Campus Entrepreneurship

Small Business Blogger Wendy Bounds of the WSJ has a nice blog post (and book promotion) on a small pub in what I think is upstate NY. Her new blog is meant to uncover the independence and importance of small biz…

This spirit of independence, and the potential money to be made from it, is what this new blog will chronicle. The Internet has transformed the entrepreneurial world, making it possible to execute an idea with unprecedented speed. Realizing that small is the new big, today’s marketers anxiously plug software, banks, cellphone services and Web-hosting programs to small business owners; we’ll help parse through it all. As the news of big business comes, this column will track its impact further down the economic pipeline. And we’ll also point you to great tales of entrepreneurial triumph, and heartache.

From our friends over at Springwise… A firm out of the Australia is putting ads on napkins. Figure 3-5 minutes while folks are waiting and paying, 15-30 minutes while eating, and some may even take some naps with em when they go. This seems tailor made for the campus. The company is called NapkinAd.

Way back when I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, a kid in my fraternity started a business putting ads in the bathrooms of bars around campus. Lots of people have tried their hand at this game and I am always looking for places that one could place ads (bottled water, laundromats, etc). Here is a new one — ads on parking stripes — from autoblog.com. According to the article, recent ads for Desperate Housewives are hugely popular with the parkers.

2008 National Student Entrepreneur Competition has been announced in Canada. It appears to be open to all undergrads and grads at Canadian Universities. The competition has provincial and regional rounds and is put on by a non-profit, ACE (Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship). Winner gets 10,000 Canadian dollars.

The growth of entrepreneurship as a field of study is part of a larger trend of MBA programs trying to offer more specialized approaches to business education. Here is a Business Week piece on that idea. And here is some information on green MBA programs (via Tim Berry).

Mark Cuban has got to be the most famous Hoosier entrepreneur out there, but an article in the IndyStar profiles some current campus entrepreneurs from Indiana University. It also provides some great insights and statistics on the number of programs teaching entrepreneurship.

The entrepreneurs, Aaron Lifford and Jessica Keckhaver , started Prodigy Staffing Solutions (it appears they provide college students/others as temps in the catering field). They invested $500 and are going to do 150K this year! Wow, that rocks.

Big prizes available at this one, from an article in Providence Business News, “With a record $150,000-plus in prizes, the contest will rank among the richest such competitions in New England, organizers said. ‘Each year the competition attracts more applicants and sponsors, which shows that there is a strong interest in supporting emerging entrepreneurs in Rhode Island,’ said competition Co-Chair Garrett B. Hunter.”

Here is the website for The Rhode Island Business Plan Competition, which officially kicks off October 3rd. There is an entrepreneur track and a student track.

I love Guy Kawasaki. I don’t know a great deal about him, but I love entertaining, motivational, and inspiring speakers. I have never seen him live, but he is great on the clips I see.

His blog, How to Change the World, is worth reading and has a post on David Bornstein’s new book on social entrepreneurs called How To Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. (I assume it is a coincidence that Guy’s blog and David’s book have the same name.)

Let us know if you’ve read this book and what your thoughts are.

A New York Times article seems to be saying that MBA’s, in light of Wall Street/Hedge Funds, are not worth earning anymore. In fact, the article really speaks about the finance industry (an a handful of giant hedge funds) and new york in particular. Worth a read, but provides little real insights; other than this very interesting fact: “The number of students who earned M.B.A.’s in 2005 was about 142,600, nearly twice the level in 1991.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s (Harvard) Facebook is creating opportunities along the way for other entrepreneurs. The Wall Street Journal (sub required) is calling it a gold rush in an article today as programmers begin to build widgets etc for the site and its users. We have seen this concept before — where a hugely successful firm (Fedex) or product (ipod) creates opportunities for other firms. This piece, in a virtual sense, confirms the size of the campus market (both physical, virtual, and otherwise) Here are some snippets from the article.

Another online gold rush is on. Entrepreneurs are scrambling to create small software programs for Facebook Inc.’s social-networking site and grab footholds in its emerging economy.

Three months ago, the Palo Alto, Calif., company invited software developers to create applications for its site. The response was immediate: Facebook says more than 70,000 developers, from college kids to big-corporation engineers, have signed up for the tools needed to build the free applications.

Another;

Many of the developers of these applications are entrepreneurs looking to start new businesses while others are expanding existing ones. And the applications, which are inexpensive to create, have the potential to become a large source of revenue and customers for those companies that can successfully mine Facebook’s 30-million-strong community. To that end, companies are using a host of business models. Some, for instance, are selling advertising around the applications, while others promote their own products and services on Web pages shown to users of their applications.

“This is a watershed event that is going to affect business and technology for many years,” much the way Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system did, says Rodney Rumford, editor and publisher of FaceReviews.com, a Solana Beach, Calif., company that reviews Facebook applications online and provides consulting and application-development services. “It’s a tool for people to discover [businesses] in a way they couldn’t be discovered before.”

Promising Platform

The applications are garnering a big buzz among Web companies and venture capitalists alike. Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture firm Bay Partners has raised $300 million specifically for companies developing Facebook applications and is making $25,000 to $250,000 investments per application. “All Internet companies need a Facebook strategy or a presence on Facebook,” says Partner Salil Deshpande, because Facebook usership is growing so quickly.

Indeed, Facebook’s monthly visitor numbers doubled to 30.6 million in July from six months earlier, according to measurement firm comScore Networks Inc. That growth has been propelled by a mass movement onto the site since Facebook opened itself to nonuniversity email-address holders.

The Facebook platform is so promising in part because its members use it to connect with people they know — or want to know — in the nonvirtual world. Unlike News Corp.’s MySpace and most other social-networking sites, Facebook members aren’t anonymous. They use their real names and connect with each other to the degree they choose. Facebook also allows businesses to interact with Facebook users fairly freely, while restricting access to any personal data.

“They make it a safe place for communication and for doing business,” says Lee Lorenzen, chief executive of Altura Ventures LLC, a Monterey, Calif., firm that also is funding application creators and has purchased several applications.

“We’re certainly pleased with how much it’s taken off,” say Brandee Barker, a spokeswoman for Facebook. “We already have a thriving ecosystem of businesses built on the Facebook platform.”