MBA Idea No.12: Millionaire Dating Sites
Ranked the top wealthy dating site on the web, MillionaireMatch features a “certified millionaire” dating program requiring documentation of over a million in assets or $150,000 in annual gross earnings—interestingly, a compensation segment most top MBAs fall into after graduation…
The site describes itself as: the first, most effective and largest site in the world to connect with, date, and marry successful, beautiful people. Our members include CEOs, pro athletes, doctors, lawyers, investors, entrepreneurs, beauty queens, fitness models, and Hollywood celebrities, just to name a few…
If you ever wondered if someone was dating you for money, you can now know for sure.
MillionaireMatch offers a white-label program where you can setup your own millionaire dating website using their platform and earn affiliate revenue for signups ($2) and membership purchases ($30).
Check out: YourMillionaireDate, WealthyDater, and DateRichSingles as examples of affiliates using the MillionaireMatch white label program.
While we haven’t found information on the founders of MillionaireMatch so far, their offices are located in Toronto, Canada:
5334 Yonge Street, Suite 141
Toronto, Ontario M2N 6V1, Canada
Check out full review here.
MBA Idea No.11: Sell Your Vacation Photos
iStockPhoto.com turns your photos into cash money by selling them to companies for use in marketing and advertising.
If you own a digital SLR or other semi-professional camera, everything from your scenic vacation photos, to baby pictures, to wedding snaps, to family portraits can become attention grabbing visual accents to advertisements, websites and marketing materials around the world.
Buyers of photography search through thousands of well-indexed archived images available for sale.
Price ranges by size and quality, plus any premium sellers would like to charge for what they believe are their best photos. There’s even a “dollar bin” to buy the most inexpensive of the photo options.
While informal polls on iStockPhoto forums estimate average revenue per photo at $11.01 USD, there is likely a selection bias with the most successful photographers responding.
Some complain that iStockPhoto undercuts traditional stock photo market, both in price and in commission fees (~50% is industry norm and iStockPhoto charges around 20-45%).
iStockPhoto.com was founded by Bruce Livingstone, a Canadian entrepreneur educated at the University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, Alberta College of Art and Design and The Banff Centre for the Arts.
Bruce Livingston, founder of iStockPhoto.com. Music teacher (as teenager), self-styled graphic designer, toured as punk rock musician, reinvented the stock photography industry, started successful design company Evolvs Media Inc and website host Webcore Labs Inc, sold iStockphoto for $50million, appointed Senior Vice President at Getty Images, business mentor.
MBA Idea No.10: Flying windmills
Joby Energy develops airborne wind turbines.
The machines generate electricity high in the air where winds blow powerfully and consistently compared to winds available for land-based windmills.
Other companies in the space include Magenn, which makes a balloon-based solution, Ampyx, which uses a plane-based solution, and Sky Windpower, which uses helicopters.
There are some kite-based projects as well, including: aeroix, KiteGen, and Laddermill.
Plus, China is investing in the field with projects from Hummer Dynamo and the city of Foshan.
Here’s what the balloon-based windmill looks like:
If you’re interested in the industry, check out: The Airborne Wind Energy Consortium and their September 2010 conference at Stanford.
Joby Energy was founded by JoeBen Bevirt, who holds mechanical engineering degrees from Stanford and University of California, Davis.
** Special thanks to Jim Wilson (Stanford MBA ‘11) for the links and info.
Founder
JoeBen Bevirt is an inveterate entrepreneur born with a passion for engineering that has driven the formation of four successful companies over the past 10 years.
In 2000, JoeBen co-founded Velocity11 which developed high-performance laboratory equipment. He served as President & CEO until 2002, as President until 2006, and as a board member until the sale to Agilent Technologies in 2007. Under his leadership, Velocity11 repeatedly achieved record organic growth.
JoeBen founded Joby, Inc. in 2005 to develop, market, and sell useful, unique, and delightful consumer products. Profitable almost immediately, Joby continues to deliver new products and record profits.
JoeBen turned his focus to renewable energy and in 2008, founded Joby Energy Inc. to develop groundbreaking airborne wind turbines to harness the abundant power of high-altitude wind. Airborne wind turbines generate electricity at prices that promise to transform the way we power the planet.
In 2009, leveraging the control systems and electric propulsion systems developed at Joby Energy, JoeBen founded Joby Aviation to revolutionize how we commute. Joby Aviation is developing a compact electric personal aircraft designed for efficient high speed flights. Electric propulsion enables our aircraft to takeoff and land vertically while retaining the efficieny of an airplane.
JoeBen holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Davis and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. JoeBen holds 12 U.S. patents.
MBA Idea No.9: Gamble Shopping
Swoopo.com lets people gamble against each other to win the right to buy TVs, electronics and luxury items at ultra-low prices.
Swoopo is bidding fee auction site.
Participants pay a non-refundable fee ($0.60) to place a small incremental bid ($0.01) on a product they want.
Each bid extends the auction time of the item by a few seconds.
When the auction time for an item expires, the person to cast the last bid wins the item for the last price listed. As you play, you can browse the history of other players, and figure out strategies to out bid them.
Similar auction sites have been created around verticals, such as oohilove.com for women’s luxury handbags.
Swoopo is led by CEO Frank Han, a Stanford MBA and Yale applied math major.
Frank Han
Chief Executive Officer
With over 15 years of experience in driving growth for innovative online businesses, Frank’s proven leadership ability provides Swoopo with the key vision necessary to improve and expand Swoop’s operations worldwide. Through his dedication to providing users with a fun, trustworthy, solid entertainment shopping experience, Frank insures that Swoopo is a great place to work and shop!
Before joining Swoopo, Frank ran the innovative online fashion mall Glimpse.com, which aggregated products from top-line manufacturers and retailers and provided fashion shoppers with a destination where they could shop across stores. Frank eventually sold this company to TheFind, a leading shopping search company. Prior to Glimpse, Frank ran the internet shopping business for the Home Shopping Network, where he drove forth the concept of “entertainment shopping.” Frank also ran eCommerce for Caesars Entertainment, was a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of eToys.com, and has worked with several venture capitalists, including Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. Frank received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS in Applied Mathematics from Yale University.
When Frank isn’t working, he enjoys sharing his vast knowledge of rock music, which can be linked to his extensive LP collection (despite his claims that he hasn’t listened to an LP in over 10 years).
Dream Auction Item: Auctioning off a small painting by Pablo Picasso on behalf of a charity.
MBA Idea No.8: Fan-funded Fashion Designers
StyleTrek.com helps emerging designers find funding and marketing support from fans and admirers.
The site is for two kinds of people: First, those who want to support fashion designers—style trekkers—both by buying their products and contributing financially as they develop their designs.
Second, emerging designers from around the world passionate about design, but unable to access the financial and marketing resources to launch their careers in a highly competitive, hits-based market.
The business builds on the concept of “crowd funding”, a new trend using social media and fans to fund new ideas.
The trend seems to happen more typically in the arts, on sites like Kickstarter.com, where funding is more difficult to find, and financial returns are likely modest.
StyleTrek.com is led by CEO Cecilia Pagkalinwan, who studied communication arts and journalism at Hofstra University:
CEO – Cecilia Pagkalinawan – cecilia at styletrek.com Cecilia has a track record in launching and marketing successful e-commerce businesses. She has launched and marketed online stores for Nine West, Burberry, Frette, and La Perla. She has grown sales from 40 – 70% year over year for fashion brands.
She has experience in running and working for internet start-ups such as K2, RichFX, Abilon, and was CEO of BoutiqueY3K, an ecommerce consulting firm. After working at dot com start-ups, Cecilia joined established multi-national luxury and fashion brands in senior and executive management positions and was involved in ecommerce, merchandising, marketing and operations for Burberry, Frette, and La Perla.
Cecilia was recognized in 1999 by Silicon Alley Reporter among the ” Top 100 Internet Executives in NY.” She was named the National Association of Women Business Owner’s “New York Businesswoman of the Year” in 2000. Cecilia is among 96 executives featured in the book “Distinguished Asian- American Business People” published in 2004. She has been featured in WSJ, Asia WSJ, VOGUE, Asiaweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune Small Business, Entrepreneur, Advertising Age, E-commerce Times and was on CNN’s “Entrepreneurs Only.” She is a frequent speaker at conferences on E-commerce, Multi-channel Marketing and Entrepreneurship.
MBA Idea No.7: Group ATM Cards
WePay.com lets you deposit, withdraw and spend money from bank accounts shared across friends.
If you’re on vacation and sharing expenses you can avoid adding up and splitting every restaurant bill, bar tab and hotel room.
Instead, everyone can deposit money into WePay.com by credit card or bank account, and get group ATM cards that draw from a shared bank account.
WePay provides itemized detail on expenses online.
In additions to vacations and parties, people are using it for club dues and splitting bills among roommates.
One tradeoff to using the service: There are some significant fees that you’d need to pay in both the deposit and withdrawal of money.
Founded by Computer Science Major and Political Science Major from Boston College.
MBA Idea No.6: Skills monitoring social network
Zapoint replaces expensive in-house HR skills monitoring software with on-demand services.
Employees and managers track and review skills of colleagues in a closed social network.
They discuss topics, make assessments and potentially make better team building and promotion decisions.
Employee profiles list out the length and depth of expertise among skill sets and even note the “decrease” in skills left unused for extended periods of time.
Founded by Hult MBA, Chris Twyman:
Chris Twyman
CEO, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Born in the UK, Chris started his technology career in telecommunications, where he was a financial analyst for Telstra, in Australia. After that he joined Sybase where he defined and managed product development for their telecoms product range. Chris then joined Computer Associates to manage the marketing team for their database products. During this time Chris was on the divestment committee for a business unit that was sold to a Private Equity team in California.
Chris founded Zapoint after seeing an opportunity to improve efficiency in the way everyone manages HR processes. He pulled together a team of Mathematicians, HR and Recruiting executives to build the industries first objective measurement tool for evaluating people. Launched in 2008, Zapoint has attracted both large and small customers in Europe and North and South America.
Chris has a Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering and a Masters degree in International Marketing along with an MBA from the ADL School of Management.
MBA Idea No.5: Work Desk with a Treadmill
TreadDesk offers quiet, low-rise treadmills to integrate with height adjustable desks.
The idea is to walk at a reasonable pace while working at a desk. For aesthetics, there’s even a model with a floor riser built flush with the top of the treadmill.
Someone who’s 175 lbs can lose 594 calories an hour if they’re going 4 miles an hour.
Check out treadmill desk video on ABC. Another video from NBC’s today show on Treadmill Desks is available here. Generally, companies are starting to support the effort hoping to lower healthcare costs and generally improve morale.
Educational background of TreadDesk Founder, Jerry Carr, not available.
MBA Idea No.4: Share purchase info with friends
Blippy lets thousands of people to share buying history from credit cards and e-commerce accounts with friends.
Find out what your friends are buying, where they shop, what restaurants they go to. Check out video.
In December 2009 CNN discussed the “death of privacy” using Blippy as a prime example of the risks of sharing private info.
Four months later, the press found credit card numbers from Blippy users available on the internet, uncovered via Google search results. Blippy claims the numbers were from only 4 beta testers of the site, whose data had been unknowingly cached by Google and that Blippy was otherwise secure to use.
Blippy was founded by two Stanford CS grads and an information studies major from Syracuse U—all of whom share their purchases via Blippy .
THE TEAM
We here at Blippy are working hard to make the web more meaningful, relevant and social. We are:
Ashvin Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO
Ashvin was most recently the VP of Engineering at Affinity Circles, where he managed an engineering team across Development & QA, Operations, and Technical Support. Ashvin graduated from Stanford in 2005 with a degree in computer science.
Ashvin Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO is sharing 10 accounts.
Chris Estreich, Co-Founder & CTO
Chris was most recently a Senior Software Engineer at Oodle helping build the platform that powers MySpace, Walmart, and Facebook Classifieds. Chris graduated from Stanford in 2005 with a degree in computer science.
Chris Estreich, Co-Founder & CTO is sharing 14 accounts.
Philip Kaplan, Co-Founder & President
Philip was most recently entrepreneur-in-residence at Charles River Ventures. Prior to CRV, Philip founded AdBrite, F-dcompany, and several other ventures. Philip graduated from and is on the board of advisors of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.
Philip Kaplan, Co-Founder & President is sharing 21 accounts.
MBA Idea No. 3: Dating tricks using statistics
OkCupid offers free dating site services for over a million users.
To generate press attention, and for the good of science, it data mines user behavior to discover fundamental truths about the human condition with sample values (1.6M+ users) that righteously surpass the vast majority of sociological studies in academia.
Example: Analyzing 500K dating conversations, OkCupid notes the words you use in a first-time message weigh heavily in establishing future relationships.
Below bar charts show green as positive influence, red as negative influence as plotted against average response rate of 32%.
To summarize:
Tip 1: Stay away from creepy/trashy greetings
Tip 2: Don’t use “net speak”, you will not be cool.
Tip 3: Avoid physical complements
Tip 4: Avoid religion in opening conversations
Based on empirical data, the conclusion is obvious:
Don’t say: Hey, sexy cutie, luv ur god, cant u holla?
Instead, say: What’s up atheist? It’s nice that you’re awesome.
OkCupid is founded by a Stanford MBA, an MIT PhD and Math Majors from Harvard.
