Every day, I come across a whole slew of startups coming out of college campuses around Boston. So many of them are working on amazingly innovative projects - ones that could change the world - but I'd be lying if I said some of them didn't stand out. Over the past couple of months, the following student startups have caught my attention, and I'm keeping an eye on them.
Wizio
This startup launched its beta site a matter of days ago and it’s already generating a ton of buzz around Boston. Led by a team of Northeastern students, Wizio is attempting to revolutionize the real estate market in the city - namely, to ensure renters stopping getting screwed. Real estate agents and landlords, who are looking to make money, push apartments on people without disclosing information about how bad these places can be. So tenants can end up leasing less than desirable living situations and usually after paying all kinds of upfront costs like signing fees.
No more. Wizio is giving tenants an online network through which they can disclose all of the nitty gritty details of their apartments and upload a walk-through video of the dwellings. In exchange for this information, people can find and lease their next apartments through Wizio for free - a function that will be coming out around January. With so much hype already surrounding the startup, I’m 99.99% positive this will be a must-use site in a matter of months.
Rapid SOS
Harvard Business School graduate Michael Martin knows that emergency response can go wrong. His father fell off the roof while shoveling snow and he was stuck lying on the ground for 2 hours because he couldn’t reach 911. Martin explained that 60 percent of 911 calls cannot be located, which leaves many people asking for help without it.
Rapid SOS is going to be solving that problem. Through the app, people will be able to contact 911 via various channels like data, bluetooth, WiFi and text messages. It identifies precisely where individuals in need are located, sending local first responders to their aid. This applies even outside of the country.
Martin had said the startup was planning to launch in January, and there are many other functions that appear to be in the works - all of which could do wonders in saving lives.
Knightly
Abbey Titcomb, a student at Northeastern, is taking on a beast of a mission with her startup Knightly: Making college kids safer. Reflecting on her own late-night walks home alone, Titcomb knows that students sometimes feel like they’re invincible - when they’re really vulnerable instead. With Knightly, she’s developing a device that goes on student IDs or credit cards and that allows people to let others know when they’re in a compromising situation.
By sliding Knightly up, you can send text messages to preset contacts in your phone to tell them you’re uncomfortable and exactly where you are. And by holding the device down for 3 seconds, you’re able to alert campus police that you’re in need of immediate help and giving them your GPS location.
Titcomb is still finishing the product development, but Knightly should be in the hands of Northeastern’s next class of Freshmen. And when the startup does officially release its product, I have a feeling the demand for the device will be so high that it’ll be an instant hit.
Zomida
Cooking can be so hard for essentially everyone out there. College kids are too busy cramming for exams - amongst other doing other things - while professionals can be too wiped after a day of work to put a meal together.
So when Zomida, a startup created by two graduate students at the Harvard Kennedy School, said it will be bringing home-cooked meals delivered to people’s doors, the response has been positive. Instead of traditional takeout - which doesn’t do a body good - Zomida is hoping to connect consumers with local cooks so they can put homemade food on the table without any effort.
Although we have to wait until spring for Zomida to relaunch indefinitely, people are already clambering with excitement.
BriefMe
On a daily basis, we get slammed with news from every which way. But how can we tell which current events are worth knowing? BriefMe, an app coming out of the Harvard iLab, is trying to filter out all of the white noise in news and give us the most important or interesting information out there.
The app, which is still upcoming, gives people the top 10 news stories of the day, but for different subjects that may matter most to people. While I don’t think folks will be limiting their news consumption to BriefMe, I do suspect it will be a good starting off point when people are trying to take in what’s going on in the world. If anything, it will be a good filter - which may become increasingly more valuable as the Presidential Election approaches. That’s my thinking anyway.
Image via Abbey Titcomb.
