While students have traditionally sought work placements with big name brands and firms, those looking to work closely with a company's founders and get hands-on experience in a variety of roles might be better off at a small business or startup.

Through its online directory, Enternships.com aims to connect SMBs and startups with entrepreneurial students, or 'enterns'. Businesses and aspiring enterns fill out a profile and advertise their needs to kick start a working relationship. Full-time, part-time, project-specific and remote placements are on offer, as are headline-grabbing opportunities with entrepreneurs such as Martha Lane Fox of Lucky Voice.

Enternship.com went into public beta last month, and its matchmaking service is currently free of charge. When it comes out of beta, the site aims to combine a free basic service with paid-for premium features such as targeted advertising and featured placements. The site was developed by former members of Oxford Entrepreneurs, a student society for entrepreneurship at Oxford University. The site continues to work with the society, and plans to add more services in the near future, including a special programme for school leavers and tailored year-long programmes for graduates. One to set up for the growing ranks of entrepreneurial students in other parts of the world?

Website: www.enternships.com Contact: info@enternships.com

Spotted by: Sam Patel

Back in March, we featured SmartyCard, a program for kids that combines educational games with virtual and real-world rewards. Focusing on an older crowd, GradeFund offers college students the opportunity to be rewarded for academic achievement.

GradeFund lets students recruit sponsors—usually friends and family—who donate money for each good grade. Participating students upload their transcripts at the end of each term and GradeFund verifies them and then collects funds from the sponsors, who can set their own criteria such as sponsoring students from their alma mater or choosing specific grade levels to sponsor. They can determine donation amounts for each grade, from as low as USD 5. GradeFund also allows employers to find students anonymously through their performance record, potentially netting students job and internship offers. So far, over 16,000 people have signed up for the program.

With the cost of college increasingly difficult for students (and parents) to cover, innovative programs that provide an alternative to loans and scholarships are only going to get more popular. If you're in financial services or education, time to get involved?

Website: www.gradefund.com
Contact: support@gradefund.com

Spotted by: Susan Johnston

Video instruction is something we've recently seen applied to music, golf and cricket. Now, through Academic Earth, it's being brought—for free—to virtually every scholarly topic under the sun.

New York-based Academic Earth aims to make a world-class education available to everyone on the planet. Toward that end, it is building a user-friendly ecosystem that gives internet users around the globe the ability to find, interact with and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. More than 1,500 video lectures are currently available on the site, covering economics, entrepreneurship, history, law, medicine, religion and the sciences, among many other topics. A series of thematic collections, meanwhile, combine lectures to create courses such as "Understanding the Financial Crisis" and "Social Entrepreneurship 101." Faculty for Academic Earth's lectures are drawn from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale, and courses are offered under a Creative Commons license through open course programs at the universities. Associated materials include lecture transcripts, handouts, reading assignments, tests and problem sets; some classes are also available as podcasts.

Academic Earth's courses cannot be used to get real academic credit, but they can be saved, rated and shared as favourites; they can also be used to gain status skills aplenty. The next step, it seems to us, will be to provide translations or variations that open it up to non-English speakers around the planet—and indeed, the site is actively seeking additional partners to expand its offerings. Educators, academic representatives and experts around the globe: one to get involved in?

Website: www.academicearth.org
Contact: hello@academicearth.org

Spotted by: Judy McRae

The web is already home to sites galore that offer educational games to make learning fun, but a new one is adding a slightly different twist by incorporating a way to motivate kids with virtual and real-world rewards.

SmartyCard offers what it calls the world's first "learn, earn and play" experience by rewarding kids for completing educational games with prizes from popular vendors and family sites such as iTunes, Club Penguin, WebKinz, Star Doll and BellaSara. Created by executives from the family entertainment, educational content and toy industries, SmartyCard.com features bite-sized learning activities from supplemental education leaders Learnstar, Ignite and Learning.com. Activities are designed for kids in grades 3 through 6 and cover subjects including reading, writing, math, social studies and science. Kids begin by creating an account with their parents, who purchase a SmartyCard for them, priced beginning at USD 10 for 5,000 points on the site. They then choose from among the site's thousands of activities and games, taking a quiz at the end of each to assess how much they learned. For scores of 70 percent or higher, the child "unlocks" some of the points on their card—how many depends on the difficulty of the activity—and can redeem them for subscriptions and virtual currency in popular online worlds such as WebKinz, or for physical items including CDs, toys, video games, books, crafts, science kits and DVDs, which can be shipped to their home.

California-based SmartyCard is currently seeking more partners for education and rewards. At the moment the site is also available only in English. One to partner with or localize for other parts of the world....? (Related: Online space for kids, teachers & parents.)

Website: www.smartycard.com
Contact: customerservice@smartycard.com

Spotted by: Ozgur Alaz

While plenty of makeup studios offer lessons in applying cosmetics, language classes generally aren't part of the deal. Which is why the ESL Makeup Course at MikaOlivia caught our eye. Catering mainly to Japanese (aspiring) makeup professionals, the small Vancouver-based studio created three courses that help students improve both their makeup techniques and English language skills. MikaOlivia explains: "Through dialogue, demonstration and hands-on participation, you will advance your English language skills as well as your make-up artistry expertise."

Owners Karen Mika Shoji and Oribu Olivia Yokota grew up in Canada, were educated in various parts of the world, and taught in schools in Vancouver and Tokyo. By turning their multilingual skills into an add-on service, they've created an additional stream of income, as well as cross-selling opportunities for their other offerings. The lesson for entrepreneurs? Tap into all of your talents! (Related: A being space for learning English.)

Website: www.mikaolivia.com/school
Contact: courses@mikaolivia.com

Last fall we wrote about The Kitchen, which bills itself as a combination upscale takeaway and on-site cooking school. Suggesting that the concept could be catching on, a similar offering was recently launched by British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

Much like The Kitchen, Recipease is a retail store that offers consumers the opportunity to assemble ready-to-cook meals using ingredients that have been prepped ahead of time by on-site staff. Customers begin by booking a session online, and then choosing the recipe or recipes they'd like to make; the seasonal menu changes every two months. (Those interested in making pizza or curry, on the other hand, can drop in without an appointment.) When they arrive at the Recipease shop—the first is located in London's Clapham Junction in Battersea—they find all the ingredients they need, washed, chopped and prepared. All that's left for them to do is follow the step-by-step instructions for assembly—each recipe requires about 10 minutes on average, the site says, and trained chefs are available to help—and then bring their food home to cook and enjoy. Prices vary by the dish, but current entree selections begin at GBP 3.75 per serving. A variety of more elaborate cooking lessons are also available, as is the full range of dishes already assembled for easy takeaway.

Traditional meal-prep services are all good and well, and we've covered several examples before. But adding a heaping helping of on-site instruction—with a side of boast-worthy status skills—transforms the concept beyond simply a convenience and into a pre-insperience experience, if you will. One to bring to a hungry market near you...? (Related: Family dinners, 24 at a time — Meal prep goes uptown — Ready-to-cook meals delivered to busy urbanites.)

Website: www.jamieoliver.com/recipease
Contact: www.jamieoliver.com/contact

Spotted by: Leonie Baird

Just a few weeks ago we wrote about Links Lessons, a Florida-based social network that offers personalized golfing instruction online, and since then one of our spotters alerted us to a similar coaching site for cricket players.

Both Links Lessons and MyCricketCoach invite users to upload a video of themselves playing their sport for professional analysis. But whereas Links Lessons offers a session of such instruction for free as a way to help local instructors recruit new clients, MyCricketCoach sells its coaching in the form of online lessons beginning at AUD 55 per session. Clients of the site, which is led by Australian cricket veteran Gary Cosier, begin by uploading a video of themselves playing in a recent practice session; the site serves everyone from beginners to advanced players. Within 48 hours Cosier then delivers coaching in the form of voice-over and written comments and instruction drawn right onto the video the user originally uploaded. Clients can also access the MyCricketCoach video coaching library, and live coaching is available as well for players equipped with a video camera and computer at their practice session.

Next on MyCricketCoach we'd expect to see the addition of community features that let clients connect. Nevertheless, whether it's guitar lessons or coaching in a favourite sport, online instruction brings professional expertise—and the status skills that result—within reach of anyone with an internet connection. Any bets on which sport or hobby will be next...?

Website: www.mycricketcoach.com
Contact: contact@mycricketcoach.com

Spotted by: Emma Crameri

There are social networks for virtually every profession, hobby and interest, and golf is no exception. Myriad sites already exist to help golfers connect, but a new one that just launched adds professional video analysis and online instruction to serve up free, personalized golfing advice.

Links Lessons, based in Altamonte Springs, Florida, is a free social network that focuses on improving members' game. That may be a common goal among enthusiast sites, but Links Lessons goes beyond forums and general professional tips to give members the online equivalent of free, personalized lessons. Members simply upload a video of their swing to the Videos section of the site. There, it is analysed by a real golf professional, who then gives them feedback and advice on improving it. Amateur golfers can also use Links Lessons to interact with their peers, including commenting on each other's swings and profiles. Professionals, meanwhile, can use the site to gain clients and exposure.

Offering a win-win for both amateurs and pros—not to mention a raft of niche advertising opportunities—Links Lessons was built using Ning, an online service that lets users create, customize and share social networks focused on any topic. How about creating something similar in another part of the world, or for another sport....? (Related: Connecting off the court.)

Website: www.linkslessons.com
Contact: dennis.card@linkslessons.com

Spotted by: Gustavo

"Divide and conquer" is a strategy that can be just as successful for tackling a task as it is for gaining power: break it down into small parts, and you have a better chance of succeeding. Such was the thinking behind DailyLit's books delivered in bite-sized portions, and a similar notion appears to be at work in Popling, a new online educational tool.

Users hoping to learn something new—whether it's French or trigonometry—begin by signing up for free with Popling and installing its Mac or Windows desktop software on their computer. They then subscribe to specific "poplings," or topics they want to learn. There are more than 150 poplings currently available, including 11 languages and topics in math, business, science and technology, among others. Based on their choices, Popling's desktop software will display pop-up flash cards on their computer throughout the day, timed to the frequency they choose. A language card, for example, might display a new vocabulary word, or quiz the user on one they've already learned. If the user ignores a pop-up it will go away, but if they click on it, they can see the full version and answer the question it contains. Popling is also available in an ad-free subscription for USD 20 per year.

Easy-to-digest tidbits are one of the hallmarks of what our sister site trendwatching.com would call snack culture, catering to consumers who seek gratification in smaller, easier-to-handle bites. Why not education, where the flash card already has a long history? Next, how about rolling out localized versions of Popling, tailored both to language and to culturally relevant topics? Consumers the world over are hungry for knowledge—give it to them the way they want it, and you could end up with some tasty rewards yourself! ;-)

Website: www.popling.net
Contact: www.popling.net/about/contact.php

Spotted by: Tracy

Last year, we featured two ventures offering online music tutorials by professional and famous artists: Now Play It—with tutorials by artists including Paul McCartney, Au Revoir Simone and The Dandy Warhols—and Mucony, which focuses on classical music and features tutorials by musicians from the New York Philharmonic, faculty members of the Juilliard School, and other esteemed musicians and teachers.

Smart concepts, since they give (aspiring) musicians easy access to a level of teaching they could otherwise only dream of. So we were pleased to see that Apple is now offering something similar: earlier this week, Apple announced that it has added Artist Lessons to its popular GarageBand application (part of the iLife software suite). Lessons are sold separately through GarageBand's Lesson Store, for USD 4.99 a piece, and participating artists at launch include Sting, Norah Jones and Sarah McLachlan.

Like Now Play It, the tutorials include step-by-step instructions for chords, finger positions, and techniques. Artist Lessons also allow students to slow down playback for easier learning, and let them control a song's mix and instrumentation, enabling them to tune out Sting and play with his band, for example.

Website: www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/#lessons