Daily Jolt

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The Daily Jolt is a network of student-run college websites focused on local campuses, and is notable for being the first network of its kind.

Each website provides useful things for college students like menus, a message board, event listings, news, weather, as well as on-campus, local and national job listings. Amit Gupta, Noah T. Winer, and Seth Fitzsimmons began the first Daily Jolt website at Amherst College, with a second started at Brown University by Mike Goelzer.

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, bringing on several new people as venture capital started flowing. By the end of 2000, 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 an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts with 6-7 full-time employees and some part-time help. 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.

In addition to its network of campus portals, The Daily Jolt has launched several offshoot projects, including Yarn, JoltCamps and Area Guides. 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. Area Guides are localized paper guides published in several of the Daily Jolt's markets, and given away free to college students.

In 2005, the Daily Jolt launched Jolinko, a college focused social networking website. While the site was shut down in late 2006, it provided the functional structure for Classface, a similar offering for high school students launched with partners Bolt.com, RateMyProfessors and RateMyTeachers.