New events calendar website provides platform for student groups

Ever since he arrived at Penn, College junior Dan Wertman has had to send a last-minute text to his “most popular friend” in order to find out what’s happening around campus on Friday night.

However, Wertman’s problem may soon be a thing of the past.

Wertman — along with two of his friends at Brandeis University — launched a website on Wednesday called CampusBash.com.

“Don’t miss an event!” is the website’s logo, and Wertman said there are many functions to ensure that this happens. CampusBash, he explained, compiles listings of daily events at Penn and allows users to sort through them based on various categories.

The website provides each user with a calendar where they can add in all of the events they are attending, as well as view what events their friends are going to. It also has a grading system available to users so that they can rate each event that they attend, resulting in a “cumulative GPA” for the host of that event, Wertman said.

“I’m always sending out mass text messages to find out what’s going on around campus,” said College junior Mike Kiley, who used the website during a beta-testing period. “It’s great to have one place to see it all.”

In addition to Kiley, Wertman said, CampusBash had about 50 other beta users before its launch.

“The infrastructure is there. It’s ready for people to use,” Wharton freshman Ben Biran, another beta user, said. “In the future, whenever I want to go to a sports event, I will check there.”

Since its launch on Wednesday, the number of users has already nearly doubled, with a number of campus organizations signing up for the service, Wertman said.

Wertman and his friends at Brandeis began working on the website about a year ago.

“It’s really user driven,” Wertman said. “We designed this website for groups and organizations — they have a hard time getting people to come to events.”

The idea of CampusBash, however, goes beyond merely knowing what events are occurring on campus, he added.

For Wertman, it’s also about promoting interaction between different colleges.

While the website is currently open only to students who have a Penn email address or are on the University’s Facebook network, he plans to add other schools into the mix soon.

“The idea is that colleges want to interact both intra-campus and inter-campus,” he said.

For Wertman, Wednesday’s launch marked the beginning of what he hopes will be a successful future for the website.

“The most amazing part of entrepreneurship is building a service and seeing people like it and use it,” he said. “This is exciting, this is tangible.”

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