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Student entrepreneurs create Houndly: the UCL event app
30 January 2015
Have you ever missed a lecture, workshop or seminar you really wanted to attend? Perhaps you've been wandering around UCL glued to your phone, desperately trying to google the location of an event.
If so, a group of UCL students have created Houndly - an events app that could mean you
never have to miss another event on campus.
Houndly was created by Gameli Ladzekpo (Engineering with Business Finance BEng), Sachin Raoul (Ancient History BA), Vlad Kolensyk, Shubham Bakshi, Jonny Manfield and Dominic Krejcik (all Computer Science BSc).
The app was the brainchild of Gameli who manages day-to-day activities and is responsible for the overall look of the app, while Sachin handles marketing and business development. Dominic, Vlad and Shubham make up the coding team who are constantly churning out updates to make sure they are offering the best service to their users.
Origins of Houndly
Originating as a Facebook page and a simple blog in which the team highlighted events that were happening across campus, Houndly ultimately evolved into a mobile app for ease-of-use. It features everything from UCLU society events to Lunch Hour Lectures to a trial session for a sports team.
Students can share events with their friends and also add events straight to their mobile phones' calendars, so they can make the most of the hundreds of activities taking place at UCL every week.
The unusual name for the app comes from the team's desire to act like a hound, tracking everything that's happening on campus and putting this all into one easy-to-use app for students at UCL.
UCL Bright Ideas Award winners
The team received a huge boost in the development of their app when they won the UCL Bright Ideas Award last year. They believe this was essential in helping them to distill their original idea for a one-stop UCL events app into a workable product design.
Speaking about the importance of the award, Sachin Raoul said, "London is one of the best cities in the world to start a business and UCL Advances gave us a second-to-none experience on entrepreneurship education through the Bright Ideas Award. Being recognised by UCL gave us the confidence to seriously develop the idea. It also gave us money - business costs money!"
"Our main priority now is to build something students love to use and push ourselves to make something truly state-of-the-art. We're collecting feedback from users on a regular basis, so we want to keep developing the app to be the best that it can be.
"We are also inspired by UCL alumni who have gone on to build great businesses, such as Oyvind Henriksen and Michael Langguth of Poq Studio and Kishan Gupta of UXcam. So outside of UCL, we are keen to explore working with other universities who want to improve their engagement with students."
Houndly is available to download to your mobile phones via IOS and Android.
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