Bevii, a social networking site currently exclusive to the Triangle’s big three research universities, launched today. 

Taylor Robinette, sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and founder and CEO of Bevii Inc., said he is confident in the venture but he isn’t going it alone. Bevii is starting with a team of eight investors and seven full-time developers to work on the program.

“After we launch, we will begin bringing in more people, such as a CPO and other executive positions,” Robinette said.

Robinette, a double major in business management and computer science, isn’t new to the social networking game. 

“For me personally, I have been working on this for a long time.” Robinette said. “It started back during my freshman year of high school. I developed a site called Lifeclickz, which was really simple. All you had to do was invite your friends to receive points and use those points to get physical prizes such as shirts or DVDs.”

“I had this grand idea for a social network because I didn’t like what was currently out there.” Robinette said. “As a freshman in high school, I didn’t really have the means to do what I’m doing now. It was a little site but within the first month we had 250,000 members and our servers kept crashing.”

About a month after Robinette launched Lifeclickz, he received a cease and desist order from Lockerz claiming the sites started and ended in the same letters and had similar logos. According to Robinette, claims were dropped once directors at Lockerz realized he was a minor. 

“Lifeclickz is where the idea first started coming from.” Robinette said. “Over the next four years, I kept turning over the idea of what the perfect social networking site would be.” Robinette considered what social media users would like to see. 

Robinette said he kept considering “What would fit the need right now?” Robinette saw that the needs of social media users were not being met by the current options and what he could do to provide that need.

During Robinette’s junior and senior years of high school he considered moving to California and not pursuing a college degree. With some convincing from his family and meeting potential and current UNC-CH students during a scholarship interview, Robinette decided to attend UNC-CH.

Robinette was plugged into an MBA course by one of his professors during his first year at UNC-CH. He competed in the Carolina Challenge and while he didn’t win, he met his first investor. Robinette received his initial investment in May and started development, which continued throughout the summer.

 “We got our first investment back in May for $75,000,” Robinette said. 

After the initial investment, a UNC-CH professor invested $25,000. Two of Robinette’s lawyers invested $5,000 each to total investments to $110,000 within a week.  Since then, various investors have put another $190,000 into Bevii to total in $300,000 worth of seed money.

Users sign up for Bevii with their school email address and are required to upload a profile picture and provide basic information. 

“If you want to add more you can go into your profile to select which details you want to include … once you’re in the app though and it’s open, essentially you just keep Bevii open running in the background and go about your daily life.” Robinette said. “What happens is that [Bevii] tracks your offline interactions with other Bevii users, and everybody you spend time with offline will automatically be added to your network.”

“Essentially it’s this dynamic where people are constantly being added and dropped from your network.” Robinette said. “Not only does Bevii automatically add people to your network but also values them and based on that value assigns them a privacy level to determine how much of your profile they can see.”

The network will keep track of the number of and the length of the interactions to determine what friendship value another user is at.

“It takes out the pain of searching for specific people to send a friend request,” Robinette said. “Say you went to a party or a networking event, everyone that has Bevii running at that event will automatically be added to your network at base level.”

“On your newsfeed there is an algorithm that works to keep the posts of your closest connections on up longer so that you’re seeing the people you want to see instead of pictures of food uploaded by someone you went to middle school with,” Robinette said.

Friendship values are based from one to five, with one being the strongest connection and five being the weakest connection. While the network determines the friendship value initially, users can manually change those values for specific users. 

“Friendship values operate as a two way street.” Robinette said. “Two users can manually set different friendship values for each other that determine what they can see and how often they appear in each other’s newsfeed.”

“Bevii is very sophisticated compared to Lifeclickz,” Robinette said. “We feel that we would be comfortable maintaining millions of users on our servers.”

Robinette said that while Bevii will start at UNC-CH, N.C. State and Duke, he plans to expand when possible. Bevii has an invitation system that will allow users to invite five people from any school per week. 

Robinette said he purposefully launched Bevii before his 20th birthday Oct. 28 so that he would still be considered a teen when it launched. He will get his wish, and all N.C. State students can download the application today.