When Adrian Portlock left his mobile phone on the tube in 2000, he was shocked at the kerfuffle involved in getting it back. “They asked me for the IMEI number of the handset,” says Portlock. “This was back in 2000, I didn’t even know what an IMEI number was.”
He finally tracked down the code and […]

When Bobbi Brown was struggling to decide what to do with her life, her mother suggested a mental exercise that lead to the creation of her eponymous cosmetics business, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics. Napoleon Barragan, founder of 1-800-Mattress, remembers his mother washing his family’s clothes by hand in the river, an image that inspired his drive […]

 
Pete Kadens, a Chicago entrepreneur, and Troy McCullough, a homeless man, met, by chance, one chilly morning eight days ago.
Kadens had arrived early for a 6:45 a.m. conference in the West Loop. He was sitting in his warm car and noticed a man in a well-worn shirt and tie, outside the offices of StreetWise, the […]

 
A British web-millionaire is to launch a social networking site to help raise awareness about malaria worldwide.
Tom Hadfield set up Soccer.net when just a teen and sold the site for $40 million to to US sports network ESPN when he was just 17-years-old. He then managed to raise millions to setup Schoolsnet.com
However, he has now […]

Ex-offender Ira Brownlow, 31, did not let his past of drugs, poverty and violence  dictate his future. In 2002, while serving a four-year prison term for gun possession, Brownlow sat in his cell at Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown, Md., and filled out papers to register his cleaning company — Shyyning Path.
“Other inmates would […]

When life throws you some failure, turn it around!
Florist Moya Topsom was upset when she lost her job as manageress at a florist in Wymondham, but she then branched out on her own.
The 21-year-old had been working at Jasmine florists for three and a half years when the owners shuttered the business because of soaring […]

 
Execution is king!
Take this story of a struggling entrepreneurs story as inspiration: Baker tells her story and how she dealt with Wal-Mart
I became an inventor while working two jobs and taking night classes in Columbus. Every Monday, to reward my efforts, I’d treat myself to barbecued Buffalo wings - extra-saucy ones - for dinner.
One night, […]

 
If Michael Whelan’s dream comes true, the Atlantic ocean will soon help keep the lights on in Ireland. And if it does, it will complete a circuit for Whelan: 30 years ago he was a commercial diver working on North Sea oil and gas installations. Returning to Ireland in the 1980s, he started a marine […]

Neurosurgeon and entrepreneur James Doty, MD, was feeling generous when he agreed in 2000 to give a multimillion-dollar gift of stock to Stanford University School of Medicine, but he didn’t realize at the time that he would end up giving away his entire personal fortune.
Doty, who had planned to retire on his stock earnings and […]

 
As his mother tells it, Cade Larson was a lively 15-month-old who loved playing peekaboo and chase with other children and was quickly adding to his vocabulary of more than 50 words, including “fish,” “bowl” and “shoe.”
But then, said his mother, Jennifer VanDerHorst-Larson, Cade got vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella, influenza and chicken pox on […]