Meet Your Klassmates

Cute Penguin is looking for a Gov 20 study buddy. Lonely Koala is feeling hungry during lecture. Winning Chipmunk hopes his CS50 classmates can suggest a good drink for late-night coding sessions.

Ignore the unusual names. These people are your classmates. Well, Klassmates with a K, that is.

These Harvard students and about 350 more are users of Klassmating, a smartphone app created by Abel Acuña '11.

The app, which launched at Harvard during the first week of classes this semester and is also available at several other schools, lets students chat anonymously with others in their classes. Acuña said that he hopes students in large lecture courses will use the app during and after class, perhaps to ask questions that they might not voice in person.

"We hope [the anonymity] will enhance interaction that otherwise wouldn’t happen in more transparent forms," Acuña said.

To promote the project, members of the Klassmating team distributed slips to students on the first day of class in several large courses at Harvard. The papers, resembling official course handouts with no logos or graphics, said, for example, "In an effort to enhance in-lecture participation and information sharing among students enrolled in Ec 10, we are piloting an in-lecture chat feature for use on smartphone devices," then provided instructions for downloading the app.

Thanks to an acquaintance in Korea who has partnered with Acuña on the project, the app is financed by a group of Korean investors who pay the salaries of six computer programmers, one graphic designer, and one business developer, who all work on the app in Seoul.

In keeping with the playful animal theme, the team has created new functions called "Zoo" and "Safari" since the initial launch. Zoo lets all users at one university communicate in a shared forum, and Safari aims to connect students from multiple schools based on common interests. For example, a Safari chat room will open up during the Harvard-Yale game to allow students from both schools to publicize parties and events happening that weekend.

Additionally, Acuña said that an internet-based version of Klassmating to complement the phone tool will be available in the next few weeks.

He is optimistic that Klassmating will grow in popularity at Harvard, pointing to the more than 1,000 students who already use it at Seoul National University, where his partner was a graduate student before taking time off to work full-time on Klassmating.

He said he hopes to increase overseas usage, first in English-speaking countries like the UK and Australia and later across the globe. Maybe soon we'll be seeing Cheeky Toad and Chipper Kangaroo complaining about their psets.

This post has been revised to reflect the following the corrections:

CORRECTION: September 27, 2011

The Sept. 27 blog post "Meet Your Klassmates" incorrectly stated that the start up Klassmates is funded by money won through the i3 entrepreneurship challenge.