CloudShouts to provide mobile message board
The idea of three guys sitting in a college dorm room coming up with a social medium they think could change the way their community interacts may seem like something from “The Social Network,” but at USC, it’s a real-life circumstance.
Ian Castrovinci, Rishi Patel and Dennis Lopez don’t quite see themselves as the next Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, but they believe their idea, if they can execute it right, could be huge.
The service, called CloudShouts, is a smartphone-based application that will provide anyone in geographic area of the university’s grounds access to a message board, where they can post “shouts” that anyone within the network could see and reply to. CloudShouts will be comparable to an exclusively smartphone-based Twitter, except without profiles or followers. One’s location — determined by the GPS on his or her phone — will determine whether he or she can access the message board.
“You’ll be able to sell stuff, promote events, ask academic or other college-related questions to the entire campus, creating a USC-specific cloud,” Castrovinci said.
Castrovinci is the business end of the company — a fourth-year finance and economics student, he runs the day-to-day business operations, which vary from marketing to financing to setting up the company to soliciting investors. Patel, a third-year computer science student, describes himself as the product developer, ensuring that, on the technical side, CloudShouts stays true to the original concept. Lopez, a fourth-year criminal justice student, came up with the principal idea for the app and now mainly researches the potential and competitors.
The three are excited about the idea. They stress that it’s not just another of the many social networks clogging the Internet today.
“We’re not a social network — we’re a communication system,” Castrovinci said. “We feel like social networking — collecting ‘friends’ — is a fad.”
They’re also adamant that CloudShouts will not become a gossip tool like College ACB (Anonymous Confession Board), a now-defunct website that endured heavy criticism.
“We would be able to ban users,” Patel said. “Even though it’s anonymous and there’s no accounts, we can ban devices.”
Castrovinci added that CloudShouts would be a more positive tool with useful aspects.
“It can be used in the same way as College ACB but with more utility to student life,” Castrovinci said. “If anything, we want to stay away from College ACB. We don’t want it to turn into a gossip place; we want to stress CloudShouts’ utility and usefulness. From the beginning, we’re going to promote it differently.”
In mid-April 2010, Lopez approached Castrovinci and Patel with the concept.
To start the process, Patel downloaded Apple’s Xcode for Macintosh operating systems and attempted to program the app himself, but realized it would have been too time-consuming.
“We realized it would have taken six months at least,” he said.
Patel did some research and eventually found a Croatian developer called Five Minutes, and the three decided to contract the company for the job.
“They’d done MTV’s app, RealNetworks and Appsmart,” Castrovinci said about Five Minutes. “They had a good reputation and proven success.”
Castrovinci, Patel and Lopez knew that it would be an expensive process — they each brought $5,000 of their own money to the table to get started. Castrovinci and Lopez used money from their savings, and Patel said he refinanced his car.
From this $15,000, they paid Five Minutes $13,344 to create the app.
“We set up a whole manual, Photoshop screenshots — showed them exactly how we wanted it to look,” Castrovinci said. “They don’t pick every project; they only take the ones they see potential in that peak their interest.”
The three knew it was no small ordeal to shovel out such a large amount of money, but they had faith in CloudShouts.
“We were nervous, but we believed a lot in our idea,” Castrovinci said. “We’d been dabbling around for months in the market, and we felt confident in our decision.”
For additional capital, they met with potential investors over the weekend and were able to raise additional funds for marketing and further costs.
“Most of our investors are older, but they believe in our technology and believe in the growth in smartphone technology and application growth,” Lopez said.
With the investment backing, they can now move forward with their big plans for CloudShouts. Their goal is to promote the service heavily and have more than 1,000 users at USC over the next year. In the long run, they’d like move it to other colleges and areas of shared interest.
The overall purpose is to solve the fundamental problem of communication in large communities like college campuses.
“Instead of asking 10 people, ‘What’s the best class to take?’ you’re asking thousands,” Castrovinci said. “The beauty of it really is that it’s just a giant thought bubble for USC students that can be accessed only by the USC student body.”
But does being entrepreneurs ever interfere with being full-time students? Lopez doesn’t think so.
“This whole process is a great experience,” Lopez said. “We’re using the university as a resource, and as students, we’re learning how to start a business and gain a market share for it. We’re always talking about it. This whole weekend we weren’t going out partying; we were meeting with investors.”