Stanford students, Apple iPad apps just go together
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Not all students here are creating companies and apps. It just feels that way sometimes.
Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is known as the school that helped give birth to such heavyweights as Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Many of the most gifted design and computer students leave Stanford and go straight to work in the technology industry.
Sometimes they don't even bother to graduate, says Nick Kruge, a Stanford graduate who now works at Palo Alto start-up Smule, a company that makes music apps for the iPhone and iPad.
Kruge recalls taking classes with Ankit Gupta, who was there one semester and gone the next, "because he sold his app." Gupta not only co-created the Pulse News Reader while at Stanford, he raised $9 million in financing and saw his app touted at an Apple event by the late Steve Jobs. (The app has been downloaded 30 million times and is a default app on the Amazon Kindle Fire.)
Matt Sullivan hopes to be the next Gupta. Late in his final year at Stanford, Sullivan created Storytree in 2011 with fellow student Zach Weiner. It is a finalist in the South by Southwest Interactive Awards. The winner was scheduled to be announced Tuesday night.
The app poses questions to help family members write captions for photos and videos and was developed on campus.
Creating apps and companies "is just really kind of emblazoned into the culture here," says Weiner, who is finishing his senior year at Stanford. "Everybody sits around their dorm rooms, late at night, talking about their next project." With the rich history of successful companies born at Stanford, "that makes everyone feel like they have an opportunity to do the next great thing."
Jonathan Tilley created the Eggaduppa game app at Stanford and saw it go into the Apple App Store, where it started doing well. Apple noticed and offered Tilley an intern position. "I had to pull down the app," he says. "Apple doesn't like you working on side projects." The intern gig turned into a paid part-time position, says Tilley, who is finishing his senior year. Apple wants him full-time after graduation, he adds.
Unlike many universities, Stanford teaches a course on how to create apps for the iPhone and iPad, and it's one of its most popular. "At Stanford, there's the entrepreneurial spirit," says Brent Izutsu, a senior program manager in the digital department. "Students look at what other students have achieved here, and they get very motivated."
Izutsu says the class is offered to computer science majors, primarily, and that's it tough to get accepted. (Even Gupta was rejected, he notes.) However, the course is available online, free, at Apple's iTunes U, where it's been downloaded more than 10 million times.
Opening eyes
Ge Wang, a Stanford assistant professor who also is the co-founder of app-maker Smule, had Gupta in his computer music class while he was creating a host of "social music apps." Pulse was created outside the class, but once it hit, "it opened a lot of eyes," says Wang. "Students get really excited when they realize they can really make it happen — from an idea to building the experience to unleashing it to the world."
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