Cool Customers

The equation was simple but perfect.  Add two idle college students at home for the summer, plus one beat up moving van, then factor in one very insistent mother. The solution?  A company started on a lark that’s grown into a multi-million dollar junk hauling franchise, with friends Omar Soliman and Nick Freidman in the driver’s seat.

Back in 2003, childhood buddies Soliman and Friedman were home from college for the summer and trying to rustle up some ...

More often than not, personal interests and passions are the springboards for entrepreneurial start-ups.  And so it was for Candace Neff Randolph, a co-founder of Cooper & Brinkley’s, a product design company in Dallas.  In June of 2008, the company launched Chalkboard China, a product line inspired by Randolph’s love of entertaining and tabletop items. Vases, charger plates, platters, and wine glasses are coated with a sleek chalk-friendly black slate ...

In a world filled with an ever-increasing number of consumer products, it’s tough to stand out in the crowd.  Tara Paterson, the founder of Mom’s Choice Awards (MCA), thinks that her company is doing its part to “give quality content and products a voice.”  Paterson, who is based in Purcellville, VA, started her company in 2004, modeling it after the prestigious Parents’ Choice and Teachers’ Choice Awards. The idea was to give high-quality ...

Five years ago, Andrea Fremiotti was working as a freelance photo assistant when two things struck him: photography was quickly moving away from film and toward digital capture; the digital equipment required for very high resolution images was beyond the financial means of most independent photographers. So at age 26, he started his own company, Burn Photo, to rent top of the line equipment to photographers who were doing high resolution work. The company ...

These days, we seem to manage almost every aspect of our lives online, so it makes perfect sense to add charitable giving to the mix. That’s the thinking behind Network for Good, a not-for-profit organization that was launched by AOL, Yahoo!, and Cisco right after the 9-11 terrorist attacks.  “So many people wanted to act and be philanthropic that those organizations came together and said “let’s make giving online as easy as shopping online,” says Rebecca ...