The Story

Curveu was born out of an app I created during my senior year of high school. Back then, there was no app to view your grades on your mobile device, so I created an app called San Jose PIV. The app screen scraped Infinite Campus’s Student Web Portal and displayed it in a mobile optimized interface. Here is an original flyer for San Jose PIV. 

With the success of San Jose PIV, I then translated the application to support multiple school districts and renamed it to IC Connector. This application soon skyrocketed in the number downloads and became the basis for a front page news article in the San Jose Mercury News. 

With the app gaining success, I created a company called DABSquared, LLC with a friend, Douglas Bolm. Our goal was to make IC Connector into a viable product and, in doing so, we turned it into a front-end wrapper for all the Student Information Systems (SIS) that we could. With this, we created a new app that would be web and mobile based called Curveu. 

Curveu had many features that IC Connector did not-  the two most important being the grade calculator and the statistics feature. The grade calculator allows a student to use sliders to see what they need to get on an upcoming assignment to pass their class. The statistics feature allowed a student to compare themselves anonymously with their classmates (as long as all the classmates used Curveu as well) and see how the whole class performed on a specific test, assignment or their grade overall. Here is an original flyer advertising Curveu’s feature set.

Curveu was widely received by all the students that shared it with, but unfortunately when we took Curveu around the VC circuit, we could not receive venture capital for it as we did not have a good path for monetization.

Curveu is still actively maintained today and acquires new active users daily.

Techy Details

I built Curveu with the Symfony 2 PHP framework (later upgraded to Symfony 3). It used to use a Vagrant and Chef based development environment with a deployment mechanism on Amazon Web Services with OpsWorks. Today, it has been transformed to use a docker-based development environment with a kubernetes deployment on the Google Cloud Platform. The data collector that gets the student information from all the Student Information Systems is based in Java and polls when a user manually triggers it or nightly on its cron based schedule.