By Andrew Martins, Managing Editor
At a young age, Hillsborough native Kenny Dundorf knew he wanted to make something big. As a child of the digital age, he got to see technology transform the way we live, work and play., Now, as 21 year-old junior at Penn State, Kenny is getting ready to launch a friend making app called Someonew with a team of nine other students., “We really wanted to push people out of their comfort zones,” he said. “When we looked in the market, we saw a big gap between social media and face-to-face conversation.”, Aimed at sparking conversations that could potentially lead to real-life platonic connections, Someonew uses the GPS capability of smartphones to help link people with shared interests., Upon signing up for the free app, each user fills out a survey asking them to identify five interests that they could “talk to a complete stranger about,” be it a hit television series, a musical artist, an art style or any other interest. If two people with similar interests come within a certain distance of each other, a push notification pops up on their phone alerting them of the other person., The idea, Kenny said, was to use smartphones to take smartphones out of modern social interaction., “There’s really nothing out there that uses your phone to get you off your phone and talking face-to-face,” he said. “To us, looking somebody in the eyes and talking is so much more meaningful than getting 50 likes for your selfie on Facebook.”, Using a cellphone or various forms of social media to connect with other people is not a new concept. From the aforementioned Facebook to Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, millions of people use dedicated applications to reach out to the world abroad and connect., What separates Someonew from those apps, is its intended use of creating new friendships with complete strangers., Though he admits that Someonew is similar to the popular hook-up app Tinder, Kenny said he is looking to separate himself from apps that aim at getting people together for a single casual encounter., “Something like Tinder is service level, so you’re only choosing the person based on their face and it’s based on hook-ups, but we found that people are kind of using it to also find friends, so they’re kind of stretching the platform for a different purpose” Kenny said. “That showed us a market need.”, After failing to find a project that excited them, Kenny said he and his partner, Penn State senior Andrew Simpson, saw that market need and worked on “helping people meet new people.”, Along with helping to find new friends, Kenny said their focus was also to help people hone their social skills., “Social skills translate to all aspects of life,” he said. “We’re really trying to push people and help them grow.”, For Kenny, the idea of honing his social interaction skills was not a problem growing up. His ability to sell a product and see potential in things started as a third grader at Amsterdam Elementary School, where he would sell candy and “wire men” made out of old computer wire to his classmates., “You know, in third grade, when you can come home with $20 in your pocket, it was pretty awesome,” he said. “That sort of thing really propelled me into my high school years.”, Eventually, he and his brother Jimmy worked together, buying and selling items at garage sales to make a dollar, further fueling his entrepreneurial drive., “Anything that caught our eye, we would appraise their value or once we got cellphones, look them up on eBay, so we were just buying and selling things,” he said. “That kind of set the path for me for the rest of my life.”, Ever since, Kenny said he has studied the lives and practices of some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg., The idea, he said, was to follow in their footsteps., “My mentality became if I wanted something or I wanted to get to a place, I would look to someone who already has it and kind of copied them,” he said., College, as a result, became a “backup plan” to his ambitions and a way to make business connections, Kenny said., “I wanted to go have the college experience, go somewhere with a great program, but also a great network of people, and my goal was to find a co-founder to start my business,” he said., Now, as a major in Information Science and Technology, Kenny said he’s learned so much from his classes and his time creating Someonew., “I think entrepreneurship is kind of glorified by ‘The Social Network’ and other movies that show a scene where someone inputs some lines of code, release their product and then quickly become billionaires,” he said. “What I’ve learned is that it’s a process and those highlight reel moments are diamonds in the rough,”, Kenny said he and his colleagues are looking to start small before moving to a wider audience., By the end of the Spring semester, Kenny said the company aims to reach 10,000 downloads in the Penn State area before spreading to other campuses and major cities., “The real goal is to make this a multi-million or multi-billion dollar company,” he said., The Someonew app is currently available on the iTunes App Store and Google Play as a free download. The service will come out of beta and formally launch on Jan. 23.
