Dear redundant old-media bigwigs: Meet your eventual replacement, a 16-year-old with gigs as a professional journalist for TechCrunch, a marketing evangelist for Qik and as CEO of his own startup. Also, he's been officially endorsed by Twitter.

A spot on the microblogging service's Suggested User List of accounts for new users has helped Daniel Brusilovsky reach just under 120,000 followers. He's also been officially "Verified" by Twitter Inc., lest someone impersonate the powerful 16-year-old. His influence at the microblogging startup apparently runs deep: he's meeting with Twitter's COO, right now.

At TechCrunch, he's a writer who dabbles in events and business development. He's also the young face of video-casting service Qik and CEO of his own TeensInTech.com. Oh, and he advises at least two other companies.

Brusilovsky's quick ascent contains lessons for the more aged and less accomplished:

• Don't fit in? Perfect! Brusilovsky was "the only one who needed his parents to pick him up from" a tech conference last year, according to GigaOM. The intervening year has only brought more mainstream success, like joining TechCrunch in June and getting the Twitter stamp of approval.
• Form a community of similar misfits. TeensInTech is a site for young people as terrifyingly ambitious and energetic as Brusilovsky. They're coming for us all. Soon.
• "Don't give up." That one's from Brusilovsky. And we do not question Brusilovsky.

Let's just hope this promising kid finishes school and goes on to college. Just because Bill Gates, the founders of Google, the founders of Twitter and the founder of Oracle all dropped out of school doesn't mean it pays, kid.

(Pic by Andrew Mager)

Send an email to Ryan Tate, the author of this post, at ryan@gawker.com.

Thanks for then unexpected post!

Startups like Bump Technologies, which recently got some funding, and My Name is E are trying to kill the paper business card, but even in 2009, many of us, including myself, still use business cards. The biggest hassle with business cards is getting the contact information into your address book as fast as possible — that’s where Business Card Reader [iTunes link] for the iPhone and iPod touch comes in.

Business Card Reader scans and “reads” the picture using ABBYY’s text recognition technology and enters the data into the iPhone or iPod touch address book. Basically, you open the application, and choose either to take a new picture of a business card, or if you’ve already taken a picture, you can upload that as well. After you take a picture, or upload a picture, the application scans the business card, and after about 15 seconds, you get the address book field to edit the scanned information if there are errors. Once that’s all done, it adds the new contact into your address book. It’s really that easy.

After playing around with the application for a few days and testing out different types of business cards, the accuracy, in my opinion, is about 85%. The only errors I got where if the companies name was in a logo format, and their logo had a weird font, but other then that, the app worked pretty well. If your a mobile networker, this is an app you’ll definitely like.

Business Card Reader is $5.99 from the App Store, where you can buy it today.

via techcrunch.com

Pretty awesome app. Check it out.

Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator’s Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I’m taking my notes below on his talk.

Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more “money hungry” then companies that are funded. If you are a funded company, you generally have money to spend that investors encourage you to spend as well. If you’re a bootstrapped company, you’re hungry to make money.

Fried also talked about the art of making money. He mentioned that making money is like playing the piano. If you started playing piano at 5, you have a lot of time to practice playing piano to get better. If you want to be a good piano player, you start young, and you practice. Same goes with making money. It’s a skill and a talent. The more practice you have making money, the more successful you’ll be.

Fried also used an interested analogy to crack cocaine, comparing crack to funding. Crack is like funding, because it’s addictive. Investors want you to come back for money — they want you to be addicted to the money.

One of the major points Fried mentioned is picking the right price. You have to find the right price to sell your products to consumers. Customers will pay if it’s worth it. Don’t make products that aren’t useful for others — you have to have people using your product, and if they use it, charge for it.

Thing will go wrong as well. Be real and honest about your mistakes. Also, you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful. Fried mentioned that 37Signals is based in Chicago, but they have employees all over the world. Location doesn’t matter to build great products. You’ll know if you have a great product if people use it.

Q: How do you know if your product is useful for a lot of people?
A:Build something you would use yourself. When you put stuff out for free everyone goes “ah, that’s cool.” Put a price on it, then you figure out if it’s really useful.

Q: Regarding virtual offices.
A: Need to find a good team. People who can work from their home a lot. We’re in touch all day using our tools, but you can put that away if you need to. You can’t put a ‘real’ office away like that. But some face time is essential sometimes. Should be the exception not the rule.

Q: Pricing?
A: First question is ‘would I pay for it?’ It’s a science. You have to worry about margins. Walmart doesn’t use 9s for their prices. They do 8. But for me, is it worth paying for. We have multiple tiers. Every price point is double, but you get more than twice as much in each tier.

Q: I’m a scientist, skeptical about luck.
A: I think luck plays a part somewhere. BUt I think for the most part make your own success. You can’t wait for something lucky to happen. Maybe timing/meeting right person is luck. I think it’s the kind thing to say, PC to say. But I think if you ask people honestly they won’t say that.

Q: How long did it take you from having idea to launching paid project?
A: We launched basecamp as a side project. We were a web design company at the time. We made it in a few months, then we put a price on it. Built it for ourselves, we needed it for ourselves. Hit $5k a month in about six weeks, has since increased. We don’t share exact rev numbers. Job wars made 1.5 mi. book material about a million. Advance from new book is handsome. We make millions in rev and profits. We did take one investment in 2006. We bootstrapped. We didn’t need the money (from Jeff Bezos). We did it for liquidity and someone like Jeff available, he’s built a business from scratch.

Palaran, a stealth-mode advertising startup based in Palo Alto, has raised $1 million Series A from True Ventures, we’ve learned. True Venture’s Jon Callaghan has taken a board seat along with Om Malik as a board observer. Palaran’s undisclosed round of angel funding came from Esther Dyson, Del.ici.ous founder Joshua Schacter and Vish Makhijani, among others.

Palaran was founded in July and has been in stealth mode until now, but we’ve learned that the startup has something to do with web based advertising.

Amit Kumar, CEO, is a former Yahoo! alum; he helped create SearchMonkey, the company’s third-party developer platform. He left last year to serve as VP of Product Management at semantic ads and content engine Dapper. The other three founders —  Joseph Primiani, George Paul and Alan Ngai — are all Yahoo or Google alumni.

Palaran has raised a total of $1.8 million including their angel around.

Congrats, Palaran!