them the go ahead to start manufacturing. Yes, this company actually make stuff!
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Communication in the workplace can be a major hassle, especially considering the fact that a lot of people who work together are doing so from different locations these days. E-mail was an amazing step forward, but it still has a ton of flaws. (I’m dying for an e-mail client that is built for how I think and work–nothing comes close.) Now that I’m starting to consider hiring interns or part-timers (more on that soon!), I need to come up with a way to communicate with them and manage projects. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are on to something with their interfaces, but they are most certainly not for communicating about work. I’ve played around with the the WordPress P2 Theme, which turns blogging software into something Twitter-like, but I’m not completely sold on it. I’ve also heard some good things about San Francisco, CA based Yammer, which seems to be a pretty sweet solution. Yammer enables “people to create private enterprise social networks.” It’s more collaborative than e-mail, and it allows you to open up conversations to a wider audience without annoying them.
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Samaritan’s Purse is this week’s sponsor. They’re an international aid and development organization that has a bunch of jobs for new and recent grads.
When I was job searching after graduating from college, one of my big projects was getting my finances in order. I opened accounts, closed accounts, cashed out savings bonds, started investing, and made sure that I knew where all my money was. I also started using Mint to track everything. It worked well until my bank updated their online banking software and killed Mint integration. It eventually got fixed, but there was no way to merge my old Mint data with my new Mint data (I essentially had to set up another bank account in Mint). This was pretty minor in terms of banking nightmares, but it was still a huge pain. Otherwise, I’m happy enough with my current bank, but I’d love to have a bank that is focused on delivering a superb online experience. BankSimple (also known as the Simple Finance Technology Corp.) wants to be that bank. They’re based in New York, NY and they’re all about customer service and user experience.
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The idea of having my genome sequenced kind of freaks me out. I’m certainly warming to it, but I don’t like the idea of finding out about a deep, dark family secret or the fact that I’m predisposed to some kind of cancer from a DNA test. I know it’s irrational, and I know that I’ll overcome it eventually. I fully expect that within 20 years every child born in the U.S. will have his or her genome sequenced at birth. So maybe I should just the bite the bullet and get my genome sequenced. But if I’m going to do that, I need your help. The other day I came across a post about Palo Alto, CA based DNAnexus on Hacker News (an awesome site for programmers and people interested in startups). The post was focused on the company’s referral program that offers $20,000 and a full genome sequencing to anyone who refers a software engineer that they hire. That clearly caught my attention (I am trying to run a business here), but, more importantly, it introduced me to what DNAnexus is doing. A single genome contains over 100 gigabytes of data. Storing and analyzing this data requires some serious hardware, especially if you want to do it on a large scale. DNAnexus is an “early-stage software technology company that aims to become the data platform of the genome era.”
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During my Freshman year at Cornell, I took Econ 101. Since I was planning on being a good student, I bought the textbook and went to class diligently. Then I realized that the professor only gave multiple choice exams which were based on the slides from the class lecture. Those slides were posted online after every class, which made attending class and taking the textbook out of its plastic wrap completely unnecessary. I still went to class because I liked the professor and it helped me learn, but I’m pretty sure that I still have the $100+ textbook with CD-ROM sitting on a shelf at my parents’ house in its plastic wrap because the campus store wasn’t buying that book back. What a waste. If I were going to college now, there’s no way I’d buy textbooks. I’d rent them. That’s exactly what Chegg offers. They’re a Santa Clara, CA based company that is saving students a ton of money. When you buy books and then sell them back, you might as well be renting them, so why not actually rent them? According to Chegg, the average college student spends $1,000 a year on textbooks–using Chegg will save them half of that.
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Yesterday we looked at a company that helps online publishers make more money from their content. Today we’re going to look at a company that helps businesses capture user-generated content and use it to drive sales of their products. It may not seem obvious, but quality content is the key to driving online product sales. Not only do you need to convince people to buy your product, but you need to show search engines that your page is the place to go for information on a given product. That’s why PowerReviews exists. They’re a San Francisco, CA based company that has “built innovative social solutions at every stage of the social commerce journey to help you connect with your customers, learn from them, and sell more.” In other words, they provide software that powers customer review sections on e-commerce websites.
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