by Willy Franzen on December 17, 2008

Over the past month I’ve had at least three people ask me whether I’ve read Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time
. Usually that would be enough of a push to get me to order the book from Amazon and give it a quick read, but I haven’t had time to because I’ve been so focused on developing a curriculum that will teach you how to find and land a job. The last person who asked me if I had read Never Eat Alone also suggested that I take a look at Ferrazzi Greenlight, the company started by the book’s author, Keith Ferrazzi. The company focuses on strategic relationship management through consulting, speaking, and professional development services – or as they say it, they share their “passion for infusing relationships with intimacy, accountability, and generosity to achieve the greatest of success.”
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by Willy Franzen on December 15, 2008

It’s amazing to think that a publication started by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell in 1857 is still kicking. The Atlantic has morphed from a focus on literary and cultural affairs to more broadly attacking the topics of foreign affairs, politics, economics, and cultural trends. It has also joined forces with National Journal and Government Executive to form Atlantic Media. Their publications are a little more advanced than Highlights and Mad Magazine, which is why a recent rebranding effort was probably necessary. Appealing to people’s intellectual sides just isn’t the best way to sell magazines, unfortunately. With lots of changes going on at Atlantic Media, and National Journal Group’s political trade journals still bringing money, now might be an interesting time to consider working at Atlantic Media.
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by Willy Franzen on December 8, 2008

We’ve just had another weekend of looking at excellent entry level jobs at non-profits, so it makes sense that we’re going to look at jobs with a company that serves non-profits today. Blackbaud is a technology solutions provider for non-profit organizations that specializes in “fundraising, relationship management, financial management, education administration, website management, direct, marketing, ticketing, prospect research, consulting, and training.” That’s a lot to do, but Blackbaud is a big company – they have over 22,000 non-profit customers and almost 2,000 employees. They seem to growing at a good rate, and they even have locations in 5 countries.
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by Willy Franzen on December 6, 2008

We’ve catered to the PBS junkies before when we’ve covered entry level jobs at PBS here and WTTW11’s internships on One Day, One Internship, and we’re going to do it again today. WGBH is a non-profit PBS affiliate based out of Boston that also happens to be the “single largest producer of PBS prime-time and online programming.” They started out by broadcasting the Boston Symphony Orchestra over the radio in 1951, but they’ve expanded to television and the web since. It’s really amazing how much of PBS’s programing comes out of WGBH. One of my all-time favorites was ZOOM, which is a little embarrassing to admit, since I was a bit old to be watching it at the time. Another interesting thing about WGBH that I picked up from Wikipedia is that they’re “considered a leader in services for people who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind, or visually impaired.” WGBH actually “invented television closed captioning, audio description (Descriptive Video Service), and created the Rear Window Captioning System for films.” As you can see, WGBH is an innovator not just in public television, but in all media, and probably a great place to work.
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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 21, 2008

We’re big on innovation here. We don’t like talking about companies that are doing things the way that they’ve always done. They’re not only boring, but they’re also destined for failure. Look at the auto industry. You can blame the downfall of the Big 3 on a lot of things, but a lack of innovation has to be a big part of your argument. We’re trying to bring innovation to the way that you find jobs, and there are hundreds of startups out there that are defined by innovation. It’s all around us. frog design is a global innovation firm. They “work with the world’s leading companies, helping them create and bring to market meaningful products, services, and experiences,” and they’ve been doing it for almost 40 years. They’ve worked with clients as vaired as Disney, GE, HP, Logitech, Microsoft, MTV, Seagate, Yahoo!, which goes to show you that they’re not easy to pigeonhole. frog design is based out of San Francisco, and they have offices (or as they call them, studios) in Austin, New York, San Jose, Seattle, Milan, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, and Shanghai
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by Willy Franzen on November 20, 2008

Some people seem to think that this financial crisis is a sign that the end of the world is coming. Well, I can assure you that it is not going to lead to the end of the World… of Warcraft. Why’s that? Because video game sales were up 18% from last October to this October. I guess when you can’t find a job, a new video game seems like a smart investment (you have a lot of time on your hands). I’d recommend that you invest in our job search training course instead, but that’s just my opinion. So, even if you’re frustrated by your job search, don’t give up on the World… of Warcraft. Not only can video games give you a way to blow off your steam while you’re getting pwned by your job search, they can also provide you ideas for new employers to look into. For instance, Irvine, CA based Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft seems to be on a hiring binge. Maybe your 1337 gaming skills aren’t useless (and don’t tell me that you don’t need a job because you’re mining cybergold). Oh yeah, and if you’re playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure, you’re doing it wrong, n00b.
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by Willy Franzen on November 14, 2008

Maybe your demographic characteristics get targeted more often than mine, but it’s a rare occasion that I see advertisements from employers on Facebook. As I’ve already demonstrated, Facebook advertising is an extremely effective way to reach a targeted audience at a low cost. That’s why it caught my attention when I saw that Alpha 411 Yext was targeting me with some Facebook recruitment advertising. I clicked their ad and took a look at what they have to offer, and I have to say that their Recruiting page is pretty compelling. Alpha 411 is a local advertising company that says that they are “rapidly becoming the world’s greatest.” I think that’s a bit of an overstatement considering that Google has a pretty strong presence in local advertising. With that said, Alpha 411 is taking a different approach by building niche industry sites like GymTicket.com and LocalVets.com to help people find local providers in specific industries. It looks like a strong business model, but I doubt that they’ll ever unseat Google; in fact, I’d wager that most of their traffic comes from the big G.
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by Willy Franzen on November 13, 2008

If I had known that today was World Usability Day, I would have waited another day to post about Hesketh’s entry level jobs. Unfortunately, I was out of the loop on this one, so I blew it. With that said, today’s company, Crowd Science, offers some pretty cool analytics tools that might help webmaster makes more informed usability decisions. It’s kind of a stretch, because most of what Crowd Science does is explore demographics, but who cares about World Usability Day anyway? (Ok, I do. A little bit.) So TechCrunch has dubbed Crowd Science as Google Analytics for demographics, and I think that the title fits.
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by Willy Franzen on November 10, 2008

One of the best parts about college is the access you get to top experts (professors). You may not realize it, but there’s a good chance that the woman who is teaching you Econ 101 knows more about a given topic in Economics than anyone in the world. Whether that topic interests you or not is another matter, but just think how much you could learn from your professors beyond what they’re teaching you in class. Ok, so you’d often rather be sleeping/drinking/Facebooking/xBoxing/whatevering than going to class or stopping in for chats during office hours, but that will change – it will change right about the time that you graduate and no longer have access to professors. That’s why the The Learning Annex is a wildly successful business. They call themselves “the premier producer of seminars, lectures, classes and workshops throughout the United States and Canada,” and they back that up by hiring “teachers” like Donald Trump, Larry King, Jerry Lewis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Henry Kissinger, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Barbara Bush, P. Diddy, Sylvia Browne and James Van Praagh. It’s access to experts for the after college crowd, and it’s resulted in $102 million in yearly revenue (794.1% 3-year growth). Since we also want to make $102 million a year, we’re considering putting together an online job search training course based on the One Day, One Job method (of course we have a method, how do you think we keep finding all of these awesome jobs), but we want to gauge interest first. If that’s something that you’d be interested in (and you’d like a discount), shoot me an e-mail at Willy@onedayonejob.com.
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by Willy Franzen on November 8, 2008

When you hear “pew,” you usually expect something to stink. That’s not the case with the Pew Research Center, which is a non-profit “fact tank” (not thinktank) that provides nonpartisan “information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.” If you know anything about thinktanks, you may be rolling your eyes at the word nonpartisan, but it’s true. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. Still skeptical? Read their Code of Ethics. They’re all about the numbers, and they don’t care so much about making sure the numbers say what they want them to. The Pew Research Center has seven ongoing projects that focus on some fascinating subject matter. They are: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Project for Excellence in Journalism, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Pew Hispanic Center, Pew Global Attitudes Project, and Social & Demographic Trends. If you’re still not straight on what Pew Research Center is all about, take a look at their home page – PewResearch.org – it’s full of the kind of information that the Center compiles.
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by Willy Franzen on November 7, 2008

Considering that college is a time when you’re supposed to be working towards having a productive adulthood, a whole lot of self-destruction seems to be going on. It must be hard for the health nuts to fit in. If you prefer 8 glasses of water a day to keg stands, celery sticks to buffalo wings, and the Nintendo Wii to the Xbox, then you’ll be a lot more comfortable in an entry level job at Rodale than you will be at a frat party. Rodale is a “global media company with a heritage, mission, and authority dedicated to the health and wellness of the individual, community, and planet.” They publish magazines such as Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Organic Gardening, Prevention, and Runner’s World. They’re also the largest independent book publisher in the U.S.
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by Willy Franzen on November 5, 2008

Typically when we feature a startup company and its jobs, the startup is at least mid-stage – they have a small but growing team, a product that has been released in some form to the public, and often have gone through multiple stages of funding. Today’s company, Maria Health, can definitely be considered early stage. They have a team of 7, an idea – not a product, and backing by one venture capital firm. They say that they’re going to change the way that you think about healthcare through “a web app which will provide users unprecedented transparency into their healthcare usage, options, and insurance coverage.” Although it’s hard to say what will actually happen down the road, you have to like the chances of a healthcare based startup in this down economy. Healthcare is an industry that just seems to keep growing and growing.
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by Willy Franzen on October 27, 2008

The great thing about living in downtown Chicago is that I’m constantly bombarded with new ideas for companies to feature here. In suburban Connecticut most of what I saw when I was driving around was trees. Here in Chicago there are few trees in sight, but plenty of businesses, billboards, and buses (with advertising on the side, of course). There are also plenty of taxes. Sales tax is 10.25% and the parking tax is 28%, but likely soon to be 33%. This is on top of already outrageous monthly parking fees, so it’s no wonder that there’s a Zipcar location just a hundred yards down the street from my building. Zipcars are kind of like rental cars, but better. They’re more affordable (I think, but I haven’t done the math), they’re intended for residents instead of travelers, they’re green, and you don’t need to be 25 to take them for a ride. It’s kind of like having a friend with a car except you have to pay that friend whenever you use his car.
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by Willy Franzen on October 24, 2008

Back when I was in high school (yes, part of that was in the 90s), I thought that I was really savvy when it came to using the Web to do better in my English classes. I found online, public-domain versions of many of the books that I was reading. The best part was that these were searchable, so if I needed to find a quote or a specific passage, all I had to do was remember a key word or two. It was fantastic. A lot has changed since then, and I don’t even know the extent of what academic resources are available online now. What I do know is that it’s not fair that today’s students have access to sites like Shmoop, when I couldn’t even dream of something like it. What is Shmoop? It’s hard for me to describe briefly, so maybe you should take the Tour de Shmoop.
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by Willy Franzen on October 19, 2008

Just because you’re graduating college doesn’t mean that you have to be done with educational development. Even if you haven’t studied education for a second, you must have picked up something with 17 years in the educational system. At the very least you’ve lived in a thriving society, and you understand how education, health, civil society and economic development are the keys to a better life. Maybe you take these things for granted, but once you see what the non-profit Academy for Educational Development is doing, you’ll get a better understanding for how innovative solutions can help solve critical social and economic problems. AED has programs that focus on 7 specific areas – Education, Enterprise & Economic Development, Environment & Energy, Health, HIV/AIDS, Leadership & Democracy, and Youth – and they also take 7 different approaches – Behavior Changes, Gender, Partnerships, Research & Evaluation, Social Marketing, Technology Applications, and Training. It may sound like they have their hands full, and they do. AED is running “more than 250 programs serving people in all 50 U.S. states and more than 150 countries.”
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by Willy Franzen on October 18, 2008

Surprise, surprise. We’ve selected yet another one of the Wall Street Journal’s Best Small Workplaces to be featured on One Day, One Job. That’s three in a row for those of you who are counting. We can’t express enough how helpful lists like these can be to your job search. Almost as helpful as Rainforest Alliance is to saving the rainforest. They’re a non-profit organization that “works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices and consumer behavior.” How do they do this? By working directly with farmers, workers, business leaders, NGO’s, governments, scientists and local communities to change the way that they do agriculture to make land use more socially and environmentally responsible while maintaining its economic viability.
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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 8, 2008

Whenever we come upon a company with a weird or hard to pronounce name, we want an explanation. Luckily for us, Chitika explains themselves right away on their About Us page. The name is pronounced CHIH-tih-ka, and it means “snap of the fingers” in Telugu (a South Indian language). With that out of the way, let’s get to what Chitika does. They’re a full service online advertising agency that works with both publishers and advertisers. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Chitika from other bloggers who use the ad network to “monetize” their blogs. We’re taking a different approach to advertising here on One Day, One Job, but it seems like Chitika is working well for a lot of people whom I have a lot of respect for.
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by Willy Franzen on October 6, 2008

Now, I usually write themed posts for holidays, but since today is only a holiday for me and those whom I force to celebrate (it’s my birthday), I don’t have a themed post. I will, however, be announcing a contest later today where we’ll be giving away an iPod touch in celebration of my birthday. We also have another great internship opportunity for you today. Last week, a woman named Stephanie Johnson from Rent Marketer e-mailed me and told me that she had “relied on One Day, One Internship (and Job) to get ideas about what a great internship looks like.” She wanted us to share the details internships with you, and since flattery works we featured Rent Marketer’s internships on One Day, One Internship today. While we were researching them, we noticed some great jobs listed on their Careers page, so we’re telling you about those here. Rent Marketer is in the business of helping property owners post their rentals to dozens of sites all at once. Repeatedly posting For Rent ads can be mind numbing (kind of like applying to a lot of entry level jobs), and they do it all for you in a simple and cost effective way.
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by Willy Franzen on September 26, 2008

By featuring one job a day, we like to think that we make job search easy to digest. Causecast is trying to make finding cool causes easier by featuring ten every month. That’s just the start of it, though. They have a community/social networking aspect, and they also link non-profits with brands and celebrities. For exapmle, Generation Rescue is supported by Jenny McCarthy and sponsored by, well, it looks like Causecast is still working on the sponsorships. They use the power of Web 2.0 to collect a ton of relevant information on organizations, and they even provide an easy way to donate to the causes of your choice. You can see what the total donations from the Causecast community are to date, which is also cool. The community, so far, is still pretty small, but Causecast’s website is excellent and will certainly generate a lot more interest in the future.
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by Willy Franzen on September 23, 2008

I didn’t even know what PowerPoint was until I got to college. Then during my first semester of Freshman year, I was expected to deliver a presentation to a professor in .ppt format. I had no idea what that was. I eventually figured it out, and put together an ugly presentation that apparently was good enough in comparison to the rest of my classmates’ presentations to get an A. I guess that I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t familiar with PowerPoint. Throughout the rest of college, I used PowerPoint again and again to deliver presentations. I almost started liking it. No, that’s not true at all. I never liked it, but I know some people who actually enjoy putting together slides for presentations. I call these people geeks (mostly because they call their presentations “decks”). SlideShare is like YouTube for geeks. It lets you embed your PowerPoint presentations online and share them with the world.
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by Willy Franzen on September 22, 2008

When we review companies, we always like to look at their client lists. It’s a good way to see what a company has done and what kind of reputation they have. Visde’s client list speaks for itself. It includes Apple, Boeing, Disney, Intel, Macromedia, and Yahoo!. If Visde were an accounting firm or a waste management company, you’d probably nod your head and say something like, “Oh, that’s nice.” The reason this client list is so impressive is that Visde is a product experience design firm. They help some of the biggest names in product design with… product design. Some of their latest projects include a personal hearing aid remote control and a national ethnographic study of parents, teachers, and school administrators for online standardized testing. These are just two types of things that you might end up doing at Visde. Their main areas of expertise are Innovation Strategy, Design Strategy, Conceptual Explorations, User Research, User Experience Design, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Visual Design, Industrial Design, Package Design, Web + Software, and Kiosks.
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by Willy Franzen on September 18, 2008

If you’ve already read our article about using Facebook advertising in your job search, you might know the name Alex Payne. He was one of the participants in our experiment who responded to our call for “adventurous job seekers.” He’s a new grad from Duke with a double major in English and Literature, and he was looking for a job in marketing and publishing. We’re not sure if our experiment helped to ignite his interest in social media, but he’s taken an internship at Ignite Social Media to try his hand at online marketing. Alex recently pinged me to let me know that Ignite is hiring for a couple positions that might be well suited to new college grads. It’s good to know people on the inside.
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by Willy Franzen on September 15, 2008

We first came across Tocquigny when were featuring another Austin, TX based company on One Day, One Internship. We thought that Pierpont, a PR firm, had cool internships and a cool office. We were right about the internships, but it turned out that the office in Pierpont’s Flickr stream was actually Tocquigny’s (here are more pictures of their office). An ultra cool office is enough to get us excited, but we’re also impressed to see that Tocquigny was named the #2 Interactive Agency by BtoB Magazine. If you’re looking to break into advertising, interactive agencies are a good way to go. New media is becoming more and more dominant as old media dies a slow, painful death. We’re not saying that the traditional ad agencies are going anywhere, but new college grads have a much better chance of landing a job and building the foundation for a successful career by becoming familiar with the interactive side of advertising.
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by Willy Franzen on September 10, 2008

Shopping is supposed to be social. When you were a teenager, you probably liked to hit the mall with friends. Now, you probably lie in bed late at night surfing web sites looking for cool stuff to buy. It’s just not the same. You need social proof to back up your buying decisions. You want to hear what other people think. You want reviews, stories, and answers to questions that you may have about a product or service. Bazaarvoice is a software as a service provider that promotes social commerce by connecting customers to each other. They get their name from the word “bazaar, ” which “symbolizes the beginning of commerce – the initial marketplaces… lively centers of town, buzzing with neighbors, friends and merchants all sharing opinions and building a vibrant community.” That’s what Bazaarvoice is trying to recreate online for their clients.
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by Willy Franzen on September 4, 2008

Since you’re looking for an entry-level job and not in one, you may not be familiar with corporate policies on instant messaging. That’s ok, since they tend to be all over the place. At some companies you are required to be available by IM, since it’s the main form of communication used in the work place. At other companies instant messaging is strictly forbidden and even blocked by the IT department. We’re not trying to get you fired from the job that you don’t even have yet, but if you absolutely need 5 minutes of contact with the outside world while at work, Meebo offers an easy way to get around company filters so that you can log into your AIM, Yahoo, Gchat, MSN, icq, or Jabber accounts. In fact, IMing behind your boss’ back probably isn’t a good idea for any entry-level employee, so maybe you should just use Meebo at home for its simple web-based interface, ability to log in to multiple accounts, and ease of use. Then again, you could just get a job at Meebo so that you’ll be encouraged to have Meebo open in your web browser all day long at work.
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by Willy Franzen on September 3, 2008

We haven’t been able to find any hard statistics to back it up, but we’re pretty sure that a lot of people use their dog’s name for their passwords. Just look at Paris Hilton, whose cell phone supposedly got hacked because someone was able to find her dog’s name on her MySpace page. That story has since been discredited, but it can be a fable for the 21st century. Instead of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” we will tell our kids “The Girl Who Used Her Dog’s Name As Her Password.” So, if you’re trying to guess someone’s password (which you shouldn’t be), their dog’s name is a great first guess. If you don’t know their dog’s name, guess “Max.” Apparently 1% (which is a lot) of dogs in the U.S. share that name. Marc Pincus really blew it when he decided to name is social gaming network startup after his dog. Nobody would have ever guessed Zynga – he wasted a great password.
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by Willy Franzen on August 27, 2008

Ok, I’ll admit it. I bought 10 Facebook gifts for $5 back when Facebook gifts were new. I don’t know why I did it, but I did it, ok? Why would anyone in his or her right mind give a digital gift that has no practical value? I don’t know, but I’ve done it, and you probably have too. The only redeeming quality that I can see in these gifts is that they don’t take up space, as in they don’t add to the mountain of crap that you’ve accumulated in your short life. If I think that digital gifts are stupid, when why am I writing about Viximo and their entry-level jobs today? Because digital gifts aren’t stupid at all. They’re becoming a big business, and Viximo is banking on being a major player in the digital gifting economy. Birthday cards are pretty useless, but Hallmark has had a pretty good run. It’s time for the next step in showing people that you care, and Viximo is ready.
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