2 Great College Startups

- At the tender age of 14, Jessica Mah sold her first company, which rented server space to small businesses, at a marginal profit. She then set up jessicamah.com and began to blog about business and technology from a young person's perspective. Last fall, Mah, now a Berkeley junior, came up with the idea for a new venture, which she began to chronicle on the site. "All of us were looking for internships, and I had no clue where to start," Mah says. "This is how business ideas begin: You want to do something, and you run into problems." Equal parts Craigslist and Mediabistro, the new site, InternshipIN, helps students identify high-quality internships—i.e., internships that do not involve "getting coffee and making copies," Mah says. Much of the initial traffic has come through a partnership with SimplyHired, a job search engine. Eventually, Mah hopes to begin charging employers a fee to post listings on the site.




- Last year, Caroline Rooney launched The Bearon, an upbeat T-shirt line sold primarily through her own website and independent sales reps on six other college campuses, including the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Syracuse University, and Northwestern. The 19-year-old is donating 20 percent of the profit from every shirt sold to three charities: UNICEF, the Alzheimer's Foundation, and New York City's Public Art Fund. For marketing, she maintains a page on Facebook, holds events with campus Greek organizations, and often speaks at assemblies and club meetings. She also maintains a blog on her website, thebearon.com, on which she promotes her favorite artists and photographers, and posts photographs of customers wearing her shirts in cities around the world. "It's getting to the point where I don't recognize some of the people who are sending in orders, calling in questions, or walking around campus wearing the shirts," Rooney says. "That's when you know the word of mouth has gone to the next level, and that's really exciting."

Digg!

Kevin Rose (born Robert Kevin Rose, February 21, 1977) is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk.


Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see.
Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg in the fall of 2004. He found programmer Owen Byrne through eLance and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea. In addition, Rose paid $99 per month for hosting and $1,200 for the Digg.com domain. In December of 2004, Kevin launched his creation to the world through a post on his blog.
Digg has been a force ever since. Acquisition offers have been made, Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek and according to Alexa, Digg is in the top 100 most trafficked sites on the internet. The success hasn’t come without its share of problems though. The site has had to face services aimed at gaming the way stories hit the front page, as well as a user revolt. Digg has however been able to get over these hurdles as it continues to be one of the social news leaders.
Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see.

Pret A Manger

Pret A Manger has come a long way in a short time. in just 16 years of trading it has changed the way we lunch forever. In the past, if inner city workers wanted to nip out and get a snack they could either go to a specialist, independently run sandwich shop or a supermarket where standards can vary from good to (more frequently) very bad. This is where Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham stepped in to fill the gap.

Three years after having graduated from the Polytechnic of Central London with the same degree (Urban Estate Management), Beecham and Metcalfe opened their first Pret a Manger store in Victoria in London with a name borrowed from a boarded up shop. However, after twelve years of running the business the two co-founders decided to take a more back seat approach and appointed Andrew Rolf as a partner, shareholder and chairman of the overall operation.

The angles or values Rolfe mentions are key to the brands’ continuing success and have been purposefully retained throughout Pret’s lifetime, something many small businesses could aspire to. Pret’s chairman believes the company to still be as strong as ever. “There are three core values that have always remained true to the brand and they all stem around passion. First and foremost, we are passionate about food and keeping it fresh and interesting. This is our core product and we work hard to produce the best we can. It would be easier to get tubs of guacamole instead of cutting fresh avocados in each kitchen in each shop but we stick to quality and taste."

When a brand gets bigger, expansion plans come into question and new partners need to be found to achieve successful growth. This is why last year the McDonalds Corporation bought a 33 per cent stake in the company that gave Pret access to their global infrastructure in property as well as improved construction and distribution and new ways of spreading the brand abroad.

Do you think there is a future for Pret in Asia? How big could they get?

Cloudera!

When Christophe Bisciglia worked at Google, the 28-year-old computer scientist quickly became the company's top evangelist for cloud computing, teaching academia and industry how to churn through mountains of data to discover new insights by shifting heavy digital workloads from islands of PCs and data centers to the globally interconnected Web. As a founder of startup Cloudera, he's aiming to capitalize on those lessons.

Bisciglia's eight-month-old Cloudera teaches companies how to "compete at Google scale." Cloudera sells technical support for open-source software called Hadoop, which analyzes huge amounts of data much faster than traditional computers by distributing the work across hundreds of machines. For companies in fields that routinely require heavy number-crunching like biotech, online advertising, and finance, Cloudera's service could help find opportunities that might not be apparent using traditional computing methods.

With a management team made up of Google and Facebook veterans and $11 million from venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, and high-profile angel investors including VMware (VMW) co-founder Diane Greene and former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, Cloudera is emerging as a player in the nascent field of cloud computing and a resource that companies dealing with quantities of data should be aware of.

Beatport!

This week, we are taking a look at another successful start up, however it is not in the retail industry. This company represents the number one website to buy and download electonic music, I am talking about Beatport.

It was founded in Denver, Colorado by Jonas Tempel. It was launched in 2004 and has more than 1 million tracks from 12 thousand music labels and 1.8 million registered users. It is referred to as the' ITunes for disc jockeys'.
Music on Beatport is categorized into 19 genre classifications which include Breaks, Chill Out, Deep House, DJ Tools, Drum & Bass,Dubstep, Electro House, Electronica, Hard Dance, Hardcore / Hard Techno, Hip-Hop, House, Indie Dance / Nu Disco, Minimal, Progressive House, Psy-Trance, Tech House, Techno, and Trance.