Author Archive for Dan Dorman

Elliott Bisnow

 

 

Trying to become an entrepreneur may be difficult without having any idea what kind of product or service you would like to provide for people. To make things even more challenging, is not having anyone to collaborate with and or brainstorm ideas. Often doing so may even lead to even more ideas you didn’t even think of. Well Elliott Bisnow created an organization to do exactly these things.

Bisnow founded the company Summit, which is really more of a community than a company, that helps bring entrepreneurs, innovators, and thought leaders together in a collaboration rich environment. In which they can strive to make a positive impact on the world. Among these people are the World’s best nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, athletes, and change makers.  All attendees are brought together through large scale annual events called the Summit Series.

Bisnow’s purpose for the Summit series is to create these environments that help immerse people in unique experiences that will result in long lasting relationships. Bisnow’s drive to use the power of collaboration for good is already starting to make an impact. The Summit series events have helped raise millions of dollars towards business, philanthropic, and environmental ventures.

Just two years ago Summit purchased Powder Mountain, which is located in Utah’s Northern mountain range, to create a permanent home for the Summit community. The Summit Powder Mountain community is a ski resort that will be the central site for all upcoming annual and year round events for the Summit Series.

Elliott Bisnow has created a service that will help the leaders around us to create positive growth.

 

Palmer Luckey

If you’re familiar with the gaming world then you should know that most of the time you are using some type of controller and you are looking at some type of screen as you play. Well the 21-year-old video game fan, Palmer Luckey, plans on changing the way games are played in a new and interesting way. He is managing to do so with his invention called the Oculus rift.

Luckey is working on perfecting his invention with the company he founded called Oculus VR. Now as I have stated before the usual gaming equipment are controllers and televisions. With Luckeys Oculus Rift he plans to immerse players into a virtual reality. The Oculus Rift itself is a virtual reality headset that displays the game being played directly in front of your eyes. Now what else is cool about this headset is that with every movement you make with your head it affects the way you see the game. For example, say that you physically rotate your head as if you were looking to the right and then left; the headset will monitor these movements and translate them into the game.

Luckey has already received endorsements from big name gaming companies such as Valve and id Software and has raised over $91 million dollars in funding for the Oculus Rift. With all this attention and funding who knows what the future of gaming has in store for this innovative and cool product the Oculus Rift.

Lucas Duplan

Image result for Lucas Duplan

 

This entrepreneur is different compared to the others I have blogged about. His name is Lucas Duplan and he is the founder of the biggest app that doesn’t exist yet. His new app idea is called Clinkle.

Lucas Duplan is a 22 year old Stanford computer-science major dropout out that is hard at work creating something very innovative in the world of digital payment. Duplan plans for Clinkle to completely eradicate the need for a wallet. The Clinkle app is planned to turn your phone into a digital wallet that you can pay for everything with.

But you may ask, hasn’t this already been invented with the likes of Square and Google Wallet? Well according to Duplan, Clinkle has a clear advantage over them. But what is this advantage? No one knows except for Duplan and his investors; such as Richard Branson and former PayPal CEO Peter Theil.

So, who knows what will become of Clinkle in the years to follow. Whether the general public gets to see Clinkle in action or not at all. I guess we will just have to wait and see.

MeetMe.com

Before Catherine Cook was an entrepreneur herself it was her brother Dave Cook that was the first entrepreneur in her family. The experience from Dave would end up helping Catherine with her business venture.

Being a new student at her high school Catherine Cook wanted a better way to get to know her classmates. One day Catherine and her brother Dave were flipping through their yearbook and started to brainstorm. After noticing how useless the information was that the yearbook had to offer she decided to do something about it. Catherine looked up to her brother Dave and thought that if he could have a successful start-up company she could to.

Catherine started the online social network website with the name MyYearBook.com. Which today is better known as MeetMe.com. At the time Catherine looked at Facebook and knew that it was a social network for people that you were already friends with. But Catherine’s goal for MeetMe.com was different. Catherine wanted to make a site that was meant for you to make new friends instead of just interacting with the friends you already have.

So through interesting quizzes and games and other aspects of the site Catherine achieved her goal. Catherine Cook is now worth $30 million dollars and MeetMe.com now gains 86,000 new users every day along with 300,000 new photos every day.

 

Tumblr: A Safe Place to Blog

I think this millennial entrepreneur is an appropriate candidate to be blogged about. At the young age of 29 David Karp is the founder of the blogging platform Tumblr. Now I am sure that many of you have at least heard of it because it currently has close to 50 million users. The founder himself is worth close to $200 million.

I would guess that many of you have heard of Twitter and Facebook which can be considered blogging platforms too but only on a micro-blogging level; compared to the tools meant for blogging such as WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad. Tumblr is meant to be a different kind of blogging platform compared to the others.

Karp intends Tumblr to be a place for blogging with a different feel to it. He believes that the other big blogging platforms are perfectly fine; he just thought they were too difficult to use for people who don’t think of themselves as good writers. So Karp created Tumblr as a tool/environment he thinks will make it easier and more meaningful for people to share their thoughts and ideas.

Karp created Tumblr for the people that don’t really enjoy writing but want to share their thoughts and ideas through images, words, and videos in a place they can feel comfortable. A place where people can build an online identity and be proud of what they built.

Millionaire at 16

Owens was inspired to get into the business world by the former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs. At age seven Christian Owens received his first computer. Then at the age of ten he taught himself how to web design. By the time Owens was 14 he had created his own companies by the names of Mac Bundle Box and Branchr. Mac Bundle Box was the first venture website Owens had created.

Mac Bundle Box was created to make it cheaper for consumers to buy popular Mac applications. Owens made this possible by selling these applications in a bundle rather than the applications being sold by themselves. This new way to sell apps had great early success by pulling in $700,000 in its first two years.

Owens then used the money earned from Mac Bundle Box to launch another company named Branchr. Branchr is an advertising pay-per-click company that Owens launched only a year after Mac Bundle Box. It works as a stage for owners of websites to sell advertising, and for business owners to buy this advertising. In its first year Branchr brought in a whopping $500,000. Combining this with the success from Mac Bundle Box is what made Owens a millionaire by the age of 16.  Branchr now has over 11,000 clients and sells more than 250 million advertisements a month.

Even with the success of his two businesses Owens does not plan to stop anytime soon. Owens plans to become the top name in mobile advertising and the top name in the internet world.