Students sick of simultaneously using Gmail, Facebook and mass text messaging to organize group projects may have a solution in Wiggio.
The Web site, wiggio.com, has been active for about a week but officially launches Monday. It aims to aggregate students’ needs for group meetings and projects.
With the help of on-campus promotions, about 50 ASU students have signed up for the Website, and more than 70 college campuses nationwide are represented on the site. The site offers free communication and organizational features like online shared folders, mass text messaging, event planning tools, live chat rooms, shared calendars and other services.
Dana Lampert, co-founder and CEO of Wiggio, said the idea for the site came from his time at Cornell University. He graduated from Cornell in May.
Lampert said he came to realize many students inefficiently use several different Web sites at once to communicate in large groups. He said it was frustrating there was a lack of a consolidating tool that made all the features of group communication available, he said. Instead, Lampert said he had to use Google Groups, Yahoo Calendar, text messaging lists and other communication methods all at once just to keep up with the schedules of his classmates and friends.
“We’re using all these different components for all these different [tasks],” he said. “What we found is that other people had these exact same frustrations.”
By surveying college students at Cornell, Lampert and fellow Wiggio cofounder Lance Polivy saw a need for a service that provided all the organizational and communication tools students would need, Lampert said.
In a test launch at Cornell last semester, about 1,200 students signed up for the service in three weeks, he said.
“Because of that, we were able to get really detailed user feedback over the summer,” Lampert said.
Wiggio uses features available on other Web sites, but puts them all together in a user-friendly interface, Lampert said. Because of that, he said, it is tailor-made for students’ needs, and can be used for communication in groups like student government, poker groups, fraternities and sororities and any other organization.
“We really pride ourselves in keeping everything within Wiggio dead simple,” he said. “It’s built to be intuitive.”
The product has a viral element to it, since one person can bring many others to the site, Lampert said.
“We’re really trying to get the group of first influences, the leaders on campus,” he said. “From there, we hope it spreads virally and internally.”
Psychology freshman Zach Johnson said the ideas behind Wiggio make sense, because group communication can be difficult and frustrating.
Johnson, who has not used Wiggio before, said he usually uses text messaging and other conventional methods to organize something with many people at once.
In class projects before, Johnson said he has had difficulty with organizing groups of students.
“There’s generally a problem, especially when there’s more than a few people,” he said.
Reach the reporter at matt.culbertson@asu.edu.
