Alums using crowd funding to develop March Madness app

[March Madness] (http://www.ncaa.com/march-madness) app that its developers, two former Texas A&M [environmental design] (http://dept.arch.tamu.edu/undergraduate/) students, say will make it easy and fun to fill out brackets and compete with friends and family for the title of best bracket in the land.

It’s the latest product by [Studio Neat] (http://www.studioneat.com/) founders Dan Provost ’07 and Tom Gerhardt ’07. Their products, which have earned acclaim in the [New York Times] (http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2010/12/23/23gigaom-glif-iphone-4-tripod-mount-review-mighty-mite-45107.html) and [Gizmodo] (http://gizmodo.com/5656046/the-glif-is-the-one-iphone-4-stand-and-camera-mount-to-rule-them-all) , include the [Glif] (http://www.studioneat.com/products/glif) , an iPhone stand and tripod mount and the [Cosmonaut] (http://www.studioneat.com/products/cosmonaut) , a wide-grip stylus for touchscreen devices.

Backers of the project, which has already met its $10,000 funding goal, can contribute $1 or more for the project until March 5 on [Kickstarter] (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danprovost/simple-bracket) , a crowd funding site where Provost and Gerhardt successfully raised funds for the Glif and the Cosmonaut.

A $1 donation secures a download of the app once its available, while higher donations will bring the donor other goodies such as temporary tattoos, a customized notebook, and more.

March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, is one of the biggest sports events of the year.

“It has become something of a national pastime for fans to fill out a bracket of their predictions for how the tournament will play out; even the president fills in a bracket,” said the duo on the Kickstarter site. “We wanted to make an iPhone app that makes it easy and fun to participate in the madness.”

They said the app features an elegant, mobile-optimized user interface, a scoring system developed by a statistician that’s an improvement over other bracket apps and an easy sign-in system to compete with friends’ brackets.

The app is available only on iOS, with further platform development possible in the future.