Jake Nolan begins a typical weekday at 5:30 a.m., reading the Wall Street Journal on his Kindle, and finally winds down around midnight after he has studied the daily sales report and organized himself for the next day.

In between there are strategy discussions with his business partner, consultations with a Web designer, brainstorming sessions on a name for a product in development, 50 or 60 e-mails and a list of calls to return.

Then there are his 10th-grade classes, too.

The 16-year-old Gulliver Preparatory School sophomore designed an iPhone application for flashcards called Flash-Me, which is already being sold in 82 countries. In the application you can either create your own flashcards or browse other ones available for hundreds of subjects. It's been just a little over a month since launch and already there are more than 50,000 flashcards in the inventory.

Coming soon -- flashcards in several languages.

For Jake, the winner of The Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge student contest, there is no time for lunch with other students. He needs to devote himself to business before getting back to his honors and advanced placement classes in the afternoon. Dinner-time conversation may revolve around what new marketing idea he had for his company, or progress on any number of products in development or his upcoming trip to San Francisco for the prestigious Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

James Nolan, Jake's father, jokes that his son forgets he is in 10th grade.

Jake's business partner for Flash-Me and other ventures is Maruika Wei, a fellow student at Gulliver. Seeing her around all the time with her laptop and sensing that she was a technical genius, he approached her one day and told her about his idea.

He asked if she knew the iPhone programming language. She said she was just beginning to teach herself but within a week she came to him with a prototype.

"It was the most incredible thing I had ever seen. There was my idea actually working on her phone, " he said, adding that her expertise, professionalism and straightforward honesty have been invaluable.

With Flash-Me, users who download the application for $3.99 can browse and use the tens of thousands of cards in the online database or create their own set -- based on chapters in their chemistry book, for example, on Cramberry.net.

The app features several ways to learn. There's the study mode, which allows the user to focus on the most difficult cards first, possibly reducing study times. There's also "scattered card, " where the user matches the front of the card to the correct back and watches them disappear if the match is correct.

Cards also can be managed from a cellphone, so new cards can be added and edited on the go.

"Jake's Flash-Me cards proposal takes a time-honored learning aid and shoots it into the 21st Century, " says Lee Clark, one of the judges. "Judges were dazzled with the marketing potential, including both national and international applications."

In his plan, Jake estimates revenue at $30,000 the first year and $100,000 and $200,000 in years two and three.

He says the business has already earned more than $8,000 in net profit. He is at the point now where he knows he needs to sink some serious money into the venture, saying his motto is "Go big or don't go at all."'

Jake and Maruika are finishing up another iPhone application -- they aren't ready to reveal the details to the world just yet -- and are also working with a Web developer to build their own site to host, improve and expand Flash-Me's potential.

The excitement builds in Jake's voice as he describes his venture: "It is going to be the educational space to learn. It is going to change the way students learn. . . . It is going to be the Facebook of learning."

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