I have about six lightbulbs out in my house that are in impossible to reach places. If one more goes out, I’m going to have to break out the ladder and risk my life for the sake of lighting. Since I don’t own the place, I’m probably not going to invest in a more expensive energy-efficent bulb that takes years to pay itself off. But if I did own a place, that would probably be the best decision, which is why TCP is worth taking a look at it–energy efficient lightning is a huge growth industry. The Aurora, OH based company (their world headquarters is in Cham, Switzerland) calls itself “the home of lighting innovation.” They “offer one of the largest selections of ENERGY STAR-approved products” and “distribute them throughout North America and abroad.”
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Google is an absolutely amazing company. They’re working on everything from information organization to e-mail to self-driving cars, but from a financial standpoint they’re kind of a one trick pony. 96% of their revenue comes from advertising, and the majority of that comes from search advertising. It’s not really a problem–it just shows what an amazingly dominant business model search advertising is. Unfortunately for the rest of the market, Google owns most of the world’s search advertising inventory. Yahoo! comes in at a distant second. And then there’s adMarketplace, a New York, NY based company that “delivers data-driven performance to the Internet’s leading marketers through the only search syndication platform that adjusts bids by both keyword and traffic source.”
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I remember when people used to be shocked that I would buy stuff online. They thought I was crazy to put my credit card number into a web form, and I though they were crazy for not thinking twice before giving their credit cards to random people who worked at stores and restaurants. While buying stuff over the Internet is now commonplace, you’d be shocked to know how painful and expensive it still is for businesses to collect payments online. It seems silly to spend a lot of time and money to make sure that your customers can pay you, but it’s kind of essential. Braintree is a Chicago, IL based company that is simplifying payments for online businesses. They solve many of the headaches, and they offer transparent pricing that makes it easy for merchants to estimate costs. The best indication that Braintree is offering a great solution for payment processing is their own growth–they ended up at #415 on this year’s Inc. 500 with 895% three-year growth and $9.9 million in revenue.
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On Friday I visited one my Dad’s college friends at his workshop. He makes sails for traditional boats, and he’s been doing it for a long time. He doesn’t get a lot of incoming calls from potential clients (it’s a pretty niche business), but when he does, he almost always makes the sale (no pun intended). It’s because he has developed a process that shows potential customers that he’s undoubtedly the best guy for the job. He does it all by hand (even to the point of writing a personal letter), but it’s essentially automated. He spends about 15 minutes on it every morning, and that’s it. While that approach won’t work in a lot of business, nearly every company can benefit from automating parts of their marketing. Pardot is a company that provides software to do exactly that. They’re based in Atlanta, GA, and they came in at #172 on the Inc. 500 with 2,001% three-year growth and $7.4 million in revenue.
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Guys. If you’re going to land an internship, you need pants. And shoes. And shirts. And maybe even a jacket and tie. Looking good is important, which is why you should outfit yourself in Bonobos like I do. Here’s $25 off your first order. My gift to you.
I have no idea where people went to ask embarrassing health questions before the Internet. I guess you could have gone to a doctor, but it’s really nice to pre-educate yourself before you ask a professional. That’s why there’s ridiculous demand for health-related information online. Everyday Health is a company that has been reacting to this demand since they started in 2002. They are a New York, NY based company that provides “consumers, healthcare professionals, and brands with content and advertising-based services across a broad portfolio of over 25 websites that span the health spectrum.” If you ask Google and embarrassing health question, there’s a really good chance that you’ll end up on one of their sites. In 2010 they were averaging 26.5 million monthly unique visitor, which is just a massive amount of traffic–especially in a niche as valuable as health related information.
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sales,
sem,
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technical support,
writing
We’re finally getting our first snow storm of the winter here in Chicago. I’m not traveling anywhere, I don’t have a commute, and I know well enough not to drive on Lakeshore Drive today (this is what happened last year), so I’m excited and watching the weather hoping for a lot of accumulation (even though there are no sledding hills nearby). I don’t have a favorite weather site, so I keep my eyes on a number of them including Accuweather. I guess it’s a bit of an understatement to call Accuweather a site–they’ve been around since 1962 and they call themselves “the World’s Weather Authority.” They’re based in State College, PA (with an office in New York, NY) where they’re stockpiling meteorologists there (the most in any location in the world). They need these weather guys and girls because they provide “products and services to more than 175,000 paying customers in media, business, government and institutions.”
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Pennsylvania,
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web development
I don’t know about you, but some days I feel sharper than others. Whether I’m trying to spike a volleyball or write a piece of code for this site, I have my good days and my bad days. There are a ton of factors that can affect how you perform on a given task from day to day, and many of them are hard to control. But the best way to overcome these fluctuations is to improve your overall skill through practice. This is pretty straightforward when you’re talking about specific tasks, but what if you are just aiming to improve your mental sharpness? As I’ve learned from reading Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything memory is a skill that can be trained just like any other skill. That’s why I was intrigued when I saw a commercial for Lumosity. They’re a San Francisco, CA based company that has used cutting edge science to develop “the most effective online tool for cognitive enhancement.” I’m skeptical of a lot of the claims in favor of brain teaser games, but Lumosity has actually built their products based on research from top neuroscientists at places like Stanford, UCSF, Harvard, and Columbia. It’s hard to argue with that.
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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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I recently discovered an awesome iPhone/iPad flight simulator/shooter game called MetalStorm: Wingman. It’s free, and it’s a lot of fun, but the publisher is constantly trying to eke revenue out of the game. There are ads, upsells to buy new planes and weapons, and suggestions of other apps to download. It’s that last one that caught my attention, and it led me to a company called W3i. They’re based in Sartell, MN, and they are in the business of “intelligently connecting people to apps.” They do this with both mobile and desktop apps, and they provide an opportunity for app developers to both expand the reach of their software and make money by promoting other apps.
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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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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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I’ve come to accept that I’ll probably never learn a foreign language (maybe I’ll try a new computer programming language one day). I think my crazy high school French teacher ruined me, but I must admit that technology is making the idea of learning another language more and more attractive. The problem with most language learning software is that it can be really expensive? Mango Languages is a Farmington Hills, MI based company that has solved this problem for a lot of consumers. They provide online language learning services mostly to libraries, schools, government agencies, and corporations. That means that they get the guys with deep pockets to foot the bill for the people who are actually learning the new languages. It’s a smart approach that works considering that Mango Languages made the Inc. 5000 with 629% three-year revenue growth to $3.8 million in revenue.
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It’s been a while since I did a survey of One Day, One Job readers. There’s really no excuse for that considering how useful survey data can be and how easy it is to run a survey online. (So watch out for a survey sometime in the next month or two.) When I see online surveys, they’re usually run on SurveyMonkey or Google Docs, but I’ve also seen a few surveys driven by SurveyGizmo. They’re based in Boulder, CO, and they offer “a web-based software company giving researchers, and small and enterprise companies powerful tools to create online surveys, questionnaires and forms – allowing capture and analysis of virtually any type of data essential for business.” It’s working for them. SurveyGizmo came in at #144 on the Inc. 5000 with 1,940% three-year growth to $3.3 million in revenue.
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Usually when I get a pitch from PR or Communications agencies, I ignore them. Why? Most of the pitches are terrible. They’re not relevant to me, and they show no respect for my time. Even worse, some of them are downright spammy. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised when I was going through my backlog of e-mail to see a really good pitch on a company that has internships for environmentally minded students. (Did I mention that more than 160 people applied for an internship with ODOJ? I’m still getting through all of them.) The company is called Greencitizen, and they’re based in San Francisco, CA. They’re business is all about dealing with the “E-Waste Crisis.” They “help consumers and businesses reduce their environmental footprint of their computer and electronics… by keeping electronics running efficiently through online and in-store repair services, along with environmentally responsible electronics recycling.” So they do a lot of the same things as a typical IT services company (computer repair, data security, tech support, etc), but they’ve made a name for themselves by making everything they do green while also putting a huge emphasis on recycling.
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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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video games,
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I’ve never liked ordering food over the phone (maybe that’s what growing up as a fat kid does to you). When I discovered that you could order food online, I was pretty psyched (even though I was no longer a fat kid). I even remember my first online food order–it was during my Freshman year at Cornell and CampusFood.com launched on our campus by offering a $10 credit for your first order. It still seems that most online ordering goes through third-party sites like GrubHub. However a company called ONOSYS is trying to change that. They’re based in Cleveland, OH, and they provide software platforms for restaurants to offer their own online ordering, mobile ordering, transaction-based marketing, and management services. This allows restaurants to own their relationships with customers instead of having to go through a third-party every time they receive an order.
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We’re hiring! Need I say more?
Yesterday I was flipping through tv channels (to avoid seeing commercials that tell me that I’m stupid), and I stopped because CNN was running a piece on millennial friendly employers. Now this may surprise you, but a little piece of me dies every time I hear the terms “millennial” and “Gen-Y.” I think that viewing your career in terms of your generation is counterproductive. Anyway, a big part of the CNN segment was about how cool it is to work at an Austin, TX based company called HotSchedules. Yes, they have policies like unlimited paid vacation, but I think what they do is way more interesting. HotSchedules provides “intuitive, web-based scheduling, labor management and forecasting solutions” for restaurants. In other words they take the headaches out of managing workforces that have a lot of shift variability.
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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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There aren’t many companies that have as many loyal fans as Netflix. I swear that everybody loves them. At least they did until yesterday when Netflix announced a change to their plans. They touted it as a good thing with their “lowest prices ever for unlimited DVDs,” but it really was a price increase for streaming subscribers. I guess yesterday was a good day for Redbox, which is based in Oakbrook Terrace, IL (with a major presence in Bellevue, WA). They operate more than 27,000 DVD and Blu-ray rental kiosks, or redboxes. Believe it or not, rentals aren’t dead, and Redbox has found a sweetspot between Blockbuster and Netflix. There’s definitely something I miss about the old school video rental shops–especially the pre-Blockbuster independent ones. But it’s mind blowing that Redbox is able to fit an entire video rental store in 12 square feet.
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Washington
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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Who would have thought that video advertising would be the new thing? It’s only been around for more than 50 years. But as consumption of video moves from watching what is broadcasted over air/cable/satellite to watching what you want when you want to over the Internet, advertising has to change with it. People will click away from a website in an instant if they’re annoyed by the ads, while tv viewers are much slower to change the channel (even if it’s one of those commercials where the volume is twice as high). Yet, there’s so much more potential online–you can actually get someone to take an action by clicking on the ad. Television doesn’t offer that. YuMe is a Redwood City, CA based company that was founded in 2004 to encourage the growth of online video content by making it easy to monetize. The founders recognized “that the nascent broadband video sector was going to need a strong ad model and technology platform to generate revenue,” so they built it.
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Today is One Day, One Job’s 3rd Anniversary! We’re celebrating by launching a Success Stories section. If you have a success story or just want to send along some feedback, e-mail me today at willy@onedayonejob.com.
It’s been fun running through the Inc. 500 in search of companies with internship opportunities, but the time has come to move on. I’m sure that I’ll eventually revisit a number of the companies that seemed cool but didn’t appear to have the right opportunities when I looked at them; however, we’re going to give this “series” a fitting finish by looking at #500 AtTask. They’re an Orem, UT based company that “develops project and portfolio management software that increases efficiency for businesses of all sizes.” They’ve seen 604% growth over the past three years, which puts them at $19 million in revenue for last year. Online collaboration is a huge and growing area, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see AtTask continue to put up exceptional growth rates.
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