At age twenty-three Corey Kossack has already sold over a million dollars worth of goods on eBay. Then he wrote a book called “eBay Millionaire or Bust” to share the tricks of the trade and has since taken things a step further authoring a piece of software that incorporates the techniques taught in the book and helps eBay sellers maximize their profits. When he’s not writing books, selling eBay goods or creating software, Corey organizes Club Entrepreneur. In this interview he shares the story of how he launched his business out of his dorm room in college at age twenty and since taken the lessons of the E-myth to heart and automated his way out of his DVD business and gone on to help other eBay sellers do the same.

Frank Fiore joins us to share his experience in how he started a multi-million dollar newspaper out of his dorm room in college, how he built the largest mail order computer catalog back in the 80’s and his experience in the early days at the MySimon.com shopping aggregator. Frank is a great story teller and his years experience spans multiple fields. Leave a comment for Frank below or get in touch with him via his email address given at the end of his podcast.

Co-founder of Inkling Markets Adam Siegel joins us to give the story of how they built their company from scratch. Inkling is a system for hosting prediction markets with a public version accessible on their site and the ability for companies to run private markets for improveing their internal decision making process. Adam went through the Y Combinator summer program when it was in its second iteration and shares the experience of what that was like. You can follow along with the progress of Inkling on their blog and they’re hiring, so if you happen to be a Ruby on Rails developer in the Chicago area, get in touch with Adam.

For our twentieth anniversary episode of the Grid7 Podcast, we have a twist of roles: Sean takes the other side of the table and is interviewed on Vivapop Live for WCGH radio Connecticut. Sean gives the backstory on JumpBox, talks about Open Source collaborative applications and what they mean to the average person and the role of JumpBox in making these accessible to the non-technical computer user.

Kevin Dooley and Steve Corman of Crawdad Tech join us to share the inside scoop on their “Listening Post” technology. They were recently featured on the home page of ASU for their innovative breakthrough. Using a technique they’ve developed called “centering resonance analysis” they are able to spider the web and blogosphere for buzz related to a company and present a simple barometer of the feedback.

This means that ultimately a single person in an organization can quickly scan a summary report and get an overview of the tone and focus of what’s being said and pre-empt problems or opportunities by addressing them immediately. Given the volume of social media scattered across the Internet and the magnitude of influence blogs can have that ripple out relayed messages, it’s an important and difficult challenge for companies to stay on top of what’s being said about them. Responding immediately to feedback either to quell a rumor or capitalize on an opportunity is a huge advantage. The Listening Post delivers this capability to companies that lack the huge staff resources to manually monitor and respond to feedback in the wild. Hear from the founders what it took to start their company and sign up for the LP beta on their site.

Luke Hohmann of Enthiosys and InnovationGames.com joins us today to explain how his unique collaborative game play scenarios can help us access that valuable body of knowledge that “we don’t know we don’t know.” Luke created twelve unique exercises that can be conducted with customers to gain better insight into their needs when they don’t have the language or perspective to explain their needs explicitly. Some of the influences Luke mentioned in his interview include Alistair Cockburn, Elliot Salloway, Mike Cohn, Ken Schwaber, Karl Weick, Bob Quinn and Peter Morville’s latest book Ambient Findability.

Erika Feinberg, Founder and CEO of Active Forever joins us to share some of her incredible promotional strategies. Erika has a knack for what Peter Burns calls “1 + 1 = infinity” thinking. She has crafted numerous marketing strategies in which she examines a market, sets her own needs aside and orchestrates a promotion between other participants in the space effectively getting them to subsidize her own promotion (which is absolutely genius). Many thanks to Erika for sharing and we wish her luck in her roll-out of her new fulfillment initiative. Catch Erika speaking at the AZ Entrepreneurship Conference in November.

Joshua Strebel joins us today to share his experience building his web design company in Scottsdale. Josh recently launched two other product companies and brings us up to speed on those. BestPartyEver is a web-based service to do online party planning and Flare9 is a website builder tool aimed at serving smaller clients with an interesting affiliate model that allows developers/designers to retain the customer without taking them on as a client. Josh is an active participant in Refresh Phoenix and started the monthly Phoenix Skulls CEO roundtable.

Peter Burns, the Founder of the Institute for Entrepreneurship, joins us today to share his story. Peter has launched numerous initiatives in Arizona having the first ever college-accredited program on entrepreneurship. He left our interview early to meet with Governor Napolitano to discuss his comprehensive program and what it means for Arizona. In his interview Peter announces a new VC fund for entrepreneurs in that should make any start-up in Arizona giddy- we’ll let you hear that announcement from his mouth. If you happen to be in Tempe this evening, stop by Mill Ave for Club Entrepreneur. The authors of StartupNation.com are presenting and if it’s anything like the last event, it should draw upwards of 200 people.

We were fortunate to attend the Revolution in Marketing Conference held March 1st at Grand Canyon University and be invited to capture the audio sessions. The focus of the conference was on how to take advantage of social media to promote your business. Ironically enough, these sessions are coming to you now via podcasting which is an emerging form of social media. Here are links to the full conference schedule, photos, and a repository of all the audio/visuals used at the conference. You can download all the audio sessions as a single zip file, listen to the streaming audio for each session or grab the individual mp3’s below.

Download all audio as a single .zip file.

That’s the media element- now engage the social component and leave a comment below or ask a question of one of the panelists, presenters or fellow attendees on anything you heard at the conference. Absorbing + Responding = Social Media.