Princeton Undergrad Brings Scavenger-Hunt Startup to Boston

From Xconomy:

It’s called the “Robbins Diamonds Scavenger Scramble,” and it will be the biggest test yet for a new Boston company called SCVNGR. Led by 19-year-old Princeton undergraduate Seth Priebatsch, the company is one of the first startups to emerge from DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based incubator similar in conception to Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, the well-known “startup camp” based in Cambridge, MA, and Mountain View, CA. SCVNGR’s shtick is running text-message-based interactive games for corporations, associations, and non-profits, using proprietary algorithms designed by two Princeton professors to efficiently direct large numbers of game players (or museum visitors, or anyone moving in space) through a series of checkpoints.

Matt Mullenweg And Dries Buytaert Probably Separated At Birth

From InformationWeek:

As I came to learn in the interview, it's as though Buytaert and Mullenweg were separated at birth. They were born only 6 years apart (The older of the two -- Buytaert -- was born in 1978 when I was a senior in high school). Both went on to create wildly successful PHP-based content management systems (Mullenweg didWordPress, Buytaert did Drupal ). Both men open sourced those content management systems. And today, both are the founders of VC-funded commercial enterprises (Mullenweg'sAutomattic and Buytaert's Acquia) looking to capitalize on their founders' art and fame.

[The underlying point is that both founders started their wildly successful open source communities when they were in their early 20's.]

Hult Entrepreneurship Club DemoCamp Boston Meetup Tonight

Democamp is a networking and idea-sharing event dedicated to great new ideas. The content of the event is entirely participant-generated.

Democamp is made up of two important parts:

1. The presentations from those in the community

2. The networking portion to connect you with the community 
When: Thursday, July 23
Time: 6pm – 9pm
Where: Hult International Business School
1 Education St
Cambridge, MA 02141
 

Streetcanvas is bringing the concept of crowdsourcing to Japan. The Harvard Business School startup launched a couple of days ago and can best be described as a "Threadless for the Japanese market." Their e-commerce company hosts ongoing t-shirt design competitions that enable the crowd to vote and choose the best design. Winning designers get to see their designs put into production and sold exclusively on the website.

Threadless spread like wildfire in the US because it provided consumers with a new model and experience of designing, choosing, and purchasing clothing that matches their interest and styles. Although, I don't know too much about the Japanese market, I do know that they have a booming art scene. Anime characters, pop prints on luxury labels and eclectiv fashion styles are all popular. However, the co-founders explain that there are still many "captivating, but unreconized artists and art with the aesthetic, culture, and detail peculiar to Japan." One of their goals is to enable these artists with a platform to communicate and gain recognition both in local and international markets.

Crowdsourcing can produce very attractive and effective business models for several reasons. The first being that it enables the consumer to get involved in the actual design of the product, fostering a sense of ownership and pride for the product that would otherwise be lacking in a traditional pre-packaged product. Since the community chooses the desirable product, or design in the this case, the platform is able to match demand and supply more effectively. For example, every one of Threadless' t-shirts have sold out. What other company can boast that type of success with all of their products. (O.K. Apple comes close...but, there's not many.)

Here's our quick interview with one of the co-founders, Oren Mor. Continue Reading...

At the beginning of the decade, 1 billion people didn't have sufficient clean access to clean water. - World Health Organization

Did you know that it cumulatively takes 10 liters of water to produce one sheet of paper? Or, 91 liters of water to produce 1 pound of plastic? Generally speaking it requires 80 liters of water per dollar to produce any industrial product. You would also think that it would take 1 glass of water to produce 1 glass of wine. But, that thought process doesn't include the incremental amounts of water that go into producing the grapes, everything in between production, and the the incremental amounts of water in other processes required to store or ship the wine.

It's a problem I never thought of until I met Warren Anderson at the latest Ultra Light Startups event. He's a Harvard graduate student working on a startup called Hydrolosophy. They're building software that crunches algorithms to compute the total amount of water it takes to manufacture different kinds of products. By tracking, analyzing, and measuring water consumption through production, companies may be able to save big bucks. Their goal is to "reveal the truth about water consumption in America and around the world, by creating disruptively innovative applications aimed at providing cost savings solutions to businesses that rely upon water as an interal part of their product life-cycle."

A growing need for accessible clean water.  Continue Reading...

If you're just getting started in computer science or looking to specialize in a web technology, then you should definitely look into Drupal. Jobs in the marketplace are in high demand, especially compared to some of the other CMS platforms. The number of Drupal job opportunities continues to increase. Just take a look at the chart from Indeed:

We've partnered with many Drupal develoment firms at Acquia. (Have you read about Acquia's Series B and plans for Drupal?) lIf you're looking for a job programming in Drupal, I may be able to make an introduction either to one of them or a company that is building an in house Drupal developement team.

College Mogul is built in Drupal and in the process of searching for a free lancer for this site and another site that I'm in the process of designing. It is for a meetup group that I run in Boston and will need help building the template. Shoot me an email if you're interested.

Here are 5 Drupal Job Boards: Continue Reading...

I'm excited to announce that we just closed an $8 million Series B round at Acquia. (Our funding now totals $15 million.) The inside round included North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. We've been growing fast expanding our engineering, marketing, and sales teams. Overall, the company has more than doubled since I first started almost a year ago from about 16 employees to now 40 or so and now have over 200 clients! We've also expanded our product offering to include hosting, remote administration services, Solr Search, and a variety of other services that help people adopt Drupal easily, scale the software, and deploy projects with confidence and the right resources.

It's not only been an invaluable experience learning how to scale a venture-backed start-up, but its also been interesting watching and helping an open source community grow. The adoption of Drupal just about doubles every year, including the number of websites built off Drupal (the number is now around 400,000), core contributors, and the general number of companies building with the software.

Amongst many other goals, Acquia will continue to focus on these core areas:  Continue Reading...

Seed capital firms and incubators like TechStars, DreamIt Ventures, and Capital Factory aren't the only type of programs that continuing to open up for young entrepreneurs. There's plenty of others (just to name a couple of recent ones I've come across) including new meetup groups such as Dart Boston, a new initiative to enable students to interact and tour start-ups that's being lead by Scott Kirsner from the Boston Globe, and a new program in mid Michigan called Incuba8 that I'll be speaking at.

Incuba8's goal is to inspire and encourage entrepreneurial activity in the area for those under the age of 30. Caryn Shick, one of the co-founders of the events, explained to me that "there's a lot technology development in the area, but most sit on shelfs because there aren't enough entrepreneurs to commercialize the technology." This goes along with my theory that we'll need an increasing amount of entrepreneurs to reap the benefits of the rapid pace of technological development.

The program will last from August 10th to the 19th and includes 3 different initiatives:  Continue Reading...

Founder, Joe Colasounno (Boston College '08), is looking for a buyer for Pong University, a start-up that sells customizable ping pong balls for the popular college game Beer Pong. He founded the company a couple of years ago, but is now selling it to focus on his other company Lusion Vitamin Mints. The site grossed over $110,000 in sales in 2008 and made about $28,000 - $30,000 in profit. Their largest sale accounted for $49,500.)

"There's potential to do a lot better, too. After putting in all the effort to set up Pong University, the site basically runs itself. I only have to put in a few hours a week. So, it can clearly do a lot better if more effort is applied." Joe said, when I talked to him the other day about possibly buying it myself. However, sales have been a bit slower this year and the Christmas banner is still up from last year. But, Joe explains that this has mostly been attributed to his lack of time and it would be easy to turn around. "I've been so busy with the breath mints that I haven't been updating the site at all, no new content, no promotions, no new advertising, nothing. My customer service is poor, sometimes taking me up to a week to answer emails. With a little bit of effort you can really turn this site around and make some dough with a very small amount of time commitment."Continue Reading...

Over the past few months, I’ve explored a bunch of different ways to develop a website without a web developer on the Blank Label team. To summarize My coding capabilities are almost non-existent, we don’t have an in-house expertise, we don’t have the money to pay for a developer, and have struggled to bring developers on board. However, we've learned several lessons, gathered some advice, and now have a couple of suggestions and better plan in place.

Let me give you the run down of what we tried, what lessons we learned, and what we recommend to others in a similar position.Continue Reading...

For those of you in Boston, I'll be attend the Web Innovators Group event tonight in Cambridge, MA. It's a meetup that's focused on web and mobile start-ups, innovation, and the Boston tech community. There's about a 100-200 people that come each time and is one of my favorite events for networking. The event includes several start-up presentations and pitches, start-up booths, and bar for networking afterward.

WebInno's goal is to support entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the field by holding events which foster community interaction. The event was founded and hosted by David Beisel a VP at Venrock Capital.

If you're interested in meetup up there, shoot me a tweet to @College_Mogul. I'm also hosting an event for Ultra Light Startups titled the Economics of Cleantech tomorrow. We have over 150 attendees registered so far and have an exciting panel that includes 2 founders from Resolute Marine Energy, SunPoint (an MIT $100k Renewables Finalist), a venture capitalist from GreatPoint Ventures, and a professor from the Northeastern University Center for Renewable Energy Technology.

Anyway, here is more info (from their website) for the WebInno event tonight:  Continue Reading...

Do you have an idea for a web startup? Do you need money, guidance, and an environment that breathes entrepreneurship?

Besides competing in business plan competitions, applying for incubator programs is another great way to start. Y Combinator, one of the first seed venture capital incubator firms is now opening their application doors for the winter of 2010. Competition between the various different incubators continues to grow as more spring up. It seems that Y Combinator is opening up early to snatch up the better ideas for the coming round.

Here's more info from their announcement. On average, they'll be investing slightly more this time around. The deadline for submissions is October 26, 2009.

The process:  Continue Reading...