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Social event app aims to bring students together

ORGANIZE YOURSELF: Computer science senior Yunsong Meng created a new smartphone app called Eventor that helps students find and organize events. (Photo by Rosie Gochnour)
ORGANIZE YOURSELF: Computer science senior Yunsong Meng created a new smartphone app called Eventor that helps students find and organize events. (Photo by Rosie Gochnour)

After a surge of popularity in social media outlets, three ASU students saw an opportunity to channel the abundance of Internet resources into one efficient mobile application, Eventor.

Eventor is a social event organizer designed as a platform to create and join events.

“The big vision is people telling the Internet what to do and the Internet will do the rest for them,” said Yunsong Meng, computer science doctoral student and one of the app’s inventors.

Meng created Eventor with team leader Yang Qin and Jicheng Zhao, who are both recent graduates of ASU’s computer science and engineering doctoral program.

The idea for Eventor came out of their own desire to make it easier to find others with similar interests, Meng said.

They began developing the app last December. While it is still in the testing stages, it is available for download on Android phones and the team is working on developing the app for the iPhone.

Meng explained the app is relatively simple to use. Users can choose to join or create an event or view an already scheduled event. By specifying interests, day, time and location, Eventor will then submit the requests to the server and notify the user once others join in.

Eventor uses information based on the data users provide, user history and other relevant information to find and match users with recommendations to fulfill your requirements, Qin said in an email.

“We kind of reinvent the concept of search; you don't search, our system searches for you,” Qin said. “In addition, Eventor will inform you of any new items that match your request whenever they enter the system.”

Unlike Facebook, which Qin explains is a static platform that is only able grow with the friends you add, Eventor uses “interest-based social networking” to connect people of similar interests.

Meng said the app has more than 50 users so far and the team hopes to expand its popularity on campus.

“We would like to provide it to all ASU students because we want to contribute to our community,” Meng said.

Yan Qi, who graduated from ASU’s computer science doctoral program in 2009 was involved in the developmental discussions for Eventor and helped with reviewing coding and improvements for the app.

He said in an email one of the challenges they are facing now is how to promote Eventor.

“Our product is not 100 percent mature yet; having a large user community would give us a lot of opportunities to improve our implementation based on users’ feedback,” Qi said.

Meng said with feedback they will be able to make the needed improvements and proper developments before moving it to the app marketplace.

“To make our vision become true is not easy,” Meng said. “We integrate a lot of search topics and a lot of sophisticated technologies.”

The Eventor app is the first step in bringing the virtual Internet world towards an interactive reality, Qin said. The team’s eventual goal is to build a social networking platform that supports services like Eventor.

“A couple of years before we were saying that the Internet is a virtual society, but now we are saying the Internet is no longer virtual,” Meng said. “Just look at Facebook, Craigslist and even Amazon, they kind of interact with our everyday life.”

Eventor will help form connections and relationships beyond what our current social media tools do on the computer, he said.

“We hide ourselves behind the monitor and chat with people or browse the news,” Meng said. “With Eventor everyone is a producer and consumer at the same time.”

 

Reach the reporter at newlin.tillotson@asu.edu

Correction: Because of an editing error, Yunsong Meng was named a computer science senior and sole creator of the smartphone application in the caption of an earlier version of this story. The caption has been updated with the correct information.


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