Young Entrepreneur Scholarship Winners For Yanik’s Underground Written by Michael | Posted in Young Entrepreneurs

This is the third year Yanik Silver has offered young entrepreneurs around the world a chance to come to his seminar for free. For the past two years, I have hosted the competition on Retireat21! Every year we say we will accept 10 winners, but it’s more like 12 because we have so many great applications, this year we accepted even more because of that same reason. Check these guys out, expect to see great things from them in the future.

If your heading to Underground this year, let us know! Will be great to see everyone.

Top Young Entrepreneurs In The Making

Benjamin Jacques

My name is Benjamin Jacques and I’m the founder of MeltingWaves.com. I’m a graphic design student at the Savannah College of Art and Design and I live and breathe art. I created Melting Waves with the intentions of helping artists in college share their artwork and make a name for themselves so that they can be set when they graduate from school. If you look at any marketer that has products to promote and services to sell, you’ll see that there’s a talented designer behind them making everything look nice and marketable. Well what if designers themselves learned how to create their own products and services to sell and really jumped into the “make money online” business? They wouldn’t have to hire anyone else to design for them because they already have that knowledge! I created Melting Waves to show designers that they have a tremendous advantage in this industry and that they can get started a lot faster than anyone who doesn’t have design knowledge. I really just want to see artists do well because they bring so much creativity to the world and they would have such an advantage over the crowds trying to make money online if they just knew where to begin. That’s where Melting Waves takes them by the hand and shows them how to use their skills to their advantage, to make a name for themselves, increase their incomes, and dive into online marketing industries that they have probably never considered before. I want to bring more creativity into an already beautiful world, and I know I can do that by giving aspiring artists a helping hand when it comes to creating success.

Eddys Velasquez

Eddys Velasquez always knew that the 9 to 5 job was not for him and because of this he decided to take massive action and become his own boss going from $0 to $60 per hour within 1 year, at the age of 15.  He then stumbled on a twitter post that introduced him to online marketing where within a few short weeks he made his 1st $1,500 online in a span of 3 days.  Soon after that he discovered that his passion was to help his friends achieve the same success doing what they love to do and that’s why he decided to start IncomeBoss.com

David King

I started off in myspace marketing when myspace was still cool and built a business using myspace and myspace groups.  As myspace faded away I evolved as the web did and started using facebook, twitter and youtube and blogging.  I began affiliate and info-marketing through search engine optimization and social marketing and haven’t looked back since.  I have been working full time from home online for 2 years now and love every minute of it.  I have info-products in the health markets and in the internet marketing/biz markets and will continue to create more. Consistency and persistency really pays off!

Kirsty Price

My name is Kirsty Price and I am 20 years old, from Aberdeenshire, Scotland. I am in my final year of studying Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. I started my first business at the age of 19 and I jumped head-first into entrepreneurship to help me pay my rent! At that time, I set up my first ecommerce site and I also dabbled in ebay for a while. This first site was a failure because I really had no idea what I was doing, so I went back to the drawing board and learned from my mistakes. A few months later I started my second business. This time I was determined to succeed. This was another ecommerce site called Mademoiselle Boutique which sold luxury adult products primarily to females. This business did much better because I went away and studied everything I could find about online business in my spare time. I loved running it, but I still wanted something more that my ecommerce site wouldn’t allow for. Before I became interested in online business and entrepreneurship, I wanted to be a teacher. I realised that I still wanted to teach and inspire, but not in a classroom. Thanks to the internet, I could! So in late 2010, I moved on from my ecommerce business and I decided to combine my passion for teaching and online business to create my current business, Laptop Rebels! Laptop Rebels is still very new, but it will soon sell information products and online courses for other young (primarily twenty-something females) people looking to learn the basics about starting an online business so they can avoid working a 9 to 5 job they have no passion for.

Brian Moran

Created Get10000Fans.com after making it big on Facebook in the baseball industry. Using Get 10,000 Fans to teach other small business how to use Facebook to actually grow their business, increase sales, and build a huge following of loyal fans.

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Dusty Reron

My name is Dusty Reron and I am from Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada). I’m the founder of iJailbreak.com, a leading web blog covering everything latest about jailbreaking/unlocking Apple’s iDevices, Sony and any other revolutionary device that can jailbroken. We provide in depth tutorials, app and product reviews, and have been featured on many popular sites. It’s a blog that stands out from the crowd with our focus on building a community that you need to see to understand.

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Jaden Easton-Ellett

My name is Jaden Easton-Ellett and I am from Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada). I am currently 16 years old and I am the Co-Founder of a technology blog called iJailbreak.com. Where we focus writing in-depth news, how-to’s and reviews on electronic devices such as the iPhone. Our blog is also a leading promoter of jailbreaking (opening up electronic devices to user driven modifications), where we share our knowledge and help other users jailbreak their devices. Ever since we started iJailbreak.com we have been big believers in running a culture based blog that cares about our readers; not just our profits. This has lead to the success of our blog and has brought us phenomenal results in only 3 months that you need to see to believe!

Molly Dunkle & Katie Barstow

Katie and I started our company together in 2006. We began with a hobby for making lip balm and turned it into a full business. We are just revamping our company website (www.sweetscosmetics.com) this month, and we are hoping to have it finished by March! Our goal for this conference is to learn some techniques and tips for selling online. Looking forward to meeting everyone and networking! Thank you again for a wonderful opportunity, it is going to be a great trip!

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Jack Cascio

I am Jack Cascio and I run an online business “Jump Out The Gym”.  I started this business with the former strength coach/physical therapist of the New York Mets (Jeff Cavaliere).  My business is dedicated to increasing an athletes vertical jump.  I have seen continuous growth with this business and am looking to get into other niches (speed, quickness, etc) as well as releasing my own workout supplement line.

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James Sun

My name is James Sun and I am a Grade 10 high school student at Earl Haig Secondary School who has a passion for business and entrepreneurship. I also am very involved with sports,public speaking, DECA and I also chair a Student Advisory Board for a new non-profit organization called One Prosper International. I first started doing business last year as the President of a Junior Achievement company called RAWR which sold gift baskets and candy kebabs. We had our ups and downs and I learned a lot from the mistakes. This learning experience got me excited to do even more business!

As a result, after our company liquidated, this year, I became the President of another Junior Achievement company named Top-Out. This company has twenty student employees from over the Toronto area. Our slogan is “A Story Behind Each and Every T-Shirt” because we sell unique hand-made customized t-shirts. What really distinguishes us from our competitors is that our products are considered affordable artwork created by students.

Freeman LaFleur

I am the twenty three year old cofounder of LoDo Magazine, Denver’s alternative lifestyle and entertainment source. I’ve been involved in a variety of different startups since the  age of seventeen, including a clothing line, a non profit, and multiple websites. I am a strong advocate of entrepreneurship and personal branding because I know how life changing your first sale or client can be. My eventual goal is to coach others through DIYPersonalBranding.com on how to take their business or service to the next level by getting it online, promoting it effectively, and automating it. I truly believe that we are about to see a massive jump in the number of entrepreneurs over the next few years, as people begin to realize that it has never been easier to start a business and that digital marketing is the biggest game changer in history.

Mattis Weiler

My name is Mattis Weiler, I’m 20 years old and a starting internet entrepreneur based in Munich, Germany, I had the pleasure to meet Michael at the Awesomenessfest in Costa Rica before Christmas. Since I had always been madly into 3D graphics and animation, but was not keen on working 60h+/week on a feature film production as an average paid specialist only following orders and fulfilling somebody else’s dream, I was looking for alternative ways to get make some money with my passion. So I started freelancing and did some minor project work, but it still didn’t fit for me. When I got to meet Michael in December, I was highly impressed of his techniques and the lifestyle he had, and decided to work out a plan of combining my two passions, 3d animation and the internet, and my desire to work where I want, whenever I want.

My website ww.cgiant.com is going to provide a free video tutorial search engine and recommendations covering (3d animation, video, web and photo as categorys)to allow users on specific skill levels to gain quick refferal to the most suitable instructions on their needs. I also plan on providing interviews and reviews to various products like training, software and other goodies related to the making of computer graphics.

Daniel McClure

Daniel McClure is a young entrepreneur that is working towards his dream of running a digital empire that can be run from anywhere. Currently based in the UK, he serves clients from around the globe developing membership websites and blogs that enable business owners to share thier vision with the world. Whilst initially only offering one-to-one web development and marketing services you can now find everything from; review sites based upon real experience, through to marketing focused WordPress skins amongst his digital portfolio.

About Michael

Michael created this website back in 2007. Since then, it has gone on to receive millions of visitors, featured in newspapers, magazines and some of the worlds top websites. If you want to do something similar, keep reading.

100 Websites To See Before You Die (Part 1)

Shape the Hive

What are humans, really, but so many bees, buzzing away? That’s the question (we think) asked by Shape The Hive, a visual “experiment in digital collaboration.”

In more concrete terms, Shape The Hive is a massive, color-coded hex grid, where anyone can use a sort of virtual kaleidoscope to fill in hexes with distorted images or videos. It’s fun to have a look around, and easy if you’re inclined to participate, so have a look.

Get The Glass 

We’re not the biggest fans of blurring the line between advertisement and gaming, but we’re willing to make exceptions in two instances: 1) When it comes to frosty, delicious milk. 2) When the game in question is a beautifully imagined and well thought-out virtual board game, with graphics that still look amazing three years after the fact.

And what do you know—Get The Glass succeeds on both of those counts! It’s almost like we planned it that way.

The Wilderness Downtown 

The Wilderness Downtown is a collaboration between Arcade Fire, director Chris Milk, and Google that uses the media capabilities of HTML 5 to create an internet music video that’s personalized to the viewer. Even if you’re not a fan of the music, it’s worth checking out as a technology demo for HTML 5 from some of the crack engineers at Google.

False.jp

What we have here is a collection of simple visualizations (most respond only to the movement of your mouse cursor, and the left mouse button) from a Japanese graphic designer. You won’t find any deep content on this page, but we suspect these mesmerizing visualizations will keep you entertained for longer than you’d like to admit.

Pretty Loaded 

Adobe (née Macromedia) Flash technology has allowed for a boom of rich media on the web, but it’s brought its share of problems as well. One such problem is the vile loading period, keeping you from enjoying your web content or video game. Thankfully, some designers realize that it’s important to keep users engaged during this period, and have elevated the preloader progress bar to an art form. PrettyLoaded celebrates these unsung heroes of web development, showcasing the very best of preloaders from around the web.

HubbleSite

Sometimes, you need to be reminded that—no matter how big your personal problems might seem—you’re just an insignificant mote in an unfathomably large universe. Other times, you just want to see kick-ass images from the most righteous piece of optics we’ve ever blasted into the cosmos. In either case, hubblesite.org has you covered.

We Feel Fine 

Say what you will about the touchy-feely sentiment behind WeFeelFine, the site is an interesting technological experiment in extracting data from the far-flung corners of the internet. Just click the big pink heart for a swirling, up-to-the-minute graph of how everybody’s feeling on the internet. Click a particle to read the sentence in question, and click the question to visit the blog it came from.

Line Rider 

For some, Line Rider is a canvas. For others, it’s a way of life. But for most, Line Ride is just a flash game—where you draw out a course for a little sledder guy to ride on.  It’s a kick, and something everyone should try, if for no other reason than to understand the effort it takes to make the kind of Line Rider videos that get passed around on sites like Reddit and Digg.

EyezMaze

EyezMaze may not sound familiar to you, but if you’re a fan of browser games you’ve probably played on of their internet-famous GROW series. If you haven’t, you should check them out right away. The basic conceit is this: You have to place a set number of elements into a scene, in a certain order. The order matters, so you have to follow the clues in the impossibly-charming animations to figure out the optimal order and win the game. We recommend you start with GROW v.3

Anasomnia 

The first thing that’s amazing about Anasomnia: The densely-packed, surreal dreamscape animations that only play when the lights in your room are out (although you can trick it if you cover up your webcam with your hand).

The second thing that’s amazing about Anasomnia: Every dream is different. Through some sort of procedural generation trickery, Anasomnia will be a different show every time you turn your lights out.

BLU 

If you’re in the kind of mood to have your mind blown, allow us to suggest that you visit the website of the street-artist BLU. Street art like graffiti? Sort of, but in motion. Check out the “Video” tab on the BLU website for a collection of four stop-motion street animations that are as insane as they are long. To see the craziest one first, start with “Big Bang Big Boom.”

Mr. Wong’s Soup’Partments 

In another testament to the fact that nobody wastes time as spectacularly as hundreds of people wasting time together, Mr. Wong’s Soup’Parments is a collaborative pixel-art image of a tower—each individual floor drawn and submitted by a different person. The final product is the “tallest virtual tower in the world” and a great way to kill a few minutes. Prepare to wear out that scroll wheel!

Blue Ball Machine 

Another example of community-driven pixel art, the Blue Ball Machine consists of tiled animated gifs representing the Rube Goldberg-esque workings of a giant blue-ball-processing facility. Originally spawned as part of a challenge on the Something Awful forums, the original Blue Ball Machine image became a popular YTMND site, and spawned a number of follow-ups.

The Million Dollar Homepage

The Million Dollar Homepage contains only a single image. That image is a giant, ugly, expensive advertisement. And that giant, ugly advertisement made some college kid in the UK one MILLION dollars.

The idea is simple: Create a 1,000,000 pixel image, and sell those pixels off for a dollar each (in blocks of 100). People are free to use those pixels to link to advertise whatever they want (online casinos and scams mostly, it seems). Every single pixel sold out, and Alex Tew of Wilshire England made a cool milli. How could he make so much off of something so dumb? Because he thought of it first

80 Gigapixel London 

It can be hard to keep up with who’s currently winning the “world’s largest photo” race, but right now the king is this360-degree panorama of London. Clocking in at 80 Gigapixels (that’s 8,000 times the resolution of your average point-n-shoot camera, for reference) this panaroma is detailed enough to read the license plate on a faraway bus.

Waybackmachine 

Another piece of internet history (both itself, and as a tool for exploring internet history) is the Wayback Machine. Simply put, the Wayback Machine will take any URL, and create a gallery of historical versions of that website for you to explore. Check out some of your favorite websites, and marvel at how far we’ve come in just 5 or 10 years.

Cleverbot 

You can’t call yourself a true connoisseur of internet curios until you’ve attempted to have a full-fledged conversation with a chatbot. People have been trying to make convincing Chatbots since the 70s, and even though we’re still far from something that’ll pass the Turing Test, it can be a real kick to try talking to one of these. Like it’s predecessor Jaberwocky, Cleverbot learns more with each conversation it has.

After you’ve fooled around for a while, check out the “cleverness” section for a collection of funny or impressive conversations between Chatbot and other people.

Rules For My Unborn Son 

We don’t have a whole lot of blogs on this list because—by their very nature—they’re not really a single-serving kind of thing. All the same, Rules For My Unborn Son’s been getting regularly updated for long enough that pretty much anyone can get a healthy dose of awesome advice just by spending an hour or two paging through the archives.

Demoscene.tv 

If you’re not familiar with the demoscene, here’s what you need to know: there’s a subset of computer programs, musicians and artists who engage in competitions to fit the most impressive and extravagant visual displays (and sometimes even games) into teeny-tiny chunks of script. We’re talking whole music videos crammed down into 64K or smaller. At Demoscene.tv, you can get a feel for what the demoscene is all about without having to run any strange code on your computer—all the demos are streamed, a la YouTube.

Perry Bible Fellowship

One of the few truly classic webcomics, The Perry Bible Fellowship is a pitch-perfect mixture of whimsical art, extra-dark humor and good, old-fashioned surrealism. The author Nicholas Gurewitch still updates sporadically, but you can absorb the whole archive in one sitting (if you’ve got an afternoon to spare). 

Zombo.com

What is Zombo.com? 

You can do anything at Zombo.com.

You’re The Man Now Dog 

From the “know your internet history” department, every nerdling worth their salt should visit Yourethemannowdog.com at least once. If you’re a newcomer to this whole internet thing, you might find yourself a bit confused.

“What is this?” you might ask. “Is this supposed to be funny?”

Well it is, or it was, and more importantly it spawned a wave of text-on-image imitators that became known as “YTMNDs.” The meme’s seen better days, but you can still find a never-ending stream of new YTMNDs at www.ytmnd.com.

Canabalt 

Sometimes the simplest games are the best. That’s the case with Canabalt, a game that only uses two buttons—and they both do the same thing. Canabalt’s running-and-jumping action might seem shallow at first, but the high speed, satisfying physics and gorgeous pixel art make it hard to stop playing.

Dino Run

Another running/jumping type of game, Dino Run has more features than Canabalt, and also the added melodrama of running from the end of the world itself.

Keep your eyes open to collect all the hidden eggs.

LMGTFY

A truly brilliant web-burn, LMGTFY.com delivers a one-two punch of snark and technological superiority to anyone stupid or unfortunate enough to ask you for help online.

Wait, you want to know what LMGTFY.com is? Well, how about we take care of that for you?

Protip: Combine with a URL shortener like bit.ly for extra effectiveness.

Let’s Play Archive 

Ever wanted know what all the fuss about a game is, but don’t have the time or willpower to actually play it? Head to the Lets Play Archive, where you can check out tons of archived “let’s play” threads from the Something Awful forum—where people post guided walkthroughs of video games, frequently accompanied with hilarious commentary and illustrations.

Desktop Tower Defense

You’re not going to find any shortage of flash games in the Tower Defense genre online, but Desktop Tower Defense is THE classic. It’s a open-field-style tower defense, so you have to create and update a maze of defensive structures to  fight off wave after wave of bad guys. Careful—VERY addictive.

TV Tropes

You might check out TVTropes and think “Hey, this isn’t a single-serving site, this is an amazing resource that I’ll come back to again and again!”

Well it’s not. The diabolic thing about TVTropes is that any actual utility is an illusion—your life will never be enriched because you know what a “Woobie” is, or who the members of a Five Man Band are. It’s an elaborately designed trap, meant to capture all your free time.

Therefore, go once, waste a day, and then never look back. You’ll thank us later.

Globe Genie

If you ask us, the coolest thing about Google Maps is the street view, which allows you to get a like-you’re-really-there 360-degree view of any location that Google’s vans have trawled. It’s an awesome way to get some perspective on places you’ve never been, but it can be hard to choose where you want to “visit.”

Globe Genie takes the work out your Google Maps globetrotting. Just select which continents you’d like in the running, and then click the Teleport button.

For added fun, uncheck the “Current Location” button and try to guess what country you’re in based on just your surroundings.

Autotopsy

Who knew an educational site about auto insurance could be so interesting? In this dramatic simulation, you tag along as insurance company investigator surveys the scene of a horrific accident. Suprisingly solid visual effects and live-action cutscenes combine to give you a morbidly entertaining look into the way that insurance companies determine who gets paid and who doesn’t.

The Best Page In the Universe

As much as anything on the internet can be considered “old school,” The Best Page In the Universe (better known as the home of Maddox’s epic rants) is old school. Online and semi-regularly updated since 1997, anyone who’s been on the internet long should have visited it at least once by now. If you haven’t, now’s the time to catch up on some comedy and net history.

Cyrkam Airtos

What happens when you take a normal timekilling activity and turn it into a flash timekiller? You get a veritable vortex of timekilling—A vortex named Cyrkam Airtos.

If you haven’t played it before, Cyrkam Airtos is a surprisingly challenging flash game about tossing crumpled-up paper into a garbage can. Sounds easy? Give it a try and tell us your high score.

Star Wars Weather 

We’ve had about enough of weather websites that just tell you boring, useless details like the “temperature” and the “humidity” and “whether or not it will rain.” Star Wars Weather cuts through all the BS and tells you what you really want to know: what Star Wars planet does the weather outside most closely resemble right now.

The F***ing Weather 

Ok, so Star Wars isn’t your thing. We’ve still got you covered. In the same vein as http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/, http://www.thefuckingweather.com/ gives you just the facts about the weather—and it doesn’t sugarcoat them. NSFW if someone in your office is offended by large, Times New Roman profanity.

I Love Bees

I Love Bees was not the first ARG (Alternate Reality Game) or the last, but it was definitely the largest and most well publicized. Designed as marketing for Halo 2, it’s way too late to participate in the sci-fi mystery story, but you can still visit the site’s original entry point at ilovebees.com for a bit of internet history. If you want to know more about the I Love Bees story, check out its entry on the Halopedia.

Google Building Maker 

Google’s built a lot of cool tools and toys over the years, but for sheer “oh, neat” value, this one’s our favorite. The Google Building Maker allows you to pick a building from any of dozens of cities, and build a 3D model of it. If your model is any good, it’ll even get displayed for everyone to see on Google Earth.

What’s that you say? “I don’t know how to make 3D Models?” Well, that’s the real beauty of this site—it makes it so easy that anyone can do it, and it’s fun. Give it a try—we think you’ll have a hard time stopping after just one building.

Hero Machine

A Time waster with a capitol T, the Hero Machine lets you put together comic-book-style superheroes from an astonishingly large list of possible parts. You can try and make the coolest hero possible, or you can just hit the random button until you find something that makes you laugh.

Photosynth 

Photosynth is a project from Microsoft that allows you to take collections of digital photos and stitch them together into a kind of 3D panorama. Unlike a normal panorama, which is a large, flat image, in a Photosynth you can move through the scene and see objects from different angles. There’s an enormous gallery of user-submited Photosynths to browse through, and more are added every day.

Pandemic 2

Pandemic 2 is simultaneously a seriously-addicting flash game, and the best reason to move to Madagascar. In the game, you play the role of a disease, and you make decisions about how you evolve (do I want to cause a fever, or renal failure?) in order to wreak havoc across the globe. Counteracting you are the world’s governments, who can do things like shut down airports and develop vaccines. Virulent disease has never been this much fun!

Crimson Room 

The premise or Crimson Room is simple: you’re in a room, its crimson, and you’re trying to escape. You’ll have to make use of everything in your environment and solve some seriously fiendish puzzles to get out. Crimson Room was so well received that it spawned an entire genre of “escape the room” adventures that now includes dozens of games.