CampusLIVE Blog

Responding to an immense amount of feedback related to the old Campus Links menu, CampusLIVE has developed an all new menu we’ve deemed ‘QuickLinks’ (we are a creative bunch). The Quick Links menu contains a variety of categories which display links to the popular websites within. Example: within the Gossip category some of the links displayed are to PerezHilton, USWeekly, DListed and more. An interested (read: bored) student can browse through the categories that interests them most and enjoy the internet without Google.

In a few weeks you will be able to choose your favorite sites and toss them into your CampusLIVE bookmarks. That way no matter where you are - dorm, library or home for the holidays - you’ll have all your links with you.

CampusLIVE’s #1 mission is to serve our users in every capacity available to us, and the best way we can do that is through responding to feedback. We feel the new Quick Links has strengthened CampusLIVE usability and we look forward to hearing the feedback from our users.

CampusLIVE launches at the Heart - Student based one-stop site brings resources to fingertips

Originally appeared December 6th, 2007 in the Spectrum (link)
By Jason Hey - Spectrum Staff

A few weeks ago a new student resource website was launched at Sacred Heart. CampusLIVE.com is a website compiled of information directed primarily towards students.

Jeff Cassidy is the co-founder of CampusLIVE. He has played a large role in the progression of the website since it was first launched at UMass two years ago.

“This is a one-stop home page for students looking for campus information. From restaurants and live Facebook feeds to campus events and news,” said Cassidy.

At CampusLIVE.com a student can register with their e-mail address and gain access to information specific to Sacred Heart.

The homepage has links to all the school’s web pages including the academic calendar, directory, registrar’s office, athletics, bookstore, and the library. It also contains current news from the Spectrum newspaper as well as upcoming campus events.

“The site is an all-encompassing tool for students. It has been a huge success and very popular among students thus far,” said Cassidy.

Besides local university news, the site also has current news around the world from organizations like CNN, The New York Times, and ESPN.

“Staying on top of the current news and sports is important to me. Not just in and around school but around the world as well,” said sophomore Paul Ruvo.

The homepage also contains one feature called the food finder. It is a feature that allows students to search for restaurants in their area whether it is delivery, take out, or dine in.

“I am always running short on time, an easier way to find food fast would definitely make things easier,” said senior Michael Viscuso.

The site also has up to date weather conditions and links to all the popular search engines including Google and Yahoo.

Students can also access their Facebook homepages with the click of a button.

“When I am on the web, I spend a significant amount of my on Google and Facebook,” said junior Kaileen Paiva.

CampusLIVE.com also allows its users to customize their homepages. Students can add links to any of the features.

“This new resource is going to add to the undergraduate experience here at Sacred Heart. I think its great how you have the opportunity to see what is going on at the school and in the community, all in one place,” said graduate assistant Robert Edwards.

The site is continually expanding and recently teamed up with Student Travel Services to help students find the cheapest spring break trip to a number of popular locations.

All the schools that have registered for CampusLIVE have their own homepages.

Once a student becomes a member, they have access to all the web pages of every other college that participates.

“I have many friends that attend other schools like UMass for example. Knowing more about those schools is valuable for when I go to visit them,” said senior Alex Gastiger.

Check out Sacred Heart’s homepage on CampusLIVE by visiting campuslive.com/sacredheart. All you need to have to sign up is a valid school e-mail address.

Take a look and see if CampusLIVE is a useful tool for you.

Hey all,

We’ve got some cool announcements to make…

First off - Fairfield and Sacred Heart have joined our network! If you are a student at either of these schools or live in the area and want to be a Campus Rep then let me know! Next up: We’ve been shopping around for great places to buy Spring Break trips online and are happy to announce our partnership with Student Travel Services (STS). They have the best deals we could find on trips to Cancun, Jamaica, Bahamas, Florida and more — check out the CampusLIVE Spring Break site.

Finally… we’ve all been feeling the Holiday spirit and have decided to do some give-aways in December. We’re taking suggestions but so far we’ve got Wii’s, American Express gift cards and a variety of cameras up for grabs. All you have to do is sign up with a .EDU email address before the 25th.

Enjoy!

[INSERT SOUND OF INTERNS CHEERING HERE] - CampusLIVE has a new office, located in the heart of Amherst. We’re now just that much closer to our roots - UMass Amherst. Come visit us anytime at 9 East Pleasant Street. Our new digs are 4x the size of the old so that we can stop packing our interns like sardines.

New desks, couches, foos ball, ping pong and free employee meals - we’re inches behind Google

Thanks to all of our incredible staff for helping us get to where we are. The future is looking great!

We’re happy to announce two more great campuses that have joined the CampusLIVE network - Bentley College and Brandeis University. A big thanks to the students on these campuses that helped make it happen.

CampusLIVE @ Bentley College

CampusLIVE @ Brandeis University

Interested in launching CampusLIVE at your school? Let us know!

From the article post 10/31/2007 (SBS Newsletter – October 2007) :

“Jared Stenquist ‘07 (communication) is President of Jaredweb Inc., a web development firm based in Hadley, MA. He started the company during his sophomore year, which led to the formation of a second company, CampusLIVE.com, a customizable website designed to organize students’ social and academic lives. It offers access from a single site to Facebook, e-mail, news feeds, restaurant menus and more. CampusLIVE is currently available on seven campuses, including UMass Amherst, UConn, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. The CampusLIVE team also includes Boris Revsin ‘08 (information technology), Chief Technology Officer, and Jeff Cassidy ‘07 (Isenberg School of Management), Vice President of Marketing, as well as seven UMass Amherst interns. In addition, Jared tells us, “Our on-campus mentor and advisor has been James Theroux, Flavin Family Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Isenberg School, who has helped us tremendously over the past year.”

CampusLIVE: A One-Stop Web Shop for Students

Originally appeared October 8th, 2007 in the BroadsideOnline (link)
Written by Online Tech Blogger Jimmy Rogers

This week I was able to talk with the Boris Revsin, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Head Engineer of CampusLIVE. CampusLIVE is a new, Mason-oriented homepage that aggregates weather, news, University links, Facebook, and much more. Mr. Revsin was kind enough to answer some of my questions:

How is CampusLIVE different from other sites students might choose as their home page?

The CampusLIVE website was created to assist students in day-to-day tasks. We know that there are weather websites, various search engine
sites, news sites, restaurant sites and especially tons of specific college resources that students use everyday. Every day I will read Techcrunch, read
the Daily Collegian at UMass, search for some of the items mentioned on Wikipedia and check my Facebook. And then, at noon, I’ll order lunch. And
I am not alone; the variety of information that is disseminated on the web is enormous. CampusLIVE strives to bring together everything (eventually!)
a college student will need on a daily basis, and provide him/her with the best possible user interface for navigating the billions of pages on the web.
A campus is a community and social networking is an awesome tool, but when students need to get something done they need resources and a jumping off
point, and that is what we are all about.

CampusLIVE has common features such as weather, news and links, but what are some of the more innovative features that your team has created?

The ability to customize weather, news feeds and links are at the core of any good homepage. Of course that is also not nearly enough.
Students love Facebook. I love Facebook. So, our team developed a quick and easy way to bring Facebook to your CampusLIVE homepage. Messages, friend
requests, groups and more all on your homepage… always.

Our favorite current feature however, is our restaurant module. Sure, there are tons of places to go to find restaurants in the area. Why not Google
it and see which restaurant is paying the most for that top placement? Instead, we work hard to enter in all the information we possibly can about each
restaurant. We tell you when its open (delivery, takeout and dine-in respectively) and we don’t just list the times. Our system automatically outputs
the open restaurants at your school without any hassle. We go one step further: we give you the actual graphical menu that the restaurant provides its
customers… and we update it constantly. To have your favorite restaurant on the frontpage, just click “Add to Favorites”. Of course,
we also provide ratings and reviews.

Last but not least, CampusLIVE is tailored specifically to your schools needs. On the left sidebar we place all of the important links around campus
(homepage, the Broadside, Patriot web, local and collegiate sports sites) and we do it with style. If we missed something, just let us know.

What kind of relationship does CampusLIVE have with Mason? Are you working closely with the administration?

As a small student-run startup we are focusing on what we know best. And we know students best. One of our dedicated interns Chris Ziomek is a former
Mason student and our representative Brendan Murphy on campus is a current student at the school. We’ve spoken for hours about what George Mason
students need on campus and what restaurants are most popular. GMU has an excellent faculty, but our opinion is that the true inspiration comes from
the students and the administration. Not one or the other. If you are a Mason student and you want to be involved with CampusLIVE then you’ll
speak directly to Jared (the CEO), Jeff (VP, Marketing) or myself. We don’t have secretaries or office managers to give you the run-around.

What new parts of the page are you currently working on to roll out in the future?

We’re constantly working with students to improve the site. In the very near future students can expect more Facebook functionality (photos, status
updates, etc), new ways to sort through their favorite restaurants (by rating, popularity, and more), all the local bars and specials and a little widget
which will let you enter your classes and keep track of where you have to be, and when. Think what Facebook used to have but high powered and more functional.
Of course, there’s more in the works that will be rolled out this year — but we’re keeping some of those under wraps until they are
perfect.

Putting Your World (Wide Web) On One Page

Originally appeared October 3rd, 2007 in the Daily Campus (link)
By Kim Hansen - Daily Campus Staff

Just two years ago, Jared Stenquist was a college student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Today, he is chief operating officer of a company that created a Web site to organize student’s social and academic worlds online.

The Web site, CampusLIVE, which was launched two weeks ago at UConn, allows students to access features such as Facebook, e-mail, news and Wikipedia on one central page.

The Web site was originally developed by Stenquist and some friends strictly for students on the UMass Amherst campus under the name “ZooMassLinks.” Since then, the site has expanded and is now available on multiple campuses - including UConn - under the new, more universal name, CampusLIVE.

CampusLIVE’s chief marketing officer Jeff Cassidy and chief technical officer Boris Revsin worked with Stenquist to create the Web site. According to Cassidy, they thought there was a need for the central site because there was no easy access point to all of the Web sites that they visited most often.

“We were tired of getting menus slid under our doors,” Cassidy said. They decided to create a site that was “convenient and catered to the needs of college students.”

According to Revsin, the Web site is a “one-stop-shop where students can access Facebook, weather, e-mail, news and restaurant information all in one place without having to look everywhere.”

The site has changed a lot from the time it was first developed until now. According to the CampusLIVE Web site, this summer Stenquist and his staff “gave up sleep, became addicted to Red Bull & Espresso, and made CampusLIVE into a scalable, dynamic homepage for college students across the country - focused on their campus and community.”

The site is currently available at just six schools - UMass Amherst, UConn, George Mason University, Amherst College, Plymouth State University and Hampshire College - but CampusLIVE is looking to expand to many others, including Arizona State University, in the near future.

According to Cassidy, the newest version of the Web site is scalable, meaning that it doesn’t take long for new schools to be added.

New improvements are constantly being made to this rapidly growing page.

“Facebook was just added and many new features, including customized links, events, and notes, are coming soon,” Revsin said.

CampusLIVE has been receiving e-mails from students all over the country at schools where the site has not yet been launched asking for the site to be brought to their campus.

“That is now our goal - to try to reach out to as many schools as we can that want it,” Cassidy said. “UConn was a logical next step for us because it was close to us and had similar demographics to UMass.”

We just launched a referral system on CampusLIVE so that everyone can recommend the site to their friends and earn rewards for it. Rewards include T-Shirts, Shot Glasses, Apple IPods and the all holy Apple IPhone.

To get started just log into your Control Panel, or click the “refer your friends” button on the bottom right of your homepage. After one of your friends signs up through the link you give them, you will see your referral credits increase on your control panel.

As always, we welcome your feedback!

Weather: Thanks for all your feedback about our broken weather. Rest assured - we already knew it wasn’t always Sunny in Philadelphia…

After many problems with Weather.com’s XML API, we have ditched them. The problem was that it never worked 100% - some zip codes would update, and others wouldn’t. We made a call to Accuweather.com and they were happy to partner with us. Thanks to the guys there for the great help.

Restaurants: You will now notice that the restaurant directory shows you which restaurants are already your favorite - and lets you add/remove them here. We felt this was easier than forcing you to the control panel whenever you want to remove a restaurant.

Oooo Tabs: Minor detail, but we added background color to all inactive tabs on the homepage. It just looks better.

In the works: We’re giving away rewards for those of you who spread CampusLIVE to your friends. The system will be simple - enter your friends email address or give them a link on AIM. Depending on how many of your friends join, you’ll earn various rewards. Gifts include ITunes giftcards, t-shirts, shotglasses and other CL schwag..