Involvio: college campus event management platform launches site and iPhone app, Android to come

Involvio is hoping to put the quintessential flyer-strewn university bulletin board online — for every school.

The new college campus event management platform recently launched along with the release of a mobile app for iPhone. Founder and Drexel University student Ari Winkleman told Technically Philly the Android application is on its way.

Just like those reliable old bulletin boards, the new campus event management platform, developed and designed by Winkleman and a crew of students from Drexel, Goucher College in Baltimore and McGill University in Montreal, is free to anyone with a .edu email address. The site allows users to input events and culls events already posted to Facebook, then aggregates them according to university. Student users can log on using Facebook to see which events are happening close to where they are at that exact moment, as well as in the future.

Involvio was released on an exclusive test run to a six colleges and universities last semester.

“Students always feel like they’re missing out. It’s all too common for students to think, ‘There’s probably something better happening than the thing I’m doing right now, I just don’t know about it,” said Winkleman. “As a result, students were tremendously excited that they could use Involvio to see everything happening around them.”

Winkleman, 23, is now a senior at Drexel but he says he got the idea for Involvio almost as soon as he arrived on campus as a freshman.

“I wanted to get involved in literally everything — club events, sports, you name it — but there was no platform where everything happening was listed,” said Winkleman. “That year, I developed a very early version of Involvio — at the time called Ticker — and rolled it out in the business school.”

Winkleman says he let the project lapse as he succumbed to the madness of a college schedule and summer internships, but sometime last year he realized the problem he had identified as a freshman was still itching to be solved. Winkleman recruited four more students to help him out, Goucher alumnus Evan Siegel, 22, Carter Smith, 20, lead developer and McGill junior, Jeremy Bloom, 23, lead designer and a Drexel senior, Diana Distefano, 22, director of finance and a Drexel senior.

Then last summer, Involvio was selected to be one of seven student startups to spend a summer at the GE/OMD Student Innovation Incubator in Manhattan. The group left the program as the overall winner and the startup dubbed most promising of all the graduates by the General Electric and OMD digital marketing agency leaders, according to a press release.

“We were very lucky to participate in an amazing incubator run as a partnership between GE — the self-proclaimed “oldest startup in the world” — and OMD,” Winkleman said. “It was really over the course of the program that we honed our business model and shaped our strategy.”

Winkleman told Technically Philly he could see clear differences between the Philly tech community and the New York community that the group was exposed to through the incubator.

“In the context of the social web, which I think we’re starting to see more Philly startups diving into, the climate here seems to be very interested in core technologies and revenue, while New York, as a media hub, has an inherent focus on building properties,” Winkleman said.

Despite having the opportunity to network with some big wigs during Involvio’s time in Manhattan, Winkleman says the Philadelphia tech community has been very supportive.

“We’ve raised a seed round from a group of incredible local investors,” Winkleman said, who added that given Involvio’s ambitious expansion plans, they’ll be looking for more interested partners and investors who want to be involved.

Still, the group has not decided where the company will call home once he and the other current students graduate.

In the meantime, the group is busy fielding student feedback and what Winkleman describes as persistent demand for Involvio at ever more college campuses all too happy to ditch their bulletin boards.

“We’ve already had students from over 100 other schools calling us, emailing us,and asking us to to bring Involvio to their campuses, so we’re going to focus on helping as many students get involved on and off campus as possible,” Winkleman said.