JYK’s Partners in Health is one of the most trusted organizations delivering relief in Haiti, as described in this NBC News report on Jan. 25. JYK’s vision for Haiti relief has led Dartmouth students to raise over $133,000 in relief funding, and in doing so develop a fundraising model that’s being adopted by college and university students across the country. And JYK’s outreach to Dartmouth alumni is convincing several of America’s leading corporations to provide desperately needed aircraft to bring medical supplies and other assistance where they are needed most.

Take Marc Belton D’81 and Christina Shea Tu’77, two senior executive at General Mills, whose response to an email from JYK is described in yesterday’s Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal:

Shortly after the disaster, Belton and Shea received a note seeking transportation support from Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim, a medical doctor who co-founded the nonprofit Partners in Health, which has strong ties to Haiti, according to General Mills.

So, with the blessing of company leaders, the firm’s 8-seat Cessna – normally reserved for corporate travel – was sent to Dartmouth’s campus in Hanover, N.H. where it was packed with antibiotics and surgical equipment.

General Mills, a company with a long record in corporate giving, will also participate in the Haiti relief effort through additional cash donations, through matching money for employee donations, and through food donations. But this creative effort — matching a corporate resource to an immediate medical need through the national Dartmouth network — shows one way that smart corporations, when challenged by a national thought leader like Jim Yong Kim, can step outside the box and make an even greater difference. Thank you, General Mills, and thank you Marc and Chris!

• Animoto is up for two Crunchies, Best internet Application and Best Design.  The competition is brutal in both cases, but I have high hopes for Animoto pulling it off: the product has evolved over the past year, and is even better than it was before.  Animoto, which I’ve posted about previously, is chockablock with Dartmouth alumni, including founders Brad Jefferson ’98 and Jason Hsiao ’98.  If you haven’t checked them out recently, the ability to add easily upload videos into your Animoto makes the company’s stuff irresistible.  See how companies are using Animoto, like Social Gaming Network and the Producers Guild of America.
• Wildfire, which provides tools for branded interactive campaigns baseed around easy-to-use software, is up for Best Boot-Strapped Start-up.  They’ve developed some tremendously interesting campaigns, including their Pepsi Stuff Sweepstakes and the Faceboook App Contest for Facebook’s entry into key European markets.  Derek Draper ’02, co-founder of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network in the Bay Area, is Dartmouth’s main man at Wildfire.

It’s too late to vote for the Crunchies, but check for the winners on their website tomorrow.  And if anyone knows of other Dartmouth-related Crunchy nominees I missed, pass their names on.  Let’s include everybody in the shoutout to our Dartmouth Crunchy nominees!

This time of year, we are all flooded with unwanted catalogs, mixed in with the very occasional catalog we’d actually like to receive.  “Lord knows how I ended up on all those lists,” you think, remembering then that all too often when you shop online your name and address are sold to anyone who’ll pay for them.  My favorite recent catalog is Maryland Square, a yarn catalog.  Yarn?  Really?

Anyway, Catalog Choice lets you opt out of those lists.  I’ve just started opting out for our address here in New Hampshire; when we did it two years ago in San Diego, the number of unwanted catalogs at our house dropped precipitously.  Catalog Choice works — and helps spare a few kajillion trees in the process.

The article, filed in the Technology section of the Times website under Startups, tells the story of the company’s growing success in getting men to think about the fit of their clothing when they buy pants.  Yes, I’m serious: the company ethos is built around the idea that men’s pants don’t need to look like rucksacks hanging sadly off the men who wear them.   But there’s a business reason behind this fashion concept:

As much as he is trying to improve the way men’s clothes fit, [the company] may be having more impact on the way men buy clothes. Bonobos, which is based in New York, has no stores in which people can try on the pants, even though its pitch is superior fit. Instead, it aims to use various Web technologies to make clothes-buying less of a chore.

With Bonobos, you get a pair of pants that fit you well and, using their ridiculously easy-to-navigate website and great customer service, get a pleasant experience right along with it.  The vision?  Once you buy pants here, why buy them anywhere else?

While the founders aren’t from Dartmouth, the company’s taking on an increasingly ‘Green’ tinge.  The company blog has a pretty hysterical posting about Dartmouth showing the reverence alums Ajay Prakash ’03 and Craig Elbert ’03 have for their alma mater.  Luckily, they’re not just praising Keggy the Keg as the Ivy League’s best mascot, but also highlighting the July 2009 PayScale analysis showing Dartmouth alumni as having the highest mid-career salary of any university.

Craig tells me that he’s been with the company since May of 2009 after wrapping up business school, while Ajay was there that summer as an MBA intern.  The company has had two Dartmouth interns so far this year, both juniors, one in the fall and one now in the winter.  Craig notes another connection: “one of the early pairs of pants, the Pluperfects, were named after a Dartmouth alum, Drew Pluhar ’00, a friend of the founders while at Stanford business school.”  Now there‘s something to put on your resume, right next to your publications and degrees: a listing of all the clothing that’s been named after you.  Well, maybe it’s not on Drew’s resume, but I bet he shows up at interviews really well dressed.

Having spent twelve years in San Diego, I know a little something about burritos.  I can report that Boloco lives up to its slogan: these are definitely “inspired burritos.”

I ordered two of the regular-sized, each more than enough for lunch.  I started with the Mediterranean with carnitas, bits of roasted pork chopped small.  It was a really interesting Greek-style approach, not what I was expecting, nothing like the burritos I experienced in San Diego, but a really nice change.

About a third of the way through that one, I switched to the other, a Classic with chicken.  This was the traditional burrito I’d grown to love, very well made, an excellent blend of flavors with just the right bite to it.  With my bag of chips and a diet Coke, I was a happy man.  What I should have done, I realized eating this one, was to start with the Classic, and then move on to the more experimental.  You might not need to, unless you’ve also spent a decade or so in California.  But for me, starting with the Classic and moving on to the more experimental and “inspired,” that’s the right way to go.

You have to try this place, especially if you’re in the Boston area — they have batches of them in downtown Boston, with more in Brookline, Cambridge and Watertown.  If you’re in Hanover visiting campus, it’s right on Main Street; and if you’re on the way, they’re in Concord too.

Good food.  A good company — they support the Prouty here in Hanover and other charities as well.  And they’re certified green.  What more can you ask?  Oh, of course, founded by a Dartmouth alum. Check them out.

Oops. I was just being nosy.

Anyway, I responded to their email, explaining my nosiness, and that became a discussion on the company’s Help pages. That’s standard operating procedure for company websites these days, your Help requests becoming searchable data for other users to see whether the problem they’re experiencing has already been solved.  For now, my query is in the locked section of the site, locked by them not me, because it’s only a conversation about how their technology might prove useful in the higher ed space.  I gave them a few ideas, including referring them to Animoto‘s “Animoto for a Cause” program, the most interesting effort I’ve seen so far to bring Web 2.0 technologies more rapidly to the philanthropy-focused user.  It will be interesting to see what happens.

I shot a note over to Monica Wilson, Director of Employer Services at our Career Services office, connecting her to Derek Draper ’02 of Wildfire.  End result: she’s posting the job through Career Services, and Derek asked her to make sure that all Dartmouth alums who apply send a cc: of their application to him, so he can shepherd the Dartmouth applicants. The circle was closed and the job posted by early this morning.

The job posting targets applicants with three years experience, so the College’s Career Services office isn’t the first place an employer’s going to look.  And in tough economic times for the College, it’s hard to look beyond the office’s core focus, current undergrads. But when you’ve got a ready-made opportunity like this one, and you’re seeking the best candidate, it’s another place to go to get the right employee for the right job.

Five minutes, three emails, and another Bay Area start-up’s developing a link into Dartmouth alums.  Loving it!

Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.  A classic on the various steps to walk through moving from listening to the groundswell — the world of the web, as opposed to the worldwide web — and then contributing.  I’d like to do more listening than I’ve been doing, but I think I also have some things to say.  And maybe I can find some voices from here inside Dartmouth and bring them to the world.

The Whuffie Factor, by Tara Hunt.  I’m in the middle of this one, but it’s defining for me the difference between online social capital — whuffie, a term first coined by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow — and market capital.  Be nice, be networked and be notable, and you’ll successfully build whuffie.  Again, networking more effectively to bring other voices into the discussion will help.

One thing is obvious: if we can more effectively network Dartmouth into the groundswell, and can use creative approaches to get the College’s message out to our corporate and venture community, they will help us out.  Dartmouth College has buckets and buckets of whuffie among its alumni and among its many friends.  We just need to tap into it more effectively.

Chris Anderson’s Free describes the emerging digital economic model, where services or content are handed out free, with revenues coming from advertising, upgraded versions, back-end content generated on or by traffic to the site, etc.  Subtitled The Future of a Radical Price, Anderson’s work is a follow-on to The Long Tail, the bestseller defining the processes by which the Internet enabled the emergence and success of niche markets online.  Yesterday’s Sunday New York Times book review on Fresh neatly places Anderson’s work in context in the opening paragraph:

Fifteen years ago — before Google or Wikipedia or blogging or Craigs­list or podcasts or YouTube — the technology investor and pundit Esther Dyson wrote an article analyzing the business of “creative content” in a future where the Internet made distribution essentially free. “Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid,” she predicted. Enforcing copyrights won’t be enough, because creators “will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number. . . . The problem for owners of content is that they will be competing with free or almost-free content.”

In the arts, that business model may be best epitomized by Cory Doctorow, who publishes his works online simultaneously with their being issued in hardcover, and keeps them freely available forever.  Doctorow understands the rather unpleasant form factor of novels printed off websites, even in .pdf format, and has learned that readers who want the first book free are later willing to buy his future works.  In addition, his aggressive use of online technologies and relentless attacks on copyright law give him something of a rock-star persona, providing speaking appearances that generate revenue along with further attention and readership.  Cory personifies the vision Esther Dyson described; Anderson’s study demonstrates the ways it has moved beyond content creators to services providers and technology start-ups.

So those Dartmouth startups I mentioned…

• Animoto, “the end of slideshows,” provides a free software allowing users to make music videos out of the digital images they’ve been stashing all over the web.  You can go to their website today for the “learn more in 60 seconds” video that outlines the process — but all you really need to know is that it’s easy, fast, and absolutely addicting to make high-quality videos of your favorite photos.  Then, when you’re hooked, you won’t be able to resist upgrading your account — especially if you’re in a small or medium-sized business looking for one more way to get noticed, as Getty Images did in this case study.
• New Relic is in the business of optimizing websites that use Ruby on Rails, the hottest software out there for website development.  Problem is, Rails is kludgy, just like Java was when New Relic founder Lew Cirne and his partners launched Wily Technology to optimize Java’s speed and utility.  Wily’s business model was based on software sales to major Java users; New Relic’s model on a software-as-a-service model based around a free ‘lite’ version of its core software, RPM.
• est. Today lets tween girls design and customize their own clothing using pre-existing patterns and licensed content.  The design is free, as is the sharing of designs between friends.  You only get to a purchase when the design is finalized — but what tween girl isn’t going to want to buy a shirt she designed specifically for herself and her friends?  Let alone having the opportunity to have your designs judged by celebrity tweens like Keke Palmer and Ashley Argota, stars who those of us without tween daughters couldn’t pick out of a lineup, but who those with hear about all the time.

Free stuff, all given away in the recognition that ‘free’ doesn’t just mean ‘free’ any more.  It also means ‘trial version,’ or ‘first step toward buying your product,’ or a host of other things.  Free, the new sales strategy.  Who’d a thunk it?

You Wouldn’t Run a Business This Way.

Here’s Why Dartmouth Does.

“Dartmouth creates a world-class product, discounts the price 54 percent, gives an additional discount for certain buyers… then begs for money.” —Ernie Parizeau ’79

Below that, a brilliant video demonstrating how the business model works.  It’s a little over two minutes long, and it lays out the story in clear, easy-to-understand language.  Beautifully done.

Ernie Parizeau, the source of the quote that launched the video concept, was at Norwest Venture Partners for 22 years and is now an Adjunct Professor with Babson College and the Olin School of Engineering.  Sometimes, for all the years we spend working on this stuff, we get so close to our own product that we can’t explain it the way our ‘outsider insiders,’ the alumni and other close friends, can.  Nice one, Ernie; thanks.