Teens in Tech - Startups

Are you a teen entrepreneur? Are you the CEO of a cool new startup? Are you the next “teen tycoon?” If you answer yes to any of these questions, then we have the contest for you! “The Next Teen Tycoon Video Contest” by Vertical Response, the well-known marketing solution provider, is looking for entrepreneurial teens to share their ideas with the world!

The Next Teen Tycoon Video Contest aims to help empower young entrepreneurs, by giving them the opportunity to pitch their ideas through video and win awesome prizes! Read to learn more

This is a great follow up to a recent Facebook related blog post, and now that Timeline is public its true potential is shining. What’s so great about it? That big, beautiful, cover photo is fantastic for marketing. I realize it’s only on your personal profile, but in that previous post you agreed that your personal Facebook profile is as powerful, if not more powerful than a fan page.

What’s so awesome about it? It’s a huge (851 x 315 pixels) advertisement for whatever you want. Mine, for example, is my personal blog. It’s non-intrusive, fits into the Facebook color scheme and is big, bold and traffic driving. When you use the personal marketing / networking methods I talked about in my previous post and you add some SVAPs (Silicon Valley Awesome Person) as friends they’ll immediately see a link to your website, blog, or whatever and you have yet another chance to impress them.

A little over a month ago, Teen entrepreneur, Safeer Mohiuddin launched Mezz, an application that takes a new spin on local discovery. Safeer describes Mezz as,

A hyperlocal mobile application and platform that allows people to discover and share what’s happening nearby. Discover fun and interesting things to do, share your discoveries with everyone locally and feel the local vibe.

Simply put, Mezz allows users to share and discover things around them. Mezz achieves this by allowing users to share “cards” that include an image, location, and description. These “cards” are aggregated based on proximity to the user’s location and placed into a feed. The feed organizes cards in accordance to proximity to current location and time since creation. Read to learn more!

Yesterday, teen entrepreneur, Sahil Lavingia launched his latest venture, Gumroad. Gumroad aims to make the sharing of digital content dead simple, by using links that allow buyers to enter their credit card information and purchase the digital good. After entering their credit card information, the buyer receives access to the piece of digital content. The general idea behind Gumroad is extremely clever, since the sale of digital goods can be cumbersome and frustrating at times.

First Impressions

After initial tests of Gumroad, I found the product to live up to all its expectations. Read to learn more about Gregory’s impressions of Gumroad!

Earlier today, 16-year-old programmer, Nick D’Aloisio launched Summly. Summly a tool that summarizes search results to help you quickly find relevant information. Along with the launch of Summly, D’Aloisio announced that he raised a $250,000 seed round of funding from billionaire investor, Li Ka-shing.

What is Summly?

Great question! Read to learn more about Summly!

This past Thursday, Twitter launched a massive design overhaul to their website and mobile application. Before this past Thursday, the Twitter website at times could seem clunky and difficult to navigate. As a result, I rarely used the website, posting almost all my tweets from the iOS and Mac apps. Twitter was long overdue for a sleek design that matches the 140 character ethos of the site.

Design

Aesthetically, the redesigned Twitter is absolutely gorgeous. The newest Twitter redesign follows a modular layout, where content is organized in easy-to-use boxes.

Okay, I lied. You’ve heard of this social media marketing website, and you might have even read a lot about how to use it to market your startup for little or no money. There’s tons of tactics that may or may not work, but there’s one you’re completely overlooking. The secret website I’m talking about is Facebook, but before you stop reading consider that you might be missing the most fundamental part of social media marketing. What part is that? The social part. Not the faux million-member-page social part, but the truly social part.

Are you under 20 years old and have an idea for a revolutionary new product? Do you have passion for entrepreneurship and feel that your ideas can’t wait till you finish your schooling? Then the “20 Under 20″ Thiel Fellowship is just for you!

Last year, Silicon Valley superstar, Peter Thiel, announced that he would give twenty young people, under 20 years old, $100,000 to drop out of school and pursue their entrepreneurial dreams for two years. Read to learn more about this exciting opportunity!

You’re probably reading the Teens in Tech Blog because you’re a teen and you’re involved in tech. The good and bad news: you play in an adult world. It’s true, there’s awesome teens in tech entrepreneurship and you should go meet all of them, but the fact remains that business is designed for adults and between school and startup life, there’s not much time left for being ‘normal’. It’s been proven that teens need to be social to be healthy and the antisocial teen is more likely to be emotionally unstable. Here’s the part where I interject my opinion: your startup isn’t everything. Assuming you don’t need to feed your family or pay the rent, doing a little at a time is a good way to go. If you’re already proclaiming that I’m full of it and about to stop reading, as I would have done even just a few months ago, I beg of you, read on and let me explain.

Editor’s Note: Ben Paster is the Founder of Strike Internet and loves to help businesses build community. You can follow him on twitter @BenPaster.

I have a favorite place in the world, I hope you do too. It’s not the beach, although I do love the beach, it’s not a little reading spot in my house, and it’s definitely not school! My favorite place, that gave me the start of my knowledge of technical things, is a small TV station in my town. The people who work there have always encouraged me, and ‘took me in’ when I was only eight years old. This TV station has been an invaluable asset for me in life, directly and indirectly shaped a lot of my views on technology, marketing, video production, and even life in general.

Ben Paster is the Founder of Strike Internet and loves to help businesses build community. You can follow him on twitter @BenPaster.
So this is a blog for entrepreneurial teens, but there’s an inherent problem with teens who run a business, they have these crazy things called classes! Yes, whether you want to believe it or not, your business will be going on and people will be buying while you’re sitting in math class. Sure, that’s great, I like to make money and learn math, but with the social internet, your customers expect near-instant support responses. If you have a well crafted value proposition, customers don’t care if you’re fifteen or fifty. That said, they also don’t expect your support to have math class conflicts and certainly won’t accept it as an excuse. Oh no! How could it possible for teens to run a business and finish high school or college?

For many teen entrepreneurs it is quite difficult to seek advice and mentorship for projects. Teens in Tech writer and Strike Internet CEO, Ben Paster, will launch his solution to this problem Thursday afternoon with the first part in his ongoing Twitter discussion for teen entrepreneurs.

Ben, who is both a skilled marketer and talented writer will moderate the conversation. As moderator Ben will ask questions and facilitate the conversation. Anyone can participate by attaching the Twitter hashtag #TeenBiz to their tweets.