The following post is by Mershard Frierson, founder of Mojo Body Fuel, a startup that puts a portion of its proceeds towards planting trees and international aid organizations. Mojo Body Fuel is working in Surigao Del Sur, Philippines and Port-au-prince, Haiti. Mershard is 21 and will be graduating from Fisk University in Nashville in May 2010.

[Interested in contributing an article to College Mogul? Shoot Alex Lindahl an email.]

Studies show that people are much more likely to switch brands if the product influences or relates to social causes. The following is part 1 of a guide that can help you link your product with social entrepreneurship. It's not only good for business, but good for the world.Continue Reading...

Hi, This is Alex here. I started College Mogul some time ago and have since moved on. It's a bit difficult to stay in the college loop after being out of school for so long. As I'm not sure what to do with this blog, I'm opening this up for suggestions. I'd be willing to entertain the idea of someone else taking this blog over as long as there is a plan in place. In fact, I'd probably much rather see someone take this over then to let it die.

If you are interested in taking over College Mogul or have a good idea for what I should do with it - shoot me an email.

Otherwise - check out Clean Economies, a new project that I'm working on. I'll be looking for writers, so let me know if you're interested in that, too.

Cheers!

Alex

Calling all sports enthusiasts (and people who should know a bit more about sports): there is a new tool on the market worth checking out. DailyTailgate is a refreshingly simple and witty email newsletter that features hot sports topics as well as personalized sports information in your inbox every morning. Each newsletter features a mix of quotes, facts, witty editorial, schedules, results, and analysis giving you the conversation fodder you need to avoid awkward silence during work lunch or appearing clueless in the eyes of your friends.

I had a chance to ask Michael Corcoran, DT's Editor-in-Chief, a couple of questions about the newsletter:

CM: I want to know more about sports. Why should I read subscribe to DailyTailgate?

You should subscribe because it gives you a quick shot of sports right to your inbox every morning. It's free, informative, relevant and fun. And you can customize it to give you scores and news of your favorite teams.

CM: How does DT fit into my daily digest of ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, and other sports news websites?

Well, we aren't a website for one, and you don't have to go looking for us, we come to you. We're not trying to deliver a comprehensive epic about the world of sports each day. Instead, we give you a dose, and do it in ways that will make you laugh and give you some unique insights and useful info to talk about with your friends who are into sports.

I'm not a sports fanatic, but I'm definitely a casual fan. What I like about DailyTailgate is that it gives you just enough to stay in the know about what matters. If you're the type of person that scours ESPN every free minute you get at work then this newsletter is probably not for you. But if you'd like to be able to shoot the shit with your friends and coworkers or be able to contribute to the mid-game conversations this football season, then do yourself a favor and take the two seconds necessary to sign-up for DailyTailgate

Running a business is never easy, especially if it’s your first time going it on your own. There are a million things to remember, clients to find, employees to be managed and of course, money to be accounted for. If you don’t have much experience managing the finances of a small business, these free courses from big name colleges like MIT can be just what you need to learn about everything from the basics of accounting to more complex economic theory—and everything in between.

1. Business Analysis Using Financial Statements: Take this course to learn more about how to read and utilize the information contained within financial statements, advantageous both for a general understanding of business and within your own organization.

2. Financial and Managerial Accounting: This introductory course will aid business owners in understanding and presenting financial information to investors and for decision-making processes within the management of your business.

3. Applied Economics for Managers: Take this course to learn more about how economists model consumer choices and market coordination. While it mostly focuses on microeconomics, you’ll learn a little bit about global markets as well.

4. Entrepreneurial Finance: While this course focuses on technology-based startups, it offers great financial advice and education to entrepreneurs in just about every field.

5. Early Stage Capital: Take this course to get a better idea of how to raise initial funds to get your business off the ground and offers some guidance in how to get outside advice and find funding sources.

6. Financial Management: This course will teach you about corporate finance and capital markets with respect to managerial decisions. You’ll learn about risk assessment, asset valuation, corporate financing and more.

7. Taxes and Business Strategy: Paying your taxes correctly and on time can be a big deal for businesses both small and large. This course will teach you how to plan for taxes and situate your business in the most advantageous spot within tax laws.

8. Management Accounting and Control: Need some help getting your finances under control and learning how to best regulate the spending of your business? This course may be able to help.

This post was contributed by Amber Hensley, who writes about online classes. She welcomes your feedback at AmberHensley1980@ yahoo.com

Facebook just announced that they've acquired FriendFeed. Although, Facebook already has a lot features that FriendFeed has, I suspect that the acquisition has more to do with the technology and live stream feed. Right now you have to manually update the feed on Facebook, which is a huge hassle. FriendFeed's is live and doesn't need to be.

FriendFeed also has a powerhouse team of ex-Googlers who likely know how to scale this type of technology and already have it built out. Sometimes its more cost effective to buy a technology rather than redevelop it yourself. That seems to be the play here.

If Facebook is able to enhance their feed, it'll give Twitter more of run for their money. It'll also help Facebook aggregate user data and activity from other applications from across the web. It begs the question, will Facebook kill Twitter? 33% of people from our previous poll believe that Facebook will kill Twitter. 54% believe that Facebook won't kill Twitter. What do you think?

What other applications can Facebook acquire to enhance the shareability of user activity?

Here is Facebook's Press Release:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Here are several other articles on the story:

First Interview After Acquisition With FriendFeed And Facebook

Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter

There's a number of different platforms that enable people to build websites on the web without any programming knowledge. Drupal is one of them. However, there are still challenges and the platform can only get you so far without diving in deeper. This is obviously changing and MIT's Media Lab is proving that it'll become increasingly easier for any consumer to build websites or applications on the web. Their project, "Scratch", is creating a new experience that even 6 year olds can use to program on the web.

Scratch enables anyone to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art on the web. MIT is calling it "interactive content," that enables even a 6 year old to pull together images around the web, animate through various controls, and produce a final product that resembles a basic application or game. Much like Drupal uses a module system, Scratch enables users to snap together different types of blocks for integrating various features.

It's not only for 8-15 year olds, which is their primary target market. Introductory computer science classes at Harvard and Berkeley are choosing to use the software to teach students basic concepts and application design instead of starting students out with Java. Teachers on all different levels are interested in using the application to teach various different types of concepts. These forward looking teachers are realizing that education is moving in a more interactive direction. Textbooks will eventually die because learning isn't efficient when you simply memorize and spit back information.

Scratch is taking off, too. There's over 330,000 registered members and new projects popping up almost every minute with a total over half a million projects with over 12 million scripts. It's not just here in the states either. Now there are 120 events in 44 different countries.Continue Reading...

I've recently been in contact with a wide range of entrepreneurs in Boston who are setting up programs and resources to help college entrepreneurs. Its great to see this trend continue in the right direction as I'm a stronger believer that the economic future of the US will largely be determined by entrepreneurs. Previously, I wrote about a growing need for more entrepreneursin order to capitalize on research and technology under development. Technology is advancing so fast that Singularity University was even formed to study its impact and how we can ensure that technological advances will be used for the greater good. Promoting entrepreneurship in universities is a good start to grow a stronger economic base by increasing the number of entrepreneurs who'll eventually build tomorrow's companies.

I've been speaking to the following people/organizations and will be working with them on our common goals. If you're interested in getting involved in any of these initiatives, shoot me an email.

10 Resources for first time entrepreneurs in Boston:  Continue Reading...

It’s not what you know or who you know, but who knows you. Susan RoAne

Having a strong network is important in the business world. But, it's even more important if you aim to be an entrepreneur. Having a strong network is only the start, though. Entrepreneurs should perpetually be working on growing their network. You never know what new contact can help you take your business to the next level or introduce you to someone in media who can get your business more exposure. The reasons go on, as you can imagine.

An undergraduate at Simmons College recently asked me how I started and gradually began to know a lot of people in the community. I explained to her that its quite simple and networking events are a great way to start. As a college student myself, I've come to realize that this is the perfect time to start, even if you aren't starting a company. 

Here are 7 networking tips to help you get started in Boston: Continue Reading...

I'm in the process of launching a side project called "Clean Economies" and need your help selecting the final logo. We've crowdsourced the design on 99designs.com and its been a fun and interesting experience to see how the model works. Over 3 days, we received nearly 300 logo submissions from 33 different designers! All we did was launch a competition on the site and provided a prize of $295 to the winning designer.

I'll be writing several posts on best practices and lessons learned in the process later. But, in the meantime, we need your help choosing the winning design. We haven't fully conceptualized and solidified the pitch, but here is the start of it to keep in mind before voting below.

Clean Economies will predominantly be an online forum, blog, and monthly event that discusses how we can re-engineer and build more sustainable economies. It's not only about reducing our carbon footprint, its about making sure the entire world has sufficient access to clean water(over 1 billion people currently don't), utilizing resources more effectively by matching supply and demand through crowdsourcing, producing better software and products through open source methodologies, enhancing collaboration and bringing different layers of socioeconomic classes together, building sustainable architecture that's self sufficient and designed to work with the environment, fostering entrepreneurship, creating better healthcare systems, commercializing technology, and ultimately focusing on new models that not only aid businesses, but aid the general well being of society and environment.

Each event will focus on a panel discussion with industry experts, investors, entrepreneurs, and related leaders in emerging fields. We're considering doing our first event on water purification and the need for ecosystems to bring clean water to a billion people who don't have sufficient access.

Anyway, please vote on your favorite design below. We'd appreciate your vote and any feedback you may have in the comments.

A:

B:

C:

D: