The following post was inspired by a random flash-back I just had. I'll look for old photos and post them if and when I find them!

Oh, the days of computer camp! I attended a computer camp from 2002-2006 and watched it transform from small intimate startup into a big nasty corporation. There was a huge influx of campers and counselors, and the management staff became uptight and nasty authoritarians. Here's the story from the eyes of 13 year old Jessica Mah:

I remember going to a summer camp fair, where dozens of summer camps showcased their pictures and activities in their booths. I walked around, and most of the camps were sports related. Being the young, geeky, unattractive 13 year old Jessica Mah that I was, I immediately picked up the brochures for the only computer camp there. My engineer dad was pushing me to go, and of course, I did! That summer, I was sent off to computer camp and experienced the best two weeks of my life. What's better than eating pizza while tinkering with C++ and playing counter-strike at 3AM? Nothing can top that!

So why were these two weeks at computer camp so significant to my growth as a geek and eventually an entrepreneur? As always, it's about the people. In my first hour at computer camp, I had already befriended four other 12/13 year old tech geeks -- at which point, I had an amazing revelation. I realized that I wasn't alone in this world! Yes, as lame as that sounds, I realized that I wasn't as nerdy weird as I had always thought I was. I FINALLY found a place where I was the "coolest" of the pack. Within 24 hours, I was tooling around with Apache server and dual booting with Fedora Linux on my 800mhz Compaq laptop thanks to camp friends.

Summer after summer, I continued going to computer camp, and I continued to love it... that is, until things got strict. There was bureaucracy. The counselors and directors took advantage of their power. Counter-strike was banned. 1/3 of our time was re-allocated to being required outdoor recreation time. Hundreds of more kids came, counselors were abusing their power, internet was banned from the dorms, and boys couldn't hang out in girls' rooms. All of a sudden, senior campers found themselves lost in a major corporation that decided to fire the founders and hire Harvard M.B.A. types. All of the new rules in place were to appease the "investors" (parents) at the expense of "customers" (campers). And to this day, my fellow camper friends and I chat on AIM about how the summer camp lost its touch and became just like every other major organization.

I think it's time that a new startuppy computer camp takes foot-hold in Silicon Valley -- except it should be WAY more than just a geeky computer camp: it should teach the fundamentals of running a startup and being entrepreneurial. How to attract users, how to co-create products with customer input, revenue models, etc... Such a summer camp would be for smart and motivated geeks 13-18 years old. There's an application process to get admitted into the summer camp, but that would insure that the campers are only of top caliber. Bureaucracy and rules exist to manage incompetent employees -- same applies to children. For recreational activity, we'll offer DDR and counter-strike themed laser tag. Together, we can re-create the geeky teenage summer camp that will always maintain its small start-up culture. In other words, we would be creating the "Rackspace of Computer Camps" or a TechStars targeted to teens. Sounds like a plan!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

I left the South by Southwest Conference today thinking about how some of the best companies we know create products make life easier for those who could afford this luxury. A few quick examples: Apple, Rackspace, and NetJets. They're each companies valued in the billions, and that all comes down to their basic philosophy: make life less stressful. The big question is would you like to solve the stressful problems of the rich and famous or would you rather provide tools to a greater number of "cheap" clientele?

Apple: They've always competed against major players, but they're so popular because they make things easier and reduce stress. Macs don’t get viruses. PCs do. Last time I checked, Macs cost a million times more than PCs and with good reason.

Rackspace: Hosting frequently goes down. When you're guaranteed nearly perfect uptime, the customer's stress goes away. Sure, Rackspace has had their fair share of problems, but they still have a reputation for reducing the stress of companies and people who need 100% website uptime. They charge around 500% more than the average dedicated server provider for this assurance. While they cost a lot, it's probably more worthwhile than running your own datacenter operations.

NetJets: Flying is stressful. As you've probably seen, I hate flying commercial! NetJets reduces the stress of having to own your own jet by offering fractional jet ownership. They get you where you need to go without the stress of going through security or waiting in the airport. They cost around $500,000 to own 1/16th of a jet, which gives about 50 hours of flight time per year. I see the company as being similar to Rackspace because both cost a lot, but they give you grade A assurance for a fraction the price of owning your own jet. Not too bad if you ask me. Clients include Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Tiger Woods, and my family. (haha, I wish)

I guess there's one major similarity among the above companies: they took a while to get to where they are now and spent millions to build their products as such. You can reduce stress at a much lower level and still make millions. Take for example Craigslist. It reduces the stress of having to go apartment hunting. eBay reduces the stress of buyers who can't find a product anywhere else. Simpler companies work too.

It needs to be understood that you don't necessarily have to start a company that "reduces stress" for the wealthy. As I've mentioned before, you have two types of companies: Companies that have mass usage and companies that go on the direct sale model. Rackspace has to manually sell its services, customer by customer. Facebook, on the other hand, has an automatic signup form. The company has very little two way interaction with its users. It seems as if "mass usage" companies can throw their products into the world without spending as much time and money. The direct sale companies require a much greater investment, but often yield much greater returns. This isn't always the case. Restaurants live by a direct sale model, but they don't prevent stress for the rich and powerful. There's a distinct difference. The best direct sale companies target the wealthy and only the wealthy.

I'll write a more thorough article on the different type of companies, what each type requires, and how to choose between the different types. In a nutshell, if you have very little time and money, it probably makes sense to throw a product out in the public under the "mass usage" model. If you have the funds (and obvious smarts,) make life easier for the rich and famous and you'll find yourself sitting on a pile of cash.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star. (and traveling to random cities and checking into hotels while being underage)

Most of you have probably heard about the terrible oil spill that happened in the San Francisco Bay last week. It's terrible - wildlife is dying, and over 1,500 people are working around the clock to clean this mess up.

Everybody is dwelling on the stupid Cosco Bussan container ship that caused this problem. Afterall, it's probably one or two dumbass human beings who led to this hapening, right? Let's look at the bright side:

For all we know, this may bring about change in how things are done in the future. We'll be better prepared for future oil spills. People who feel passionate about fixing this will try to bring about permanent change in policy. If an oil spill 10X worse is to happen a year from now, we'll be much more prepared because of this one event.

This relates to the Rackspace.com dilemma below. The downtime Rackspace experienced happened because of one dumbass driver who crashed his truck. I don't see any pluses to this situation, but if Rackspace saw this downtime in its earlier days, it could have prepped itself for when the company grew to the large scale it is today.

With my hosting company three summers ago, we had a terrible DDOS attack that put offline a few thousand websites. We lost clients, we lost money, and we were left with a tarnished reputation... but hey, we learned from this. We made everything secure for if this was to happen in the future. We grew 1000% in the next few months, we were sure to spend time patching up all of our customers' machines, and not a single customer experienced a security related problem.

So stop dwelling on the past if you can't go back... there might be a positive benefit for all you know!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

It's a pity that Rackspace, a company with a stellar reputation for uptime and "Fanatical Support" experienced hours of downtime for clients in the Fort Worth data center. After putting in millions of dollars into infrastructure, how could something like this happen?

First, disclosures: I used to be happy Rackspace customer. I studied the way they did business and implemented it in my own dedicated server solutions business back in 2004. I'm friendly with the founders/former management of Rackspace and Serverbeach, and I've learned so much from their advice.

Just a few weeks ago, Serverbeach experienced a power outage. They took the necessary steps to get people back online within a few hours, but it was sure to cost clients thousands of hours of man power and money to fix. The damage is still there - downtime puts full time businesses out of order.

When a hosting company goes down, so many levels of the business chain are hurting. For example, I used to have servers at Sagonet, and when they had problems, all of my racks there were down. When my racks were down, thousands of websites were shut off from the world. Thousands of websites shut down mean that not only are my clients mad at me, but their clients are mad at them. And those clients may have to use these websites to serve THEIR clients, and so on. The loop can go on forever, and it all comes down to a datacenter hickup.

At that point, there's nothing you can do but wait for the machines to come back online. And once they're online, a shit ton of complain emails are bound to go to the datacenter, the leasers, the resellers, the clients, and even the clients of the clients. Companies like Rackspace who manage both the datacenter and the actually sold services are forced to compensate for lost time, or face terrible press and a huge loss of clientele.

It's particularly frustrating for Rackspace that all of this happened from a stupid truck accident that brough a transformer down. The open letter says that they had to shut some infrastructure down just to get to the accident victim. I'm sure the high level Rackspace clients wouldn't have minded leaving that poor soul to suffer if it meant keeping their websites running.

When I was in the business, problems weren't as terrible, because I targeted small businesses. Many of them wouldn't even notice downtime! Rackspace, on the other hand, serves clients such as Motorola and JC Morgan Chase. And when their services go down, the entire world is bound to know.

I'll give Rackspace credit for doing the right thing. They wrote an open letter to their clients, took responsibility, and promised compensation.

Unfortunate for them, their reputation may be somewhat tarnished from this stupid accident.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.