Five ASU students developed and launched a new application for Android and iOS users to easily exchange contact information in just a few taps.
Technological entrepreneurship and management sophomore Jake Slatnick said he remembered attending an ASU football game as a freshman and trying to exchange contact information with new students.
“The crowds are really loud, and you can't really hear anything,” Slatnick said. “It became a problem.”
In 2011, he developed an idea that would allow people to exchange contact information quickly and accurately, especially in large crowds and at loud, chaotic events. He created the Tap Contact Exchange application with the help of four other ASU students.
The application launched at the end of March and was later marketed to ASU students on campus.
“There are a bunch of really cool features in the app,” Slatnick said.
The application allows users to create virtual contact information cards to exchange with other application users within a 5-mile radius.
Users can create different types of contact cards, including business and personal cards, with different forms of contact information. The application allows users to list information such as phone numbers, personal addresses, email accounts and birthdays.
Political science junior Chris Riha controls customer service for the application. He said the contact information easily updates not only in the user's personal phone, but in the phone of all other phones that contain the user's information.
“If I change my address on my family card, it updates in all my family's phones,” Riha said. “You're really in control of your info in other people's phones."
Riha said he even created a drinking card for when he exchanges contact information at bars.
Users can have the application detect other users nearby and send a request for contact information with just a press of a button. People can choose to accept or decline contact requests and are able to pull their own contact information from other phones at any time.
The application also has built-in global positioning systems that allow users to easily remember where they obtained a new number.
Slatnick and Riha worked with students Joseph Stratton, Brandon Sleater and Michael Howell to market the application to ASU students.
Slatnick said the primary mission of the business now is to reach out to as many ASU students as possible to build popularity of the application.
“We're trying to figure out how to get everyone to have it,” Riha said.
Slatnick and Riha said they do not plan on selling the application anytime soon, but they don't know whether or not the group will continue to run it themselves in the future.
“There are no plans to sell it at this point,” Riha said. “There are a lot of opportunities that can happen in the future, but we don't really know yet.”
Howell, a software engineering freshman, controls the application for Android users. He said working with other students has been a unique experience during his first year at ASU.
“It's been hectic and stressful,” he said.
Along with adapting to college and keeping up with his home life, Howell said running a business is difficult and requires compromise.
“There are two ways to go about it. You either need to be patient – work on it in the background for years while classes take up most of your time – or you need to accept that C's get degrees,” Howell said. “It's impossible to get straight A's and do amazingly fast work. I should've taken the former route, but I signed a contract that implied the latter.”
Riha said although taking on a business as a student is difficult, it is also very rewarding.
“None of us have really done anything like this before,” Riha said. “But it's been a lot of fun.”
Slatnick said the group, like all businesses, had a difficult time working together in the beginning.
“But we learned each other's strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “We are learning what it's like to work as a team.”
He said creating an application and running a business while still in college has given him and the other members experience that they couldn't obtain in a classroom.
“It's not just homework assignments,” he said. “(Gaining real-world experience) has been the most valuable part of my (college) experience. It's allowed me to get so much more out of my education.”
Reach the reporter at wpogden@asu.edu or follow her @whitneyparis10
