Startups 101

Free online personal finance service, Mint.com aims to make managing and saving money online easy and secure. So Mint CEO Aaron Patzer, knows what he's talking about. Recently, Patzer gave a 45 minute presentation on building startups from the ground up, with his own candid disclosures and advice. Watch the video, and see the presentation deck, here.

The New Business School Stats

BusinessWeek reported some recent findings of the annual applicant study of QS World MBA Tour, a group that holds global MBA fairs. Women now make up 46% of worldwide MBA candidates and there have been shifts in preferred program length (more opt for one-year programs) and post-MBA career plans (the No.1 goal is to start a business), as explained by Wharton MBA alumnus Quacquarelli. Read more here.

Best Dressed

VIP alumni company Henry Davidsen dressed the Phillie Phanatic for the cover of Philadelphia for the 2009 Best of Philly issue. Looking sharp!

JibJab Meets President Obama

Alumni company JibJab recently created an original satire video of President Obama as a superhero that was shown at the RTCA dinner to President Obama and the many attendants. Check out this video on Facebook that shows Obama laughing at the JibJab Obama video, folllowed by a brief CBS interview with Gregg and Evan. To read about their experience meeting the President, click here.

Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2009

Brett Hurt, Wharton alum and co-founder and CEO of customer review management service Bazaarvoice, has been named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2009 Winner, the world’s most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs. Read more about Hurt here.

Super Angel Status

Alumni venture capital firm First Round Capital has become the country's most active seed-stage investor, according to BusinessWeek. Among other "super angels" such as Baseline Ventures and Felicis Ventures, First Round is funding startups and entrepreneurs at a time when large VC firms are holding back. Read more here.

What Elon Musk Thinks

Paypal founder and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk speaks about electric cars, hybrids, the Tesla and the mysterious ways of Detroit in the first of a two-part Knowledge@Wharton and Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs podcast series "Great Companies Are Built on Great Products". Listen to the podcast here.

America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs

Two Wharton alums, Alex Mittal, founder of Innova Materials, a company that makes antimicrobial products for private industry and uses those revenues to fund water purification systems for developing countries, and Felipe Vergara, co-founder of Lumni, a new investment system that uses private capital to fund higher education, were named among 25 of America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs in BusinessWeek.

President Obama's Small Business Plan Shared With Wharton's Own

Wharton MBA alumnus entrepreneur, Marco Lentini, founder and CEO of restaurant Gia Pronto, was selected as one of the small business owners selected to participate in a round table discussion with President Obama regarding his small business plan. Read more here.

Spring Cleaning: Pixily Style

Pixily, the self described "interactive document management service," founded by Wharton graduate Prasad Thammineni, can help you clear your desk clutter. For a monthly fee ranging from $4.95 to $59.95, Pixily will take any paper documents you send by prepaid envelope and "digitize" them into a private Web account. Check out the BusinessWeek product review here.

PlaceVine Ahead of the Curve

PlaceVine, a brand integration service founded by Wharton MBA alums who were members of the Venture Initiation Program, recently raised an additional $200,000 in financing from NYCSeed, as reported in BusinessWeek's article focusing on the recent trend of product integration.

The four-person company provides a fee-based classifieds service, and now plays a key role in unifying the entertainment and advertising communities, currently connecting over 300 content producers to more than 200 brands and agencies.

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).

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.

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.

Innovation At Its Best

Organic Motion has taken motion capture technology and applied it to a Stage system, allowing for 360 degrees of digital information taken from a human beings' natural movements. Co-founded by developer Andrew Tschesnok and Wharton alumnus Jonathan Rand, Organic Motion aims for many future applications of the Stage system, ranging from its use for medical research to the movie industry. Recently, Organic Motion Stage Systems was named by PopularMechanics a Top 10 New World-Changing Innovation of the Year! Check out the article here, and while you're at it, take a look at the rest of the Top 10.

From 0 to $7.5 Million

You probably have heard of jibjab.com, a site known for its video parodies and personalized internet gags. Founded by Gregg Spiridellis, a Wharton educated ex-investment banker, and his brother Evan, an accomplished animator, JibJab has become quite the success story. TechCrunch recently reported that JibJab closed "a $7.5 million Series C funding round with participation from new investors Overbrook Entertainment (a production company co-founded by Will Smith) and Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as existing investor Polaris Venture Partners." Ten years after JibJab first launched, the site is now ranked by Quantcast to be among the Top 100 most popular sites in the U.S.

Buzz Marketing Expert Andy Sernovitz's Quick Blogging Advice #7

Andy Sernovitz is a prolific writer and consultant on entrepreneurial marketing. Check out his blog, "Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That!" for great tips on writing your own company blog. In fact, check it out for all of the tips and tools he offers start ups. He's one Wharton alum who was listening closely to the classroom lectures of Wharton Marketing Prof. Leonard Lodish who wrote the book on "Entreperneurial Marketing"--literaly.

Venture Initiation Program Companies Announced

The suspense is over! Wharton's new roster of Venture Initiation Program companies have been announced and you can check them out here. If you are a student at Penn and have an idea for starting your own business, don’t wait until you graduate to get it going. Leverage the Penn community and apply to VIP. The next round of applications are due in April. Maybe you could end up like this guy, who started his business in VIP back in 2003.