PulseTECH: New app helps students get to know the Woo

The city of Worcester is known for its dense concentration of colleges and universities, boasting nine higher education institutions within the city itself. Although those colleges bring more than 36,000 students to the city, these millennials are often at a loss when it comes to finding things to do. A lack of structural communication between schools makes it difficult to find out what’s going on across campuses, and the depth of events happening throughout the city can be near-impossible to navigate for students who’ve lived here for a relatively short period of time.

Two Clark University students, seniors Alexander Turgeon and Abhijit Singh, are hoping to change that. “The problem that we identified has less to do with Worcester than it does with the negative perception students have about the city,” Turgeon said. “With this in mind, our ideas quickly grew into a passion for progress.”

Through funding attained by winning the Clark University Ureka! Big Idea Challenge, the intrepid duo is launching a new way to connect university students with the vibrant and eventful community around them. WooConnect is a web and smartphone application that will allow students to “discover events that are occurring on their campus, other campuses, and the city they live in.” The app also will help businesses and individuals to market their events by offering analytics that provide insight into needs of the app’s users.

A pilot application will launch with limited features this fall at Clark University, where it will benefit from feedback from students and administrators. Turgeon said, “After the initial focused pilot, WooConnect will go live to all Worcester students from September until mid-October, focusing on promoting and marketing content off campus. In the future iterations of the application, students will be able to filter and search by various categories such as start/end time, genre, location, etc. We envision an expansion of other features focused around great user experiences, but testing our core product is the goal for the pilot.”

Some readers may be familiar with a similar service that’s existed in Worcester for the last few years – The Worcester Go List. Operating through an email subscription list server, the Go List allows for a crowd-sourced accumulation of local events and classifieds in the form of a daily email digest.

Turgeon and Singh plan to develop their app in a way that will be more accessible for college students and will negate many of the issues that come from using such a service. “The real value of using our application is that students are recommended not just events, but content aimed specifically for students based on their interests, rather than spending time filtering through an already crowded mailbox. We believe in a seamless product that our users will love and continue to want to use based upon their initial experience with the application.”