College Tonight, the new social network for college students that recently went public through a reverse merger, has started to reveal the mobile features intended to make its service more “social” than Facebook and other traditional social networks. The company has announced a deal with click-to-call widget provider, and phone number obfuscater, Jangl that will 1) enable students to call each other without revealing their phone numbers and 2) allow them to leave voicemails for each other that they can later recall. This latter feature is referred to as the “drunk dial” feature because students are expected to use this functionality to delete the embarrassing messages they left for each other the night before after drinking a wee bit too much. Call me cynical but I don’t think either of these mobile features will take off on college campuses. First, I don’t really see a need for students to hide their phone numbers because I can’t imagine a common situation in which students want strangers to contact them by phone. Perhaps you could give that cute member of the opposite sex your Jangl number at the bar, but if you’re questioning their desirability you might as well give them a fake number and call them yourself if interested later. As for the recalling of voicemails, what drunk person is actually going to think “hmm, maybe I should use Jangl for this call because I might regret it tomorrow?” Intoxicated people, almost by definition, don’t have that sort of foresight. College Tonight has hinted at some other mobile features in the pipe: a WAP site, mobile photo uploads, mobile status alerts, “Reply-All Texting”, real-time campus updates, and a feature that notifies you when your crush has entered the building (?!). The company has hired a “former FBI profiler” so I assume this means they’ll be serious about safety and security, especially with regard to this last piece of functionality. When I spoke with CEO Zachary Suchin a little while ago about his intention to attract college students, he suggested that the mobile functionality of College Tonight would play a major role. So far I’m not persuaded that College Tonight can provide a robust enough set of mobile features to drive college students away from Facebook, but I hope to be proven wrong, if only because I’d love to see social networking via mobile really take off. Update: CTO Jason Schutzbank says → Read More
College Tonight, one of a group of startups that is trying to win over Facebook’s core college membership, has raised a $1.6 million round of financing. Oh, and they went “public.” This isn’t really going public, though. They’ve merged with a barely alive public entity called Simex Technologies (SMXT), which is trading at $0.49 per share on the Nasdaq pink sheets. Simex, which had been delinquent in its annual and quarterly reports for some time, is now current and has changed its name to College Tonight, Inc. This is a common way for startups to get liquidity fast, and it rarely ends well. When Nasdaq companies get delisted into pink sheet purgatory, they will occasionally get picked up. A subsidiary of Simex called Remote Business, Inc. used to be “engaged in the design, installation, servicing and monitoring of digital surveillance security systems for business and industry” — hardly anything related to social networking. CrunchBase Information College Tonight Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
While Alice Mathias may have overplayed the frivolous uses of Facebook for college students in her article called The Fakebook Generation published in the Grey Lady a few weeks ago, she was certainly correct in saying that Facebook lost a certain je ne sais quoi for students when it opened up to the real world last fall. So instead of trying to take this $15 billion animal head on, as one $222 billion beast is attempting to do, startups might be wise to try capturing the niche that Facebook has intentionally left behind. Of course, there are a handful of reasons to think there will never be another social network that catches on so quickly and so thoroughly with college students. Namely, Facebook itself, which still holds the attention of the vast majority of college students. Personally, I think any company that tries to create a social network for college students faces a very steep uphill battle. But you can’t blame them for trying. Let’s say you did want to capitalize on students’ (growing?) discontent with the “mature” Facebook; what strategy would you follow? You’d probably want to take a few pages out of Facebook’s own, er, book by restricting membership to users with .edu email addresses, gradually opening up to elite schools, and keeping things stupidly simple. But you’d also have to provide something particularly unique, useful, or entertaining that tempts mainstream Facebook users to jump ship. We’ve taken a look at the websites out there claiming that they are the next “it” social network for college students. And we’ve got to say: overall, we’re not terribly impressed. Only one stands out – a website called College Tonight – and this because of its novel attempt to bring social networking back into the real world. College Tonight is well-designed and has some features you won’t find in other social networks, such as an area for lost and found items at your school and a place to “drunk dial” with messages you can take back in the morning (if you’re up and out of bed in time). The company behind this site, which launches Monday, also has a set of undisclosed features in the works that tempt us into believing that they might actually appeal enough to college students to survive. We’ll have to write more about them later once we’re more informed. The other decent site among the bunch → Read More
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