Nikita Bier co-founded the consumer technology startup, Five, through the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology while a student at Berkeley. Although he graduated in 2012, Bier has just developed his latest iPhone app, Five. Five is a virtual Berkeley hang out where students can meet and chat. His previous app, Politify, which won the 2012 CITRIS innovation contest, was a virtual visualization tool that allowed users to illustrate the impact of politicians’ decisions on their own lives.
Five was released on Tuesday, March 17th, and has already been downloaded by over 600 Berkeley students. It is exclusive to our campus as a user must have a berkeley.edu e-mail address in order to download it. With the app, users are able to privately chat in “semi-anonymous” rooms and their messages are only seen by others in that room. For now, the app is exclusive to the Berkeley community and is only available for download from the apple store.