| Website | Unigo.com |
| Blog | theprereq.com |
| Category | Consumer Web |
| Phone | 646.861.7986 |
| Employees | 25 |
Over the past year, 18 full-time editors, 300 on-campus interns and more than 15,000 students have collaborated to build the world’s largest resource on 225 of America’s top colleges.
The result, Unigo.com, makes its public debut on September 17th. The free site offers tens of thousands of candid and original reviews, videos, photos, documents and more – all searchable within an interactive community built around student-generated content. High school students can communicate with one another, and with current college students, to find the information they need to make better college decisions.
Conducting months of research into 225 of America’s top colleges, Unigo’s editors networked with tens of thousands of students and gave them the opportunity to tell their stories. After more than 30,000 student reviews, videos, photos, documents and more poured in, Unigo’s editors viewed and organized all of it, working with students on campus to ensure accuracy and making everything available at Unigo.com. At some featured colleges, close to 10% of the student body contributed content.
Unigo will offer the following resources to prospective college and university applicants free of charge:
o Original articles from students and recent grads on every aspect of college admissions and college life; o An Intelligent Calendar to guide students through the search/application process; o “Unigo Match” to help students find the colleges that are right for them, and current students at those colleges with whom they can interact o For 225 top colleges, editorially-written overviews, accompanied by tens of thousands of current student reviews, photos, videos and documents o Ability to search through reviews of every college by each reviewers’ gender, ethnicity, major, political leaning, hometown and more, so you can see every college from a variety of perspectives o All content can be rated, commented on and flagged by other users to ensure truthfulness and accuracy.
Not only a resource for high school students and parents, Unigo is also a platform for college students to create and share content about their college lives. Current college students are able to make profiles, then create reviews, photos, videos, documents, blogs and more about their colleges, painting intimate and honest portraits of their schools and college lives. And Unigo will soon expand to cover nearly every college in America.
Jordan Goldman, Unigo’s founder/CEO, is now 26 years old. As a 17 year-old Goldman was featured in a New York Times article on the college admissions process. Times education reporter Jacques Steinberg began following Goldman, and the specifics of Goldman’s own college search later became the subject of Steinberg’s New York Times bestselling book The Gatekeepers.
The next year, as a college freshman, Goldman set out to improve the college search process by creating a series of more accurate, honest and 100% student-written college guidebooks. Goldman’s Students’ Guide to Colleges went on to be published by Penguin Books in 2005, was updated for publication in 2006, and was featured in Forbes, US News and Time Magazine
Now, four years out of college and driven by the needs of the 60 million students and parents who still used outmoded resources and tools to make this life decision, Goldman created Unigo.com and formed a board headed by Frank V. Sica (a private equity investor and board member of JetBlue), and an advisory board that counts Tom Rogers (CEO of Tivo), Bob Chase (former president, National Education Association), Chuck Hughes (former Senior Admissions Officer, Harvard University), Don Ross (Chief Revenue Officer, Bankrate.com) and education blogger Sam Jackson as members. Goldman’s partners in Unigo include design firm Deepend New York, build firm GotCoders and entertainment firm Autonomy.
Unigo gives high school students and parents an unprecedented volume of the content they need from the day it launches, centered around one of life’s most stressful decisions. And it gives college students all the reviewing, video-sharing, photo-sharing, document-sharing and networking capabilities now familiar to web users everywhere – but all in one place, and with a purpose
This video was originally published on Beet.TV
Added: 3/2/09
