Young, Fearless, and Smart

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The results were impressive, with more than 300 people nominating their favorite ventures. We whittled these down to 25 businesses with serious potential. Check out our slide show profiling each of them, then cast your vote on the last page. We'll report the results in November.

There are several trends in this year's batch of entrepreneurs. For one, a number of their companies have turned offshore for inexpensive software development. Mobo, a cell-phone-based restaurant food ordering prepayment service, employs four software developers in South Africa. And Extreme Entrepreneurship Education and MyMPO's Musicane have Web developers and staff in India.

Telecommuting is popular, too. Several of our featured entrepreneurs' businesses have assembled teams of employees that work from home, making office overhead a nonissue. CulturalConnect employs about 30 people who all work remotely, divided between the West Coast and the Midwest, with one in Israel.

Do it Yourself and Save

Traditional advertising also appeared to be a relatively negligible expense for many of the outfits we profiled. CulturalConnect, for example, relies on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, and social networking platforms. Musicane's technology includes the ability to actually share an online music store virally on social networking sites.

It's as easy as copying a line of code. "Today, you don't have to have a multimillion-dollar ad campaign—you can do it online," says Anand Chhatpar, CEO of Brain Reactions, one of last year's five winners (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/31/05, "Entrepreneurs: Cream of the Young Crop").

Web-based "service-as-software" applications were another common innovation. Music Arsenal, for instance, provides communication and database software to record labels, and Comcate performs a similar role for government agencies. These companies add value to cash-strapped operations by providing cheap access to tools that can improve office operations and efficiency.

The defining qualities of this year's fearless young entrepreneurs: They've all got clear revenue models, their ideas fill a gap they found in their own lives, and because of technology, they're operating on a skinnier shoestring than ever before.

Jeffrey Gangemi is member of the MBA Class of 2009 at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He was previously a staff writer for BusinessWeek.com.