"This changing expectation of students, to be 'Internet-enabled' as soon as possible and their increased use of smartphones and other Wi-Fi-enabled devices (eg iPod Touch) present new challenges for universities."

"At Stanford, we envision the iPhone as having a profound potential to break barriers in the way we provide information and services to students - in how they converse with the institution, their curriculum, the faculty, and each other. With an enduring entrepreneurial, innovative, and technological leadership, those same qualities that helped shape Silicon Valley, Stanford is in a unique position to chart yet another new course, this time using the iPhone. "

"Loopt Star"

""I was standing in line in a coffee shop on campus, and noticed that many people these days are using smartphones," says Kayvon Beykpour, vice-president of Blackboard Mobile. "Students are doing all kinds of things with them: they're on Facebook, checking email, making phone calls. People were doing just about everything except interacting with the university, which we thought was a bit of a disconnect. There's so many things that, as a student, you need to do every day, whether it's registering for a course, or finding your way around campus, or checking the directory or athletics scores-and they're all traditionally different places. Why not create a really sophisticated, really elegant, and really beautiful app that brings all those different services together in one place, and makes it really usable for the student, for the faculty, for the tourist? And that's what our platform does.""