If I remember correctly, you were going to reinvent the Address book on iPhone. If I may ask, what was the reason behind pivoting from that idea to a private social network.? Curios to know the reasons behind abandoning the idea of building a better address book.
You can go the route of using contractors. We have helped startups rapidly develop apps, while they are in the process of hiring their own developers. We built Hipster's iOS App before they had internal iOS Developers on board. My email and company is on my profile, feel free to reach out.
Love it. We worked on Hipster's iOS App (Also did some work for Path too) and was wondering how yet another photo sharing app could survive. For me, the killer feature is being able to batch upload the pictures. Love the intuitive UI.
I worked at Stanford, UC-Berkeley, UW-Madison (across UW-System) on enterprise student systems. Typically, professors have little say on the technology that gets used in the schools. It is mostly the IT department that makes most of the calls. Easiest would be to get someone at the top interested. You can email me (in profile) and if I like the idea, I can put you in touch with the CIO at one of the universities that I had worked at before.
Be warned that the sales process is pretty long at universities (especially the public ones) and everything has to go through an RFP.
But this kind of snake oil is being sold all over the internet and I haven't seen this level of critical analysis applied to others doing something similar, but under a slightly respectable garb. Examples: Tim Ferris and his 4-hour work week/body, Gary V with his Crush it, Ramit Sethi and his Earn 1k infomercial http://earn1k.com/
He should probably right a book about blogging your way to riches by working 2hrs a week and he would be on NYT Best Seller list and an eventual Angel investor and speaker at various startup events.
