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!