Up and Coming Young Entrepreneurs

Naveen Sevadurai

Naveen Sevadurai is the co-founder of Foursquare.com, a location based social networking website that allows users to communicate their geographic location via computers or smartphones. The online service has 10 million users worldwide and has an Alexa Rank of 623.Sevadurai founded the company with Dennis Drowley who is now CEO. The company is valued somewhere between 100M and 250M.

Chris Van Pelt and Lukas Beiwald are the founders of CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing platform that uses internet tools to help companies outsource large projects and tasks to thousands of people. A project that may have taken months to complete could be done in a day. The technique used by CrowdFlower is to delegate a task to thousands of people all over the globe. Their network includes close to one million workers in 70 countries. Their website allows for the managing of all the task delegating. Van Pelt and Beiwald founded the company (formerly called Doroles Labs) in 2007 and they are located in San Francisco, CA. Things have been good for Van Pelt and Beiwald. Crowdflower, reached 100M completed tasks sometime in Spring 2011 and have received $13.25M in funding from various VC and Angel Groups.



Angelo Sotira, a native of Greece, co-founded deviantantART.com at age 19 with two others. This supercharged, facebook of the art world allows users to interact in a variety of different ways. Artists of all kinds can share their work, browse, buy, sell, discuss, collaborate and more right on the site. The type of artwork is open from digital art to traditional art, photography to poetry, film/animation to game development and others. Their Alexa Rank is currently 111. The site has well over three milion unique visitors a month,  12 million members and over 100 million unique, original artworks. You can browse all different types of art on their site.

Ecovative Design believes that mushrooms are the new plastic. Eben Bayer is proving this theory to be true. MycoBond is a a patent pending technology that takes agricultural waste products and turns them into packaging materials. The result is a styrofoam alternative that is equal in it's packaging strength and reliability but is 100% safe for the environment. One of their main products, Eco-Cradle was featured in a previous post in top green inventions of 2010. Below is a video of Eben Beyer speaking at TED in Oxford, England.




Websites discussed:
Foursquare.com
deviantART.com
CrowdFlower.com
ecovativedesign.com
Alexa.com

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