"Shaving knowledge and technique is not instinctive, all men need to learn the art and unfortunately many learn it badly". A passionate statement from London-based grooming shop Geo F. Trumper, which now offers classes on how to shave properly. Customer demand led to the introduction of the one-to-one sessions, in which a barber shows a customer the best techniques for shaving and how to avoid unsightly problems such as ingrown hairs and razor burn. Other shaving tips are offered according to skin type.

Two types of class are on offer from the Soho branch, depending on the skills sought: there's the Mach 3 Shaving School at GBP 50, or the 90-minute Open Razor Shaving School at GBP 75. Founded in 1875, the Trumpers chain is drawing on the power of status skills to expose modern men to its traditional craft while showing customers the advantages of its high-end range—something entrepreneurs in most industries should think of doing, if they aren't already. Which skills can you help your customers master? (Related: Publisher launches creative writing academy.)

Website: www.trumpers.com
Contact: www.trumpers.com/contact.cfm

Spotted by: David Licona

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