Acceptional and Shpoonkle Form Strategic Partnership to Create Student-Focused Resource Solutions for College and Law Students

Cambridge, MA (PRWEB) October 24, 2011

Acceptional.com, a company that offers the most comprehensive online resource of college essays written by students accepted into the top U.S. universities, including the Ivy League, Stanford University, and MIT, has formed a strategic partnership with Miami, Florida-based Shpoonkle, an innovative and free web site that not only allows clients to confidentially post a legal case on line and attorneys then will bid for that case, but also offers one of the largest free online collections of high-quality case briefs and outlines for law students. Together the companies leverage technology to offer the most extensive, online resource for college and law students.

We are excited to announce our strategic partnership with Shpoonkle, an innovative leader that shares our vision of a creative, technology-based approach to the challenge of leveling the playing field for students, said Aaron Michel, co-founder, Acceptional.com. Our partnership advances the delivery of resource solutions for students and provides new growth opportunities for Acceptional.com by increasing our current market presence and expanding our demographic reach.

In the last decade, online and social media-based technologies have redefined student life, and access to online assets has become critical for success. The strategic partnership between Acceptional.com and Shpoonkle will provide the innovative, interactive, and collaborative online solutions college and law students need for academic success.

Shpoonkle is dedicated to increasing our collection of free online resources for students and to expanding the services we offer, and our partnership with Acceptional.com will allow us to widen our reach to more students, said Shpoonkle CEO Robert Niznik.

With the help of this partnership, Acceptional will be moving into the legal space over the months ahead, offering affordable sample admissions essays and advice to candidates for law school. Shpoonkle will be expanding its offering of case briefs to students who are just embarking on the law school application process.

Sharing a belief that services to help students need to be effective, accessible, and affordable for all, Acceptional.com and Shpoonkle are partnering to expand and extend the resources they provide. Each company has very different business models but both have similar demographics and goals with students.

The traditional college application process is terribly skewed, high stress and difficult to navigate, and Acceptional.com is facilitating change by making affordable high-quality admissions sample essays and help available to everyone. Similarly, Shpoonkle is creating a new model in the legal marketplace by making justice affordable and by providing free services for law students with high quality case briefs.

About Acceptional.com

Acceptional.com levels the playing field in college admissions by increasing transparency and access to resources that help applicants apply successfully. The company offers access to more than 1,200 essays written by individuals who were accepted into top U.S. universities, including the Ivy League, Stanford University and MIT. Essays can be sorted and viewed by authors' demographic and academic profiles. The company also provides an essay advisory service that gives students feedback, and an interactive Blog, written by students for students, that allows discussion on essay writing advice and other topics related to the college admissions process. Visit http://www.acceptional.com for more information or to browse essays.

About Shpoonkle

The EBay of Legal Services, Shpoonkle is an innovative free web site that allows clients to confidentially post a legal case on line where attorneys then will bid for that case. The client selects one of their bidders to represent that case. The client has the option to pick any of the bidders and can communicate privately with the attorneys. The site is free for both client and attorney. In the United States, the process has saved the average client almost 30% on legal fees while allowing Attorneys a resource to build and/or expand their practice. Shpoonkle has been widely publicized and recognized with over 600 international articles written about the highly productive service as a means to extend advocacy and affordable justice to many consumers. For more information, visit http://www.shpoonkle.com.

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Money Saving Tips for New College Students

Fort Lauderdale, FL (PRWEB) August 29, 2005

The new school year is approaching and soon many recent high school graduates will venture into a new segment of their lives, the college years. Apart from getting used to the heavy course loads and assignments, students have to learn to handle their finances in a mature manner which involves good judgment and smart spending. The following tips and guidelines are created to help college students adapt to their new life style in a financially smart manner.

Create a Personal Budget

Any personal finance expert will tell you that creating and following a personal budget is the smartest method in being financially efficient. A personal budget will spell out exactly how much money you have and what your expenses are. This method will refrain students from overspending and will also teach them to live within their means.

Tuition Expenses

All students should allocate some time to research and apply for scholarships and grants, which can alleviate some of the financial pressure put on by college related expenses. Students should also shop around for student loans and look for the best possible interest rate. Students should choose a loan program that initiates charging interest only after they graduate from college. These types of loan programs can save students thousands of dollars in interest charges.

Textbook Expenses

With an average textbook priced at well above a $ 100, college students should look into buying used textbooks from other students or bookstores. Students should keep a close vigilance on campus fliers and student newspapers for possible textbook bargains. Internet based textbook retailers such as http://www.collegetext.com enables students to sell, buy and trade textbooks with other students.

Protect Your Identity

Protecting sensitive personal information has been a major hurdle for many college students who reside in campus dorms. According to http://www.bankrate.com, 49 percent of college students receive credit card applications on a daily or weekly basis and almost 30 percent of students throw out credit card applications without destroying them. Also, since most of the universities use students’ social security number as the primary student ID number, these students face an additional risk of loosing their personal information to prying identity thieves.

To minimize this threat, students should refrain from storing significant personal documentations such as, social security cards, passports, birth certificates, PIN numbers and other important documents in their campus dorm rooms. Students can also request universities to stop using their social security number as their primary student ID number and ask them to assign a random student ID number.

Go Easy on Credit Cards

Nowadays, all college students have at least 2-5 credit cards in their wallets and almost all of them use it for their everyday purchases. Credit cards are useful and efficient as long as you pay off your balance in full each month. If you have a habit of charging everything to your Visa or MasterCard and payoff only the minimum payment due each month, you will end up with thousands of dollars in credit card debt when you leave college after four years.

Other Ways to Cut Back on Expenses

Students can cut back on everyday expenses by looking for good deals around campus. Almost all merchants near major universities offer discounts to students and these savings can save hundreds of dollars in the long run. Most universities offer its students free gym access and medical services, which can be quite expensive outside the campus. Inexpensive transportation passes, discounted calling cards, discounted movie passes, free wireless Internet access are some of the other ways of cutting down your expenses during your college years.

CreditGUARD of America is a non-profit credit counseling agency that assists consumers through debt counseling and financial education. Please visit our web site at http://www.creditguard.org or call 1-800-867-0406 for a free consultation with a certified credit counselor.

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New on-line company offers free help to college students

(PRWEB) November 18, 1999

Company Press Release

SOURCE: StudentCredit.com

SUBJECT: New Online Service Offers Free Information to College Students about handling Credit

In an effort to counter the problem of credit debt among college students, a new company, StudentCredit.com, has started a nationwide campaign to get good credit information and education to college students.

The average student obtains their first credit card by running into a table marketer on a college campus offering a free T-shirt or bottle of soda to fill out a credit card application. Usually there is no information given out by the marketer on how the student should handle credit, and in this process, students rarely read the fine print of the specific card they apply for. Very often there are interest rate changes or hidden fees the student may not be aware of.

The student fills out the application without this information presented. A few weeks later, the card arrives with a credit limit of $ 500-$ 1000. Now the student has the similar buying power as his or her parents. Normally, that student will go out and buy some clothes, CDs, eat at restaurants, and buy drinks for friends, etc. The student may even use the card to purchase textbooks for the year.

Suddenly, the credit limit is reached. Students usually work only part-time, and they end up making minimum payments. It is a fact that credit card companies usually give students a credit limit equal to or more than what they earn in an entire year. So that student may also miss a payment. Now there are late charges involved. Students very often have to go to their parents to help pay the bill.

This happens to college students all across the country. It is a fact that credit debt has been a problem for students, as well as adults. According to the Consumer Federation of America, aggressive marketing by banks and lack of initial information towards college students has resulted in many students running up unmanageable debts. There have even been extreme cases of desperate students taking their own lives. (See the following link on this story)

From CNN.com: http://cnn.com/US/9906/09/college.kids.debt/index.html

Credit card companies actively seek out college students because they are the next generation of consumers. College graduates make more in the work place and the card companies want to get a head start with those future workers. Unfortunately, in order, to attract these new consumers, the credit card companies often resort to cheap gimmicks to get people to sign up.

Recent college graduates created StudentCredit.com specifically to help college students. The emphasis of the company is to provide information for students to learn good credit management skills before they acquire a credit card. StudentCredit.com offers extensive information about how credit works, how to get and how to maintain good credit. The students can also get information on how to get a copy of their credit report and how to repair their credit if it is already damaged. The company web-site features a variety of credit cards the students can apply for at their convenience, not under pressure from a table marketer or a flashy mail campaign. StudentCredit.com does not want any student to apply for a credit card until he or she has acquired the skills to manage one responsibly.

"StudentCredit.com is a free service that provides a convenient, responsible way for students to learn about and obtain credit. Credit is something the vast majority of College Students are seeking and we felt there was a need for a more educational approach by providing key information and education about good credit," said David Ogden, CEO.

As part of its national campaign, StudentCredit.com has printed good credit brochures for distribution to college students. This brochure is not a credit card application. In the brochure, cards are not mentioned, nor is there an application to fill out. The brochure simply lists an overview of the good credit information on the company's web-site. Over one hundred thousand (100,000) of these brochures have already been passed into the hands of students across the country. Many colleges, Duke and Clemson University, to name a few, have worked with the company to get these brochures to their incoming freshmen for this school year.

To date, over 250,000 students have visited StudentCredit.com and utilized the free services. No other web-site offers the combination of good credit information, services, and variety of cards.

For further information:

CONTACT:

David Wise

David@StudentCredit.com

(407) 453-2206

Or

Russell Gentile

Gentiler22@aol.com

6755 South Tropical Trail

Merritt Island, FL 32952

dotReader to Slash Cost of College Textbooks

Tacoma, WA (PRWEB) June 10, 2006

dotReader will help Freeload Press slash the costs of textbookstypically by 60 percent. And publishers couldn't be happier.

The secret is to embed ads inside textbooks via dotReader, Tom Doran, Founder/CEO of Freeload Press says, and dotReader is the perfect solution for publishers using our Textbook Media Services. FedEx|Kinkos, Starbucks, or even local pizza shops could target ads to specific geographic markets. With ad money factored in, a $ 100 science book might sell instead for $ 39.

My own daughter's been blogging up a storm about the textbook costs, says Mark Carey, CEO of OSoft, the software company behind dotReader, a powerful and easy-to-use e-book program. She's thrilled that I'm part of the solution to the problem.

This is a win-win for everyonepublishers and students like my daughter ?Quinn. Students' total savings could over time could reach the billions.

According to the National Association of College Stores (NACS), college course materials were a $ 6.5 billion dollar market in 2004/2005.

The cost of books and supplies for the academic year 2004-05 rose from $ 745-$ 843 to $ 773-$ 870 and does not vary much from two-year to four-year institutions, or from public to private schools, according to figures reported by The College Board.

New commercial option

The new technology could be a bonanza for cash-strapped students, who no longer will have to borrow quality textbooks and supporting materials from friends or the library. Worse, because of today's climbing textbook costs, professors may avoid assigning certain material in the first place.

Now, however, Freeload Press, a Saint Paul, MN company, will use the ad-serving capabilities of dotReader to publish a propritary line of free textbooks, as well as distribute other publishers e-texts. Prices will typically run 60% less than competing paper textbooks.

These textbooks, says Tom Doran, Founder/CEO of Freeload Press, will come from the best authors in their respective fields. Quality will not suffer.

We have received tremendous interest from top publishers of college texts, he says. Consider that publishers sell a book once and the college bookstores sell the same book 3-4 times with no revenue back to the publisher. Students can buy select books electronically for less than the used book price and the publishers earn revenue on every sale. We believe the sweet spot is about $ 39.00 for science, math, and technology books vs. a typical cost of over $ 100.

The slash in textbook prices is made possible by embedding dynamic advertising within the e-book. Students agree to this format in exchange for the lower price.

During beta testing, Freeload Press used PDF format to deliver content. The shortcoming of a PDF platform is on the advertising side, Doran said. We wanted to provide our adversers with both rich media opportunities and the ability to easily update or change their advertising message. To scale up, Freeload Press chose OSoft's dotReader.

dotReader Solution

The dotReader is an open source e-book reader with an open architecture that allows publishers/distributors to create plug-in features in this case, an advertising module.

We are delighted to see the dotReader put to this use, said Mark Carey, CEO of OSoft, based in Tacoma, Washington.. The dotReader permits unobtrusive dynamic advertising that can be hidden during reading and studying work.

Books in accounting might offer advertisements from major accounting firms, notes Doran. Companies could target to student geographically. Ads are automatically updated as new sponsors come and go. Best of all, the content can be read online or offline on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, tablets, and most PDAs.

And students will be able to customize the appearance of the reader. For example, the screen displaying the book can include a control to change the size of the type on the screen. Or they can use other 'buttons' instead.

The reader is colorful in looks, and the iPod generation should love the aesthetics.

And the ads aren't intrusive. Students will see them when going to a new chapter, but they can then switch 'em off to focus on their lessons.

Building Communities

Freeload Press chose the dotReader also because of its ability to develop learning communities around content. The dotReader allows for embedded forums, polls, and group discussions inside each book.

Instructors can send students all of their annotations (including a syllabus) which will be rendered directly in the book at the point of discussion. Private, group, and public annotation enhances the learning environment.

DotReader is of major significance for educators since it will be easier than ever for students to engage in collaborative learning, Carey says.

Everybody Wins

Doran believes that the primary focus is to reduce the textbook pain students experience in the college bookstores and give publishers more control over their revenue stream. We are both challenging and inviting publishers to rethink their business model. In the low-margin publishing business, electronic books supported by advertising makes sense and the dotReader is the perfect platform to accomplish this.

Industry analyst John Blossom from Shore Communications loves dotReader, formerally known as ThoutReader. In an article written in January, Blossom states, Then why in the wake of all of this [Consumer Electronics Show] am I more excited about a piece of open source software from a garage startup in Tacoma, Washington than all of the wizardry rearing its head in Las Vegas? Because it has the outlines of how publishers can actually control their fate in the midst of a rapidly changing marketplace for premium content.

For more information, contact:

Tom Doran

Freeload Press

(651)695-0870

Mark Carey

OSoft.com

(253) 848-4758

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