Campus Entrepreneurship

Fascinating article by Jonathan Cheng about a Hong Kong based entrepreneur, Lam Sai-wing, in the gold business who created a gold toilet and scored a marketing coup for this business. Something outrageous like a gold toilet (and an entire golden palace) helped grow Lams business by differentiating it from others in the retail jewelry market.

Those odd prices (ie $3.6 at Wal-Mart (which they may be dumping) were created by Sam Walton to grab attention — as did the elephants and other things that Walton used to build the base of small town Wal-Marts that would eventually become the world’s largest retailer. Walton had to do something drastic as he entered the retail market full of new competitors. Wal-Mart, Target, and KMart were all founded in 1959 — and these are just the large, successes that prospered.

I believe that any business, regardless of industry or customer base, can use a golden toilet.

From the article,

He has spent the past decade constructing a palace of gold, decked out in six tons of the precious metal. In recent years, the palace has become an attraction mainland Chinese tour groups couldn’t miss, and a boon for Mr. Lam’s retail jewelry business…

As far as Mr. Lam is concerned, the golden toilet is more than a Guinness World Record-certified, 24-karat, fully functional flushable throne.

Mr. Lam, a former goldsmith, came up with the toilet gimmick in 2001 as he was pushing his jewelry-manufacturing business into a fierce retail market…

As a boy growing up in Cultural Revolution-era China, Mr. Lam, now 53 years old, was obsessed with gold. He says he found himself transfixed with one sentence in Vladimir Lenin’s writing: “When we are victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.”

Lenin’s words alluded to a socialist utopia with no need for money, but Mr. Lam read them as an indictment of the poverty-stricken existence he found himself in. He rarely had meat to eat, and after he turned 7, Mr. Lam struggled to help his single mother and six siblings sell bananas and peanuts.

Its now been just over 2 weeks since we launched our new website — introductory post here. As a consumer website, getting the word out is crucial to the success of FamilyFantasySports.com as we kick off our first free leagues during NFL 2008.

We are continually pushing our name, concept, and ‘value proposition.’ We are email, calling, writing, commenting, faxing, and generally hustling. We have not spent any money on advertising, although we did spend $140 to issue our press release over PRWeb.

The June 24th Guerilla Marketing Weekly Intelligence email from Jay Conrad Levinson really spoke to our current situation. The title of the edition is Patience in Marketing.

It lays out a typical advertising situation that a new business might find itself in — advertising in a local newspaper. The article then goes on to quote an article written in 1895 in London about advertising — it is a list of 20 statements. Here are numbers 1, 6, 11, and 17. (more…)

Just received an email from the NDE (National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship) and they have a great 2008 reading list on entrepreneurship. They did include Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City; a book whose entire life-cycle I witnessed up close while I worked with Richard. It was an amazing process. Here are some (4) reviews from NDE’s list — which is well worth checking out:

Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

Timothy Brook (Bloomsbury Press, 2007)

You may be wondering how a book about Vermeer makes it on a listing of books about innovation and entrepreneurship. In this fascinating book, Brook uses the subjects and objects of Vermeer’s paintings to provide history of the development of global capitalism. Vermeer’s rise paralleled the Netherlands’ rise as a major economic force, and Brook tells these stories by tracing the emergence of trade in new products like tobacco, porcelain, and furs.

Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital

Spencer E. Ante (Harvard Business School Press, 200

It often seems like the venture capital industry has been around forever, but, in reality, someone had to invent it. That someone was French business professor and investor Georges Doriot, and his achievement occurred not too long ago. Beginning in 1946, Doriot and his firm, American Research and Development Corporation, virtually created the modern model of the venture capital firm. This well-written biography examines Doriot’s life and his impact on the world of business finance. (more…)

Wendy Bounds at Independent Street offers 15 Entrepreneur Blogs Worth Reading. We didn’t make the list, but that is not too much of a surprise. The list offers many usual suspects — Guy, Mark Cuban, Duct Tape Marketing, etc and is in line with our current media/social cycles (the first blog offered is green — the Eco-Capitalist blog).

The list is worth reading and is organized well. At the end she asks for more blogs worth reading. Feel free to share Campus Entrepreneurship with her at IndependentStreet@wsj.com. Thanks.

The $500,000 Global Security Challenge is back for another year after a successful events the last two years. While this is a clearly a niche competition, the market it explores is huge and very important to people with a lot of money (the defense/security establishment).

From the competition’s website:

We seek to uncover the creative capabilities of innovators in universities and infant companies that apply to public security needs. This includes software or hardware solutions that help (a) protect people, critical infrastructure, facilities and data/electronic systems against terrorist or other criminal attacks and natural disasters or (b) help governments, businesses and communities defend against, cope with or recover from such incidents.

Examples of our areas of interest are (but are not limited to) biometrics, detection sensors, network security, data storage, video surveillance, RFID, data-mining SW, biotechnologies, and search software.

My thought as I ponder this competition is how they would respond to ’soft-power’ startups in the media and cultural space. Think Radio Free Europe or other types of security tools that have been employed over the years to try to strengthen security for the US and its allies?

Entry is open until June 15. Semifinals will be held in September in DC, Brussels, and Singapore.

The deadline to apply for the UC Davis Green Tech Entrepreneurship Academy has been extended to May 16th. The Academy is for science and technology doctoral students, post-docs, and research faculty. The event will take place over a week in July in Lake Tahoe, NV.

The keynote speaker for the event is going to Armory Lovins. From their press release:

Lovins, who will speak on the evening of July 9, is a world-renowned energy consultant and physicist, as well as an author, speaker, and MacArthur Fellow. In 1979, he co-founded Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, nonpartisan “think-and-do tank” that focuses its research on advanced resource productivity and innovative business strategies that lead to “abundance by design.” Lovins is also a member of the Board of Advisors for UC Davis’ Energy Efficiency Center.

Two thoughts come to mind when I read this. Firstly, this is a great example of an institution (UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship) being focused on leveraging entrepreneurship, both across its own campus and onto other campuses. The Academy is only in its second year (campus entrepreneurship is new! remember?), but its program communicates quality and dedication.

Secondly, and more importantly, while the campus institution is prepping the battlefield, it will be up to each individual to take advantage of the opportunity. While I don’t know that much about Lovins (I bought his book Natural Capitalism, but never read it), for many people he is a ‘rock star’ in his field and could teach one a great deal and open many doors. (more…)

The Maxim like photo is what caught my eye. I admit it. I wanted to know who that ‘hottie’ entrepreneur on the cover was. (She was described as such in the article). I was also interested to know if the article, Ning’s Infinite Ambition, had something to offer in understanding social networking and social networking websites.

Anyone who is following campus entrepreneurs has likely noticed the amount of new ventures that have social networks at the core of their business — Facebook, Collegetonite.com, Skoogo.com, etc.

I read through the piece by Adam L. Penenberg and came away feeling that the picture had been a red herring (remember that internet mag) and the article, which promised to explain a ‘new concept’ called ‘viral expansion loop,’ didn’t tell me much and make me believe Ning.com was anything special. (Ning is to social networks what Tripod was to personal websites)  From the article:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what’s called a “viral expansion loop,” a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it — you won’t find much). It’s a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It’s not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you’d have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million. (more…)

Springwise is featuring a story on a Dutch company that uses students as ‘cell phone’ instructors for older users. They teach txt, bluetooth, voice mail management etc.. The company, Bellendoejezo, has been hired by banks, law firms, and an energy company.

Think of how much apparently basic phone/blackberry/iphone etc. knowledge that students have. Think about how much money businesses spend on smartphones for older users, only to get a small % of the productivity gains available. Could even extend this business to using wireless/hotspots. Basically mobile tech instructors.

Looks like a pretty simple business model that could provide great returns for campus entrepreneurs.

DC-based accelerator Launchbox Digital is hosting another online chat this week. From their email,

LaunchBox Digital will be hosting another online chat tomorrow, Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 7 pm EDT.  Please join moderator Tom Des Jardins, founder and ex-CTO of Lightningcast, as he leads a discussion on start-up company valuations and investor due diligence.

To join the chat at 7 pm EDT tomorrow please visit www.launchboxdigital.com and follow the link, or click here.

At the login page, please enter the username that you would like to use as an identifier for the chat.

Found this via Tim Berry; Small Business Trends blogger Anita Campbell has compiled a list of 100 Marketing Secrets. I appears she called for submissions and this is the output. Its available in a 33 page pdf. Yes, its free. From her site,

A big THANK YOU, dear readers, for the outstanding marketing tips you contributed to the Best Kept Marketing Secrets roundup.

As promised, we took 100 submissions and turned them into a downloadable PDF document.

It’s 33 pages of tips for marketing, including relationship marketing, marketing strategy, selling, messaging, online marketing and social media. 

It’s all been packaged up tidily into a document for you to save, give to clients, print, post on your website — use it however you wish.  It is free of charge, of course.

Looking forward to seeing whats in there, but I am excited by the use of Campbell’s site to aggregate knowledge, edit/clean it a bit, and then distribute it back out. (not to mention picking up sponsorship by HP)