Submitted Kairos 50 Application

 

Wow, I just spent like 2 hours writing the Kairos 50 application for Benelab! The Kairos 50, a part of  the Kairos Society, annually recognizes the 50 world’s most innovative ventures started by university students. The recipients of the Kairos 50 award will be invited to the prestigious Kairos Global Summit that is held Feb 3rd-4th, 2012 at the United Nations, New York Stock Exchange, and Rockefeller Estate. I know, we're in high school, but I asked them and they said we can still be selected! In fact, they said we're the very first high school venture to apply! If we are one of the 50, wow, I'll fly out to NY and we'll get tons of publicity as in press, and even more connections! I reallyyy hope we get selected (it's my Christmas wish haha), so wish us luck!

Benelab on Crista Homepage!

Woah, this one startup coverage on GeekWire's doing a lot of good for us! That one article got 61 likes, 28 tweets, and a couple re-posts on other blogs! I just found out today from one of our biggest fans, Tonie Duchemin, who happens to work at King's HS's parent organization, CRISTA that we are currently featured in the homepage of Crista Ministries as the Ministry Spotlight! That's huge!

Benelab on Edmonds Beacon!

Benelab has been featured in the front page of Edmonds Beacon! Last Friday Devin and I had an interview with the editor Mr. Ratliff and he seemed to like us a lot. Benelab <3 connections haha. Here's an online version of the article:
http://edmondsbeacon.com/news/article.exm/2011-12-22_local_high_school_entrepreneurs_make_a_difference

Benelab on GeekWire!

 

"Startup Spotlight: 16-year-old Internet entrepreneur juggles school and startup life at Benelab"

This is the headline of our second press coverage (and a major one) on GeekWire! GeekWire's a tech and startup blog based in Seattle, and it has quite a bit of visitors. And we were featured in it! You can read the article here. I'm currently handling most of the marketing aspect of the company as in the press and media -wise, and all this hard work is starting to pay off. Our goal is to get featured in 5 publications before 2011 ends, and we're going to totally make it! More press coverages are on the way... :)

Benelab - Meeting with Sean

This week's been a busy week at Benelab as always, and today Devin, Zoe and I (Jack) went to downtown Seattle to meet and talk with Mr. Sean Dimond, a branding consultant. Sean gave up his time to talk to us and give us some really valuable advice. One of the biggest things we learned from the meeting was "personal, personal, personal". We need to make every aspect of the company personal, from our charities or the month to the way we approach press and media. So starting now we are going to go through some big changes at Benelab. One of the major changes will be what causes we support every month. We think it will be a good idea to donate to individual people instead of to big organizations. How cool would it be to completely change someone's life from pure website use? Now that's something that Benelab can only do :).

Benelab Schoolwide Announcement video

So today we showed this video to the entire student body during the assembly. We at Benelab have this thing with videos - we think that no matter how much you speak or show pictures, the best way to get the word across is to show a video. So we went to Ryan Printz, the video guru, and asked him to make a sick video announcing our release on King's computers and all the great features the Benelab search engine. (we're going to hire him soon) And here it is!

Benelab on ALL King's computers!

Hey guess what? I (Jack), Devin, and Dalton had a meeting today with the CRISTA (our school's parent organization) IT department and they like us a lot! They're really cool people (they got us Red Bulls haha) and are very supportive of what we do.
So what was the point of the meeting? Well we went in there to ask to set all of the King's computers' homepages to Benelab, which would increase our traffic a whole bunch and gain a ton of King's users. And they said yes! So from now on we have the entire King's HS behind us, using Benelab every day!

Benelab featured in our first press!

Hey, guess what? Benelab's been featured in our very first article! I (Jack) contacted the Shoreline Patch a while ago and Devin and I were interviewed last Friday. We talked about how Benelab was started and basically the whole story behind it, as well as how people can take part in our efforts.
Well, here's the article, and hopefully you see us in wayyy more publications soon! (we're sending in press releases like crazy right now..) http://shoreline.patch.com/articles/student

Seed Funding!

Good news! we just cashed in our $1500 seed funding to our bank account! A large part of this is going into our new servers, and we're really getting going these days. We also got a yes to set Benelab as the homepage on all the netbooks at King's!

Welcome Mckayla, our VP of Marketing!

Hey, Jack here! Today Devin and I had an interview with Mackayla Matthews and she was so good, we hired her on the spot. From now on she's in charge the majority of the marketing aspects of the company. She is a third year DECA student and she will be writing many, many press releases for us, as well as contacting other businesses. Her main goal right now is to get Benelab featured in 5 publications before 2011 ends. Good luck on behalf of the team Mckayla!

Site Update - Instant Video Results

Wow, today's been a good and busy day for us. Dalton just finished development on our in-house YouTube embed system, and it is now live, in beta, on our main website. It scours our top 4 API-feeded listing for any youtube videos and displays it in our blue summary box (we need a name for this box!) as a small embedded video. So now you can search for any song and BOOM, there's the music video, without even leaving the results page.
Try it out - http://benelab.org/search/?q=stereo+hearts&submit.x=0&submit.y=0

Email sent out to King's Community

Sweet news! Our company representatives Jack and Devin had met with our school principal Mr. Ruhlman a while back and today an email about us went out to the entire King's community of +2000! Today our site's traffic has tripled and we're slowly but steadily growing in user base. $10,000, here we come.

WRLC Booth - Before & After

I (Jack) just came back from the San Diego DECA trip and it was awesome! Out of the some 30 exhibitors, Benelab was the ONLY student-managed company and DECA sponsored booth! We had a spot right next to PepsiCo and I even got free drinks (those people were awsome..)
Anyways, as you can see in the picture, just after a day we ran out of everything - all the 3000+ Benelab goodies and our booth was just littered with money haha.
At the booth we had hundreds of highschool kids come by and learn about Benelab. We had amazing responses and we handed out promotional flyers (printed on hundred dollar notes), Benelab stickers, and free candy. DECA advisers were pretty interested too!
-Jack

Benelab at WRLC '11 San Diego

Hey! The team's been hard at work this week because we got the awesome opportunity to present Benelab at DECA's WRLC '11 San Diego! Jack will be representing us down there with a special booth sponsored by DECA. Check it out! http://www.wrlc2011.org/

Welcome Ellie, our new Social Media Guru!

In the midst of our new corporate restructuring, we have hired a new member to Benelab - say hello to Ellie Rasmussen! She's our social media guru who will handle all our social networking. She's in charge of our somewhat sad (hopefully not anymore) Facebook page, Twitter account, Youtube channel, and most importantly, this blog!
Anyways, we welcome Ellie and she should be expecting an initiation soon (hehe...)
Over and out!

Presentation in Chapel went great!

Hey, it's 11/1/11 and we have some good news! Our presentation during Chapel last Friday went very well, and now we have a supportive student body of 500+ behind us! After Friday our site visits have nearly quadrupled (although we barely had any before.. :). We are one step closer to gaining a sizable user base!

Site Launch at King's HS!

We at Benelab have been very busy these last weeks and are ready to re-launch the full site tomorrow during chapel at our school, King's High School! We are very excited to finally get up and running with a user base, and spreading the word about what fellow students are doing at school! Wish us luck!