World-renowned jewelry designer, Pascal Mouawad, has teamed up with Grammy Award winning music mogul and style icon Jermaine Dupri to create NuPop Movement . The line, characterized by its oversized case and vivid colors is designed with inspiration from the iconic pop art of the 60’s as well as the vibrancy of today’s music and culture – and makes it affordable for all – between $95 and $145.

By Marcia Wade Talbert

Kalief Rollins, winner of the 2009 National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge, presents one of his company’s t-shirts to President Barack Obama. (Source: The White House)

Running a successful business is not an easy feat no matter what your age. Yet there are teenagers, like Kalief Rollins, the winner of the 2009 National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge, who were able to benefit from business start-up education and learn not only the value of a dollar, but how to claim the value of his life.

In this, the first article of a four-part series on youth entrepreneurship, BlackEnterprise.com examines how an emphasis on teen entrepreneurship education has the potential to create positive career paths for youth.

Rollins, 17, considers the t-shirt business he started with his brother in April, to be his ticket to success. He quit football and even missed out on high school graduation night parties with friends so that he could dedicate more time to his business, Phree Kountry Sankofa. His ambitious attitude even afforded him a chance to meet President Barack Obama along with two finalists in the OppenheimerFunds/NFTE National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge competition.

The competition is the cornerstone for NFTE, which sponsors programs around the world to teach students how to start a business. By the end of the entrepreneurship course students are expected to create a business concept and write a business plan for it. The course runs for either a semester or a year, and it is paid for by the school or with donations from local businesses.

“NFTE helped me realize that I needed to be a legitimate business with licensing and figure out my profit margin so that I didn’t sell shirts for too little or too much,” says Rollins, one of 28 contestants in the competition. Rollins has sold nearly 400 shirts since the company’s inception in April.

But Steve Marriotti, NFTE’s founder, says that the real purpose behind the program is not about teaching kids how to make money, but it’s about teaching teens how to take ownership of their lives. Studies show that entrepreneurial experience increases occupational aspirations, interest in college, reading, and leadership for youth.

“Entrepreneurship is just a tactic. It is really about owning you,” say Marriotti. “The strategy we are trying to [teach them] is to own your time. Money is a tool [to do that].”

Over the last 21 years more than 280,000 young people from low-income communities have graduated from NFTE classes and a recent evaluation of alumni shows that six months after matriculation 70% were in college, and one in three ran a small business.

Ephren Taylor

Recently CNN interviewed Ephren Taylor, 27, the youngest-ever African-American CEO of a publicly traded company in the U.S. He talked about starting his own business at age 12 and shared tips on being an entrepreneur and starting a business.

One thing Ephren Taylor pointed out is that a recession can create the opportunity in many cases to start your own business. This is a great point if you think about all of the people who are collecting unemployment. People who have gotten laid off and are eligible for unemployment still have a steady stream of income and plenty of time on their hands. So instead of putting all your time and energy into finding another place of employment working for someone else, why not dedicate yourself to starting your own business?

Be persistent
Another tip Ephren Taylor shared was that you have to be very persistent when asking for cash advance loans to get your business started. Ephren Taylor says starting his business at such a young age was an advantage for him because he was fearless and he could use his age as a marketing tool when trying to secure funding.

Ephren Taylor taught himself how to create video games and program computers when he was young and he started his company when he was 12. He said he asked about 80 different people for financing, and his young, fearless idealism kept him from getting discouraged.

Read, read, read
Ephren Taylor’s path to learning to create video games started with a book. Ephren Taylor points out that there are books on just about every subject out there, including starting a business.

Ephren Taylor has also written his own book, “Creating Success from the Inside Out: Develop the Focus and Strategy to Uncover the Life You Want.” He also has a web site, “Ephren Taylor The Social Capitalist” that offers business and finance advice.

Don’t overanalyze
Ephren Taylor cautions people against over-thinking opportunities, because that can lead to fear and giving up before even getting started. Ephren Taylor has become so successful at such a young age because he started working on his goals when, he says, he was still “dumb enough to believe” that he could do anything. And it paid off.

On his web site, Ephren Taylor offers advice to churches to help them prosper. He says he is passionate about financially empowering people. He particularly encourages college students and people who don’t have kids and mortgages to start their own business because they are in a better position to take risks. His web site says:

Beyond his unprecedented accomplishments at an early age in business, Taylor is an author, inspirational speaker, and real estate mastermind. His first book, “Creating Success from the Inside Out”, is published by the world’s number one business publisher, Wiley and is an Amazon and CEO Read best seller. The book serves as an expose of the mindset of today’s multi-millionaires while defining success as not only attaining wealth, but how to utilize it.

The biggest hassle with business cards is getting the contact information into your address book as fast as possible — that’s where Business Card Reader for the iPhone comes in, reports TechCrunch.

Business Card Reader scans and “reads” the picture using ABBYY’s text recognition technology and enters the data into the iPhone or iPod touch address book.

Basically, you open the application, and choose either to take a new picture of a business card, or if you’ve already taken a picture, you can upload that as well.

After you take a picture, or upload a picture, the application scans the business card, and after about 15 seconds, you get the address book field to edit the scanned information if there are errors.

Once that’s all done, it adds the new contact into your address book. It’s really that easy.

iphone app biz card