Penagain Creator/Founder — Cal Poly

Colin Roche came up with the idea for a revolutionary new writing instrument while in Saturday detention during HS. Years later, while discussing the idea with a college buddy, they decided to launch the company: PenAgain. I saw him on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch earlier this week. Pretty good story.

From the PenAgain website:

Colin then teamed up with a former business partner from college, a star engineer for a high tech company in the Bay Area. The two began sketching solutions, and then they formed the Pacific Writing Instruments, Inc.

Facebook Thoughts — Harvard University

There seems to be a lot of chatter about facebook right now. Facebook was founded by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. Last week while watching Charlie Rose interview Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Wales went on and on about facebook and the sharpness of its founder. Then there is the recent NY Times article about Facebook going after MySpace.com

While surfing wordpress tags I found this entry on facebook’s business model.

Is Facebook that hot?

Alabama — Statewide Business Plan Competition

An article from the Huntsville Times in ‘Bama highlights the performance of UA Huntsville participants in the inaugural Alabama Launchpad Initiative. It is sponsored by the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama and the six participating universities. Here is the competition website.

The participating schools were;

• Alabama A&M University
• Alabama State University
• Auburn University
• University of Alabama
• University of Alabama at Birmingham
• University of Alabama at Huntsville

8 Entrepreneurial Types

Skip Shuda (I don’t know who he is) has two posts on the 8 entrepreneurial types that he has discovered.

Here is the long post, here is the short post.

Here is the website for his business — Team and a Dream.

College Students Eat, Right?

From Tulane graduate Scott Himmel, Campusmenus.com. Pretty straightforward and useful in my opinion.

So Many Options for Studying Entrepreneurship

An article from last summer at Inc. that outlines how extraordinary the growth in the study of entrepreneurship has become. It is based on a study done by The Johnson Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Indiana University.

From the piece,

As entrepreneurship continues to grow in popularity with college students, the nation’s entrepreneurial centers are responding with more classes, teachers, and programs focused on the business of entrepreneurship, according to a new study by the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Indiana University.

The study found 533% growth in the number of schools offering courses and programs in entrepreneurship since the 1980s. “These findings will be extremely useful to budding entrepreneurial centers as well as colleges and universities looking to start their own programs,” said Donald F. Kuratko, executive director of the Johnson Center, who headed the project.

Police Test Prep Startup – U of Western Ontario

Stephen Grocer of the WSJ has a profile of PolicePrep.com over at StartupJournal.com. The trio who started the firm met while getting their MBA’s and made great use of the campus and their time in the program to plan their venture. From the piece,

“I started kicking around ideas with anyone,” Mr. Jessop says. “And one night I was out with Adam and mentioned a training program for police officers. I remember how difficult it was for me to find information about the test when I became a police officer.”

The idea turned out to be a perfect fit for the threesome. During college, Mr. Cooper had worked for a test preparation company, while Mr. Jessop brought his experience of going through the process and Mr. Rathod had key technical expertise.

The threesome researched the business over the next year. They met with colleges that ran police programs, set up focus groups with students and searched the Web to gather information they would need to design the online test-prep course. Part of their research online was tracking down questions. Many police departments will post a couple of sample questions to give recruits a general idea of what to expect. They used these samples as a template for writing their own practice tests.

“We would work on it during class,” Mr. Cooper says. “If you look at the tests, many of the names used in questions come from people in our classes.”

The profile is well worth reading. Here is Western Ontario’s MBA program.

Looks Can Be Deceiving – Bill Gates

Would you have invested or worked with this guy and his team?

BPlan Comp for Space Entrepreneurs – Colorado School of Mines

This May 19th-21st the 2007 Lunar Ventures Student Business Plan Competition was held at the Colorado School of Mines (in Golden, CO — home of Coors I believe). The goal of the competition is to encourage “students in business, engineering, and space to collaborate in creating business ventures related to space.” Here were the eligibility requirement. Not only can winners get some cash, but they will go to meet with folks from NASA to pitch their ideas. Here is the list of finalists and their ventures.

Campus Entrepreneur wins BPlan Contest w/cool Email – RPI

Send emails from simple, printer like machines? From the Albany Biz Journal, “Celery LLC, was named the winner of the $100,000 business plan competition at the Summit in Tech Valley on Monday. The Troy, N.Y., company has created a system that allows people to send and receive e-mails using a regular printer rather than a computer.”

Apparently H-P is looking to crush CEO Andrew Gibson and his team as they make email available to those who don’t want to use computers — such as senior citizens — a growing market. The company comes out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Incubator Program and has garnered national attention.