Matt.Bachman's blog

While Tony Brown initially set out to aid the failing journalism industry with his NearBuy iPhone application for classified ads, his product may have a greater impact on the failing real estate market.

Last week, a panel of industry experts selected him and teammates Zenhua Ma, Dan Wang and Peng Zhuang as winners of the Reynolds Journalism Institute Student iPhone Competition hosted by the University of Missouri. The team created an application that syncs real estate classifieds pulled from Google Base and Craigslist to a Google Map based on the iPhone user’s location. The application also allows users to post pictures of the surrounding neighborhood via Flickr and even communicate with the Twitter community for reviews of the property itself.

Outfitted by the school with $3,000 and new iPhones with AT&T service contracts, the team competed against three other teams for eight months to create the most innovative, media-oriented application. “I can’t say that I’m an expert in anything related to real estate," Tony acknowledges, but believes his efforts to modernize the traditional classified ad may help save the tanking industry. Continue Reading...

Considering a job with a startup company right out of school? Here are three crucial questions to ask when looking at potential companies.

Who is running the show?

Mike Brown, an investment professional who starts companies and invests capital for the Virgin Group and Richard Branson, advises college students to take a close look at the management running the company. "Follow the guys that are qualified. We [at Virgin] always examine the management team to make sure they have a long track record of success in the space before investing." While an experienced management team is vital, it certainly does not guarantee an easy experience in the venture world. No matter who runs the company, Mike warns, "you're going to work long hours and hope to learn as much as you can from these guys because they've done it longer".

Is this the right atmosphere for me?

The most important gauge of a start up's success is the atmosphere created by its employees. Sean Kelley learned this firsthand while building Fitfuel.com , one of his many startups in the nutrition industry. "At fitfuel, some of the biggest mistakes we made were in trying to immitate larger companies." For his latest venture, Boom Boom Energy, Sean has done away with these rules and now implements a "Results Only Work Environment" (ROWE) model. Sean notes that this model is significantly more demanding of management, but it helps to facilitate creativity and increases enthusiasm substantially in the workplace. "Personally, I would spend twice as much time managing people if it meant they were getting more out of their job each day". Sean believes so strongly in a positive, energetic atmosphere that he is launching two products based on the idea. The Boom Boom vapor inhaler and nasal energizer are organic products designed to energize users, and will hit stores in the US and Asia very soon.

Is the company building momentum?

Both Mike and Sean believe that a strong management team combined with a strong atmosphere creates "momentum", another vital component of a successful company. Momentum occurs when a startup can channel its positive energy toward output and get other people excited about their projects at the same time. A company with strong momentum may have recently broken sales records, generated significant buzz in the media, or rolled out an entirely new product that's turning heads (or any combination of the three). Momentum is a key indicator that the company is healthy and its management and employees are working hard to produce results.

CollegeMogul is growing in every way. Unique visitor numbers are climbing, our staff is expanding and, most importantly, potential content continues to grow with each new person we meet. While this may seem like a good thing, growth introduces a host of new questions about where content can improve. A friend of mine condensed my questions into a simple and telling metaphor: “Is your site a dealership, or a garage?” The question is a crucial one for any blog trying to improve its content.

My friend explained to me that many blogs function like car dealerships: They showcase success stories the way a car dealership showcases a shiny new car. The more successful blogs, however, function more like a mechanic’s garage: They look beyond the shiny exterior to examine what’s under the hood.

Currently, our blog is mostly a dealership, with a lot of potential. We love to showcase the more successful startups because like new cars, they are innovative, they generate buzz, and they inspire. Certainly, the dealership model is a proven one, but it has its caveats. Too many blogs following the dealership model are selling pre-owned cars instead of new ones; they are echoing stories already told around the web, rather than uncovering new and genuine content. One of our major challenges as we grow will be to continue to expand our network of entrepreneurs so we can increasingly break venture news as it unfolds.

Like any good dealership, our site needs to have a garage. Just as we tell the stories of startups that are performing well, we need to examine the startups that are sputtering, or need a tune-up. By looking under the hood and pointing out problems with a startup’s revenue model, SEM, marketing strategy, value proposition, business plan, design, or overall approach, we can provide insights that our readers may be able to apply to their own ventures. Like the dealership model, the garage model has a major caveat: Its performance depends on the mechanics looking under the hood. While we are excited about the tech space, we are still relatively new to it and so is our staff. Our next challenge will be to transform ourselves into a group of mechanics who are increasingly comfortable looking under the hood and writing about what we see. We can do this by continuing to reach out to our existing network to learn about their problems firsthand, not just monitoring their sites and seed funding.

Our final challenge will be to improve how our audience interacts with the site and how they respond to our content by benchmarking engagement. Currently, the average reader on our site spends less than two minutes perusing and does not post comments when they are finished. Should we overcome this challenge, our audience size will continue to grow, but more importantly, we will develop an increasingly engaged reader base which is crucial to our long-term success.

We're looking for more writers...

If you're interested in interviewing successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and networking with industry experts, then shoot us an email to: collegemogul2@gmail.com ...we're actively searching for more writers.

Microsoft put its Photosynth technology to work yesterday at the Presidential Inauguration and the results are impressive. In a nutshell, the application builds a navigable, 3-D model of a landscape by compiling, sorting, and repositioning a collection of photos. Here’s the kicker: the app is crowdsource-capable. (What is crowdsourcing? ) Working with CNN photographers located among the masses, Microsoft successfully mapped the scene around the Capitol building. By allocating each photo to a specific point cloud, or notable point of focus within the photo, the application calculates patterns and variations in the photo cloud, locates the vantage point of each photo, and finally positions it accordingly within the model.

[Image via CNET]

The decision to showcase technology calculating vantage points and mapping a seemingly infinite area at an event where the President is exposed to a massive crowd underscores the security potential of Photosynth. It is not hard to imagine Presidential security using this software to track a sniper hidden within a sea of people. More astounding is that the application’s performance improves with increasing scale, as more photos create a more detailed model.Continue Reading...

While many young entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to panels of executives in hopes of financial support, Mike Evans (Hamilton College '05) and Dave Cullen (Winner of the 2007 Arthur Ashe Courage Award, an ESPY) pitched Full Court Peace to ex-IRA and ex-UDA paramilitary authorities in Belfast, Ireland.

Full Court Peace brings high school boys from rival catholic and protestant high schools together to play basketball, eventually traveling to the US to play American teams. Mike took his cause to the doorsteps of Catholics and Protestants in neighborhoods with a history so violent that they are segregated by walls and protected by the remnants of different covert, paramilitary forces. By meeting with the boys and their families and building trust through cultural understanding, Mike eventually earned their commitment to the cause. "I would meet the boys to play basketball after school once or twice a week and their families invited me over for dinner." At the same time, Mike spoke with other members of the community to locate hidden paramilitary leaders alert them to his idea and earn their support. After earning the trust of certain community members, they guided Mike through community backchannels to the paramilitary leaders so he could engage them in his cause. While attempting to explain to ex-paramilitary leaders the upside of bringing together children whose parents fought each other a generation earlier may seem like a futile gesture, these leaders were surprisingly supportive. "Both sides agreed this was exactly what the boys needed". Once Mike had the support of these leaders, the fundraising began. Continue Reading...

The Campus Word is a multimedia platform that provides its own journalistic content, while also enabling its users to share their favorite web content with the help of a user profile. Still in alpha, the site currently has fifteen student writers contributing content from campuses around the country. Blogs range from self help advice, to relationship advice, to political and sports op-eds. The site’s layout is pretty easy to understand, as it separates and organizes media for the user, producing content uploaded by The Campus Word writers or users first and then linking it to other college media sites and blogs on the web.
But co-founders and Hamilton ‘07 alums Greg Rogan, Chase Garbarino, and Kevin McCarthy have bigger plans than the traditional online publication platform. “We are currently developing a platform for students to easily find and share all of their favorite content from around the web and develop new connections with people across the country interested in the same types of content to optimize their experience” said Chase Garbarino. Currently, the student blogging feature is available for all users, as is the site’s video content. Chase expects these two features to be expanded and others to be released when the site becomes fully operational at the end of the summer.Continue Reading...