Classifieds Click at Mizzou's Journalism iPhone Competition

While Tony Brown initially set out to aid the failing journalism industry with his NearBuy iPhone application for classified ads, his product may have a greater impact on the failing real estate market.

Last week, a panel of industry experts selected him and teammates Zenhua Ma, Dan Wang and Peng Zhuang as winners of the Reynolds Journalism Institute Student iPhone Competition hosted by the University of Missouri. The team created an application that syncs real estate classifieds pulled from Google Base and Craigslist to a Google Map based on the iPhone user’s location. The application also allows users to post pictures of the surrounding neighborhood via Flickr and even communicate with the Twitter community for reviews of the property itself.

Outfitted by the school with $3,000 and new iPhones with AT&T service contracts, the team competed against three other teams for eight months to create the most innovative, media-oriented application. “I can’t say that I’m an expert in anything related to real estate," Tony acknowledges, but believes his efforts to modernize the traditional classified ad may help save the tanking industry.

With the foundation for the application in place, the NearBuy team set off for Cupertino, CA to meet with Apple developers and marketing executives. Working with the Apple team took the project to another level.

While the NearBuy team wanted to keep the application free for buyers, they worked with Apple to develop the sell side of the application, ultimately producing a tool for both commercial and private realtors allowing them to post the location, basic information and pictures of a property entirely from their iPhone. Tony says, “It’s one thing to create the database, but it’s quite another to change the way sellers access buyers…Crises breed ingenuity and we hope NearBuy will connect buyers and sellers more efficiently than before.”

If their position in the iPhone App Store is any indicator, NearBuy is well on its way to changing the real estate game. Among real estate applications, NearBuy ranks in the top three and already has over 20,000 downloads.

The success of the application, along with the other applications in the competition is unprecedented. Unfortunately, this success triggered an intellectual property dispute between the University of Missouri and students, as the school retroactively declared ownership of 67% of revenue generated by the competition and awarded just 33% to participants.

While the lack of transparency by the school is frustrating to participants, Tony is confident that further discussion with the University of Missouri administration will facilitate a more reasonable final split.

Here's a video of NearBuy's presentation at the competition. (Source: PBS)

Related links:

• NearBuy
• NearBuy's YouTube Channel
• Reynolds Journalism Institute
• Google Base