It is rare to walk around MU’s bustling campus without seeing students texting, talking or listening to music on iPhones. With more than 85,000 applications for this phone available on iTunes, there are 6.3 million downloads per day. Two Columbia residents are responsible for the creation of one of these apps: Nightlife, an application that gives daily deals and events of 40 popular local downtown establishments, such as Campus Bar and Grill, Booches and Déjà Vu Comedy Club.
“It was an idea I had been playing with for a while,” Nightlife creator Kyle Turner said. “We bounced the idea back and forth and thought it was something we could go with. There was just a market for it.”
Turner and co-creator Justin Voss saw many companies try and fail to create websites that had the same premise of Nightlife.
“I think the idea of making it mobile was a really natural fit for what we wanted to do, because when you’re going out, you don’t bring your laptop with you,” Voss said. “You need something portable you can take with you, and websites just can’t meet that need.”
MU students are appreciating the application’s benefits.
“Though I am not 21 yet, I really like using this app to tell me food deals at my favorite restaurants,” freshman Patrick O’Meara said. “It’s really beneficial. This especially helps college students, because it allows us to save money, even if it’s just a little bit.”
Every day, Turner and Voss hit the streets and go into each of the 40 restaurants, bars and clubs and learn of their specials going on that night. They then manually enter the information into the application’s server.
“Our plan is to allow the bar owners to put in the information themselves, so when they decide to make a special, it goes into our system today,” Voss said. “We currently only have so much access to so much of the data. The freshness of the data is a totally valid concern most people have.”
In summer 2011, Turner and Voss will create Nightlife 2, which will be more user-friendly. It will allow users to “like” information, leave comments and flag information that is incorrect. It will allow for more personalized recommendations.
Nightlife has been downloaded 2,100 times since its debut in late October and receives about 20 downloads per day. The creators said the hype of the app has not died down.
“I figured we’d put this out there and my mom, my girlfriend and my dad would download it and that’d be enough, but we’ve enjoyed this great success,” Voss said. “And now we’re creating a new version of it. It’s really cool.”
