Give Water: One of the Coolest College Start-Ups

Sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Ben Lewis, CEO of Give Water, has landed on Inc.com's list of the Coolest College Start-Ups.

Give Water donates 10 cents per bottle sold to four different types of local charities: children's causes, breast cancer research, environmental causes, and muscular-disorders research. As Lewis says, "Consumers... want to choose how they give back, and they want to give back locally." First sold in a few stores around Lewis' hometown Pittsburgh, Give Water has since donated more than $50,000 and garnered interest from producers in Canada, in the Midwest, and along the East Coast, including Whole Foods. Read more here.

Meet the Experts: Tina Wells

Tina Wells, founder of Buzz Marketing Group, an information service provider to companies that target youth, is an inspiration to anyone hoping to utilize viral marketing for business growth. Buzz has acquired clients in the fashion, beauty, entertainment, business and lifestyle sectors such as: PBS, Procter + Gamble, SonyBMG, Sesame Workshop, Time Inc, and now Island Def Jam Music Group.

Island Def Jam Music Group and Tina Wells, who received a certificate in entrepreneurship from Wharton Exec Ed and was a presenter at Wharton's VIP panel Meet the Experts this morning, have recently partnered to launch a talent search based off Wells' tweens book series character "Mackenzie Blue."

Startup Central

Wharton alumni company ChubbyBrain, the "world's largest user-generated database of innovative startups", just launched its public beta. The platform currently contains over 13,000 startups, 900 investors, and 800 reviews of emerging business models, technologies and companies. Startups on the platform span from clean/green tech to nanotech to web to mobile to social entrepreneurship (and everything in between).

Inside Knowledge

Wharton Professor MacMillan: "Cutting Prices Across The Board...Will Destroy Your Profit Streams"

The newsletter Wharton@Work has just come out with an interview with Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs co-director, Professor Ian MacMillan, on how to grow during a downturn. "Mac" says, "Some customers will enter into your market and others will leave...[Resegment] proactively instead of cutting prices across the board, which will destroy your profit streams." Visit Wharton Executive Education to read the entire article: "Focus on: Finding Strategic Sweet Spots in a Sour Economy".

Why Not?

RentHop.com, a start-up founded by Lee Lin and Wharton alumnus Lawrence Zhou, is truly pushing the boundaries of creativity. The website not only provides free information for several no-fee apartments throughout New York City, but also offers no-fee appointments with real estate agents- themselves. Don't worry, the RentHop founders have yet to quit their day jobs, but Lin and Zhou have plans to make this unique idea work.

Check out the article "Getting the Agent Without the Fee" featured in The New York Times.

NASA takes on SpaceX

Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX, a start-up company founded in 2002 that has eliminated traditional company layers of management and sub-contractors to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft with reduced costs and increased reliabilty, has beat out Boeing and Lockheed for the NASA Cargo Resupply Services contract worth $1.6 billion.

Check out the CNN.com video which features founder Elon Musk, a Wharton alumnus, here.

Wharton Entrepreneurship Conference 2009

Buy your tickets now for WEC taking place February 13th at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia. The conference will feature the first ever WEC 25 startup expo, as well as keynotes by Donny Deutsch from CNBC's "The Big Idea" and Julian Brodsky, co-founder of Comcast. Find out more here.

All About the Business Plan

You've got an unbelievable idea for a new business. But before you do anything, you need to have a detailed business plan in place. It's your blueprint for success. Bloomberg TV gives us some tips in "Writing a Business Plan", a segment featuring Wharton lecturer Lawrence Gelburd, Quaker BioVentures' Adele Oliva, and the VIP member company Henry Davidsen Suits.

TAKKLE Success

TechCrunch reports: Alloy Media + Marketing, a division of the publicly listed Alloy, has agreed to acquire Wharton alumni company, the high school sports social network and portal TAKKLE, and intends to fold it into its youth-focused media and advertising network http://www.teen.com/. TAKKLE is an online community service that enables young athletes to create sports profiles and connect with team coaches and college sports recruiters. While the terms and size of the acquisition were not disclosed, TAKKLE raised $7 million in venture capital funding in 2007, from investors like Sports Illustrated, the New York City Investment Fund, and many more.

Watch and listen to Devin Griffin, Wharton MBA class of 2009, talk about gaining real-world experience as a Wharton Entrepreneurial Intern Fellow, working at Takkle, Summer, 2008 here.