When opening a new browser tab, Shiv Dutt saw an opportunity.
Dutt is the founder and CEO of MeaVana, a fast-growing Google Chrome extension that allows users to customize their dashboard to their needs.
“When you open a new tab on your browser, instead of that boring Google page, you get a really personalized, customized dashboard with your pictures, your codes, your information,” Dutt said.
Dutt said MeaVana increases the “productivity functionality” of the internet with three main use cases: building community, digital resource linking and productivity.
“We had seen some players in the market do very simple wallpaper apps and they already had a lot of usage,” Dutt said. “We felt that we could take it to the next level.”
MeaVana currently has more than 600,000 users around the world, according to Dutt.
Adewale Aderibigbe, MeaVana’s UI/UX product designer, said when they designed and launched the product, they reached out to several companies and branches — such as Nike, Coca-Cola and Mercedes.
However, after recognizing that younger people made up a large percentage of users, Dutt shifted focus toward expanding MeaVana’s presence on college campuses and tailoring the platform to academic life and student needs.
Aderibigbe said they gathered input from students at different schools to understand what features would be most useful.
“What we did first was to create a template so as to acquire students from those schools, to learn more about the school we are focusing on,” he said.
By conducting usability tests, Aderibigde said they learned how to tailor dashboards to individual schools — including Boston University.
Rashik Hossain, a graduate student in the Duan Family Center for Computing and Data Sciences and a College of Arts and Sciences alum, is currently an intern for MeaVana.
MeaVana is exciting because it is not very “corporate-minded,” said Hossain. “There’s not a lot of pressure from the founders’ side because they give most of the free range [to] us students.”
After attending BU for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees, Hossain said thinking about the websites he used often helped him find easier ways to link different things together for current students.
Students can find those BU-specific features in one place. However students can still personalize their own browsers, Hossain said.
“Not all BU students are going to be the same,” he said. “So there are options for you to customize and change, add or subtract. It’s all very exciting.”
Hossain highlighted the quote section at the bottom of the BU dashboard which can feature quotes from famous alumni, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Julianne Moore.
Hossain said the group hopes to involve students from every college and recruit as many interns as possible.
“Undergrads from the College of Communication could curate imagery and wallpapers and make a separate gallery for Boston University images,” he said. “When you’re speaking from a technical side of it, the CS students can generate their own API hooks and work in the back-end side of things.”
Dutt added they are looking to bring more undergraduate students on board as they hope to cater more to them.
“We have options in different capacities,” said Dutt. “We have campus ambassador roles, we have campus master roles [and] we have growth marketers. We want to create a good team structure.”
As MeaVana expands its presence on campus, flexibility and personalization remain central to its mission.
“If you want a maximal dashboard for your browser, then you go for it. If you want a completely minimal one, then you can also do that,” Hossain said. “We’re basically giving students and users the opportunity to do whatever they want here.”
This story was published at 2:03 p.m.