A mobile app that connects classmates to form a “virtual community” has gathered 4,000 users in its first four months and is on track to amass as many as 10,000 by the end of the semester, according to its student creators at Clemson University and North Carolina State University.
Phloat is the brainchild of Ryan Catoe, a junior electrical engineering major at Clemson, and Geoffrey Fylak, a junior computer science major at N.C. State. They have been working with the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership at Clemson to develop the app and form a business based on it.
Students download the free app to their smartphones, sign up using their university email address and instantly have access to group chats for all of their courses.