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Grab A Bunk In The Dot-Com Dorm
airrage writes "According to this Washington Post article, the University of Maryland has created "dot com" like dorms complete will all the necessary executive perks: wood desks, leather chairs, wireless, whiteboards; all to encourage entrepreneurship. Apparently, it's working too. Twenty of the students have created their own start-up firms, and six are already generating revenue."
How many are profitable? I could generate revenue selling old paper cups to morons over the internet, but I bet I wouldn't make any money at it.
But this gives the \. readership something to strive for once they get out of high school, so I suppose it's topical.
-MondoMor
...if I recall correctly there was language in all the paperwork I signed when I went to school that said something to the effect of 'everything you do while you're attending college belongs to the college'.
Does anyone know of any possible consequenses to this type of arrangement, or if that sort of agreement is even enforcable?
On the other hand, maybe they're just playing the odds that if they throw 100 people together and provide the infrastructure and cell phones, one of them is bound to come up with enough of a marketable idea to make a bajillion dollars.
That's my purse! I don't know you! -- Bobby Hill
What about the ownership of the individual business models or products?
At my university, all products and ideas developed on university owned equipment is property of the university. Is that to say that since the whiteboards and other "idea-inducing" workspaces and utilities are functionally provided by the university, and on university property, should they belong to the university?
Should they and will they are obviously two different questions...
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
"Venture capitalists, lawyers and serial entrepreneurs drop by weekly to impart wisdom and to mentor" If any of these "businesses" were worth a damn, the VCs would be imparting more than wisdom. But I do like the term "serial entrepreneurs", it describes these people very well.
I wonder if the students can start any kind of business. What if their company policies clash with the school's policies? This would include nuddie sites, adult toy sales and companies the dedicated themselves to spaming college students. Can the school draw the line somewhere?
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Generally it is all classwork that belongs to the University, not _all_ IP. Anything that you did with their labs, their equipment, etc.
Not to mention most dorms aren't really associated with the school for other legal reasons. When I went to school, the dorms weren't even technically on state property, and run by some management company. This allowed for strict rules in the dorms that the university could pretend to not be able to do anything about, among other things. I wonder where this leaves these entrepreneuers.
You'd have to read the fine print on several different contracts, and not only the ones you signed, but the dorm with the university, etc.
Other privileges of living in South Campus Commons include monthy inspections by the RAs (yes, you do pay money to a private company to live under Resident Life rules -- even though we are technically "off campus" housing). It's not uncommon for the hot water to go out for days at a time, frequently with no notice.
And the kicker? The lease that I signed forbade running a business from my room. In other words, unless they modified the lease for these Hinman CEOs, they're all in violation.
We *definitely* do not live in spaces that would ever be confused with executive furnishings.
FYI (and yes, I caught the double entendre), while there may be laws against sex stores in many southern states, they're not enforced.
I've lived in both Texas and Georgia, and both have anti-sex laws of various flavors. In Texas it was illegal to own more than 6 dildos. Didn't stop adult video stores from having a few hundred and selling them. In Georgia it is (or was) illegal to rent adult videos. And yet there are at least a half dozen chains that exist primarily through the sale and rental of them.
There are occasional busts in both states, which end up with tons of mostly bad publicity for the police chief that authorized it, but by and large the blue laws are ignored. And in recent years (in Georgia at least), every blue law that went to court has been struck down.
And the rest of UMD gets: Slow Internet Access in Residence Halls:
We are aware that Internet access in the Residence Halls has been extremely slow for many of you this semester and apologize for the inconvenience. We are investigating various methods of improving the performance of your data connections.
And by "slow", they mean 2k/s downloads, and 1k/s uploads. Oh, if only I had my 28.8 back...
This is exactly what my older brother did when he was here. In fact, he's still here because of his oak-wood desk business with deep synergy underpinnings: Pizza and beer, to your door, in 30 minutes or less, oh and they take plastic. In fact, by the numbers, even considering that they basically shut down three months out of the year, they still gross more per capita than most other chains in this end of the state.
:)
Or then there was the other kid in his class who had a great racket going for a while - he printed up a bunch of parking tickets that looked identical to those of the university. The only difference is that the funds were to be remitted to a different address. He'd have people run around early in the morning before the real parking people went to work and cite all the illegally parked cars (primarily students in faculty lots). The real lady would come around and assume that the other lady already tagged that lot. You can imagine the rest. He got about $10,000 in his first month, oddly enough he was only expelled