By Joanna Xu
The Stanford Daily, Stanford

(UWire)--Student iPhone application startup Terriblyclever Design, LLC, creators of MobilEdu and iStanford, was recently acquired by Blackboard, Inc. for $4 million, according to an announcement last week at Blackboard's company meeting in Washington, D.C. Terriblyclever co-founder Kayvon Beykpour Stanford University '10 will join Blackboard as vice president and lead the Mobile Technologies for Education division of the company.

MobilEdu is an independent platform that allows iPhone users and students to download their institutions' application from the iPhone App Store. Stanford University was the first campus to implement the application.

"Today's students want to do everything with their mobile devices, including managing their social, school and work lives."
-Michael Chasen"We [the Terriblyclever team] are all students, so we thought about all the things that students use," Beykpour said. "We use the campus map, campus directory, course catalogue-and we access these things on a daily basis. When we thought of iStanford, we wanted to take all of those things and put it in your pocket, in the iPhone."

Blackboard President and CEO Michael Chasen recognized the future possibilities of mobile development in the educational market.

"Today's students want to do everything with their mobile devices, including managing their social, school and work lives," Chasen said in a press release. "We're pleased to join forces to help institutions get serious about meeting the expectations of students and other campus constituents who live and learn in a mobile, digital world."

Terriblyclever Design, LLC was originally co-founded by Beykpour, a computer science major, and his childhood friend Joe Bernstein.

Stemming from an interest in Web design, the company was soon working with companies such as Best Buy, Comcast and Sprint.

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In July 2008, the Terriblyclever team-which had expanded to include Ben Cunningham '10, Pablo Jablonski '10, Aaron Wasserman '10 and Nils Rocine-met with Tom Black, associate vice provost for student affairs, to discuss creating a mobile presence for Stanford on the iPhone.

At the time, the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) had recently been released by the company, and Black wanted a mobile solution for Stanford.

Beykpour hopes he and Blackboard can continue to provide mobile solutions for other universities.

"Our goal is to seriously transform the way people use their mobile devices on campus, which will be much more interestingly attained with a relationship with Blackboard," Beykpour said. "Other companies aren't oblivious to the mobile trend; we just stumbled on it first because we walked around campus and knew what students used, so we connected the dots."

"We knew about other companies in the space as well and had spoken to Blackboard and were aware of their product," Beykpour added. "Some of our clients used Blackboard products as well. It wasn't a shock that we started having conversations."

Presently, Blackboard's client list includes Stanford, Duke, Texas A&M, UC-San Diego, University of San Diego and the Medical College of Georgia. It's also working with four more schools whose applications have not yet gone live.

While the Stanford students on the Terriblyclever team are all full-time employees, they are also full-time students at Stanford. Beykpour admits there are many sleepless nights as a result of these commitments, but claims the experience is worth it.

"Really working on a project and the company-it will stick with me even long after school is over," he said.

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