The following article is from College Magazine, written by Ashley E. Nolan, a student at Maryland University, and syndicated here with permission from the magazine. 

Style in the City: Colette Young

Perched high above New York City in her studio apartment near Penn Station, Colette Young snacks on baked chicken and balsamic sautéed Portobello mushrooms, leftovers from the night before. Just beyond her left shoulder, a mannequin is dressed impeccably in a black and gold shift dress, complemented by a chic black hat a la Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Colette opts for a more comfortable outfit, wearing a gray tank top, her sleek brown hair in a bun.

With a resume that includes co-founding a contemporary women’s boutique in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, meeting with manufacturers in Korea and designers in Paris and attending cocktail parties at the gossip-worthy Beverly Hills, you might think Colette has been a fixture on the high-end fashion scene for decades. In fact, she is just 18 years old, a budding freshman at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

“My mindset isn’t that of an 18-year-old,” she said laughing. “It’s 30.”

Meet L’Colette      Continue Reading...

It should be hardly surprising that you find me criticizing about the lack of support for the growing trend of college entrepreneurship if you've read my previous post, The Grey Entrepreneur. There are going to be seismic social changes which will be great opportunity with the increasing supply of student entrepreneurs in the market.

Education is far too archaic and bureaucratic to make the paradigm changes necessary. And this is coming from a student attending Babson College, the number one ‘ranked’ school for entrepreneurship. As good as they are, the Y-Combinator’s ,TechStars  and DreamIt Ventures  aren’t big enough to cover or assist the growing number of young, first-time entrepreneurs. [Here's a directory of other start-up incubators.]Continue Reading...

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

- Paul Graham

Paul Graham writes brilliant essays on technology, startups, and innovation, which I recommend as must reads for any entrepreneur. In one title "Cities and Ambition", he discusses the different types of personalities and characteristics that a city has. Each city sends a particular message, which in turn, can have a huge effect on the type of people that it attracts and the type of community that it builds.

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

I live in Cambridge, MA, where Graham describes the message as "You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to." I completely agree with him.

New York is all about being rich. And...

Silicon Valley is all about being powerful.

But, what about being entrepreneurial and supportive of start-ups.Continue Reading...

I've been working at Acquia (a start-up commercializing open source Drupal) for almost a year now. It's been a valuable experience working with open source because it follows in the same founding principles of the internet: facilitating collaboration and free, open flow and sharing of information through connectivity. Witnessing the growth of the Drupal community, and open source in general, has really opened my eyes to the power of crowdsourcing innovation and technology.

The results of these open models are very disruptive. They create brilliant technology such as Linux, MySQL, PHP, and Drupal while reducing the adoption costs of these technologies by licensing under a General Public License.

But, I sometimes wonder what percentage of the population truly understands the importance and significance of open source and crowdsourcing. Or, if lawyers and traditional corporate executives understand the underlying principles and why these models are successful. Users of Drupal clearly do, but there's a larger population that still needs to be educated and convinced.  Continue Reading...

The following is a guest post from Robert Tuchman, the author of "Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneurs Guide To Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own." Here is a brief bio to keep in mind before reading:

Robert Tuchman is the Founder of TSE Sports & Entertainment, a company he started out of his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan at the age of 25. TSE has gone on to appear on Inc. 500’s list of America’s Fastest Growing Privately Owned Companies. Tuchman now serves as President of Premiere Corporate Events, a division of Premiere Global Sports. A frequent guest on "Your World with Neil Cavuto," he has also appeared on CNN, the “CBS Morning News,” BET, and has been the subject of features in USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Entrepreneur. He lives in New York City.

Graduation from college carries such ironic emotion: you have spent four years yearning to graduation, but as soon as you do, you spend your remaining days nostalgic about your school days. College is a great time, but with graduation comes reality. You are now armed with all that you need: you are the fuse and your diploma is the match. Let the fireworks begin!

Many leave college and send out applications to tens of corporations looking for a job. But there are others who take a bit more of a risk: they seek entrepreneurial pursuits. Know that what lay behind you and what lay in front of you is trivial compared to what lay within you. Have courage.

If it is entrepreneurship you desire post graduation, there are several thing you must consider. Continue Reading...

Some of the best ideas come from the crowd. Businesses are starting to recognize this trend and launching competitions to crowdsource new products with intent to actually produce the most popular submitted ideas.

Yahoo is now trying this approach to develop new green products. Their competition "Make It Green" is currently running with a couple of days left to submit new ideas. If yours is selected, you could see it on store shelves and share a slice of the profits.     Continue Reading...

These two moguls in the making were at Lennox Lounge tonight selling home-made candies for $2 apiece. Elijah, age seven, (right) said the price was 4 x 50 cents. Not bad math for a second grader. Said elder brother, Giles III, age 14, theirs is a multi-generational business. Angela’s World of Creations, which sells chocolate and hard candy lollipops, edible arrangements and assorted souvenirs is a mult-generational business.      

Continue reading on TechTrotter...

Last May, College Mogul and the BU Entrepreneurs co-hosted the first Boston Ultra Light Startups meetup on open source and crowdsourcing. The event attracted over 80 attendees and introduced members of the BU Executive Leadership Program to startups that are utilizing these concepts to build new business models. If you weren't able to attend, I wrote about the event on Xconomy and provided a transcript of the crowdsourcing discussion here on College Mogul.

We're now excited to host our next event, 'The Economics of Cleantech',  that will take place on July 16th from 6 - 9pm and hosted at Northeastern University. We have some interesting speakers lined up from the solar and wave energy industries and working on getting 1 or 2 more from the venture capital industry. If you're in and around Boston, I welcome you to come!

Here is some more information on the event. Please be sure to register.    Continue Reading...

Related links:

• "Chad Mirkin Receives $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for Invention"
  
• "World-Renowned Nanotechnology Expert Proves There Is Big Potential In the Smallest of Matter"
  
• International Institute for Nanotechnology (directed by Mirkin)
  
• Mirkin Research Group (Northwestern University)
  
• Nanosphere (co-founded by Mirkin)
  
• NanoInk (co-founded by Mirkin)