by Willy Franzen on December 18, 2009

Being a newspaper these days is tough. I’d imagine it’s especially tough in a place like San Francisco where people embrace new technologies so quickly. Although I’d also expect those early adopters to be just the types who are heavy users of newspapers. I’m not sure where that leaves the San Francisco Chronicle, but they do seem to have a strong history of adapting to changes in their business model. According to Wikipedia, they first went online with SFGate.com in 1994, and now they’re moving towards a focus on subscriptions instead of advertising to generate revenue. I’m not sure that’s going to work long term, but you have to like the flexibility that the San Francisco Chronicle has shown over the years. It’s no surprise that they remain one of the largest newspapers in the country.
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by Willy Franzen on December 17, 2009

I love boring businesses. It may not seem like it considering the fact that I’m often featuring startups that are on the cutting edge of technology, but I really do appreciate when a company is able to take an extremely simple idea and make it profitable. Uline is a perfect example. They are a Waukegan, IL based company that considers itself “the leading distributor of shipping, industrial, and packing materials to businesses throughout North America.” It all started in 1980 when Liz and Dick Uihlein identified a need for a local shipping supplies distributer. They started the business in their basement with the H-101 carton sizer, and now they have a product line that fills a 452 page catalog. That’s a lot of growth, and I expect it to continue as e-commerce and the shipping that results from it keep expanding (I have about a dozen boxes in my apartment from various holiday season shipments). And if for some reason the shipping business does slow down, Uline can always reorganize as a producer of forts for children—I always loved playing in cardboard boxes.
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by Willy Franzen on December 10, 2009

I love playing with data. I’m always poring over Google Analytics looking for ways to improve things on my sites. If you’re like me, then you’ll almost certainly enjoy Swivel, the “YouTube of data.” They’re a San Francisco based company that makes it extremely easy to visualize and compare data. For instance, you can take a look at cities with low temperature variance and how their highs and lows vary over the course of a year. (I can tell you that Chicago is not on that list with a high of 12 degrees today after much warmer weather just a few weeks ago.) I still haven’t figured out how to make the most out of Swivel, but I definitely see the potential for using it to identify some interesting relationships.
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by Willy Franzen on December 4, 2009

As a kid I wasn’t a total video/computer game junkie, but I certainly spent my fair share of time sitting in front of a screen playing games. One of my favorites was a game that I played on my Mac called The Secret of Monkey Island. I figured that the game series had been discontinued long ago, but it appears that a relatively new company called Telltale Games has resurrected the series while also developing some new story-based games. Telltale Games is based in San Rafael, CA, and, as they put it, they are “the first and only studio to release interactive episodic content on a monthly schedule.” They seem to have found an interesting niche in the gaming industry, and they’re having success across platforms that include Wii, Xbox360, and the PC.
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by Willy Franzen on December 1, 2009

We’re officially in the Christmas season, and that means lots of good things. One thing that isn’t so good is all of the spending that comes with buying people gifts (whether you enjoy the consumerist aspects of the holidays or not). It feels great to be generous, but only until you look at your credit card statement at the end of the month. Cutting back on gifts or making your own is one idea, but it’s a lot easier said than done. Your best bet is probably to find some other ways to save money so that you can buy everyone what you want to buy them. A great way to do that is BillShrink. They’re a Redwood City, CA based startup that offers “a free, personalized savings tool that helps you save money on your everyday bills.” If you can cut your cell phone, credit card, and gas bills, then you’ll be able to buy me (or someone you actually know) more gifts.
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by Willy Franzen on November 27, 2009

It’s Black Friday! And that means that it times to talk about spending money. In previous years we’ve taken a look at jobs at Amazon.com and Ernst & Young (for companies that are “in the black”). We also look at jobs with SlickDeals, one of the best websites for finding Black Friday deals, a few months ago. Today we’re gong to look at Visa, since it’s hard to do any amount of serious shopping without some sort of debit or credit card. Many people think of Visa, which is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, as a credit card company, but that’s not exactly right. Credit cards are backed by a bank or similar financial institution that actually lends you the money to make your purchases. Visa is “a global payments technology company.” That means that they provide the network for your transactions, but they aren’t actually the lending institution backing your credit card.
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by Willy Franzen on November 20, 2009

We’ve looked at plenty of Internet video companies in the past, but we haven’t spent too much time looking at companies that provide the underlying technology that drives Internet video. DivX is a San Diego, CA based company that develops and licenses video codecs. Codec is short for compressor-decompressor, which is essentially technology that allows you to more efficiently transfer data. In DivX’s case they provide a codec that allows high definition video to be compressed without sacrificing quality on the other end. They’re a big part of why Internet video finally works so well. Transmitting uncompressed video over the Internet takes a huge amount of bandwidth, but using a DivX codec significantly decreases the amount of bandwidth necessary to transmit your favorite time wasting video.
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by Willy Franzen on November 4, 2009

I’m going to be brutally honest with this one. When I landed on the The Wrap’s Home page, I immediately clicked the back button. I thought that I had landed on one of those Google Money Maker scam pages (it’s all because of the font choice). After processing what I had seen, I decided to take a second look. Despite their poor design choices, The Wrap is a legitimate site—if a site that covers entertainment industry analysis and breaking hollywood news can be considered legitimate (I kid). Now, The Wrap shouldn’t be confused with gossip sites like TMZ or Perez Hilton, this is actually an industry focused site that does primary source reporting. They’re venture funded and quite obviously located in Los Angeles. I don’t know a lot about the entertainment industry and how it’s covered by the press, but it looks like The Wrap is growing a solid audience with their web-based content.
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by Willy Franzen on November 2, 2009
This is a guest post by Heather R. Huhman. Heather is the media relations manager at a national health care professional association and entry-level careers columnist for Examiner.com.

Text 100 is a global, high tech public relations agency. They call themselves the world’s only “global boutique PR consultancy” or “big agency 2.0.” Like the public relations industry as a whole, Text 100 prides itself in constantly evolving to meet its clients’ needs. Speaking of clients, I recognize nearly every name on their client list, which includes PayPal, MTV, IBM, Adobe, eBay and more. This year, Text 100 took home two awards, including the 2009 Holmes Report “Best Agencies to Work For” where it ranked #6. The other award, also from Holmes Report, was “Best Campaign” for its work with Cisco.
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by Willy Franzen on October 22, 2009

One of my goals with One Day, One Job is to get more interactive. I’d like to get more feedback from you, the readers, on what you want to see, and I’d also like to use the collective wisdom of thousands of college aged job seekers to develop better content. The best way to do that is through reader surveys, which is why I recently signed up with SurveyMonkey. They’re a Menlo Park, CA (formerly Portland, OR) based “startup” that has been helping people run online surveys for the last decade. While most Internet companies that started in 1999 have since flamed out and most companies started in the 2000s have relied on flashiness to bring in venture capital money, Survey Monkey and its outdated look have been laughing all the way to the bank. By providing a dead simple way for business owners (they’ve worked with more than 80% of the Fortune 100) to collect data, SuveyMonkey has built an insanely successful business.
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by Willy Franzen on October 21, 2009

Product placement started out as a secret. Companies realized that they could pay to get their products featured in books, television shows, and movies, so they did. And we, the viewers, assumed that these products were included for editorial reasons. At some point we got smart and realized what was going on. It didn’t really change much, but we became a little more skeptical. Now product placement is assumed. If someone is promoting something, you take for granted that they’re getting paid for it. Delivery Agent is a San Franciso based company that realized this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They’re taking product placement to the next level with a level of integration that we’ve never seen before. They call this “shopping-enabled entertainment.” When you see Dwight Schrute wearing a great looking shirt on The Office—ok, bad example—when you see a beautiful necklace on Gossip Girl, you can go to the show’s website and check out the “Seen On” section for more information how to buy the necklace. There’s also SeenON.com, which aggregates the information from all of Delivery Agent’s clients and makes it easy to “shop by show” or “shop by celeb.”
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by Willy Franzen on October 19, 2009
This is a guest post by Heather R. Huhman. Heather is the media relations manager at a national health care professional association and entry-level careers columnist for Examiner.com.

Bite Communicationstouts a “fearless and boundless” approach to B2B and B2C communications. They have seven offices worldwide—three of which are in the U.S., including Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco. “Public relations” and “media relations” used to be synonymous, but no longer at Bite Communications. They recognize different clients have different challenges that require different approaches. Starting your career at a progressive agency is the best way to go—you’ll end up a more rounded professional and thus be more marketable. As a full-service agency, Bite Communications offers everything from strategic counsel to new media programs to influencer relations—and everything in between. Some client names you might recognize include Sun Microsystems and Vonage.
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by Willy Franzen on October 16, 2009

Social networking is a new thing, right? Not at all. Social networks have been around almost as long as the Internet. They’ve just become way more mainstream in recent years. Take Redwood City, CA based Care2 for example. They’re an online social network that aims “to help people make the world a better place,” and they’ve been doing it since 1998. That’s impressive, not only because it means that they were early to social networking, but also because it means that they survived the dot com bust of the early 2000s. “Making the world a better place” used to be strictly the territory of non-profits, but now we’re seeing more and more companies like Care2 that are choosing to be B Corporations. That means that they can do good and build a profitable businesses at the same time. That’s exactly what Care2 is doing with their “more than 50 employees, 11 million members, 400 nonprofit partners and hundreds of responsible advertisers making a difference.”
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by Willy Franzen on October 15, 2009

Once you start interviewing for jobs, you realize how important it is to stay well informed. Whether it’s staying up on the industry that you want to work in or just keeping up with current events, you need to be able to speak (somewhat) intelligently about a wide range of topics. Chit chat and small talk play a big part in the impression that you make, so don’t try to use the fact that you “live in a bubble” at college to explain away your ignorance. Instead, you should subscribe to the The Daily Beast. It’s a cheat sheet for current events that covers a wide array of topics. Some would call it a news aggregator, but they like calling what they do “curating.” The site was created by Tina Brown, who was formerly the editor at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. The Daily Beast, which is based out of New York City, launched just over a year ago, and has been able to garner a huge amount of traffic pretty quickly. I guess it might have something to do with their IAC backing.
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by Willy Franzen on October 14, 2009

I remember being in middle school and deciding that I wanted a drum set. I already had a snare drum, but I knew that a full set would be much cooler. My mom bought me a copy of the Bargain News, a local paper full of classified ads, and helped me pore over the listings in search of a drum set. That’s certainly a relic of the past, but classified ads are far from dead. They’ve just moved online. You’re probably most familiar with Craigslist, and maybe you’ve considered using Facebook Marketplace or something like that. What you probably didn’t realize is that there is still a huge business behind classified ads. Take Chicago based Classified Ventures for instance. They’re another Inc. 5000 company, and they’ve increased their revenue from $146.7 million to $297.5 million over the past three years. They’ve done this with four distinct businesses: Apartments.com, Cars.com, HomeGain.com, and HomeFinder.com. You’ve probably noticed at least one of those sites before, which is exactly what they’re looking for.
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by Willy Franzen on September 25, 2009

We’ve featured a lot of startups here at One Day, One Job, but never one with as good of a sense of humor as Rooftop Media. They’re a San Francisco based company that is entirely focused on comedy. Yes, they were able to secure $2.5 million in venture capital solely on their sense of humor. Ok, they actually have a well thought out business model too, but I’d like to think that instead of pitching decks (slides) to VCs, they just did a little standup routine and that was that. The main concept behind Rooftop Media is providing a platform for middle tier comedians—professionals whom you’ve probably never heard of. They have a destination comedy video site called RooftopComedy.com, while also working with media and advertisers. For media they “create custom comedy programming for broadcast, web, mobile and print channels hungry for unique, compelling content,” and for advertisers they “create powerful, branded entertainment and integrated marketing programs on behalf of our advertising clients.” They’ve worked with impressive names like Microsoft, Purina Mills, Virgin America, Fast Company, and more.
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by Willy Franzen on September 18, 2009

At this rate I think that I could finish out the rest of the year covering companies that are on the Inc. 5000. I’m not going to, but I’m tempted by how many high quality entry level job opportunities I’ve been able to find from this list. Today I’ve decided to take a look at Covario, a San Diego based company that makes interactive marketing analytics software with a focus on search. I do a lot with search engine optimization, so I’m quite familiar with the industry, and I know that it’s growing rapidly. Making data driven decisions becomes essential in tougher times, because companies can’t afford not to know if they’re getting a return on investment. Tracking SEO performance through web analytics is a lot easier to measure than tracking the success of a “branding” campaign. I guess that’s why Covario has grown from $1.3 million in revenue in 2005 to $12.7 million in 2008.
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by Willy Franzen on September 15, 2009
Today is the last day to enter our Maghound Your Way to a New Job contest. With so few entries so far, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll win a one-year subscription to an awesome new magazine subscription service (3 monthly magazines for free!).

I’m still on my Inc. 5000 kick, and today we’re looking at a company whose name immediately caught my eye. They’re called College Hunks Hauling Junk, and that’s exactly what they are. Omar Soliman wanted to make some money during the summer, so he borrowed his mom’s cargo van to start hauling away people’s junk. He then entered his business plan in the Rothschild Entrepreneurship Competition and won the $10,000 first prize. He realized that he had a business that he could grow, and now College Hunks Hauling Junk is doing $2.9 million in revenue. Guess that’s why Omar and his co-founder Nick were named (also by Inc.) as Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30. College Hunks Hauling Junk is headquartered in Tampa, FL, but through expansion and franchising they now operate in Anne Arundel, MD; Baltimore/Howard County, MD; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Columbus, OH; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Detroit, MI; Indianapolis, IN; Little Rock, AR; Los Angeles, CA; Louisville, KY; Orange County, CA; Orlando, FL; Phoenix, AZ; Raleigh-Durham, NC; Richmond, VA; San Francisco/San Jose, CA; Tampa Bay, FL; and Washington, DC Metro.
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by Willy Franzen on September 14, 2009
Be sure to check out our new contest, Maghound Your Way to a New Job. We’re giving away two one-year subscriptions to an awesome new magazine subscription service that can help you find a job.

In continuing with my obsession over jobs at Inc. 5000 companies (which fits in perfectly with our latest giveaway), we’re going to take a look at Blue Entertainment Sports Television today. They’re a Louisville, KY based “full-service sports and entertainment management, event and production company.” They’ve taken the unified agency approach that you often see in Marketing and Advertising, and have applied it to sports. That means that their areas of work include representation, marketing, promotion, hospitality and events. Their strategy seems to be pretty solid considering that their revenue has grown 4,685.3% over the past three years to $22.9 million.
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by Willy Franzen on September 9, 2009

It’s funny how well respected brands that have been around forever will get swept up in a fad. Some, like Abercrombie & Fitch, will make it part of a new identity, while others like Burberry will enjoy the popularity but maintain their core image. Burberry is a British company that has been making quality garments since 1856, but they became especially trendy in the early 2000s, if I remember correctly. While most brands are recognized for their logo or a specific product, Burberry is known for their plaid. In fact, unless you’re a tartan freak, “Burberry Check” is probably the only plaid that you recognize by name. Over their 150 years Burberry has moved more towards luxury goods than outdoor garments, which is best evidenced by their new ad campaigns with Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame.
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by Willy Franzen on September 8, 2009

I’m not a total gearhead, but I can get pretty excited about gadgets (like the ones that we just gave away in our Back to School, Back to Work contest). Luckily, there are plenty of gadget sites on the web to keep us all up to date on the newest and greatest tech toys. We have Gizmodo and Engadget and hundreds of others to bring us breaking news on what’s hot. So, why would the guy who started both Gizmodo and Engadget (both of which he sold off) start another gadget site? The New York Times says that Peter Rojas thinks he can do it again—this time with gdgt, a user-generated content site for owners of gadgets that aren’t necessarily the best new things.
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by Willy Franzen on September 4, 2009

Since I’m spending the weekend in San Francisco, I thought it would only be fitting to feature a San Francisco based startup today (as if we haven’t already featured enough). I decided to cover one in my industry (job search and online recruiting), because I really like what they’re doing (and they’re probably the best source for San Francisco based startup jobs too). Their name is Job Alchemist, and they’re the creators of one of the few job boards that I actually think is worth using—Startuply. They’ve also developed a number of other niche job boards like HomeBy3 (flexible jobs for moms) and Reddit’s job board. Beyond that, they’re working on a project called JobSyndicate, which is an affiliate network for jobs. I’ve seen a lot of entrants to this industry in the past couple years, and Job Alchemist is one of only a handful that have impressed me. When a company creates a job board that I actually use, that’s saying something.
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by Willy Franzen on September 3, 2009

Judging by what people are watching on the televisions on the cardio machines at my health club, there’s a lot of excitement about the US open right now—and we haven’t even reached the exciting part yet. There’s a decent amount of television coverage of the Open on ESPN2 (check out ESPN’s entry level jobs), but if you really want to watch a lot of tennis you need to watch the Tennis Channel. They’re a tv network that is based in Santa Monica, CA (with locations in Atlanta and New York City), and they’re “the only 24-hour, television-based multimedia destination dedicated to the professional sport and passionate lifestyle of tennis.” Tennis Channel obviously isn’t for everyone, but that’s what niche media is all about. They own the tennis market.
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by Willy Franzen on September 1, 2009

Today we’re kicking off our Back to School, Back to Work contest where we’re giving away an HP dv6 Laptop, an HP Mini 110 Netbook, a customized Timbuk2 bag, and Syncables software to one lucky winner. Last December when we did another HP giveaway we took a look at entry level jobs with HP, so this time we’re going to check out Timbuk2 (since they were kind enough to provide a prize for one of you). They’re a San Francisco born and bred company that builds “bags and accessories for urban adventures with a simple philosophy—create good-looking, tough-as-Hell bags you can truly make your own.” I already had one that I stole from my girlfriend, and I just got another to check out for this promotion (the bag goes with me everywhere now).
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by Willy Franzen on August 28, 2009

It’s hard to imagine that a film production company could morph into “a holistic interactive agency built for a digital world;” however, that’s exactly what New York City’s R/GA has done. Now, film production and advertising aren’t all that different, but it’s still a big psychological leap from one to the other. Moreover, not many companies are willing to take a huge risk and move where innovation takes them. R/GA embraces change. They’re also really freakin’ good at what they do. Their clients include Nike, Verizon, IBM, Target, Bank of America, and a bunch of other extremely well known companies. They also have the best corporate website built in Flash that I’ve ever seen. Everything about it works—I can actually give you links to specific pages. Beyond that, the site does a fantastic job of presenting R/GA’s brand. It’s packed with information and has fantastic videos (they obviously haven’t abandoned film production completely).
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by Willy Franzen on August 24, 2009

This morning I was reading a New York Times article about how some of the “super rich” are being hit hardest (at least in terms of total dollars lost) by this recession. A lot of this has to do with heavy investments in real estate. As we all know, real estate has not been the place to be lately. The good news about the bad real estate market is that it’s leading to all kinds of innovation. There are a ton of cool real estate startups, and I just came across another one called eRealInvestor. They’re based in San Francisco, and they offer a suite of tools that allow those who still have it in them to invest in real estate to be much smarter about it. Since I’m not a real estate investor, I don’t fully understand what all of the tools do. However, it’s hard to argue with a data based approach to buying and selling real estate.
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by Willy Franzen on August 21, 2009

When I’m looking for companies to feature, I spend a lot of time looking at new startups. Sometimes I hear complaints that the jobs that we feature are a little heavy on the tech side, but that’s where a lot of the exciting jobs are these days. Startups are also more likely to be companies that you’ve never heard of before (which I consider a good thing). So, imagine my surprise when I’m browsing a startup job board and come across a posting for Charles Chocolates. They’re a San Francisco based chocolate startup founded by Charles Siegel, a guy who “has been a part of the San Francisco chocolate scene since 1987.” That may sound a little odd, but he’s done this before, and now he’s doing it again. I think the timing is right for an artisanal chocolate success story—just look at what Vosges is doing with their chocolate business.
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by Willy Franzen on August 20, 2009

Believe it or not, over the past week One Day, One Job has been coming to you from a lodge on the banks of the Grand Cascapedia river in Quebec. As I’ve learned this week, fishing for Atlantic Salmon is extremely difficult, even though you can often see the fish right in front of you. In some pools there appear to be plenty of fish, but none of them will bite. That’s probably a good thing considering the fact that the estimated annual run on the Bonaventure (where we’ve been doing our fishing) is only about 1,500-2,000 fish. That means that if I catch and release my daily limit of two fish, I’ve caught .1% of the entire run. Even though we’d really like to, we can’t even think about killing one of these fish to eat—they’re too precious. Luckily, CleanFish is a company (and a B Corporation, you know what that is now!) that offers sustainable seafood that we can eat. They’re based in San Francisco with offices in Gloucester, MA and Los Angeles, CA as well, and they’re changing the way that we eat seafood.
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