Students create crowdsourced calendar


When Peter Jung transferred to USC from the University of Illinois and met Jake Cho, they had no idea that the friendship would turn into a business partnership.

Jung, a senior majoring in international relations and global business, and Cho, a senior majoring in economics, are the co-founders of Quuve, a crowdsourced calendar system where people can easily update their calendar and share it with others.

Cho had the initial idea for the startup, which he formed while serving two years in the Korean military. When Cho met Jung, who works on operation and design for the startup, through their involvement in the Korean International Student Association, the idea quickly came to life for Quuve, a homonym for cube. Jung said he has always had a passion for entrepreneurship and realized that the best place for him to be was in Los Angeles, where the startup culture is quickly growing due to the influence of Silicon Valley.

“The KISA organization helps international students become acclimated to the school, and this leadership skillset pushed me to do something more, not just for KISA but for the whole USC community,” Jung said.

Collaborative websites like Reddit and Wikipedia all have a community of individuals with similar interests who share common objectives. The goal for Quuve is to create a comparable community within USC. Though friends or classmates have like objectives and dates, each person updates his or her calendar individually. Jung provides an example where a professor assigns a homework assignment to a class of 200 students. These 200 people then all proceed to do the exact same thing of writing it in their calendar. The point of Quuve is to allow simply one individual to mark this assignment and update it for the entire class.

“What we are trying to do is change the way groups communicate,” Jung said. “If you look at Google calendar, there is a way to share calendars with other people but that goes through an email notification. What we want to do is create a separate app just for crowdsourcing. I think that is what makes us different and unique because that is our minimum value and what we are going to focus on.”

Jung and Cho are working to create a mobile app and a web application for Quuve and anticipate having a Beta prototype by the spring semester. The greatest challenge so far has been building the app itself since neither Jung nor Cho are skilled in coding and computer science. During the summer, the team worked with a group of USC graduate students to create the app; however, they are now outsourcing the work to a different company. This comes with other risks since the Quuve members are not physically seeing the work being done and only communicate with the app creators online.

The biggest takeaway for Jung is to learn from failure, a concept that has helped him not only in this startup endeavor but in other applications of life as well.

“I am actually an introvert, so that sets me back from doing what I actually want to do. But through this, we initialized many things, executed many strategies and failed as well, and we learned from that,” Jung said. “Through this experience, I learned that if I want to do something, I should initialize it and learn through my failures.”

The long-term goals for Quuve differ slightly for the two founders. Cho hopes to have 20 percent of the USC undergraduate population using the app by the end of next semester. Jung will be happy with 10 percent engagement at that stage. Over the next two years, the team is focusing on gathering users, the most important aspect of any successful startup.

“We need to promote and show our value and then people need to realize this value, which will help gather other users,” Jung said.

Jung and Cho will launch the app at USC and then strive to expand to other college campuses on the West Coast and ultimately have a presence at colleges nationwide.

Jack Walker contributed to this report.