Campuslive Offers Customized Portal for Campus News, Information Students Need

There is new kid in school, his name is CampusLIVE, and wants to act as every college kid’s 24/7 RA (Resident Assistant) by providing all the information you need to know as a student on campus.

The new social community website aggregates information a college kid needs to know. Besides the usual, like weather, there are customized news feeds (CNN, Boston Globe, Philly.com, Fox News, MSNBC, and even Playboy, and much more), customized search feeds; that include Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Flickr, Technorati and much more. In addition, each school’s page has ‘quick links’ that feature necessary housing and health information, local public transportation schedules, dining services, registrar information, library, academic calendars and more.

They also feature a great Food Finder feature that allows students to find local eateries, their contact information, whether they offer dine-in, delivery and take-out options, and they offer online menus for each in their system, as well as the ability to leave public reviews for each.

CampusLIVE also understands the need for a college kid to know what is on TV at all times - therefore implementing the ability to find TV listings using the TVGuide.com system.

One thing you might think after reading the above would be ‘another Facebook’, but they aren’t.  Actually, they have gone as far to integrate with Facebook so that students can actually see their live Facebook messages from their homepage.  They also have plans to tie in other social networks that are popular to students such as LinkedIn, MySpace, and I assume Twitter, Digg, and maybe a few others might join the force @ some point.

CampusLIVE started in UMass and has grown to cover 26 universities in nine states. They are doing well - in terms of providing useful information for students, and in a concise and clear manner. However, they need to focus their growth overall, in terms of adding more schools, and integrating more customizable features that will allow students not only have access to useful information, but also build a virtual dorm room. So for each school, they can go beyond just providing a portal for useful information, but access to teachers, other students, virtual blackboards, and so on.

CampusLIVE was started by a group of UMass students, and finished in the top 5 of Business Week’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25 in America 08?. CampusLIVE employs five full-time people, and interns, and had just over $100,000 in revenue during 2007. The company is currently negotiating a $1.25 million investment deal, according to Business Week. They are also looking to lease office space in Boston, moving themselves into an office and out of the dorms.

Thoughts.

I love their business model and opportunity to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak.  I just hope they do it now, and push aggressively - as you never know what the landscape for a model like this might look like in a year.

They need to build up their school database offering - at the same time, it opens up a huge door for advertising opportunities, which they must take advantage of - especially if they have angel investors now involved. You don’t want to have to carry their weight for too long, and obviously wish to become profitable in the next three years in a major way.

They have a great platform here to also explore partnerships of all kinds; building on all the above - sets themselves up nicely for an aggressive business build - before ’selling’ to a top organization, i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc…in five years or so.

For more information, email me @ nicholas.cifuentes@gmail.com