For more information or media inquiries, contact:
Tony Brown
Director of Marketing
tony@nearbuyclassifieds.com
A little back story:
(click here for a great collection of videos about NearBuy from the Reynolds Journalism Institute)
Nearly seven months ago, I entered myself in a contest sponsored by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri for students to create an iPhone application that would benefit journalism. I went into the contest with a single rough sketch of my idea: a Craigslist that takes advantage of the iPhone’s sexy yet simple interface.
I wanted the application to be powerful yet free to those who want to use it. I also wanted it to be simple, but fun to use.
Luckily I met three like-minded partners: Peng, Zhenhua, and Dan. They’re all three graduate students in the computer engineering school at MU and I quickly found that their motivation to create something powerful yet useful exceeded even my own. They adopted my rough sketches and ideas as their own, and by the time we presented our idea to the first panel of judges in the competition (presentation can be viewed here: http://tinyurl.com/nearbuypitch1 ), they had created a web-based version that showed the true potential for our application.
The height of our development daydreaming came on a trip to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Seated at a table with executives in charge of Apple’s brand and product development, the other 4 teams that had passed through to the final round of the competition, and the heads of the MU School of Journalism and the School of Engineering, our brainstorming sessions exploded with ideas.
Four months of testing, research, and endless coding and debugging have culminated in our acceptance into the iTunes App Store. NearBuy has finally arrived.
However, we’re far from finished. Last month, Apple released the developer’s kit for its OS 3.0 update, to be released to iPhone users in June. Since, we’ve been hard at work to deliver an even greater user experience and more powerful tools.
NearBuy today is just the tip of the iceberg, and we hope you’ll follow along with us on our adventure in app land.
– Tony
2 Comments so far
Leave a comment
NearBuy - Real Estate for the iPhone 
Great story on the development of this app. I don’t know if my comments are tied together or not but I mentioned earlier elsewhere that I’m loving your app. I’m a tech loving real estate broker and downloaded it yesterday. If you guys ever need/want input from my perspective I’d love to help any way I could. You guys are clearly on to something here.
Comment by Payne Walker May 8, 2009 @ 3:15 amJust got my new iPhone and downloaded your NearBuy. This is so cool! I was walking my dog and met a neighbor who asked me if I knew (I’m a Realtor in Devon, Pa) the sale price of a home? I sure can, and in less than 30 seconds I was able to give her the price.Love it!
Comment by Judy Peterson June 29, 2009 @ 3:17 pm