Daily Jolt

Some time after spreading to a few more schools, specifically in the Five Colleges area of Massachusetts, the Daily Jolt became a business, and by 2000 was at 20 schools. Amit and Mike ran it for awhile, but hired on several new people as venture capital started flowing, including former dot-com hotshot Andrew Collins. At its peak, the Daily Jolt employed over a dozen full time employees, as well as over 200 college students as part-time employees to run the school-specific websites.

After the dot-com bubble burst, things were tough for the Daily Jolt and forced some scaling back, but it has since stabilized its business and slowly begun to expand again, buoyed by the raging growth of Internet advertising sales.

The company currently maintains a small office in the Cambridge, Massachusetts with a handful of full-time employees. The number of schools with Daily Jolt websites ebbs and flows as some sites fade away and new ones launch, but it generally hovers around 100. Two new programs were launched as parts of The Daily Jolt recently: Yarn and JoltCamps. Yarn is a collaborative story-telling system where users can collaboratively develop choose-your-own-adventure type stories. JoltCamps, was launched to provide a way for summer camps in need of staffing/recruitment to access the Daily Jolt's large college student viewership.

The Daily Jolt recently launched a new sister site, "Jolinko," that seeks to "feed all your online addictions simultaneously." The site features blogging, photo albums, events, friends, groups, discussions, stalking, etc.

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