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Startup Nation 2nd Annual Top 100 Contest is open for entries. StartupNation is a free service founded by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs providing entrepreneurial advice on the radio and on the web.

Will you be one of their lucky winners this year? Are you one of the next 100 outstanding home based businesses? There are a bunch of cool categories to choose from including; Best Financial Performers, Most Innovative, Boomers Back in Business, Greenest, Yummiest, Wackiest, Grungiest, Recession Busters, Most Slacker Friendly, Most Glamourous.

Is your business the “wackiest” or “grungiest” - you never know until you try.

Enter today at http://www.startupnation.com.

Back in the early 1980s, Frank Crail had a dream that many of us harbor in some small corner of our souls. A successful - if harried - tech entrepreneur in sunbaked Southern California, Crail yearned for a small town in the cool mountains where he and his wife could raise a big family and savor the simple life. So he moved to Durango, Colo. (pop. 15,000), and started looking around town for a way to make a living.

“I realized I had two options: a car wash or a chocolate store,” Crail recalls. “I’m not a car-wash kind of guy, so I opened the chocolate factory.”

Crail wasn’t exactly a candy man, either. He mixed his first batch of chocolate on a Ping-Pong table and got it all wrong. The nut clusters were as big as hockey pucks. The peanut-butter cups were a size D. But it turned out that folks were hankering for supersized sweets. Crowds gathered, and not just for the chocolate. Part of the fun was watching the new shopkeeper fumble around in his open kitchen.

Today Crail’s Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory is the largest U.S. chocolate retailer in terms of locations, surpassing Godiva and See’s. Rocky Mountain has 325 stores in 44 states and this year plans to open 40 more. Revenues rose 13 percent, to a record $31.6 million, in fiscal 2007. (Same-store revenues, however, were flat.) Profits climbed 17 percent, to an all-time high of $4.7 million, propelling the company to No. 80 on the FSB 100.

Money CNN

It took a few years before Martine Rothblatt got used to describing her daughter’s chronic lung disease as a lucrative market opportunity. “I choked every time I said it - it sounded so immoral,” says Rothblatt, 52. But when she realized that the fastest track to a cure was to launch a biotech firm and then take it public, Rothblatt started United Therapeutics (unither.com).

That was in 1996, and today she is convinced that capitalism is the answer. “I no longer have any doubt about the benefit of using profit motivation to develop cures,” she says. “It’s the language I need to build the company,” she says. “It’s the language that Wall Street understands.”

Rothblatt had no background in biotech: She had started her career as a corporate lawyer and gone on to help launch three successful satellite-communication companies, including Sirius Satellite Radio (Charts). In 1995, Rothblatt sold some of her telecom stock and used the proceeds to fund nonprofit PPH research. But after spending $2 million over two years, she saw little progress and grew discouraged.

She started researching the disease herself and found more than just a potential treatment - she found a business opportunity. The National Institutes of Health estimates that more than 200,000 suffer from PPH worldwide. Each patient pays as much as $150,000 a year for treatment - a $7.5 billion market in the U.S. alone.

After selling her vision of an inhaled PPH therapy to angel investors, Rothblatt tracked down and recruited two scientists who had developed a promising PPH drug at Burroughs Wellcome before it merged with Glaxo in 1995. It took Rothblatt seven months to license the compound, which Glaxo had shelved in favor of Flolan. Rothblatt founded United Therapeutics in 1996 and took the company public three years later.

Reaching her goal of developing an inhaled drug would take years of clinical trials, and Rothblatt had to find a way to keep investors happy in the meantime. “Something I learned from my satellite companies - you have to develop iterations of your products over time, producing real revenues incrementally,” she says.

In 2002 the FDA approved the company’s first version of Remodulin, the compound she licensed from Glaxo. Remodulin, which patients inject under their skin, lasts as long as three hours in a patient’s bloodstream and doesn’t have to be cooled. The drug, say some pulmonologists, is easier and safer to administer than Flolan. Neither a spokesman for Glaxo nor one for the drug’s U.S. distributor would comment on the ease and safety of the use of Flolan.

Money CNN

Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish.com is my new hero (James Hong of Hot or Not is a close second). Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.

I’ve moderated many panels in my time, and if I had to choose one that entrepeneurs should watch, this is it. If you’re one guy/gal or two guys/gals in a garage, it will push all the right buttons, and you’ll love it. However, if your plan is to raise several million dollars from venture capitalists and then hire five engineers, one vp of biz dev, one CTO, two testers, and a vp of marketing to ship a product in a year, you probably shouldn’t spend your time watching it.

The members of the five-person panel provided many good insights into starting and funding a company today.

- Marcus Kazmierczak, vp of engineering, Maya’s Mom
- Markus Frind, Founder, PlentyofFish.com
- James Hong, Co-Founder, HotorNot.com
- Dave Lu, CEO, Fanpop
- Karen Northup, CEO and Founder, CoreFino

Guy Kawaski

The new PennyBay.com websites’ motto boasts that you can place an Auction or Classifieds ad for less than a penny… hence the name “PennyBay”. Ad listings for less than a penny, means they’re literally free.

PennyBay.com offers their free auction and classified ad placements to registered sellers, and registration to the site is free. The PennyBay site is, of course, free for shoppers and buyers, to use as well.

The “PennyBay Auctions” function on the site allows sellers to place their goods in various style auctions such as “Standard”, “Private”, “Dutch”, and “Buy It Now”, just like the other pay auction sites, but without listing charges.

The “PennyBay Classifieds” function is just like any other pay classifieds newspaper or website, where sellers list their merchandise or services, within the “Employment”, “Real Estate” or “Personals” categories, etc., except on PennyBay.com, placing that classified ad is without costs. Uploading a few photos to any ad, auctions or classifieds, is free of costs as well.

Ads can be upgraded for just “pennies”, with the “Listing Extras” feature. The “Listing Extras” feature allows users to add additional indicators to their listing to attract more attention from potential buyers while they are browsing the site, with features such as “Attention Getter” images, “Featured Ad” or auction listing, “Preferred Placement”, & “Bolding” to draw special attention to ads. Again, listing most of these extras is available for just pennies on the dollar.