Bill Gates was 19 when he came up with the idea for Microsoft. Michael Dell was the same age when he started selling computers out of his dorm room. Who are the teenagers and 20-somethings trying to hatch the big tech and media ideas of tomorrow?

paidContent.org has compiled a list of likely candidates under the age of 21, from web design impresarios to "pimp my MySpace" tycoons.  Taking advantage of the Web's low barriers to entry means that you often only need a really good idea.

Catherine Cook

Age: 19
Company: myYearbook

Some great ideas come from analysis and introspection. For siblings Catherine and David Cook, it was the result of a snarky comment. “My brother David and I were flipping through our high-school yearbook during my freshman year,” Catherine recalls. “We were looking for a girl in his class—I think he liked her—and he was trying to show me who she was. Once we finally got to the picture he was like, ‘She looks nothing like that.’”

The problem, they realized, was that the yearbook photo was a year old. The conclusion: “Yearbooks suck.” The Cooks figured they could make a better yearbook online, one that allowed people to choose and update their own pictures. They got $250,000 from their older brother, Geoff, who had started and sold the web sites EssayEdge and ResumeEdge when he was a student at Harvard.

In less than two months, they finished myYearbook (outsourcing the programming), and launched it in April 2005. By the fall, it was bringing in some 3,000 new members a day. Today, it has more than 9.8 million unique visitors a month from students all around the world, according to comScore.

MyYearbook had more than $10 million in sales last year, according to Cook and First Round Capital, an early investor in myYearbook. Besides advertising revenue, the site has built interest around its “lunch money” program. Users pay $10 to get $1 million in myYearbook money to buy virtual gifts for friends or finance assorted acts of do-goodery, such as sending books to Africa, saving the rainforest or buying carbon offsets. Says First Round Capital partner Chris Fralic: “There are a number of sites that have gotten to their size, but not many that have been able to build aa business around it like they have.”

More:

• Teen entrepreneur Catherine Cook says myYearbook’s Lunch Money adds up (VentureBeat)
• MyYearbook makes Mashable’s list of The Top 10 Social Networks for Generation-Y (Mashable)
• Teen’s social-networking site a hit with high schoolers (San Francisco Chronicle)

Ashton and Ryan Clark

Age: Both 20
Company: Dynamik Duo

Entrepreneurs are lucky if they can turn one idea into a viable enterprise. Ryan and Ashton Clark, twin brothers at the University of Illinois, are now into double digits.

Since launching their first web site in 1999, the siblings have created nearly a dozen web businesses that sell everything from consumer electronics to shoes to tickets—even parking spaces. Never mind that the Internet was supposed to usher in an age of disintermediation. The Clarks have found their calling serving as intermediaries between online consumers and manufacturers and wholesalers.

Their first web site, Circuitbreakers.com, was conceived after the twins—then just 11 years old—saw an opportunity to sell affordable electronic products online. They persuaded a Chicago-area electronics wholesaler to let them sell its merchandise online under their Circuitbreakers moniker. They sold it less than two years later, on eBay, and the proceeds helped finance their future web sites.

Today, the twins preside over Dynamik Duo, their holding company, which operates half-a-dozen web operations. Among them: Hostivo, a site that serves as a one-stop shop for companies looking to build their own web sites; 247mixtapes, a paid music service that lets music listeners make their own music compilations (both brothers are pianists); and We Park Chicago, a site where drivers can reserve parking spaces in the metro Chicago area. They get commissions on sales from shoes and parking.

While they often divvy up duties on a business-by-business basis, the brothers consider every business a joint venture. “We both have our own respective ideas,” says Ashton. “But at the end of the day, they’re both of ours.”

More:

• The Next Generation: Emerging Leaders Under 40 (Diversity Executive)

Ashley Qualls

Age: 18
Company: Whateverlife.com

What began with a 14-year-old noodling around with HTML code to create brightly colored web pages has turned into a company worth more than a million dollars. Ashley Qualls’s web site, Whateverlife.com, is a favorite destination for young girls looking to “pimp” their MySpace page with awareness ribbons, buttons, quotes, and glitter—all of which can be pasted on top of more than 5,000 layout designs.

Initially, the site didn’t garner much attention outside Qualls’ coterie of gal pals. But within a year after she began designing customized MySpace pages, the site was generating 60 million pages views a month. Even better, it was generating more than $50,000 a month in sales. Qualls has since landed a couple of big marketing deals.

The extent of Whateverlife’s popularity was made clear three years ago when Columbia Records decided to bypass radio and promote the Jonas Brothers—then a barely known pop act—exclusively online. The company placed a three-part video on Whateverlife, and within two months some 60,000 JoBro fans uploaded the video to their MySpace pages.

Ashley ultimately dropped out of high school to run the business, which she manages today from a four-bedroom house she bought just outside Detroit. In 2007, she turned down an offer from MySpace for $1.5 million (plus the car of her choosing). It’s a decision she may live to regret: Whateverlife traffic has dropped precipitously, from 7 million visitors a month to around 550,000, according to the web-measurement firm Quantcast.

More:

• Girl Power: Ashley Qualls has built a million-dollar web site (Fast Company)
• Check out Qualls’s own colorful layouts on Twitter and MySpace
  

Kayvon Beykpour

Age: 20
Company: MobilEdu

Kayvon Beykpour’s various business ventures have a theme: helping big institutions get hip to the web. His epiphany came during an internship at the ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners after his freshman year at Stanford. He had been helping many of the firm’s big clients develop their web presence. “It occurred to me that there was a whole lot more opportunity if I was working on my own,” he says. So Beykpour and his childhood friend, Joe Bernstein, started Terribly Clever Design, and began reaching out to the very same companies.

Around the same time, Facebook had become big, and so they also started creating web applications. “We went around to companies like Sprint and Comcast and said, ‘Look, we’re college kids. We know how kids use Facebook. Let us implement your brand campaigns on this new medium.” In just a few months, the pair was managing the Facebook presence for Sprint, Best Buy, Comcast, Doritos and others.

Beykpour and Bernstein, both iPhone fanatics, also pitched their school on iStanford, a mobile application that would allow students and faculty to access all university services, from a course catalog to the athletic department schedule, on their iPhones. If a friend recommends a class, the application would give you a course description and tell you when and where the classes are being held the next semester, as well as a brief bio of the professor.

iStanford launched last fall, and the partners quickly began offering it to other schools. In March, Duke University introduced its version, called DukeMobile. Another five schools are set to go live in the next month, says Beykpour, who is also into filmmaking—he won two student Emmys for documentaries in high school. A venture source familiar with the company said that by the end of the year, mobilEdu will have brought in upwards of $1 million in revenue.

More:

• Can iStanford Take On Facebook Mobile? (Time)
• TerriblyClever launches iPhone applications targeting universities (The Industry Standard)

Jenny Liu and
Kevin Modzelewski

Age: Both 20
Company: Eclectyk

At MIT, Prof. Hal Abelson’s classes have gained cult-like status because of his award-winning work in computation. One of the requirements in his mobile-applications class is that students come up with a viable business plan. The idea that rose to the top of the heap this year: a pitch by Jenny Liu and Kevin Modzelewski for a mobile wallet.

“We see replacing a user’s wallet with a phone,” Liu explains. “We want to take the wallet out of the picture entirely so you don’t have to deal with the hassle of taking out all your cards and looking for the right one.”

It sounded easy enough—all consumers had to do was place their phone over an RFID reader at the cash register—but their idea presented some challenges. Namely, how do you consolidate and organize all the different cards that people carry into one application that works on the phone? And what sort of security do you guarantee the user? The partners spent the better part of two semesters coming up with solutions, and were asked to demonstrate their application—called Eclectyk—at the NFC Developers Summit in Monaco in April. (NFC stands for Near Field Communication, a technology that Nokia among others is trying to promote.)

But as important as it was to develop the software, much of Eclectyk’s future will depend on whether RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) takes off. Not widely prevalent, it is slowly gaining wider acceptance at retail shops. Commercial outlets such as 7-Eleven, CVS, Petco, and McDonald’s are beginning to use RFID scanners at their cash registers.

For now, they don’t yet have any funding or revenues. Liu and Modzelewski are trying to build business relationships, as getting companies to use Eclectyk will determine the success or failure of the application. “If I knew how complicated it would be to navigate a business in a space dominated by large network operators and banks, I probably would never have attempted to take this further than a class project,” says Modzelewski.

(Photo credit: Jenny Liu and Kevin Modzelewski)

More:

• MIT students’ system puts card data on your phone (The Boston Globe)
• Watch Jenny and Kevin’s Eclectyk presentation at MIT (YouTube)

Read more at paidContent.org.

Times are tough for car makers, so Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally is going the extra mile by delivering cars to customers himself.

Unfortunately you have to be CEO of a very large company to qualify. Here’s Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer taking possession of his new Ford Fusion Hybrid at the software company’s Seattle-area campus.

 
“This is awesome!” Ballmer declared, before climbing into the car for a quick seminar on how it works. He didn’t seem too interested in the fuel consumption figures, but said his wife insisted on a hybrid.

The car was the millionth with Ford’s SYNC system — powered by Microsoft technology — which allows you to control a phone and play music with voice commands. So people in the back seat can embarrass you by shouting “Play Abba”.

The high-octane double-act of Ballmer and Mulally — CEO pitch-men par excellence — seals an interesting alliance between Seattle and Detroit. Ford’s Mulally lived in the Seattle area in his 30-plus years at Boeing’s nearby commercial plane operations, while Ballmer’s father — who raised his family in and around Detroit — was a long-time Ford employee, starting in the company’s financing unit in 1950.

Former state-owned telecoms incumbents with their reliable cash streams from millions of customers have an enviable position in these turbulent economic times. But don’t think that means they can kick back and catch up on their sunbathing, says France Telecom’s finance chief Gervais Pellissier. Nor do they have time to explore unlikely mergers and acquisitions, like last year’s $40 billion hostile and ultimately failed bid for Nordic telco group TeliaSonera. This year at France Telecom, owner of the Orange brand, it’s all hands on deck for management to steer the great ship through the crisis.  “Even on an aircraft carrier, when the sea is very big, I think everybody works,” Pellissier told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in Paris.  ”When the sea is calm in the Mediterranean in the middle of summer, half of the team can tan on the sun deck,” he said. I don’t say this is what we did in 2008… but let’s say we could dedicate some time to such an operation last year that we cannot dedicate this year — it’s impossible.”

Investment bank Jefferies recently released a report on technology M&A in the first quarter of 2009. As one can imagine, there are few surprises. We may as well give you the highlights here, which point to some signs of recovery compared to the end of last year, but clearly there’s still a long way to go:

• The number of tech deals in North America fell 4 percent to 373 in the first quarter from the fourth quarter of 2008. It’s the lowest level of activity in five years, but at least the drop is a manageable 4 percent — in the December quarter, the number of deals dropped 23 percent from the third quarter of 2008.
• The aggregate value of North American M&A transactions was $4.3 billion in the first quarter, also a 4 percent drop from the prior quarter and an 85 percent plunge from the first quarter of 2008.
• Not a single tech IPO priced in the U.S. market during the quarter.
• The biggest tech deal announced in the quarter was Autonomy’s purchase of Interwoven for $764 million.
• The first quarter of 2009 has only three transactions greater than $500 million, compared to 10 such deals in the year-ago quarter.

The Jefferies survey also looks at tech M&A in Western Europe, which presents a similarly gloomy picture. Nine of the top 10 Western European deals in the first quarter were cross-border, and four of them involved U.S. buyers. The aggregate deal value fell 80 percent to $1.8 billion compared to the fourth quarter of 2008.

But it’s interesting to note that the mix of deals in the software, services and media sub-sector hasn’t changed much quarter to quarter. For example, IT services deals have hovered at about 30 percent of total transactions for the past five quarters, while digital media M&A has ranged from 32 percent to 35 percent of total deals in the same period.

Based on the grim experience of the first quarter of this year, Jefferies predicts there will be fewer than 1,500 deals this year in North America, a decline of 22 percent from 2008, which saw 1,919 deals. In terms of aggregate value, the bank expects only $17.2 billion, a 79 percent drop from last year, and nowhere near 2007, when the total deals announced were collectively worth $191 billion.

(Chart: Jefferies)

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s research chief, strolled the stands at TechFest on Tuesday, checking out the fruits of the software company’s 850 researchers working in six labs across the world.

The annual showcase, held at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington headquarters, is an attempt to “manufacture serendipity,” said Mundie, as developers see how other far-seeing projects might mesh with their own. 

One of the most popular demonstrations was the “omni-directional projector”, which lets you manipulate 360 degrees of data or images with voice and hand signals, like being in a little planetarium where you can reach out and pull the stars around.

The wide-angle projector and infrared sensor was housed in a small dome, but Microsoft is hoping to make it work in any normal room, eventually.

Here, Mundie and Microsoft researcher Hrvoje Benko show off what it can do:

This is turning out to be an earnings season when all bets are off on how technology giants will perform. With tech earnings taking the market on a roller-coaster ride, it wouldn’t be surprising if investors are a little sick in the stomach already. 

The hits and misses so far among the biggest and brightest:

Intel: Missed expectations, profit fell 90 percent and they said they wouldn’t give a detailed quarterly forecast due to the economic uncertainty.

IBM: Beat expectations and gave an outlook above Wall Street estimates. Not only did IBM shares surge on the news, it even lifted major U.S. indexes.

Apple: Record quarterly earnings made Wall Street delirious. Can’t blame investors for feeling relief after all the worry about CEO Steve Jobs.

Microsoft: Didn’t want to hold on to the bad news until the appointed time, so the it reported earlier than expected on Thursday. Said revenue and profit would almost certainly drop over the next quarter or two. 

Google: Saved the day, kind of, by balancing Microsoft’s disappointing results with news of a quarterly profit that topped Wall Street expectations.

Google gave Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali some hope that the tech sector continues to be more resilient than other sectors. “Although it depends on the severity of the recession,” Squali wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “Nobody is immune forever.”

Squali carried this ominous tone into his Friday morning research note as well, calling this earnings season a “mixed bag” and the 2009 outlook “unanimously poor.”

With Yahoo and Amazon set to report earnings next week and no guarantee what surprises might be in store there, we wonder if investors will just call in sick until next year’s earnings.

(Photo: Reuters)

Several exhibitors took up the “green” theme at CES 2009 as the “Pre” party continued. Any chance Dell had to upstage Palm disappeared in a cloud of secrecy with the “Adamo” laptop it briefly presented, but gave no details about.

Fuji said its EnviroMAX alkaline batteries were made of more than 90 percent recycled materials, had no mercury, cadmium and were PVC free.

Singapore-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies said their “HydroPack” water-activated and portable power system HydroPak could provide 4 to 5 hours of 50 watt emergency power without pollution or noise.

Design conscious Areaware showed off a retro and playful radio called “Magno”, that it said was made in Indonesia with sustainable harvest timber.

And Greenpeace held a press conference praising gadgets by Lenovo, Sharp, Samsung, Nokia and Toshiba in its 2008 Green Electronics Survey.

Intel rolled out the next generation of its netbooks aimed at the education sector and emerging markets. The third generation Classmate PC netbook is actually a netbook tablet, adding a touch screen and powered by Intel’s Atom processor.

Check out this slideshow for a look at some of the shiny new toys in various shades of green and grey featured at CES 2009.

(Photos: Fuji’s EnviroMAX batteries, HydroPack system by Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies)