Steve Jobs’ official biography by Walter Isaacson went on sale this morning in real life bookstores and eBook stores around the globe. Issacson’s book has some fascinating insights into the mercurial CEO, and media outlets have been rolling out bits and pieces of the biography in advance of today’s big release. While you may have heard of Jobs’ general animosity towards Google and his slightly radical temperment, here’s some our favorite facts about Steve:

On Design

Jobs was known for his dedication to design and perfection, and that temperament was passed down to him by his father. “Paul jobs was a Salt of the earth guy who was a great mechanic,” said Isaacson in an interview with 60 minutes. “And he taught his son steve how to make great things. Once they were making a fence and he said, ‘You gotta make the back of the fence that no one will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know. That will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.’”

The Original Phone Hacker

One of Steve’s first hacks was with his later business partner Steve Wozniak. They re-created something called the “blue box” which was a tool that reproduced phone company tones, allowing users to make illegal long-distance calls. It was this hack that prompted the Steves to start Apple. Jobs said to Issacson, “With my marketing skills and Wozniak’s great design, we could sell anything.”

In Pursuit of Nirvana

Steve Jobs, like many free thinkers in his day, traveled to India in search of enlightenment. According to Issacson, Buddhism was a strong influence on his design sense. The idea that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” is at the core of Apple’s philosophy.

A Humble Billionaire 

Jobs was never the materialistic type. His house in Palo Alto was on a regular street, with no live-in help and no fancy driveway. He kept a humble demeanor in spite of his obvious wealth because he had seen how money had changed people in his life, specifically his colleagues at Apple. “I saw a lot of other people at Apple especially after we went public and how it changed them. And a lot of people thought they had to start being rich. So a few people went out and bought Rolls Royces..their wives went out and got plastic surgery…and I saw these really nice, simple people turn into these bizzarro people. And I made a promise to myself: I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.”

According to Issacson, Apple board member Art Levinson was the man who convinced Jobs to take on third party apps. Initially, Jobs did not think his team had the bandwith to “police” third-party developers. Little did he know that the Apps bazaar would create a whole new industry of products and innovation. Good thing the typically cantankerous CEO was able to be swayed, otherwise you wouldn’t have Hashable!

A Television Pioneer

One product Apple had not tackled in Jobs’ lifetime was the television. “He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson wrote. “‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”

A Mysterious Long-Lost Son

Jobs met his biological father, unbeknownst to the two of them. He and his sister, Mona Simpson, tracked down their mutual biological father Abdulfattah John Jandali. While Steve did not want to meet him, Mona took the plunge and met Jandali at the restaurant he was managing at the time. Upon meeting, he said to her “I wish you could have seen me when I was running a bigger restaurant…Everybody used to come there. Even Steve Jobs used to eat there…He was a great tipper.” Jobs remembers meeting his father at the restaurant in Palo Alto years before. “We shook hands,” he said.

On Mortality

Death was a frequent conversation between Isaacson and Jobs. In one interview Job said, “I saw my life as an arc, and it would end. And compared to that, nothing mattered. You know, I mean. You’re born alone you’re going to die alone. What exactly is it that you have to lose Steve…nothing!”

One day, Steve and Walter were sitting in Jobs’ backyard, and they began discussing God. “Sometimes I believe in god, sometimes I don’t…but ever since I’ve had cancer I’ve been thinking about it more. Maybe because I want to believe in an afterlife that after you die, it doesn’t always disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated it lives on…but sometimes I think it’s like an on and off switch. Click and you’re gone…that’s why I don’t like putting on and off switches on Apple devices.”

The iconic CEO is now not only memorialized in our devices, but now in a 500+ page book. We suggest you leave your office now and grab a copy–or if you’re an Apple loyalist, get it on iBooks and read it on your iPad.

Photo via Obama Pacman

The news yesterday that Apple founder and global tech visionary Steve Jobs had died reverberated through my Twitter stream. It was clear that people were deeply shaken, and deeply saddened. Time magazine stopped their presses to devote the week’s entire issue to Jobs. At a tech event I attended last night, I overheard a forty-something guy in a suit say that he had never reacted like this to the death of a business leader, that he wasn’t expecting to feel so sad.

I wasn’t expecting to feel so sad either. I’m not a lifelong Apple fangirl, or even a lifelong tech geek. I vividly remember moments of Mac-generated wonder, but came late to the Apple-love party. I was even a PC girl until two years ago, and have not even owned my iPhone or iPad for a year. But when you work in the tech industry, as I have for the past two years, you come by love and respect for Apple by osmosis. Not just because they are beautiful and easy to use, but because you realize quickly that they have just changed everything. “There’s an app for that,” did not exist 3 years ago; 5 years ago, the iPhone – the place to find those apps – didn’t exist, either. Steve Jobs died just a few weeks shy of a decade after the launch of the iPod: October 23, 2001.

“Great products don’t just showcase creativity; they unlock it in others,” wrote Hashable Director of Products Dave Sebag when it was announced that Jobs was going on medical leave. “I think this explains all the Steve Jobs love today.” This is the other reason you can’t move within the tech industry impervious to the impact of Jobs and Apple. Instagram. Square. Foursquare. Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Words With Friends. Evernote. And, Hashable. Apple created beautiful, functional products – and a fundamental platform upon which an entire industry — and the progress it has wrought — has been built.

On a more prosaic level, working in this industry means struggling over basic questions of user experience – there’s inventing the raw product, and then there’s making it easy to use. This is hard. Design, functionality, intuitive understanding of human nature, thinking ahead to the mechanics of repetitive hand movement – again, this is hard. Apple always did and does it beautifully. Things of elegant simplicity usually reflect the most brilliance in the process.

So yes – it is hard to be in the tech industry and not take in the Jobs-love by osmosis. It comes through respect for the details, awe of the scope and getting to use a beautiful product that brings you joy (even if my iPhone 4 were just a camera, that would be enough for me). But for me, my respect for Jobs became something else when I watched his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, which flew around the Internet when his leave from Apple was first announced. I’m sure you’ve seen this but if you haven’t, drop everything and watch it now – or read the transcript, which I have included below. His personal story is amazing, and reminds us that everything you do in life can and will be pulled into what you do later, that the random can become the pivotal, that second and third acts are possible, and that it is all worth it when you truly love what you do.

He also talks about facing death after getting his first cancer diagnosis:

When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I have often said that I believe people create products in their image — they make what they want, the way they’d want it, and the way they think others would want it. Looking back at what Steve Jobs gave to the world across a truly incredible career, it is clear that the path to the Mac, and the iPod, and the iPhone, and the iPad and every sleek white minimalist beautiful gadget filled with game-changing innovation came straight through his heart. In his memo to Apple employees announcing his leave last January, Jobs wrote: “I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can.” He’s still there; he’s in it, all of it.

Here is Jobs’ speech at Stanford in 2005; the transcript is below.

(Video via Stanford University.)

Thank you. I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop­in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five­cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand­calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans­serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever — because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer­ animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.

No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.

And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

(Transcript via Scribd; modified from a post originally published at Mediaite. Image via apple.com.)

Attention Android users: We have another update for you! Version 2.1 is here to give you a better and more seamless Hashable experience. Our developers Joe and Aaron have added some great new features to create a quicker and more fluid tool for storing and managing your contacts. Head over to the Android market for an update and here’s what you’ll get:

Simplified Hashing: We’ve streamlined the process of saving connections. There’s a lot less to think about while Hashing. Let us know how you like it!

New filters by location: Want to get a list of all the people you met at your last event? With our newest filter you can search and browse your connections by location – including at specific venues, like that meeting you had last week at Starbucks on 14th St.

Set notes and reminders offline: No wifi? No problem! You can now set connections, notes and reminders offline, making it even easier to keep track of your connections no matter where you are. Hash on the A train and your data will sync when you get your 3 (or 4) G back.

Sticky location: Are you at a conference? Going to be in the same place for a while? We’ll now detect this and bring up your previous location when you are still in the vicinity. It’s great for Hashing multiple people in a row at an event.

Hash faster! Hashable now provides email address autocomplete suggestions for common email addresses and merges email addresses and twitter handles for new contacts, so you can spend less time typing. Huge.

General upgrade: We’ve fixed a few bugs – also, the app is now faster and takes up less space on your phone. It’s the little things.

Here’s what it will look like:

Get the new update here and feel free to ping us at @hashablesupport or support@hashable.com with questions and feedback.(iPhone users, your version is here.) Enjoy the new app – hope you find it useful!

Happy September! Since our release of Hashable Version 2.0, we’ve been working hard to make Hashable quicker, better and more useful. With today’s release, we have. So update your iPhone, because we’ve added the following features:

• Filter by location – Trying to remember that dude’s name from that conference in Dallas? You can now search and browse people you’ve connected with by location. Pick a city, and lo, a menu will drop down with all the places you’ve been.
• Set notes and reminders offline – Stuck in a subway and want to set a reminder or make a note about someone? You can now do this offline – Hashable will sync the data when you regain connectivity. Underground productivity FTW.
• Search notes – You can now search the contents of notes you made on people directly in the app. You can also scan them all in one view via the ‘Filter’ button.
• Hash faster! – Hashable now provides email address autocomplete suggestions for new contacts so you can spend less time typing on a mobile keyboard. Huge.
• Autocomplete profiles – If you hash someone using an email address and that person has a Twitter handle, Hashable will merge the person’s Twitter avatar, name, and bio automatically.
• General upgrade – Performance improvements and bug fixes, so your product can work better

Here’s a quick look at what the updated screen will look like:

Yes, I should probably clear some of those notifications, and yes, I should probably charge my phone. And yes, you should go update your iPhone! Go ahead and download it here . As always, feel free to ping us @hashable, support@hashable.com or comment on this post with feedback or questions. We hope you find this useful!

As the summer begins to wind down, we unfortunately need to say goodbye to our two Hash interns, Kishin Manglani and John Exley (feel free to ask them questions!). We are currently seeking candidates for our Fall 2011 Marketing and Community internship. You can find more details below:

Hashable’s Marketing & Community team is seeking highly versatile and passionate candidates for a three month paid internship. This fantastic opportunity is for students or recent grads looking for experience or those trying to break into the NYC startup scene. During this period you will work full-time in our office in midtown Manhattan (no remote workers – sorry!). The ideal timing is September through November.

Responsibilities:

• Implement marketing strategy by producing marketing collateral
• Produce both internal and external deliverables from press to analytics
• Find companies to build partnerships and gain sponsorships
• Working closely with Hashable’s Community Manager to build and foster our 
community of users
• Consistently and effectively use social media to convey Hashable’s goals, vision 
and culture

Requirements:

• Familiarity with the standard tech tools – Dropbox, Excel, Powerpoint
• Ability to learn quickly
• Ability to multi-task and prioritize
• Passion for our product – we expect you to have downloaded and used our app
• Savvy and experience with social media
• Analytical ability to suggest methods and avenues for improvement to processes
• Personable and outgoing personality

Apply:

• Local candidates interested in startups and technology are preferred. Those from all backgrounds are encouraged to apply, as we appreciate diverse skill sets.
• Submit your resume and a brief cover letter to jobs at hashable.com. Please include “#internship” in the subject line
• Include relevant links such as personal website, blog, Twitter profile, and Hashable profile

(Step 1): Apply for an internship. (Step 2): Submit your resume. (Step 3): Wait for an interview. (Step 4): Complete the interview. (Step 5): Send a follow-up message, thanking the interviewer for the opportunity. (Step 5.5): Wait to hear if you got the internship.

That’s it, right? …Wrong. If that was ever the case, it certainly isn’t anymore.

Chances are, if you’re gunning for ‘the perfect internship’ with a company you love – the ball will be in your court to prove that you are right for the company. It’s going to take a lot more than the standard application process to make it happen.

Here are 7 ways you can put yourself in the right place to secure the perfect internship:

1. FIND THE RIGHT COMPANY

Start by making some ‘top 3′ lists. What are the top 3 cities where you’d like to intern? What are the 3 companies in each city that you’d most like to intern for? Which 3 industries interest you the most?

Narrow down your search, make an overall top 3 list of companies you’d love to intern for, and start pursuing your absolute favorite. Ready to hustle? Let the chase for your perfect internship begin.

2. REFINE YOUR WEB PRESENCE

Heads up: your interview will occur around the clock and in public (based on your activity around the web) until you are are either given an offer or told “sorry, maybe next year…” So, you better refine your web presence. Make sure it’s crisp and up-to-date. Reflect on your past experiences and create a logical (and emotionally engaging) narrative for how your experiences have lead you to believe this company would be your perfect internship.

#HashTip: Start a blog and write about the industry and/or interview people who work in it!

3. EXPRESS YOUR INTEREST EXPLICITLY

Start by creating a compelling value proposition for the company that marries the skills you offer as an intern with the company’s short term needs. You need to sell yourself convincingly. Next, find and research the person who you think will have the most say in hiring you. Then, establish your first deliberate point of contact with the company (don’t forget to be explicit about expressing your desire to intern for them!).

#HashTip: Communicate your long term interest in potentially working for the company after graduation if possible. Nobody wants to hire a skittish, quickly-on-to-the-next-one, ‘fairweather fan‘ type of intern who loses interest before even reaching the halfway point of an internship!

4. FIND OUT EVERYTHING YOU CAN ABOUT THE COMPANY

How are you going to stand out? Take your research to a new level. Carefully read the company’s support forums (e.g. UserVoice, GetSatisfaction, ZenDesk, etc.), meticulously search through their mentions on Twitter, participate in Q&A threads about the company on Quora, and comb Google in search of blogs and articles talking about them. You should obsessively study every piece of product feedback you can find, from feature requests to bug reports. Your extensive research will demonstrate to the company that you are assertive, motivated, and detailed in your work.

#HashTip: Practice explaining the product to your parents and grandparents! You need to become a knowledgable user of the product and a pseudo ambassador for the brand.

5. RELATIONSHIPS. NETWORK. RELATIONSHIPS. NETWORK. RELATIONSHIPS.

Build, maintain. Build, maintain. Build, maintain. It cannot be emphasized enough how important it is to build and maintain strong relationships with users of the product, industry professionals, and in general ‘people who will be able to speak on your behalf’. Try to engage people orders of magnitude ahead of you in their careers. For example, if you are pursuing a business development intern position, try to find some biz dev professionals who can unofficially mentor you.

#HashTip: The harder you work to help others, the more likely you will one day have respectable people who will be happy to endorse your work!

6. BEING PERSISTENT PAYS OFF

There is a thin line between being persistent in a good way and annoyingly stalking a company. However, finding a creative way to stay on the company’s radar or directly reach back out to them to follow-up is not just acceptable, in most cases it is absolutely imperative. This is where publicly visible evangelism comes into play. To really stay on their radar, ask your mentor to send a personal recommendation of you to the company.

#HashTip: Many companies probably say some version of “You’re great! We’ll follow up with you in…“ after interviewing promising candidates – but what most of them actually mean to say is “if you really want (and deserve) the internship, you will earn it by finding a creative way to get back on our radar and follow up with us before it’s too late”.

7. BEING PASSIONATE WILL SEAL THE DEAL

At this point, you’ve basically done everything you can to provide evidence that you would be a valuable intern for the company. What’s left is most likely a test to see if your character is a good fit for the team’s culture, as well as some sort of ‘final observation’ to see if you are actually fully committed to the opportunity. If you can demonstrate your passion for their space, their product, their team, and overall that you are just a passionate individual…it might just be the icing on the cake for you to achieve your perfect internship.

#HashTip: Read through your favorite 3-5 articles that have been written about the company and then try to write the ultimate blog post (complete with a thorough, detailed explanation of their product) for your own blog. Link to the other stories where appropriate and mix in a consistent tone of excitement!

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*NOTE: A lot of these principles played into my own experience getting my internship at Hashable. Click here to read the story (it’s the craziest, most detailed story I’ve ever written).

Thanks for reading! If you have any tips or pointers to add, please do. Also, we want to hear your stories of the craziest things you (or your friends) have done in pursuit of the internship you really wanted! Drop a comment below.

Welcome to Hashable 2.0! We’re very excited to bring you the brand new version of our Hashable app on iPhone and Android. Download it now! Go ahead, we’ll wait.

The new version builds on the core utility of Hashable: making networking easier, more efficient and more useful for everyone.  When we came out with Hashable 1.0, we wanted to create a service that would allow people to track their true connections and ongoing relationships in the real-time world.  We wanted our users to easily save and remember everyone they met,  keep track of meetings and interactions, and send virtual business cards to kick off relationships, quickly and paper-free.

Hashable 2.0 builds on that. After letting the service take hold amongst our community (you!) we let the feedback roll in – and listened to what our users wanted.  You clearly wanted to connect – but what we learned was that you wanted to anchor that connection with notes, reminders and a sense of how those connections build into your larger network. You also wanted a personal, private tool  - great for public connecting, when it’s convenient.

So, with that in mind, here are some of the new features we added to our mobile app:

See a list of your reminders

• Reminders – Add follow-up reminders for each contact.  Schedule them in advance and integrate it with your smartphone calendar.  Use our reminders list to manage your day based on the connections you need to make.

• Messages – send quick follow-up messages (thank you, meeting notes, etc) while you save the details of your meeting.

• Default Privacy Settings – Keep your network private.  Every person you hash will default to a private connection.  Anything you opt to share will only be made public to your Inner Circle, and no tweet will be sent without your opt-in.

View integrated contact details

• Integrated Contact Information - Email, tweet, call, text or hash anyone directly from the Hashable address book.

• Private Notes – Add a private note about your contacts, to remember and keep track of key details.

View relationship history

• Relationship histories – A quick tap on any contact will show a history of your interactions with the person, dated and with all tags and co-connections. (Incredibly useful for those “Who the heck is this person?” moments)

• Tap-free Networking – For those of you with Android phones that can support Near-Field Communication (NFC), you can now exchange contact information with people by just putting your phones together back-to-back.

• Send business cards at any time – You no longer have to tag a connection as a “Just Met” to send a business card.  Anytime you hash someone – with any type of connection – you can send them a business card.

Hashable is still a very social app – after all, networking is all about personal connections – and we have still retained all the non-app functionality that many of our users rely on day-to-day. But the social layer has to be built on the utility layer, and that is what we have strengthened in Hashable 2.0.

We welcome you to download the latest version of the Android and iPhone app and check it out.  And as always, please keep the feedback coming. We want to know what you think!

-Team Hashable