San FREEcisco

A user-generated collection of free things to do in the city, targeting primarily San Francisco’s 72,000 students at 23 colleges and universities.  Users will be able to express interest in events, invite others, and comment on events, while friends can subscribe to events and pictures flagged by their social network.  Advertising and merchandise are the main revenue sources for this low-cost business idea.

Resume 2.0

A facebook application for uploading resumes and finding internships for college students.  Despite facebook being the hub for college student interaction, there is no serious competition for this application yet.  Resume 2.0 will offer templates and automatic upload of existing resumes, along with a possibility for instant video interviews.  Revenue will come from premium services and advertising.

San Francisco Volunteer Network

An online community focused on volunteer opportunities for San Francisco high school students required to perform community service.  No other destination is focused on making high school community service opportunities easy to find, and helping students and organizations track volunteer hours.  Users will be able to see which volunteer opportunities their friends are participating in.

YouMix

Like at popular Asian sites such as SongTaste and K8, users will be able to make their own karaoke mixes, upload vocals from their computers, and comment on other users’ mixes.  Revenue will come from ads, and a paid iPhone application.

Congrats to Peggy Takahashi and the entire Freshman Launch Program team for creating an outstanding first year business major experience from scratch.  Given the quality of work we’ve seen from the students, we now know we can do a lot more with them during their entire four years at the McLaren College of Business.

The Syllabus and Readings for the Social Networking and Online Communities seminar are available under open content licenses, so take a look and grab anything that might be useful.  Again, the idea was to provide an introduction to business that examined both ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ business.  Last semester’s experience was written up in this previous post.

The student project for the seminar was to propose a new business use of Social Networking/Online Community technology.  Here are the concepts they came up with:

RateMyCaf.com

A site for college students to rate cafeteria food items, and provide food suggestions.  Proposed pilot at USF (Bon Appetit), but with an eye towards a nationwide rollout.  Revenue from ads targeted to a college age demographic, and subscription fees from cafeteria food providers.  72 of 75 USF students surveyed said they would want to use this site.

Gimme-a-ride.com

A ridesharing site that would interface nicely with couchsurfing.com, a popular service for finding free places to stay.  Unlike the rideshare forum on Craigslist, gimme-a-ride.com would use profiles and user feedback to give potential ridesharers more confidence in who they’re catching a ride with.  Gimme-a-ride.com would also allow searches based on when and where a ride is desired.  Revenue from ads focused on discount travel services.  Longer term, the proposal is to develop forums with travel advice focused on the bargain domestic traveler.

iConnect

A proposal to add voice-driven messages, status updates, and ratings to the existing BMW iDrive car computer.  Provide social networking focused on location-based topics of interest to drivers, but within an exclusive community of BMW drivers.  Software would be added to all BMWs equipped with iDrive, but activation would require a subscription.

RecruitMe.com

A site focused on recruiting underappreciated ‘non-star’ high school players for NCAA competition.  The site would combine stats from MaxPreps.com, video hosting from YouTube, and Skype video chats with a social networking layer to create an easy-to-use site for athletes to specify their playing preferences, and for coaches to quickly search for talent they wouldn’t ordinarily be exposed to.  A premium service model based on how much material student-athletes load onto their profiles.