Just when you thought the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch could do everything short of laundry, two Stanford juniors rolled out the Stanford iPhone Project to keep their fellow students perpetually connected and in-the-know.
Launched on October 1, 2008, by Kayvon Beykpour and Aaron Wasserman of Terriblyclever Design, iStanford, made up of five iApps, further facilitates information flow on campus, enhancing the student-life experience. MobilEdu is the name of the product, and as it is implemented at individual universities, the name changes to fit the school––hence “iStanford,” according to Wasserman, a Managing Partner of Terriblyclever.
Currently Stanford only offers a line of applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In fact, half of the university’s 8,000 students own one of these Apple devices. Within the suite of applications, users can look up contact information for professors or fellow classmates in the “Directory.” The “Maps” program enables students to pinpoint any given location on campus from the palm of their hands. Sports fans can log into “Athletics” to view scores, travel schedules, and post-game analyses of their favorite Cardinal teams. Students can check out their tuition balances and view past statements on “ePay.” Soon, the “Courses” app will allow students to not only scan the course catalog, but also add and drop classes.
Stanford’s Assistant Registrar Celeste Fowles welcomes this new option enabling students to register for classes from their mobiles.
“This program is unique because the Stanford administration provided the student developers with secure access to the University information system,” Fowles explained. “iStanford is an exciting new use of technology to help improve the experiences of Stanford students. I hope this starts a trend for other colleges to offer more services to students on mobile devices.”
While Stanford sophomore Tessa Price reports that the suite of iPhone applications “runs fairly smooth,” she does admit that the “Courses” application takes the longest of the five to load.
“[‘Courses’] is convenient to look at courses, but I will probably do most of my course searching on my laptop, rather than on iPhone, unless it becomes faster, or perhaps when they add the updated version where you can add and drop classes,” Price said. “For now, it’s just a catalog of classes to look at, rather than a site to actually use.”
Overall, however, Price says she “frequently” uses the iApps and raves about their convenience and user-friendly design.
“I’d have to say that the map is probably my favorite part of the application because I use it the most to find where a party or a new class is located,” she said. “Stanford is the second biggest campus in the world––it’s easy to get lost.”
Indeed, the university found its way to the software developer Terriblyclever through Apple once the iPhone software development kit was released in 2008. Aaron Wasserman spoke to the Spectator from the start-up’s San Francisco office. The twenty-year-old Stanford junior admits that while he is a student on paper, he spends most of his time at Terriblyclever’s headquarters. He definitely has plans to take MobilEdu on the road and market the product to colleges and universities nationwide, including Hamilton.
“We’ve built the [iApp] in such a way that it is easy to implement at other colleges and universities and on other phones aside from the iPhone, like the Blackberry,” Wasserman explained. “Basically, it can work on any phone with a browser.”
Dave Smallen, Hamilton’s Vice President for Information Technology, is optimistic about the potential to integrate such mobile information technology on campus in the future. Already, approximately half of Hamilton students have cell phones or comparable mobile devices with Internet capabilities, and 97% work off wireless laptops, though the number of students who own an iPhone is still unknown. The college itself does not have the staff resources to create its own iPhone application, so it would have to tap an outside provider to build such a product. And given cost and complexity, students probably will not be downloading iHamilton applications anytime soon, though Smallen pointed out that the iPhone is compatible with the school’s secure network.
“We know that mobile computing is in the future, and we want to take advantage of that,” he explained. “Our campus-wide wireless network is already in place, so we have the first major piece that many other schools don’t have.”
In fact, one’s alma mater may be the only thing missing on mobile devices these days. Price put this thought into perspective: “Everyone has their music, television shows, email, contacts, weather, stocks, and Facebooks on their iPhones, why not have all your college stuff on there too?”
