Students exhausted from typing in Web addresses and tired of viewing Brown-specific Internet content one site at a time have one more way to access all their information in one place.
A new site, CampusLIVE at Brown, provides weather feeds, Facebook, Gmail, newspaper headlines and links to commonly used Web sites on a single page. Launched Sunday night at campuslive.com/brown by the Amherst, Mass.-based company, the site made Brown the latest campus with a page on the Web site.
Launched a year and a half ago by two University of Massachusetts at Amherst students and staffed primarily by their friends, CampusLIVE now has personalized pages at about 60 colleges across the country, said Ryan Durkin, director of business development. Business Week ranked the company's founders the No. 3 best entrepreneurs under 25 last year.
"We're dominating in New England," Durkin said. "We started out with only UMass and over the past year we've added about 55 campuses. We want to be over 100 in the next few months."
The company's revenue comes primarily from university and athletics departments that advertise on their campus's page, Durkin said. Restaurant menus and other unique content is uploaded by interns and campus representatives who work for the company in exchange for course credit at some Universities.
The founders' inspiration for the site came when they were students themselves. "All their friends were browsing the Internet all day for resources," Durkin said. "Why not just put it all together?"
The company decided to produce a page for Brown after about 30 students requested an edition, Durkin said. The page includes links to The Herald, The Brown Noser, Banner, MyCourses and other popular Web sites. Though few Brunonians know about the site now, close to 60 percent of students at UMass use it as their home page, according to Durkin.
