studentbeans.com Beanzine Programme 2008-2009 Following the huge growth in popularity of studentbeans.com, which now makes us the leading student focused website in the UK, we are launching an online magazine - Beanzine.

We are looking to create a national student team of aspiring journalists and writers to contribute to Beanzine, which will be published on studentbeans.com .

We want to offer you a unique opportunity to contribute and develop Beanzine into a leading online resource that informs, engages and entertains students across the UK. With a balanced mix of news and features, content channels will include: entertainment, student life, fashion and travel.

What’s in it for you?

* Gain great experience - have your articles published on the UK’s leading student website - visited by over 200,000 unique visitors every month

* An opportunity to have fun, engage with students across UK, be controversial and get a real head start in your careers

* Get profiled as a contributor on studentbeans.com

* Compete to win ’studentbeans.com media awards’ as voted for by the studentbeans.com userbase

What we’re looking for…

* Feature writers to contribute articles within content channels: entertainment (music, film, clubbing etc) student life, fashion and travel

* People with passion, ambition, and a good eye for detail

* We do not want being part of Beanzine to be a chore, we want you to contribute to areas that you are interested in!

* People who aren’t afraid to take risks and most importantly we want you to be proactive

How to apply…

If you want to benefit from this great opportunity and be part of the Beanzine team - please email your CV, and a 400 word article with a title of your choice based around either: entertainment, student life, fashion or travel to: beanzine@studentbeans.com

The closing date for applications is Friday 7th March 2008

DON’T MISS OUT ON THIS EXCLUSIVE OPPORTUNITY!

Wow what a start to the year.

With the influx of over 25,000 new members in the past few weeks we’ve been extremely busy building up our hardware to cope with so many students accessing our exclusive deals and discounts.

No wonder our facebook fan page has been going from strength to strength - 6313 fans and counting….

This leads me on to the launch of our facebook application, which brings you all the latest studentbeans.com offers straight to facebook.

The application provides a live stream of up to date discounts, offers, sales as well as great tips for student to use every day of the week straight to your facebook profile. It’s easy to use and provides the perfect way to stay up to date with the best ways to save your cash! CLICK HERE to add the application to your facebook profile.

We must be doing something right! Microsoft seem to be pleased with us. They noticed a surge of orders when Microsft Office 2007 was mentioned on studentbeans.com

We’re currently beavering away on a new project ‘Beanzine’. For now I’ll leave that up to your imagination. Until next time…

We just wanted to wish you a very happy new year and tell you about our exciting new developments with facebook.

We have launched our very own facebook page and we are inviting you to become a fan!

Why become a fan?

• Get alerted whenever new offers and features are launched on studentbeans.com
• We can only negotiate bigger & better offers - like 2 for 1 cinema tickets & meal deals with your help - be our first fans and help spread the buzz about studentbeans.com
• Access exclusive offer & deal content only posted on the fan page
• Use the fan page to have your say about what you want to see on studentbeans.com

Click here to become a fan of studentbeans.com on facebook!

We hope you’re enjoying your winter break…

We’ve been working hard over this year so you can use studentbeans.com at home as well as when you’re at uni and thought we’d remind you

Simply click here or click on the change area tab and select your home city - even if it’s not listed you can still take advantage of our national offers, like 2 for 1 cinema tickets at Cineworld or ODEON and meal deals at places like Nandos.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Looking forward to a bigger and better 2008 filled with lots of offers and more

The Bean Team

Sooner than expected after my last judging experience only a few weeks ago, I pulled out my Dragon alter ego after I was invited along to consider the university students who had reached the final of this years Students! Make Your Mark Challenge. The 2007 challenge, ‘Make it pay in a globalocal way’, was designed to get the teams thinking about solutions to the world’s social and environmental issues.

The teams had to come up with an idea and develop a business and marketing plan to show how it would be successful, and then pitch their idea to a panel of judges including:

Entrepreneur Seb Bishop, who starred in Channel Four’s Millionaire’s Mission

Levi Roots, the entrepreneur who made his name by winning the investment he needed for his product Reggae Reggae Sauce on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den

Matt Littler, the actor who plays Max Cunningham in Hollyoaks.

And me – Co-Founder of studentbeans.com. It was a fantastic day and great to see so many ideas being presented.

For the announcement of the winners, once the judging was over I found myself at the front of the room sitting sandwiched between Levi Roots and MOBO award-winning hip-hop artist Akala who hosted the finals.

As an entrepreneur it is fantastic to see so many other students following their ideas and developing them. Speaking to so many students – a lot of people perhaps don’t develop their ideas as they do not think it is an option. Make Your Mark as a campaign is fantastic in bringing like minded people together and helping them to build the foundations that really can make the difference between ideas that are just a thought and then helping people take those ideas and making it happen!

What idea do you have and what are you going to do about it?

Matt Littler from Hollyoaks on stage announcing one of the awards alongside Akala

Feeling bored? Let studentbeans.com come to the rescue. We’ve just released some dastardly hard quizzes for you to pit your wits against. And the best part is you can win some great prizes and if you reach level 2 you get £5!

In the run up to Christmas if you’re stuck for pressie ideas you should check out the bean board for some awesome savings.

We need your help to make studentbeans.com better and win some goodies while you’re at it……click here to take part in our short survey about the site - you should find it quite interesting and it will only take a few minutes - your feedback will also be very much appreciated.

Last week studentbeans.com underwent a number of exciting developments. This included the release of the much anticipated Bean Board - which lets student from across the UK share useful information on local and national deals, discounts and free stuff that fellow students will find useful and valuable. This powerful addition to the studentbeans.com platform will further enable users to stretch their student loan and gain even more from their university experience. It’s very early days yet but it’s great to see the board already getting a healthy number of valuable posts and we look forward to this continuing.

In addition to the bean board, we released a new homepage portal template which enables easier access to the diverse studentbeans.com content - as you will see the local portal now offers a snap shot of local offers, local bean board content a selection of competitions - my personal favourite at the moment is win a skiing holiday in Vald’Isere, and easy access to the studentbeans.com market section, which offers a unique selection of online retailers that will help complement student life. The portal will also house a number of additional features which are yet to be released so watch this space for further updates.

Finally, studentbeans.com has also just released a West End theatre discount website - where you can save up to 50% on West End shows. In only a week you guys have snapped up loads of tickets so I’m glad to see you’re enjoying that. The ticket site is actually also available to non-students so feel free to spread the word to family and friends!

Have a good week!

So as Enterprise Week 2007 came to a close I met some fantastic people who all contributed to making this week a success. Tuesday at Thames Valley University saw me being interviewed by the FT so a short video for their website click here to view it. Enterprise week was all about encouraging people with Ideas to Make them happen - and if you didn’t have an idea to start to think what might be possible.

On Friday morning I was invited to the launch of The Make Your Mark Tool Kit in central London. It was a fantastic event with people from all different parts of Business - MPs, PR and the media. The highlight for me was hearing Eugenie Harvey speak - Co-Founder of We Are What We Do the organisation behind the book Change The World For A Fiver a brilliant book, you might have guessed, that costs £5 - and has 50 practical Tips on what you can do to Change the World. By each of us doing our bit we can all make a different. I came across the book shortly after it was originally launched in 2004 - they hope to sell their millionth book by the end of this year. Hearing Eugenie speak was inspiring, her energy and passion for the movement they have created and the impact they are having. Click here for a recording on Delicious Ambitious to hear Eugenie for yourself.

What are you going to do to make a difference?

As I have been travelling up and down the country attending several different careers fairs for students I have been amazed and intrigued by the power and draw that our free sample packs of jelly belly beans have had on attracting students to our stand and website.

It is a well know fact that students love most things free, cheap or at discounted prices, all of which fall nicely under the umbrella of studentbeans.com. With this I new our jelly beans would go down well with the students, just how well I wasn’t quite prepared for. Whilst most other stands were offering freebies in the form of pencils, rubbers and if you were lucky a stress ball or chocolate nothing drew in the masses like our jelly beans! Students would try all different tricks and tactics to get there hands on one extra pack, pretending they hadn’t already been to our stand or signed up to the website earlier.

As the day drew on and our supply of jelly beans shortened there demand became greater. It wouldn’t just be the students who had caught wind that we were distributing jelly beans, now other graduate recruiters were trying to trade off their freebies for a pack of jelly beans. I was more than happy to supply them with there share of beans along with many organisers of the event who were easily “paid off” to help me out in return for the odd bag or two! Little did I know just how useful the jelly beans would be to me. I started to wonder where it would leave me once my supplies had run out, luckily we had some great voucher flyers to also offer the students and quell the demand for beans. Most importantly many of the students seemed extremely excited and interested by a number of the offers on our website so were more than happy to sign up, with or without there jelly beans!

If you have missed out on getting a pack of jelly beans don’t worry you can win a years supply of jelly belly beans in our competitions section and I still have a couple more fairs to attend across the country! Just need to make sure I don’t eat them all when I’m stuck in traffic on the M1 coming home to London.

The fourth annual Enterprise Week starts today, with over 5,000 events and activities taking place throughout the UK across the week – a massive 61% up on last year. It has involved a massive collaborative effort with 1,893 different organisations officially registering events, with support from many more.

So what are we doing to Make our mark? On Tuesday I’ll be a Judge at Thames Valley University along with Alex Tew who set up www.milliondollarhomepage.com and another fellow entrepreneur. This should be a great day with local students having to pitch their ideas to us to be in with a chance of winning £150. The winners will go forward to a national final, where they’ll compete to win £2,000 plus a package of Microsoft products to help them get their business underway.

Wednesday I’m down at Brighton University speaking at Beepurple’s Enterprise Week event Reality Cheque running interactive Q & A sessions along with Speed Networking which is a bit like speed dating for those that have been!

Friday sees me do an assembly for a school in North West London – so why is all of this so important? Well, being an entrepreneur is probably one of the most varied and challenging experiences you might choose to do. So many people end up working in jobs they don’t enjoy and let their dreams disappear - you have a choice and the question is what are you going to choose?

As a team we are creating something new and different, it is fantastic to look back over the last year and see how much we have grown as a business whilst there is always so much more we want to do. If you’ve got any ideas of what else you’d like to see us to let us know!

Having an idea and making it happen is what Enterprise Week is all about – celebrating innovation and people that are making a difference. What are you doing? What can you do to make your mark?