Besides merely serving as a distraction in that political science class you now realize was a mistake signing up for, perhaps that iPhone or BlackBerry will actually give you the power to drop the class on the spot.
At Stanford - and more recently, Duke - that choice will soon be available to students on campus.
A mobile suite of applications for web-enabled devices, called MobilEdu, allows students to view campus maps, look someone up in the directory, pay school bills, check sports teams' scores, find campus events and add or drop courses.
Terriblyclever, the start-up behind these applications, was launched a year and a half ago at Stanford University.
The company, which already has six full-time employees, is run by a group of close friends, many of whom are undergraduates at the university.
"We were originally building web applications and content-management systems for clients like Best Buy, Comcast and Sprint," said TerriblyClever co-founder Kayvon Beykpour, a Stanford junior.
"When we ran into people interested in making a mobile application, we sat down as a company and realized that the iPhone was a real platform for something grand and powerful," he said.
The suite was first launched last fall as iStanford and was available as a free download for students with iPhones or iPod Touches.
The first version of iStanford had a course catalog, campus map, directory and athletic scores. Now, after rolling out version 2.0 in March - which upgraded the previous applications and added an events calendar - the company hopes to add on-campus shuttle tracking and the ability to add or drop courses by this fall.
While the suite is specifically optimized for the iPhone or iPod Touch, a less "sexy" version of the applications in browser form is available for most web-enabled devices.
With the recent launch of the BlackBerry application store and the G1 phone, Beykpour made it clear that the company wants to establish a mobile presence wherever it can.
"We can't just use the iPhone because we want to grow this out," he said. "Why shouldn't every student have something like this?"
Duke is the second university to employ the use of the suite, as Terriblyclever launched DukeMobile last month.
Beykpour indicated that the company has plans to work with five other schools in the next month or so.
While Penn does not appear to be on that list of schools, the prospect of one day having what Beykpour calls "one hub in your pocket" is attractive for College sophomore Maddie Stolper.
"You constantly see students on their BlackBerrys or iPhones around campus and if these applications can somehow bring together Penn InTouch, Blackboard and webCafe, there is no doubt that it will be a huge success," she said.
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