reliable-web-hostings.com

Eleven-year-old Levi Stinson is Shallowater’s youngest entrepreneur. He sells flavored ice treats in the summer, and he works just about every day from noon until 4 p.m. His business is in Shallowater, and it’s called Shallow-Ice.

Stinson says he makes a profit, “Sometimes I make $60 a day, sometimes $30.”

newschannel10.com

11-year-old entrepreneur uses his business skills in Shallowater is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. Give them plenty of advice, direction and support.
While they are still in their learning phase, it is important to ensure they are given constructive criticism to help them fulfill tasks in the future to a better quality, but praise is also very important to maintain self-esteem and boost confidence levels. With this, give extra, specific and almost gratuitous details of the task in hand but without sounding patronising.

Have a read up on Herzberg’s two-factor/hygiene theory and put yourself in the mindset of the new employee.

Read all five here.

Five things for employers to consider when hiring students is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

When Faith Borden, 16, of Metuchen, N.J., applied for a job in March to be a counselor at a summer day camp, she looked around and saw “all these 30- and 40-year-olds,” she said. “Usually it’s just teenagers.”

Also facing a competitive job market, Max O’Dell, 14, of Cary, N.C., started Smiley Inc., a custom T-shirt design business. He paints shirts in his driveway and hangs them in the garage to dry; revenue so far has been $170.

Unemployment for 16- to 19-year-olds is at its highest rate since 1992 — at 22.7 percent in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is causing some teenagers to rethink their notion of work and to embrace entrepreneurship.

“This is a generation raised to believe they can do anything, and the first to grow up with entrepreneurial celebrities like Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google,” said Donna Fenn, who interviewed 150 young entrepreneurs for her forthcoming book, “Upstarts: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success.”

The Internet may be the most significant catalyst for teenagers’ entrepreneurship. The ability to start a business online has lowered many barriers to self-employment faced by young people — you need only a domain name and a Web site to set up shop and are largely anonymous to customers, who never have to know your age, said Alan Lysaght, co-author of “The ABCs of Making Money for Teens.”

There is also an abundance of information online about starting a business.

Laura Durst, 18, a recent high school graduate in Woodstock, Conn., in the state’s northeast corner, said that there were so few jobs for teenagers there that two years ago she began setting up a Web-based business, WorkInMyRoom.com. It provides teenagers with information and online resources to find jobs that can be done from home.

Ms. Durst said she was inspired by her mother, who also is an entrepreneur. “Seeing her work from home, where she could be her own boss, I liked the idea of that,” she said.

Ms. Durst’s revenue comes from advertising. She uses Google Ad Sense — which displays relevant Google ads on her site — and earns money when users click on them. She says she is making about $250 a month.

nytimes.com

Teens Are Building Their Own Job Engine is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The business model invented by Chris King, 19, a freshman at USC living in Huntington Beach, Calif., with his parents during summer break, is pretty simple: extract built-up lint from long, winding clothing-dryer ducts, and charge $39 for the service.

It’s a low-cost way to immediately boost energy efficiency and dramatically cut drying time for clothes.

“One neighbor said it took like an hour and 20 minutes,” King said. “Now it’s down to 20 or 30 minutes, tops. He’s super happy. He said, ‘Call me back next summer.’”

King said he got the idea after trying, unsuccessfully, to find a summer job.

“I started applying everywhere,” he said. “You know, the economic downturn. I got a couple calls back, but it’s hard to get a job right now.”

Instead, he began helping around the house.

“One weekend, my mom was complaining about how long it took to dry her laundry,” King said. “My dad tried to fix it. I was helping him.”

Like many others in his neighborhood, their house has a laundry room in the middle of the house. The duct that releases warm air from the dryer must be 18 feet long to reach an outer wall.

A kind of light bulb, perhaps with a greenish tinge, went off in King’s mind. A lot of his neighbors had the same floorplan.

The cleaning method – King wants to keep it secret for now – works most dramatically on long ducts. In only two weeks of offering the service door to door, he says he’s already picked up about 25 customers.

King, who is planning to be a business major, said he said he hopes to continue the service even after school resumes in August.

“I’ve already started marketing around a couple surrounding neighborhoods,” he said. “If everything goes as planned, I’ll try to expand as fast as I can.”

miamiherald.com

Out-of-work student now a green’ entrepreneur is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

“My aunt’s mother-in-law used to make them for the family,” Alayna said. “She had passed away, and I wanted to do it for the family to give one to everybody for Christmas.”

So she and her mother, Shannon Kennedy, went to the knitting and crocheting circle that meets twice a month at the Alliance YWCA.

“We began showing her the basics, casting on, basic stitches,” said knitter Jodene Hardy. “She was a natural — she caught on so quickly. We would only show her something once, maybe twice, and she had it. She had very good control of the needles and the tension of the yarn.”

“My grandma told me that other people would need them, and I wanted to get an iPod Touch, so I started selling them,” Alayna said.

Thanks to some sales help from mom and grandma, she had no trouble finding customers and is now the proud owner of an iPod Touch.

cantonrep.com

Young entrepreneur stitches together her own business is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Shreelaxmi Suresh received recognition for her work after she developed a website for Kerala Bar Council, located in the country’s south.

The youngster has displayed a keen interest in computers and art since she was in Kindergarten.

With a little assistance from her father, Shreelaxmi managed to find a ‘knack’ for web design.

At the age of eight, Shreelaxmi had already created the official website of her school, a website for deaf people and a news website for children written in Malayalam language.

Her newest creation, The Kerala Bar Council site, aims to update people on legal matters and offer free legal aid through the website.

bigpondnews.com

Nine-year-old starts up web business is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

It’s not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last month’s May’s Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

High school girl discovers styrofoam-eating bacterium.

Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn’t considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

That was Daniel’s question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.

mnn.com

Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Michael Adams\Eddie’s Energy Bars “I started the business because I hate being bored. I need to do something every minute of every day.”

Adams launched ‘Eddie’s Energy Bars‘ three years ago, inspired by an entrepreneurship class he took in high school. He liked baking, and business and wanted to make a little extra cash.\

Michael: “Multiple bars have shelf-lives of 6 months to a year. That’s not real food- why would you want to eat something that’s a year old?”

With the help of his parents, Adams baked and sold the energy bars locally. When he was away at college, he worked on marketing, while Jeanne and ‘Ed’ – the company’s namesake – took over many of the cooking duties.

Ed “We have a hard time finding a place to sit and eat now.” At a point now where they have to turn down some customers.

Michael “They can’t quite grasp that we make our bars in a 200 square foot kitchen- with one oven and one mixer. I don’t think any of us thought it’d get this big.”

Despite the company’s success so far, Adams says one of his biggest challenges – outside of juggling college and his company – is selling consumers on his product. These bars are fresh– which is normally a selling point, but not necessarily when it comes to energy bars.

Michael “People are used to taking an energy bar and throwing it in the glove compartment, and when they run off the road in a blizzard they can eat it. That’s not true with our bars- unless the blizzard is in the next 2 weeks.”

No blizzards in the immediate forecast, but the Adams have had to weather a flood of orders recently. And somehow Michael still managed to pull in a 4.0 G.P.A. last semester- while managing the business from afar.

After next year, that will no longer be an issue. Though Michael hasn’t decided if he’ll continue to grow the company after graduation. He’ll have to see if he has the energy.

necn.com

Entrepreneur runs “energetic business” while at college is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The premise of MathTime is simple; it takes the old-fashioned flashcard “mad minute” drill idea and adds a new media twist. Participants can practice addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on the phone by quickly solving problems with two taps of the phone, one to show the problem, one to display the answer.

“I thought it would be cool,” said the Hinsdale, Ill.-native, adding, “It’s really cool to make something work, to make a little money, to do something like this and see it up” on the App Store.

After he established the basic premise of the game, Owen’s 9-year-old brother Finn designed the mathematical symbols in Photoshop. Once the design was done, the boys pitched the program to Apple.

“Nothing’s impossible if you don’t know it’s impossible,” said John Voorhees, Owen and Finn’s father, who created an app account and provided a bank number for the boys. “He dug into it all by himself, I didn’t touch a line of code.”

The Apps Store has over 35,000 different iPhone applications and games available for download. “These two kids are unusually young to have done that, but the development environment is so easy, novice programmers with good ideas can now develop something compelling,” said Matt Murphy, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Murphy also manages the iFund, a $100-million fund devoted solely to investing in start-ups creating apps for the iPhone.

A now billion-dollar economy, Murphy believes iPhone apps will keep growing. In a single day, MathTime, the .99-cent application, was downloaded 141 times. “It started booming,” said Owen, “I woke up and I was like, I’m an entrepreneur now.”

inc.com

Kid Entrepreneurs Builds iPhone App is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

To help you get started, check out this sample entry, and the featured resources at right. For more inspiration, you can read about our 2008 winners below.

And don’t forget, each week during the summer you will have a chance to be featured as the Lemonade Stand of the Week and win a special t-shirt. Learn more about our fourth annual Best Lemonade Stand in America Contest and what it takes to enter.

inc.com

The Best Lemonade Stand in America Contest is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

As a result of his flourishing DJ entertainment service, 2009 Stoneham High graduate David Buono Jr. (called DJ since birth) has been awarded a $40,000 Entrepreneurial Scholarship by the McKelvey Foundation.

At an early age, DJ discovered his father’s music collection and old equipment, including turntables and a studio mixer, and he took advantage of his house’s intercom system to conduct his first primitive broadcasts. Over the years, after visiting his father’s friends at various radio stations, the son had his career ambition.

In eighth grade, Buono received what he calls his “big break,” as he was pulled out of class and asked if he would like to perform at a school dance. For Buono, it was a much larger crowd, the freedom of musical control, and the chance to confront any lingering reticence.

As a freshman at Stoneham High, Buono took real entrepreneurial steps with a Web site, T-shirts and business cards. At this point, a former DJ stepped in for a discussion with the new DJ.

Currently, Spinner Music Productions has 10 employees. The staff now has multiple setups and he estimates the business books both nights of the weekend about 70 percent of the year.

The McKelvey Scholarship was relatively a last-minute discovery for Buono, but his commitment shone through.

“What we’re really looking for,” said Christine McKelvey, the president of the foundation, “is for the applicants to convey to us that they really do have the innate drive and ambition to be an entrepreneur. With David, you could see that passion.”

wickedlocal.com

Stoneham teen DJ nets $40,000 scholarship is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

• Daniel Brusilovsky, CEO—Teens in Tech (teensintech.com)
• Jun Loayza, Founder—Future Delivery (fdvirtualworld.com)
• Jessica Mah, Founder—InternshipIN.com (internshipin.com)
• Ashley Qualls, CEO—WhateverLife (whateverlife.com)
• Carly Wertheim, Co-president—Teens Turning Green (teensturninggreen.org)

Teen Entrepreneurs Tell It Like It Is is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Last summer, Jonathan, 12, and Adam Holland, 13, noticed the popularity of shaved ice treats at summer camp and found themselves buying cold apple or blue raspberry-flavored treats on the hot afternoons.

After their younger sister Zoe, now 9, was accepted to private school, the brothers wanted to help their parents foot the new tuition bill, on top of their enrollment in the seventh and ninth grades at the Landon School in Bethesda.

After buying an ice shaver and a variety of sweet syrups, Adam and Jonathan took their mobile shaved iced stand, AJ’s Hawaiian Iceez, to their first event in June 2008 and raised $11,000 throughout the summer by taking it to community carnivals, picnics and birthday parties.

This summer they have set a goal to raise an additional $25,000 and have already raised $8,000 in just three events in Largo, Upper Marlboro and Bethesda, said their mother, LaShawne Holland.

“It’s always fun, and the best part is you get to have an ice,” Adam said. “You can’t sell a product you wouldn’t eat yourself.”

Both boys said they have learned to balance the business with schoolwork and extracurricular activities, such as basketball, football and lacrosse.

Brandywine brothers look to earn cold cash for tuition is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Muziic software created by 15-year-old David Nelson enables computers to mine YouTube’s rich database of songs and play customised lists of tunes free of charge.

“The Muziic player is a pretty cool little thing,” said analyst Matt Rosoff of technology industry tracking firm Directions On Microsoft.

“It looks and works a lot like iTunes in that it is a downloable desktop application; but you get all the content from YouTube. You have an all-in-one-place library of music for free.”

Google has been trying to develop ways to make money off of YouTube and that goal could be undermined by a Muziic Player that lets users tap into the video-sharing website’s music while avoiding advertisements.

“Hopefully, they will work something out,” Rosoff said of Muziic and YouTube. “Muziic is analogous to a subscription music service, but it’s free.”

Nelson and his father, Mark, launched the self-funded internet enterprise this year and bill it as the first “YouTube for music.”

David Nelson is Muziic’s chief technology officer, having switched from public school to taking online high school classes from home in order to devote more time to the website and the player software, according to his father.

“We served thousands of downloads of the Muziic Player and Encoder in just a few hours!” a message about the incident on the website’s blog said.

“We’ve expected and anticipated extreme growth in our website and application … However, within less than a week of our ‘unofficial’ launch, we have been – over abundantly – blessed with huge amounts of traffic!”

watoday.com

Teen’s invention puts YouTube music on tap is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Sam Houghton, of Buxton, Derbyshire, was just three when he came up with a double-headed broom to collect large debris and fine dust simultaneously.

Sam, who was inspired by animated inventors Wallace and Gromit and Archie the Inventor from TV series Balamory, said: “I saw my Daddy brushing up and made it. There are two brushes because one gets the big bits and one gets the little bits left behind.

“I don’t know if I want to be an inventor when I grow up but this was fun.”

Sam had been watching his father at work in the back yard, swapping between a large broom, for leaves and twigs, and a small one, for finer particles, when he came up with his idea.

BBC UK

Youngest inventor patents broom is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Jordan’s computer savvy has really paid off. Not only has he been able to tuck some cash away, but it’s earned him attention with the McElvy Foundation. They awarded him $40,000 for college!

Jordan- “I had no idea that you could get scholarships just from being a business owner at such a young age.”

But “Dotcomer” has been a lot more than a paycheck for Jordan. It’s taught him several aspects of running a business including how to conduct himself in a professional way.

Jordan-”It’s taught me to just be aware of how you act when you’re out in public or when your with people that could bve your potential clients in the future. You never know who you’re going to be workign with.”

kxmc.com

Teen Entrepreneur Earns $41,000 for College is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

I posed that question to the grown-ups I encountered recently while exploring Whateverlife.com. The teen-girl site and company was started by Ashley Qualls, an entrepreneur from a working-class neighborhood outside Detroit, who happens to be 17 herself. At that age, LeeAnn Prescott, the research director at Hitwise, was working at an amusement park, fashioning faux Civil War shots of people. Robb Lippitt, the former COO of ePrize who consults for Qualls, had worked his way up from dishwasher to prep cook to manager of Buddy’s BBQ. Ceca Mijatovic, the founder of the girls portal dayZloop, didn’t have a job yet; she was a foreign-exchange student from Yugoslavia. Me? I was delivering pizza for Domino’s.

“Of course, this,” says Ian Moray of ValueClick Media, referring to Whateverlife, “is something we all wish we’d done when we were 17.”

If only the Internet had been around then. One of the many fascinating things about Whateverlife is that Ashley didn’t set out to start a business. The Internet practically did it for her. Web design was a hobby, something she’d been learning online since she was 9. As a high-school sophomore, she figured out how to create layouts for MySpace pages, and her friends at Lincoln Park High School were keen to customize theirs, much like school lockers. As word spread throughout the MySpace universe, the 15-year-old couldn’t afford the servers to support her exploding online audience. A friend suggested using Google AdSense, which generates ad revenue based on a site’s traffic. Ka-ching. Whateverlife was off and running. Ashley has created nearly 3,000 layouts, her monthly audience is around 7 million, and revenue has grown from a couple of thousand bucks a month to as much as $70,000 – more than $1 million in less than two years.

Fast Company

Whatever Life Dot Coom is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Switchpod is a podcasting hosting service that provides both free and premium accounts. You can create a podcast with their technology, upload it to Switchpod and be podcasting to the world in a matter of minutes.

Switchpod’s product soon generated 800,000 downloads and was bought out by Wizzard Software in an all-stock transaction worth $200,000. The sale also provides the partners with annual salaries of $40,000 for a 20-hour workweek.

startupjournal.com

America’s Next Business Tycoons is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The 16-year-old Colfax High junior has created Subject Skateboards, a home-based company that makes and sells boards, T-shirts, hats and buttons.

Corey’s interest in skateboarding began when he got his first board, at age 6.

“I really got into it at about 12,” he said.

It was also around that time he started thinking about starting his own business.

“I’d been messing around making up pretend companies,” he said. “Then this I got this idea for skateboards. I thought it sounded kind of cool, so I decided to go with it.”

He sells his products through his Web site, and at Boards N Motion in Auburn and The Riders Union board shop in Colfax. Many of his customers find him through friends and word-of-mouth.

auburnjournal.com

Teen-turned-entrepreneur has favorite ‘Subject’ is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The 20-year-old sophomore from Overland Park collaborated with fellow DePauw student Zach Koch to start BookSnag.com in January 2006. With a $500 investment in computer equipment, the two created a Web site to help students at the small liberal arts school in Greencastle, Ind., save money buying and selling used textbooks.

BookSnag‘s idea is simple: Provide a local alternative to the campus bookstore for exchanging textbooks. Students can use BookSnag for free. Sellers name a price for old textbooks and list the offer. Buyers can search by title for the books they need and either purchase at the asking price or make a counteroffer.

If a book is not available, the site directs users to Amazon.com as an alternative. Tinker and his partner earn revenue from Amazon on referrals.

The DePauw duo are among a growing number of young entrepreneurs running a business. According to the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, 188,000 self-employed people were under the age of 21 in 2005, compared with about 142,000 in 2000.

DePauw University News

College Entrepreneurs Start Web Service is a post from: Top Business Opportunities