Sign On UCSD: SquaredOut

For the typical college student, balancing a hectic schedule full of classes, social events and club meetings can be challenging and often unappealing. SquaredOut Inc. has a solution.

Based in San Diego and Orange County, SquaredOut is an event-driven social calendaring service that allows people and groups of all kinds — students, sororities and frats, businesses and organizations — to broadcast their upcoming events and activities through a calendar interface.

The platform is scheduled to launch in December. The program was created by Vice President of Business Development at SquaredOut Inc. Grayson Lafrenz, in collaboration with his team of fellow entrepreneurs AJ Mitchell, John Correa, Robert Rodrigues and Shane Snyder. “Our product is very diverse in which our target market spans from the high school student to the elderly to the business executive to the stay-at-home mom,” Lafrenz said. “However, at the end of the day, we feel a great target market is the college student because they’re entering that realm of responsibility. We want to give them a product that’s not only going to be fun and social but rewarding in the fact that it’s going to help them better manage their time.”

While merging the various calendars of your life — class, work and personal schedules — you can find events through a location-based search engine, which you can then “calendarize” and share with your friends and networks by posting your calendar on Facebook or linking it to your Twitter account.

Or, if you’re not one for broadcasting your life to all your friends, the more private side of SquaredOut allows users to create their own personal schedule, giving you the option of sharing it with a select few. But the public side is where the innovation comes in; it allows you to create and “follow” public calendars — those of your favorite celebs, sports teams or other groups of interest — in order to stay up-to-date on relevant promotions and functions.

SquaredOut is giving students an opportunity to be among the first to test the site out before its public launch and welcomes interested students to enter their info into the field on the SquaredOut homepage for a VIP invite. Lafrenz also spoke of some opportunities to join the SquaredOut team.

“We are interested in talking to any of the students who are eager and energetic and want to get into the entrepreneurial game,” Lafrenz said. Only a year since the development began in Dec. 2010, the founders of SquaredOut have transformed the ordinary calendar into an integration of “squares” where you can “create,” “invite,” “join” and “follow.”

“We have a big vision for the future and a lot of projects that will be coming, and different features that we’ll be adding onto our calendar to make it even more user-friendly for the end user,” Chief Operating Officer AJ Mitchell said.

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