SPOTLIGHT Future Entrepreneurs

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Tomorrow’s executives demonstrate how they fuel entrepreneurial drive while in school

Smartphones power early success

Matt Bischoff

New Jersey Institute of Technology

When Apple Inc. approved Quotebook, a smartphone application for finding, saving, sharing and organizing quotations, it was a big hit for Lickability.net. Since March, thousands of iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad owners have downloaded the app at $1.99 a pop; the company gets $1.40 from each sale.

Enter “friends, Romans, countrymen” in the Quotebook app, and you’ll be led to information on William Shakespeare and other quotes from “Julius Caesar.” Users are able to rate quotes and flag them for easy retrieval, and can also easily share them through online social networks.

“It’s an extended-memory system for quotes, for writers and students,” said NJIT sophomore Matt Bischoff, a co-owner of the company. The most unusual user so far, according to Bischoff, is “a father who is keeping track of the funny things his daughter says as she learns how to talk.”
Bischoff, 20, founded Lickability with Brian Capps, a student at the University of Miami. The company’s lone employee, NJIT student Andrew Harrison, programmed the app and answers e-mails from users.

The three split the proceeds from the app sales, Bischoff said.
“This is really exciting — and a lot more exciting than any other summer job opportunity for a college student,” Bischoff said. “It engages creativity, and more important than the money is that I’m making things that people I really respect care about.”
Bischoff is majoring in human/computer interaction, and when he graduates from NJIT, he said he expects he’ll be doing work for a small design agency, designing user interfaces for applications on platforms of big companies like Apple, Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. But “if it works out, I might start a company.” His success so far “has given me great hope.”

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