A business phenomenon is spreading on campus and as the spring season unfolds, so are the visions of young social media entrepreneurs at DU. First-year business majors Bryce Quigley from Gilford, N.H. and Grant Wilkinson from El Paso, Texas recently launched an initiative to specifically serve DU students called ChatterU.net, a website that pools together all of the school’s activities into one convenient web page. With over 400 members at this point, ChatterU.net went live at the beginning of spring quarter.
Wilkinson, owner of Denver-based mobile app company Inovize, and Quigley began the project as an assignment for a DCB course entitled “The Messy Startup” taught by CEO and founder of Captain U, Avi Stopper, who was invited by DU to teach business start-up class. In this course, students learn how to pitch an idea, build it and market it, turning in weekly reports to mark their progress.
“I had this idea of making a college social network system that revolved around postings of college topics,” said Wilkinson, who later introduced Quigley to the idea. “But we started walking across campus and decided there’s a ton of events on campus that no one notices because you get lost in all the bulletins. So our idea for a college interaction-based site turned into a college events listings site where we take all those events and put them in one organized place. We just want DU students to be informed.”
The duo organized the website into eight categories: sports, Greek life, speakers, clubs, activities, off-campus, jobs and performances. Each posted activity is accompanied by a short summary that includes the event’s date, time and location. Since their launch the first week of April, the pair has regularly been adding new features including a “Top Attending” list where users can see who will be attending which events as well as a feature for posting comments.
While Wilkinson handled the website’s program development portion, Quigley took over product promotion.
“Bryce had the ideas on layout,” said Wilkinson. “I worked on development and programming the site while he worked on building awareness for it and getting a lot of people to try it out.”
Wilkinson and Quigley turn to global social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and emailing student orgs and clubs to invite them to use their product as advertisement of their website.
On April 25, ChatterU.net also became available as a mobile app for students to use on-the-go.
In the beginning, Quigley and Wilkinson visited each building on campus to gather event information in a five-hour long process, but the pair has since invited student organizations and clubs to submit descriptions of their events via the site’s email.
“All these people take the effort to print out flyers and walk across campus just to have them covered up in a day,” said Wilkinson. “Why is that the best solution? Posting your events to this website doesn’t take much work compared to posting flyers, but it yields the same results.”
Although the website is not affiliated with nor endorsed by DU, Wilkinson and Quigley have required that users register with their DU email addresses in order to access ChatterU.net.
“The plan was to get all DU students involved and make it easily accessible for them,” said Quigley. “Since we’re trying to be local and relevant to DU students, so you kind of have to prove that you’re a student here.”
After discovering the need for an interactive, centralized student activities resource, the pair chose a title whose acronym, adorned with a graduation cap, would prompt users to associate the ChatterU.net website with universities, giving their project a college appeal. After smoothing out the website’s kinks here at DU, the duo plans to expand their services to nearby colleges, such as CU Boulder and CSU.
The website features a simple, neatly organized red-white-and-black interface with the homepage displaying a slideshow of event photos. On the side of the homepage are columns listing “Latest Tweets” about posted events and “Top Attending” events. The site is easy to navigate with large buttons, tabs and icons.
“It’s a passionate endeavor,” said Quigley. “People say DU doesn’t have much school spirit so it’d be nice to see an effect of what we’re doing translate into people coming out and supporting each other in their events. We’re connecting people through events and we haven’t seen that kind of social calendar.”
