by Willy Franzen on December 2, 2008
When I was a senior in high school (2002), I thought that my class was cutting edge to include a CD with our yearbook. Then I was greeted by “The Class of 2006 Website,” a site very much like Facebook (before there was a Facebook) for my incoming Freshman class at Cornell. Finally, Facebook arrived on the scene in 2004, and the idea of a yearbook was forever changed. At least it was for college students. Facebook didn’t open up to high schoolers until September of 2005, and in that time both MySpace and myYearbook had already started tapping the high school social networking market. You may not have heard of myYearbook, but you should have. They have the 14th most pageviews of any site on the Internet, surpassing both Amazon.com and Wikipedia. What makes this more impressive is that New Hope, PA based myYearbook was founded by a 15 year old and a 16 year old brother and sister during their Spring Break.
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by Willy Franzen on November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for reading and helping to make the first year of One Day, One Job a great success. Last year we told you about jobs at Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg, which are still a great option if you want to be reminded of Thanksgiving every day when you’re at work, but this year we’re going to take the easy way out and talk about turkey. I was first introduced to Jennie-O when I tried some of their turkey bacon. It’s good, if you haven’t had real bacon in a while. Since my Thanksgiving cooking philosophy is that bacon makes everything better (especially when it’s put on top of the turkey and doused in maple syrup, seriously, try it), I’ll let Jennie-O provide the turkey, but I’m getting the bacon somewhere else. In the three or four years that I’ve been familiar with the Jennie-O brand, I’ve noticed that they’ve revved up their branding efforts. You’ve probably seen some of their tv commercials, which are pretty funny, but you may have overlooked the fact that they’re working hard to expand recognition of their employment brand with college students.
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by Willy Franzen on November 25, 2008
I have a first generation iPhone, and despite the fact that it uses cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots instead of GPS for location, I have still become entirely dependent on using my phone to find my way. It’s blatantly obvious that the cell phone is the convergence point for all kinds of technology – cameras, video cameras, computers, GPS devices, voice recorders, address books, and video games now exist in one device. The next step is tying location awareness into all of these functions, and that’s what Sunnyvale, CA based TeleNav is all about. They were the “first to launch a GPS navigation and mobile workforce management service on a cell phone in North America,” and they’re also the “fastest growing company in Silicon Valley” according to Deloitte. They’re partnered with “every significant wireless carrier and device manufacturer,” and they’re primed to make the most of the GPS chips that are now found in most phones.
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by Willy Franzen on November 24, 2008
I don’t recall having any friends in college who sent out their own holiday cards, but if you’re planning on sending out cards, you better get on it. Christmas is 31 days away. My family always tried to send out Christmas cards, but it usually resulted in a fight between my sister and me over which picture to use – if we could even get along long enough for a picture to be taken (yes, we were both in college at this point). With my sister’s and my being difficult and my mom’s procrastinating ability, Christmas cards almost inevitably became New Year’s cards, which typically arrived well after New Year’s. I’m not sure that Mountain View, CA based Tiny Prints could have helped with conflict resolution between my sister and me, but they can make it ridiculously easy to produce a beautiful holiday card.
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by Willy Franzen on November 6, 2008
You may not think of it this way, but every time that you visit a website, you’re downloading files from someone else’s computer (server). The server that One Day, One Job is hosted on is shared with quite a few different sites (including One Day, One Internship). Even though there are thousands of people coming to our sites every day, they’re only downloading text and images, so it barely puts a strain on our server. Facebook, on the other hand, has millions of people on their site who are doing hardware intensive things like uploading photos and searching huge databases. They need thousands of their own servers to handle all of the activity. Somewhere between the server needs of One Day, One Job and Facebook is a middle ground where many businesses find themselves. They have major server needs, but they don’t need to do it all by themselves. That’s where Rackspace comes in, they are an “IT hosting company that delivers enterprise-class web infrastructure and hosting services to businesses of all sizes.”
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by Willy Franzen on October 29, 2008
One of my favorite movies is Trading Places
. I was introduced to the movie by my Econ 101 professor when he played a clip in class, and it still amazes me how much fun it is to learn about the world of high finance and commodities markets from Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. These days it seems that entire markets are as volatile as the concentrated frozen orange juice market was in the movie, but that just makes things more interesting. Trying to play the markets right now might be fun, but there aren’t a ton of companies in the financial industry hiring right now, and you don’t need that stress anyway. If you’d still like a front row view of the daily excitement that is capitalism, then you should consider a job with the CME Group, “a combined entity formed by the 2007 merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).” Instead of playing the market, you can be the market.
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by Willy Franzen on October 22, 2008
Despite what you might think from looking at the logo to the right, Chumby is not the first cousin of Gumby. Chumby is a startup that makes a real-life product that bears the same name. Their product is an “internet radio, digital picture frame, alarm clock, and more.” The “and more” includes news, social networking, weather, and games. It’s a dead simple Internet device that seems perfect for your bedside or the breakfast table. I’ve never actually tried a Chumby, but the reviews are glowing. At the very least it’s a cool niche product, and there’s certainly the potential for a Chumby to replace the alarm clock.
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by Willy Franzen on October 13, 2008
Ok, it may be politically incorrect to celebrate Columbus Day, but it’s just about the only holiday that I had off in college. Maybe it just happened to be a convenient weekend for Fall Break, but I still can’t believe that I didn’t have class on Columbus Day, but did have class on Labor Day (when I went to a School of Industrial and Labor Relations). Anyway, Christopher Columbus wasn’t much of a navigator. He had no idea where he was going, and he tried to take the long way around the world. Still, his ineptitude was the reason that he “discovered” the Americas. Had Garmin been around in the 1490s, Columbus never would have ended up where he did. Then again, the existence of a company built on GPS technology would have changed a lot of things for famous explorers five centuries ago. (Much like the existence of iPods – like the one we’re giving away – would have changed the world for musicians back then.)
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by Willy Franzen on October 9, 2008
Did you know that the invention of the portable clock was mainly driven by the need for ships to measure longitude? I bet that you didn’t. I did because I was forced to read a book called Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
during the summer before my Sophomore year of high school. For most of nautical history, one of the most challenging problems facing mariners was figuring out where they were at a given moment. Now companies like Veson Nautical provide software solutions that “allow users to manage and share information efficiently across Chartering, Operations, Trading, and Accounting departments—streamlining workflow, cutting costs, and optimizing profits.” If Christopher Columbus had software to optimize profits, he certainly never would have “discovered” America.
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by Willy Franzen on August 20, 2008
Software used to be all about personal computers. You bought a computer, then you bought software, and finally you loaded the software onto the computer. Whether you wanted to play a game, make a spreadsheet, or edit images, the process was essentially the same. We’re rapidly moving towards a future where much of the software that we use resides on someone else’s computer – a server – and we access it over the Internet. One obvious example of this change is Google Apps. Another less obvious example is Facebook. You may say, “But it’s just a website!” Yes, it’s a website that does a lot of things – it’s software. More and more developers are spending more and more time building applications that run “in the cloud.” The biggest challenge for these developers is ensuring that their applications scale – in other words, that they work just as well with 100,000 users as they do with 100 users. Building the software and hardware infrastructure needed to scale efficiently is a mountainous task, that’s why 10gen is building a software based solution that runs on most current hosting hardware. They envision a future in which a single developer can build a software product that serves millions of users without having to worry about scaling.
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by Willy Franzen on August 14, 2008
A company’s home page should make it instantly clear what the company is about. For many companies this is not the case. There’s all kinds of fluff that fails to give potential customers a proper brand introduction. Menlo Innovations doesn’t make this mistake. Their home page introduces a problem: “In 2004, the U.S. wasted over $55 billion on failed and poorly run software projects.” Then it identifies the cause: “These failures can be traced to a lack of understanding of the business issues being addressed and the wrong implementation methodologies being used.” Finally the home page poses their solution:
Menlo Innovations applies High-Tech Anthropology® to help our clients fully understand their business problems and opportunities. If the solution requires software, Menlo either develops the software within our Menlo Software Factory or The Menlo Institute trains your staff to use proven methodologies to develop the software themselves.
It’s clear. It’s concise, and it gets to the point. There’s no misunderstanding about what The Menlo Institute does.
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by Willy Franzen on July 11, 2008
Imagine that instead of graduating in 2008, you graduated in 1978. You’re a paralegal, and you’re working on a major litigation for a Japanese auto manufacturer. You are responsible for organizing thousands of pages of documents by keyword so that the lawyers will be able to quickly find relevant depositions. Doesn’t sound like very much fun, does it? Not too long ago this was a reality, and although we’re now mostly blind to the wonders of search, Laserfiche offered a revolutionary product in 1987 when they offered the first DOS-based document imaging system. Now paralegals could just scan these documents, and software would automatically index every single word. This may have been bad for paralegals (software replacing humans), but it was good for anyone who might consider working for Laserfiche. Although it may seem that companies could easily manage their documents now that most things have gone digital, they can’t. That’s why Laserfiche is still kicking around, helping organization manage information.
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by Willy Franzen on June 25, 2008
Now that it’s summer, it may be hard to think back to having the sniffles and feeling a cold coming on, but try your hardest. You probably heard from various friends and family members who swear by this remedy or that remedy. Chicken soup. Zinc. Naps. Vitamin C. Ahhh…. Vitamin C. Some people swear by it, and others think that they’re nuts. You can drink OJ, use Airborne, or take Emergen-C – my favorite. You can also swallow cheap Vitamin C pills, but that’s no fun. Airborne got slapped with a false advertising suit for making claims that their product has the “ability to cure or prevent the common cold.” They settled for $23.3 million. Emergen-C doesn’t make such aggressive claims, although they do say that their product will “give your immune system a fighting chance.” In reality, it’s not all that important. Emergen-C is absolutely delicious, especially when mixed with orange juice. If it even makes you think that you’re going to feel better after taking it, then it’s doing its job – at least we know that it’s not less effective than Airborne.
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by Willy Franzen on June 10, 2008
We didn’t get a whole lot done yesterday. We were slightly distracted by the events going on at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where Apple announced a 3G iPhone along with some amazing software updates, and a daytime Yankees game on tv. A lot of people complained that too much time was spent at WWDC talking about software, but we couldn’t get enough of it. A couple really cool apps in the medical field (Modality and MIMvista) were showcased, but neither of the companies that developed them appeared to have entry-level jobs; however, Epocrates is a company that was featured at the announcement of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and is also putting the iPhone into use in the practice of medicine.
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by Willy Franzen on May 29, 2008
Most people like shoes. They protect your feet, offer support, and keep you warm. Some people love shoes – love them to the point that their loved ones (not the shoes) are likely worried about them. Oddly enough, the people who deeply love shoes often seem most interested in shoes that barely protect their feet, offer little support, and provide little or no warmth. We don’t really get that. Zappos.com puts these people to shame. As a company they have a shoe obsession that is far worse than that of the most Sex and the City addicted, Daily Candy reading, New York City fashionista. Why do we say that? Because Zappos.com is obsessed with everything shoes, not just the shoes of some designer whose name you’re supposed to know.
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by Willy Franzen on May 12, 2008
Some people love grocery shopping, some people hate it, and most people don’t have time for it. If your college campus was anywhere near a Wegmans, then you probably made time for the supermarket; however, once you start working a full-time, entry-level job in a city with no Wegmans, grocery shopping will likely become an imposition. That’s where FreshDirect steps in. They deliver fresh, affordable food to your doorstep quickly.
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by Willy Franzen on April 18, 2008
Get your shovel out. No, we’re not going to BS you, but it’s required equipment if you want a job at Digg. Digg is a social news site that allows users to vote up and share interesting news items, videos, and images. At times it can seem like a total time waster, but then out of nowhere an extremely useful submission will pop up. You’re also likely to find Breaking News on Digg well before it gets picked up by the mainstream media.
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by Willy Franzen on February 14, 2008
Happy Valentine’s Day! Yesterday and the day before we profiled companies that not only offer great entry-level job opportunities, but also can help you with last-minute preparations for making today (or any day) special for someone you love. Today we’re going to talk about a company that has something to offer for those of you who are looking for someone to love. Speaking of which, we want your love, so become a Facebook Fan, subscribe through RSS, or join our e-mail list. You’ll get great information about entry-level careers, and we’ll get a self-esteem boost. Everybody wins.
A lot of people say that job searching is like dating. That metaphor has been played out, and we’re not going to write an article on How to Use Google to Find a Girlfriend. We are going to talk about how you can use your surplus of Valentine’s Day love to find a job or a date at eHarmony, since randomly poking people you think are cute on Facebook isn’t going to get you a date (nor will doing the equivalent on LinkedIn get you a job). eHarmony is a dating site that matches people based on a scientific approach to compatibility. We’ve never used it, but the couples on their commercials seem pretty darned happy; moreover, on average, 90 people get married from eHarmony every day. With so much success, there has been an upcropping of sites that claim to be “the eHarmony of jobs,” but we’re pretty skeptical of this approach. If most companies can’t even put together good job descriptions, how can they be expected to write an organizational profile that will yield accurate results when put into a compatibility algorithm? You’re better off reading One Day, One Job, doing your own research, and determining organizational fit yourself.
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by Willy Franzen on January 24, 2008
College is when you make decisions that affect the rest of your life. You pick a major, you choose to study (or party) hard, and you might even decide to ask out your future spouse. Then, one night, things get a little out of hand. You wake up on the living room floor of your apartment, you walk to the bathroom, look into the mirror, and see that you’ve managed to get a bit of ink on yourself. No, your friends didn’t shame you with sharpies. You got a tattoo. It’s not going to wash off, no matter how hard you scrub. Sorry, mom.
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by Willy Franzen on January 16, 2008
Yesterday, we spent a good part of the day camped in front of our computers reading MacRumors.com’s live blog updates from the Apple Keynote at MacWorld Expo San Francisco. In case you aren’t a “macfanboy,” you should know that they announced the MacBook Air, updates to the iPhone and iPod Touch software, improved AppleTV functionality with downloadable movie rentals, and a wireless router/storage/backup device called Time Capsule. For some who were expecting more, yesterday’s products announcements were quite a disappointment, while for others, it was like Christmas morning all over again. Anyways, today’s event was a great display of how even huge companies can remain innovative, and that got us thinking about how a new college grad can snag a job at Apple.
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by Willy Franzen on December 14, 2007
Do you remember the Far Side cartoons by Gary Larson? There was one with two parents watching their son playing a video game. Both parents had thought bubbles coming from their heads with dreams of classified ads listing high-paying video game testing job after high-paying video game testing job. Their dream has come true. A career in video games is a reality for today’s college graduates. Unfortunately, those video game jobs aren’t always as dreamy as they might seem. The industry is known for a high rate of burnout; however, Insomniac Games is not one of the culprits – for the past 3 years they have been in the Top 10 of HR Magazine’s List of the Best Small & Medium Companies to Work for in America.
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