One of my major goals for the Pencils.com site is the resource it can be for students and teachers alike. Whether it's teacher to teacher sharing of favorite lesson plans, an information source for students writing a paper, or an on line drawing lesson, this site has been designed around the concept of collaborative sharing and learning. I hope that Pencils.com members will use the site to experiment with new learning ideas and concepts.

In a very major way the means by which we will operate the Pencils.com business will be as a learning laboratory in itself. Through a unique new collaboration with the University of the Pacific Business School we have developed a new course in Applied Entrepreneurship in which the students enrolled in this course will play a very significant roll in the operation of the business. By getting the chance to apply the broad disciplines they are learning at the Eberhardt School of Business students will become intimately involved in all major aspects of running this site.

The students involvement will include managing the Pencils.com and Pencil world Creativity Store @ eBay, developing and adding site content, developing marketing concepts and promotions to build traffic and even leadership in creating new products and services to be added to the pencils.com business incuding adding to the California Republic brand range products such as our most popular Palomino and ForestChoice pencils.

This evening I presented this opportunity to a group of interested students at the University and am most excited about this collaboration which begins in January with the Spring Semester. In fact we have committed that a proportion of all the on line revenues generated will be dedicated to the university in support of Entrepreneurship education. This is in addition to our historic practice at the Pencil World Store of dedicating 5% of revenue to donating pencils. Here on the Pencils,com store we'll allow Pencil Points our members earn by contributing to the site to be used towards discounts on store purchases.