College Mogul

Like College Mogul? Like Alex Lindahl (the co-founder)?

Well, he turns 23 today so wish him a Happy Birthday in the comments below! (i.e. make fun of him profusely)

College Mogul is growing and we couldn't be more excited to have more top notch writers join the team. We're crazy, passionate, and overly zealous about start-ups, entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, and new ideas. As we expand, we'll have more entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, thought leaders, and creative journalists contributing on a regular or ad-hoc basis. With that said, I would like to introduce you to one of our new contributing writers, Mike Brown.

Mike works for Virgin Group, the branded venture capital conglomerate started by Richard Branson in the 1970s. His role at Virgin is to start new businesses and/or invest in new business on behalf of the Virgin Group and Mr. Branson. As both an entrepreneur and VC/PE investment professional, his expertise is on consumer brands, how to develop them, grow them, and make them very successful. You can learn more about Mike and his involvements on his blog, Silicon Bowery.

Check out his first post below: "Brand Strength Can Create Tangible Value For Your Start-Up"

Are you looking for free advertising space, press coverage, or introductions to venture capitalists for potential investment? If so, check out our elevator video pitch competition on Vator.tv, a social network and media site for start-ups, entrepreneurs, and investors. We've partnered with the funded start-up becasue we share the same goals; to discover great companies and technologies, introduce them to the world, and analyze their models, stories, and impact they may have on you and I.

Are you able to pitch your company in under a minute, or even thirty seconds? Well, you should be able to do it in one sentence. The easiest way to do this is to compare your model to another one (or two if it is a combination) that people already know and understand. Just twist the story to make it specific to your company. You'll likely need a couple different versions if an individual isn't familiar with the other companies. Either way, its important to be able to pitch your start-up in different contexts. The simple reason for this is that people come to understand concepts, models, ideas, or value propositions by examining them from different angles or view points.Continue Reading...

Drupal has won Best Overall Open Source CMS Award for the second year in a row as well as Best PHP Open Source CMS by Packt Publishing. After working at Acquia for the past few months and learning about the Drupal phenonemon, it comes as no surprise. I only wish I knew about Drupal earlier so I wouldn't have wasted time toying with WordPress. WP is a nice platform, and you can build great blogs on the software, but Drupal is able to take content management to the next level. Drupal gives you the ability to build a social network on top of your blog, add group functionality, profiles, blog networks, or build sophisticated social publishing sites.

Although, open source Drupal has tremendous benefits, there has been no central source for expertise, technical support, and network services to help you manage your website. Acquia bridges the gap between proprietary and open source models. Of course, you can scan your valuable time searching the web for your answers, but why do that when you have some of the world's top Drupal expertise at your finger tips?Continue Reading...

Marketing is sometimes the toughest part of starting a company. It won't matter if you have a great idea, product, service, or blog in my case, if you can't reach your target audience and make it as easy as possible for people to find you. One of the quickest ways of building traffic to your site is via blogging. It is also a perfect way to start building an audience before you even launch by writing about the industry you seek to enter, providing valuable information, or just simply writing about your experience starting your company. Blogging has exploded and even seeping into the corporate world. Did you know GE just launched their corporate blog ? In many ways blogging is starting to mold a new era where transparency, free information, and daily communication between companies and public are critical to build brands and companies that people are attracted to.

Blogging, in other words, is a great marketing tool. Although, I'm not using this blog to market something else, I am using it to build a brand, culture, and motivating force to inspire other young entrepreneurs to venture into the world of startups. I suppose to some degree I am marketing myself, but I mostly blog because I enjoy it, love startups, and know that there are tons of interestings startups by college entrepreneurs who don't receive enough press coverage. They need a home. Anyway, I'm a fanatic about technology, the web, startups, entrepreneurship, innovation, web trends, and anything that challenges something in the world to do something better. Continue Reading...