AKT’s Chief Operating Officer Jared Mendelewicz is once again the featured guest blogger on YoungEntrepreneur.com, the largest social networking forum for entrepreneurs. This time, Jared writes on the sometimes sensitive subject of the bad hire and outlines key traits of red flag employees that might be doing your company more bad than good. Read more here: http://bit.ly/lzxzMx

AKT kicked off 2010 with the announcement of the opening of its second warehouse. This warehouse, also located in Winter Park, Florida, is now home to AKT’s graphic design team and also functions as a fully operational print facility.

Throughout the year, AKT was honored by many local and national publications for its consistent and outstanding professional achievements. The Orlando Business Journal included AKT in its annual “Forty Under 40” list. The company was also recognized by Cambridge Who’s Who for excellence, leadership and dedication. Inc. Magazine ranked AKT Enterprises No. 511 on its fourth annual Inc. 5000 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.

AKT was also asked to contribute to multiple media outlets this year, including YoungEntrepreneur.com, one of the largest online forum communities for entrepreneurs, Full Sail University’s Music Business Department and the Winter Park Observer, a popular newspaper in the Orlando community.

In March, AKT acquired Smartpunk, one of the world’s most popular online music storefronts. AKT’s expertise in online stores and entertainment merchandise, coupled with Smartpunk’s worldwide customer reach, has allowed the company to distinguish itself as a leading force in music products and services.

Big Top, AKT’s first retail initiative, opened its flagship storefront in August. Located in Winter Park, Florida, Big Top specializes in the development of specialty products, including direct-to-garment items, embroidery, web design, and more. The store is ideal for both big and small businesses, family gatherings, sororities and fraternities, and much more, providing AKT with the opportunity to infiltrate the local market. Big Top is the first of many planned retail projects for AKT.

AKT Management has established itself as an asset to the entertainment industry, utilizing all of AKT’s resources to foster long and meaningful careers for its clients.  In addition to the production of a sold-out tour for YouTube sensation LiveLavaLive in April, AKT Management announced the signing of the Orlando-based band Savannah, who recently released their debut EP to a great response. AKT Management also represents Dan Brown, the founder and star of Dan 3.0, the most-watched show on the number one Internet television station, Revision3.

AKT recently announced Smartpunk Live, its new music-based web show, which marks the beginning of an exciting turning point for Smartpunk. Smartpunk Live features live acoustic performances and in-depth artist interviews with both established and up-and-coming bands in a brand new state-of-the-art production studio and lounge.

Maintaining its reputation as the premier YouTube merchandising company, AKT is excited to present Playlist LIVE. Playlist LIVE is a two-day convention that will bring the biggest and best producers of music and video content together in a conference-style environment. The event will feature interactive talks and performances by some of the most successful people in the new media industry. Playlist LIVE will be held in Orlando, Florida in March of 2011.

AKT Enterprises continues to expand by delivering the highest quality products through the diversified talents of the company’s rapidly growing team of dedicated employees. The company’s success would not be possible without the endless support of family, friends, clients and team members. With exciting new ventures and plans for even more expansion on the horizon, AKT looks forward to making 2011 its biggest year yet.

We are particularly proud to announce Smartpunk Live, our new music-based web show. This marks the beginning of an exciting turning point for Smartpunk. Smartpunk Live will feature live acoustic performances and in-depth artist interviews. Our goal is to give up and coming bands the opportunity to share their music and give our all-time favorite bands the opportunity to share their story.

Smartpunk Live will air regularly on www.smartpunklive.com in full HD. The first episode, which airs Wednesday, November 24th at 7 PM EST, will feature an interview and performance by Saves The Day.

To stay up-to-date on all things Smartpunk, follow us at @smartpunk and @smartpunklive.

This past weekend, AKT Enterprises sponsored the first annual TEDxOrlando conference at the Orlando Science Center in Orlando, FL. TED, a small nonprofit that started out as a 4-day conference, brings together people from three different worlds: technology, entertainment and design. The TED conference has since become a worldwide phenomenon and a platform for new and engaging ideas.

TEDxOrlando is a program of local events that bring people from these three industries together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, both video and live speakers combine to ignite discussion and inspiration in a small group. The first Orlando TEDx conference featured presentations by many of Orlando’s cutting edge thinkers, as well as other intelligent minds from across the nation.

For more information about TEDxOrlando, visit http://www.tedxorlando.org.

YoungEntrepreneur.com is one of the largest communities for established and aspiring entrepreneurs online.

Inc.Magazine Unveils Its Fourth Annual Exclusive List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies—the Inc. 5000

AKT Enterprises Ranks No. 511 on the 2010 Inc. 5000 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 592%

NEW YORK, August 24, 2010 – Inc. magazine today ranked AKT Enterprises No. 511 on its fourth annual Inc. 5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent-minded entrepreneurs. Music website Pandora, convenience store chain 7-Eleven, Brooklyn Brewery, and Radio Flyer, maker of the iconic children’s red wagon, are among the prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

“The leaders of the companies on this year’s Inc. 5000 have figured out how to grow their businesses during the longest recession since the Great Depression,” said Inc. president Bob LaPointe. “The 2010 Inc. 5000 showcases a particularly hardy group of entrepreneurs.”

AKT boasts a finely tuned network of design, merchandising and marketing companies optimized to solve the marketing needs of clients both large and small. Specializing in new business development, AKT Enterprises lives up to its reputation as a one-stop-shop for industry professionals.

With a diverse and ever-growing clientele, AKT caters directly to over 500,000 customers, vendors and consumers. AKT’s awareness of current trends and solid grasp of technology combined with their forward-thinking team work to create solutions, products and services that benefit organizations of all shapes and sizes.

Click here to view AKT Enterprises’s 2010 Inc. 500|5000 Profile

AKT Management’s Dan Brown is featured on the home page of FastCompany.com. Fast Company magazine reports on various topics including innovation, digital media, technology, design, leadership, and more. The article spotlights Dan’s groundbreaking Internet TV show, Dan 3.0.

Via FastCompany.com

Dan Brown’s life is out of control, and he’s nervous. He’s telling the Internet about it, over-enunciating his Ps and Ts while he describes his project, Dan 3.0, his Web TV show that will put his day-to-day life in the cyber hands of his fans. But this is all part of the plan, and it’s all very under control.

The notion behind Dan 3.0 is that “groups make better decisions,” he says. (About what? That’s up to the group.) Using an online “decision engine,” Dan is outsourcing his “decisions” by letting participants suggest and vote on daily tasks. Each day, he says, he’ll do the most popular task. So far this has taken him to the streets of Lincoln, Nebraska to high-five strangers. And it’s taken him on a walk to the nearest city, Walton.

But don’t worry, Dan says, the big tasks are coming; he and Internet-television network Revision3 just need more time to plan. Then they can focus, for instance, on one of Dan’s favorite topics: his girlfriend. She might get a birthday visit from Dan–if his viewers want it. And since “my viewers care about me,” Dan says, chances are they’ll give him the task he wants. Now who’s controlling whom?

There are still 361 days left to see. As of Friday afternoon, there are four episodes of the show, which debuted August 1. After the pre-show ad and the logos for Revision3 and sponsor SquareSpace, a bed-haired Dan, wearing what seems to be his only T-shirt, starts talking. He’s in his studio (decorated with art sent in by fans), and he’s chatting away with his practiced self-assured but self-conscious delivery.

This self-referentiality seems to be constant, even when the task of the day begins. Dan spends the task talking about doing it while doing it, talking about talking about doing it while doing it, and so on. But, as he notes, “It’s not about getting a whole lot of footage–it’s more about capturing the moment.” So, following his own advice, he captures the show’s meta-moment–existing as a show–as he reflects on the project.

Perhaps Dan has reason for his ego, however cloaked in young-adult angst it may be. He began building a strong Internet fan base in 2007, when he posted an instructional YouTube video on how to solve the Rubik’s cube. Three years later, the video has almost 16 million views. In the meantime, Dan has posted videos on everything from gay marriage (which he supports) to, in the following video, Crocs (which he says “might just be the most important issue I ever talk about”).

Dan is one lucky vlogger, and he knows it: “I make videos talking about what I want to talk about when I want to talk about it, and it provides for me.”

Dan gains from vlogging, and his viewers are supposed to gain from watching and suggesting tasks. But besides a chance to influence the quotidian, yet artificial, life of a 20-year-old, what else do they stand to gain? “I want everyone who participates to be happy about the whole experience,” he says. “I want to push the envelope as to what it means to have a new media relationship with an audience.”

Indeed, it’s quite the transitional period for visual entertainment, as television and Internet share and influence each other’s content more than ever. As Dan says, “There’s so many new tools being invented everyday that increase the capacity for interaction.” His decision engine–the simple yet incomplete structure for a year of his life–is supposed to be one of those tools.

Dan 3.0 is still nascent, so it’s hard to tell if viewers will continue to interact with it the way Dan wants. According to Revision3, the website’s traffic doubled on the day the show launched. And there are more than 5,700 tasks posted on the site.

Hype, of course, is at least one of the reasons driving the show’s initial popularity. But Dan’s simple vlogs have been doing well for years, and there’s somehow never a shortage of time to spend watching strangers on screens. Seventeen years ago, in his E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, David Foster Wallace offered some prescient explanation:

If we want to know what American normality is–what Americans want to regard as normal–we can trust television. For television’s whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It’s a mirror.

Or, as Dan says, “I think that a lot of the appeal of watching people’s day-to-day lives is just people are curious as to how other people live their day-to-day lives.”

But pretty soon we start to turn inward, Wallace warned: “We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching.”

Full Sail University’s Music Business department asks Jared Mendelewicz, Kevin Khandjian and Jeff Vaughan to speak on the Music Business Bachelor Degree students’ final project panel. The purpose of the panel was to review, analyze and critique the music business-oriented ideas of each group in the graduating class.

Via Winter Park Observer

By Tina Russell
Observer Staff

It was two weeks before her friend’s bachelorette party. Rena Tchekmeian had scoured the Internet in hopes of finding a place that could print 10 shirts before the trip.

The design was specific: three men holding up wedding rings with the man in the middle holding up the largest ring, saying “Megan picked the right one.”

Every screen-printing company she contacted was through e-mail. There was no face-to-face communication or telephone communication.

“I would e-mail them, and then I would get an e-mail back, and it wasn’t exactly what we wanted,” Rena said. “They couldn’t do a certain color, or they couldn’t do the exact sizes we needed.”

Three days before the bachelorette trip to downtown Orlando, Rena called her brother, Alex Tchekmeian, and he was able to make the shirts.

Five years later, Alex, president of Winter Park-based AKT Enterprises, a branding and marketing company, is materializing the need for hassle free, face-to-face communication into something tangible with the August opening of Big Top, located at 7612 University Gardens Dr., just outside Winter Park.

This brick and mortar store offers all the same web and print media services AKT offers — identity development, web-based applications, web hosting and maintenance, online stores and fulfillment — but it also provides screen-printing services for garments to the regular consumer in a face-to-face environment.

“My sister always talks about how her and her friends who are going on these trips and how they want 10 shirts for the girls to wear,” Alex said. “My vision is to have my sister and her friends walk into the store, design their own shirt, and within an hour, walk out with the printed shirts .”

Alex said while the Internet sales option still exists, AKT wants to move away from the online experience with this retail store and become a business partner with the consumer.
“The new side of Big Top is making AKT more accessible to regular consumers, but we’re still offering the same services to businesses, companies, organizations, musicians — all the same stuff that’s gotten us to where we are now,” said Jared Mendelewicz, vice president of AKT Enterprises.

The target consumer for Big Top isn’t only small retailers. It also includes businesses, clubs and organizations that need help with promotional services.

“We are targeting the pizza shop opening up next door who wants business cards, logos, and designs; we are targeting the individuals; we are targeting the parents and we are targeting the moms who want monogrammed initials on all their towels,” Alex said.

Mendelewicz said other companies provide the same amenities they provide, but a person would have to go to four or five different stores to get what they can do under one roof.

The logo for Big Top consists of a circus tent with the words “Big Top” laced in ribbon.
Mendelewicz said the name for Big Top came up randomly in conversation, and from a marketing standpoint, Mendelewicz and Alex wanted it to be over the top but still professional, which is where the circus theme came into play.

“The closest thing I can approximate Big Top to is an Apple store,” said Will Chung, general manager for AKT Enterprises.

The retail space of Big Top consists of modern décor where form follows function. The store oozes red, white and black with plush red swivel chairs, circular white and silver corner tables, black tables, and flat screen televisions.

Big Top is the flagship store for AKT Enterprises, and Mendelewicz and Alex already have plans to open up additional locations in the future. Alex said he would like to have one additional Big Top developed or in the works by the end of 2010 with five or six additional stores either opened or in the works by the end of 2011.

Twenty-four-year-old Tchekmekian, who started the business when he was 17, wants to expand with locations closer to the University of Central Florida or Sanford.