Their printing services range from all kinds of invitations (baby shower, birthdays, parties, weddings, etc), announcements (weddings, graduation, moving), all kinds of baby & kid related items, and holiday gifts. Items like custom printed labels on mint tins are not something you find at every online stationary printer.

Ordering Business Cards

Like I mentioned, the only service I have experience with is ordering a set of business cards, but I am going to guess that the other print services are the same.

I started originally wanting to upload my own design – sounds easy right? Well, no. Unfortunately, TinyPrints does not allow you to upload your own custom design like most other printers. I had a business card design that I created in Adobe Photoshop and had printed at other places but wanted to try it through TinyPrints but could not.

So, than I had to switch directions and pick from one of their premade designs to customize with my information. Once I found a design that I liked, it was very simple to add in my information and quickly complete my order. Now, while you cannot upload a completely custom card design, you can upload different elements to your card such as your own logo. Some of the templates are set up to have a picture of you in which case you can upload a photo and edit it for use on the card. This was good to see and is a nice feature to still be able to personalize the cards more for your business or brand rather than just having a plain text card.

Most online printers offer your standard vertically and horizontally printed business cards. TinyPrints.com has those and many other options too. If you’re looking for something a little more unique then a normal card, check out some of the options they have – folded cards and different size cards.

25 cards for $23.50? Isn’t that a bit expensive?

This simple answer is yes. There are plenty of options when using a printing service online that offer some rock bottom prices and offer all kinds of additional services and features as well. At almost $1 a pop, these little cards are pricey, especially for not being able to upload your own custom design. When you think about the price your paying for the cards though, it is important to consider a couple points.

First, the shipping time is pretty quick. With some of the other online printing services, you have to wait weeks for your cards to just be printed let alone shipped. I ordered from another service a few months ago and the wait was 4 weeks just to have my cards and banner printed.  It appears that the standard shipping service for TinyPrints has the cards arriving in about a week to a week and a half from when you order.

The minimum order quantity is only 10 cards. Then you can order basically in increments of 5. Other sites, your minimum order are usually 100 and can often times be 250 or more. With a higher quantity, they are obviously going to be able to charge a lower price. But when you only need a small run of cards, invitations, or other items, TinyPrints is offering that service and you are going to pay a premium on such small orders.

Finally, the quality of the cards is great. I’ve ordered from 3 other websites and also the printing service at my local Staples store. The cards are always much thinner and sometimes the printing is a lesser quality than how my cards arrived. The card stock for the cards is a nice thickness and corners are not easily bent when in pockets or your wallet.

So while the cards would be expensive, the quality and turnaround time is great so there is a trade off. Either way, my experience with these guys was good and I’d recommend them for small printing runs or definitely for the other services like baby announcements and invitations as their designs looked great.

Have you used TinyPrints.com? Share your experience in the comments!

Disclaimer: TinyPrints.com sponsored the business cards for this review. The opinions in the review are 100% of it’s author.

While in college, I partied, and sometimes pretty hard – hey, it happens. There was a bar that we would all go to on Thursday nights for a great priced beer, a ridiculous long island ice tea, and dancing. On top of that, they sold pizza’s at the end of the night as you walked out the door. For just a couple bucks you could enjoy a freshly cooked pizza on your way home. What a treat!

Well, one day I was in the local Wal-Mart doing some grocery shopping and as I come down the frozen food isle, I see the owner of this bar which sells the pizza with a shopping cart full of Tony’s Pizza. He was buying the pizza’s at Wal-Mart and selling them at the end of the night at his bar! First I thought, that jerk and then I thought, what a great freaking idea. Anyway, I bought one of the pizza’s and it wasn’t as good as it tasted after a Thursday night out at the bar at 2 AM, but it was pretty close.

Now, Tony’s Pizza have released a new line of pizza’s featuring a thin crispy crust. While I haven’t seen one in my local stores yet to get my hands on to try for sure, I’m betting it’s pretty good.

There are a few other reasons BESIDES the good taste to check out Tony’s Crispy Crust.

• First, the price! They are a great low priced item to keep stocked in your freezer – whether at college for students or at home with your family. Nothing like just pulling a pizza out of the freezer and popping it into the oven for a quick dinner.
• So much faster than delivery! Why wait 30-45 minutes for the delivery guy to show up when the solution is right in your freezer?
• They are perfect for game day when your friends are over and hungry. Feed a big group for a great price!

So, now I’ve got a few coupons for a free Tony’s Pizza. If you’re interested in trying one out, leave a comment and I’ll be in touch to get your address and drop the coupon in the mail. I only have a few coupons, so they will go to the first people who comment!

Summary: Courseopedia.com is a college course search engine, primarily marketing towards community colleges and those interested in improving their own personal skills.  The site launched in October 2008 and currently is only in the California region with 50,000+ courses.  Definitely keep an eye on this site!

1)      What was the “ahh haa” moment for you? How did you decide to start this site?
A few years ago I (Abdullah Yahya) wanted to find a French course to take in my spare t me. I first tried searching Google for courses but it didn’t give relevant local results. Then I visited the college websites in my area. Not only did I not know all of the schools available in my area, I found that searching them was very time-consuming and frustrating as I had to conduct separate searches. I figured if there was a search engine for jobs, cars and real estate, there should also be a search engine for courses. This led to the birth of Courseopedia with co-founders Jawad Ahmad and Haseeb Qawam.

2)      When did you start / how long did it take you to develop the site?

We started Courseopedia in October 2008. It took a few months to develop and a few months to populate it with the 50,000+ course we currently have in it from various California community colleges.

3)      The tough thing about starting any website is the “Catch 22” problem between Content vs Traffic vs Advertisements.  A site will not receive any traffic without adequate content (IE students will not visit Courseopedia if their school and courses are not listed).  No one will advertise or pay to be on the site without adequate traffic.  How did Courseopedia manage this constant challenge?

We realize that this is a problem so we aggregated course information from various California community colleges to seed the database so that prospective students will find results in their searches. We currently have a little over 50,000 courses on Courseopedia. We hope this will lead to colleges and private instructors to post their courses themselves (which is currently free) to generate more content for search users.

4)      What is the business model of Courseopedia?

Currently, Courseopedia is free for colleges and instructors to post course information. Eventually we will charge a nominal per-course posting fee. We may also sell ads.

5)      If a student is already enrolled at university___X___, why would they use your system to search for classes; when they can use the system provided by the school?

Courseopedia’s primary purpose is for the general public that is interested in finding continuing education courses such as real estate, art, weight training, French, Java programming, etc. Many of these types of courses are offered at community colleges. Courseopedia is not intended to replace a school’s own course search engine but rather to help them market their courses to the general public to increase enrollment.

6)      How is the site funded? (Privately, loans, credit, investors, etc.)

The site is currently privately funded.

a.       What are the top questions you would suggest to others to practice/know before seeking funding.
What’s your business model? How much traffic do you have? Who are your competitors? What’s your go-to-market strategy?

7)      Explain the process of how you got the first couple schools on-board.

We presented Courseopedia at the ACCCA (Association of California Community ollege Administors) conference and the TechEd (Technology in Education) conference. We also had a booth at the TechEd conference and emailed some college marketing directors. These efforts eventually resulted in a few early adopters coming on board as launch partner colleges.

8)      How do you go about expanding to other schools?

We plan on manually aggregating college course information until we generate enough traffic to the site which would interest colleges and instructors to post their courses themselves. Our expectation is that the more courses and traffic to the site, the more schools and instructors will want to post their own courses resulting in continuous expansion. /span>

9)      How do you get the word out about your website to the students at the 17 schools your currently at?

Courseopedia caters to the general public, not just current college students. As such, in addition to our publicity efforts, we plan on using social media and local advertising to reach out to the areas where we currently have many courses.

10)   How do you:

a.       Get the data

We have custom-built scrapers that aggregate course information.

b.      Maintain the data (and ensure it is accurate)

Every semester we aggregate new course information. Most college course information doesn’t change. We inform search users in search results that course information is subject to change and encourage them to verify the accuracy of course information with the course provider. Schools and instructors who post courses themselves can log in and update their course information to ensure accuracy.

11)   Do you plan on adding the ability to register for classes also in the future? (One stop searching, one top registration).
We currently don’t plan on adding a course registration feature because that would require integration with college registration systems which vary from one college to another and contain confidential student information. Colleges can include course registration links directly in course detail pages on Courseopedia for students to register directly at the college’s website.

12)   What top 5 resources do you use or would you suggest to other student entrepreneurs currently in school?

1. Use a shared web hosting service to initially keep costs low
2. Use open-source technologies to keep costs low
3. Use social media to help spread the word in a low-cost way (e.g. youtube, facebook, myspace, twitter, etc)
4. Read tech blogs, e.g. TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, etc, to keep apprised of other web startups, potential competitors and the startup community in general.
5. Attend free or low-cost entrepreneur meetings to network with people in the field.

13)   What is your favorite quote?

Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay

This was a guest post by College Town Menus (CTM).  CTM enables restaurants the ability to dynamically control every aspect of their menu on one central website that targets students from their respective college towns. With CTM acting as the official restaurant portal for local universities, students are able to quickly identify what and where to eat, without having to search multiple websites or scuffle through their menu drawer.

One thing you can do to brace yourself is to go back to your suppliers—to your telephone provider, landlord, car dealer—and renegotiate.  Go to the people you are paying out to, and renegotiate on the contracts you had made with them.  See if they are willing to pull back at all.  Although they are dealing with the same slow-down as you are, you will find that they are more willing to cut you some slack than lose you as a customer.

I cannot stress enough the need for products you are selling to be presented in more detail.  You must make the clients understand your philosophy and your product. Market better!  Understand where people are coming from: be compassionate with their concerns.  Be willing to work out payment plans for potential clients.

Save money using technology: take advantage of email and video conferencing.  You should email documents rather than sending them via mail.  This will save you in postage and in paper.  Also, instead of driving or flying to meet with a client or vendor, you should videoconference with them.  Both of these will save you time and money.

With today’s adversity constantly pulling on your being, implore as much persistence and fortitude as you can muster.  When you are stuck and everything is working against you, when it seems like you cannot last a second longer, you must persist, for it is at that peak in struggle that you will conquer and turn the tides.

This was a guest post from Robert Tuchman, who is the Founder of TSE Sports & Entertainment, a company he started out of his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan at the age of 25. TSE has gone on to appear on Inc. 500’s list of America’s Fastest Growing Privately Owned Companies. Tuchman now serves as President of Premiere Corporate Events, a division of Premiere Global Sports. His Book “Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide To Chasing Your Dreams and Breakout Out On Your Own” is out now.

That means that they sell premium WordPress themes, and also offer membership into their themes club. Membership offers you the chance to have access to all of their themes over a 3 or 6 month period, whichever you prefer, rather than purchasing each theme separately. This is a great advantage to the designer/developer because you can sign up and download any current and future themes that come out during your membership period.

I’ve been looking for an effective way to redesign 3-5 WordPress sites of mine and WooThemes has come up to be the answer. Their current inventory features over 17 different themses that range the categories of business, personal, CMS, lifestream, news, and portfolio. With so many choices, this gives you the easy opportunity to try out a lot of different options – and I like options.

So, I signed up. Yupp, I did it. I joined the club. Adii, I hope you’re happy and are enjoying my money. So far I am enjoying the site, so lets keep it that way.

Here is what their subscription options look like:

The thing that I really liked was being able to easily have a wide range of themes to choose from and further customize to meet my needs. If you are an internet entrepreneur and have a lot of WordPress based websites or are looking to launch many, then you definitely need to check out WooThemes and consider signing up.

The sites I’ll be using themes on from the guys at WooThemes include the new ChrisPund.com, ProfessionalGFX, Dorm Room Biz, and more possibly. So, keep a look out for lots of changes coming about soon!

As I get closer to being finished with customizing some of the sites, I will start posting about it and giving some screenshots.

If you need a jump start creating an online presence, check out Domain Express. Here you will find affordable business, home, and beginner hosting packages starting at £1.19/m. The versatile interface eases your transaction in registering your domain(s) so you can develop your online presence. Using Domain Express can save you time and money. Let me tell you more about it.

Before choosing your domain name, check out Domain Express price comparison list. They do a great job at breaking down the prices. Since Domain Express has no middle man, they can offer rock bottom prices with their fully automated registration service. When searching for your desired domain name, the registration service will indicate if it is available. If it is not available, don’t worry, you can choose from the suggested domains they have listed.

Not only do they have competitive prices, but they also offer many useful free features. Keeping up with your domains is no problem with Domain Express. You will receive four renewal reminders for each domain that needs to be renewed. Whether you need to buy domains in bulk, enable email and web forwarding, or get Web Space, Domain Express has the support you need. If you can’t find your answer in Domain Express frequently asked questions, take advantage of their live support chat for all your support or sales needs.

Free Features:

· 24/7 Customer Support
· Account Management Tools
· Domain Holding Page
· Domain Security Features
· Name Server Changes
· Email Forwarding
· Multiple Domain Checker
· Advance DNS Management

Check them out!

• Linux Platform
• Windows Platform
• ASP Scripting
• PHP Scripting
• JSP Scripting
• Python Scripting
• FrontPage Extensions
• Multiple Domains
• SSH Secure Shell
• MySQL
• Merchant Account
• Control Panel

With all of those options, if you can not limit your search, you can also search by the montly price that you are willing to pay as well as the amount of disk space that you need. The search page gives you 15 different categories to narrow things down. I’ve done some reviews of other hosting comparison websites before, but I must say that 4cheapwebhosting.com has the best search page out of any that I have seen.

The site also provides you with a list of the 10 best ranked hosting packages. These are the best rated/ranked and not ones that pay the most advertising money for this spot on the list, so be aware that the information and ranking on this siste is unbiased, which is something they stress.

You can also find a website hosting tutorial section and hosting glossary to help you better navigate your choices!

If you can find a decent sales job that you can excel at and get experience, then you can continue to look for another job that better fits your criteria. But, at least you are 1) working, 2) making money, 3) not wasting time, and 4) hopefully using your education. I tried to stress these points to some of my friends who were having harder times than others. However, they would not give in to a sales job (even when pretty good offers came their way) and they are STILL looking for a job — 5 MONTHS LATER! Now with the economy being in an even worse condition than before, I will guarentee that they are still unemployed even without talking to them.

One of my fraternity brothers moved to the Chicago area and has been struggling to find a job that fits his needs. He is lucky that he had some money saved up from working throughout college and his parents are able to help support him while he continues to search, send resumes, submit applications, and go on interviews. I recently came across a website called Chicago Sales Jobs. I instantly thought of him and sent him the link.

The site is great – although it is similar to the other job listing websites. Being focused on a specific geographic area allows for a better variety and more opportunity to target the right audience with the website. This website reminds me of the fact that you can not only focus on the larger career/job sites like Monster or Career Builder, but you need to look for more geographically focused or niche/industry focused sites that relate to exactly what you are looking for. Specific job sites usually allow for the companies to post a longer description of the position and may even offer a wider variety.

So, if you are in the Chicago area, check out Chicago Sales jobs, or if you are also still looking for a job and graduated in May, or graduated after summer classes, or are going to be graduating in December keep up the search, expand your horizons for the search methods that you use, and keep your head up! You’ll find something!

Are you guys having any issues like this? More and more students are graduating each semester with college degrees and it is making it more difficult for others to find jobs. Perhaps this is the perfect reason to start a dorm room business while you are in school so you do not have to worry about getting a job when you graduate?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic of the job market and the challenges with finding a job after graduating.

Just a quick post today, to let you know about a site I am starting to use more and more.

The stock market isn’t exactly looking good at the moment. Investing in stocks is a hard and risky task, while some stocks may still pay big, most will see your money go down. But what if you still fancy yourself as a bit of an investor? What if, you think you could survive in these testing times that have brought down many big names that were considered safe just months ago? Well, if you do, then UpDown.com is the site for you! With $1000000 to invest and no risk (you can even make a bit of cash) now is your chance to prove to Wall Street that you are exactly what they need!

This site is actually pretty fun. It feels quite cool when you make a virtual profit or a good decision (you just start to wish it really was real).

Have fun!

Sophie

One of those companies is LandAirSea Systems Inc. They have been in the business for nearly 15 years and are a leader in the technologies and products being developed in GPS tracking. Their technology utilizies the 24 Department of Defence satellites that are orbiting the earth. The result of using so many satellites is being able to accurately pin point someones position within 2.5 meters of their exact location. You can download the tracking logs from your device onto your computer and see everything in Google Earth through the satellite images, watching ever turn you made and every location you stopped.

To accomplish this tracking, there are a few differen devices that Land Air Sea offer. If you want to stay on the small side and more personal (as in if you want to track your daughters whereabouts while she is out with “friends”) you could us something like the GPS Tracking Key. Which as they say on their website “is like having a personal Private Investigator at a fraction of the price.” The tracking key can tell you route traveled, speed, direction/orientation,time en route, arrival addresses, duration of stop.

They also offer devices that can be attached to your car, some that come with attennas for better tracking and reception.

If you want to keep tabs on someone or know where your car is incase it gets stolen, then think about picking up a gps tracking unit. The tracking key sells for around $200.