Wolfielist.com is a classified website created by Stony Brook students that aims to connect students shopping for and offering products and services. The website recently won the Stony Brook University Entrepreneurs Competition. It plans to use its cash prize to continue expanding the website.

Wolfielist was co-founded by three Stony Brook MBA students – Jason Lantier, Deepak Reddy and Pooja Reddy. According to Pooja Reddy, it all started when Lantier was telling her and a friend about the difficulty he was having finding a tutor for his accounting class.

“Jason explained the frustration he was feeling with finding an accounting tutor and showed [us] just how cluttered and outdated the bulletin boards were,” Reddy said.

The group agreed that a bulletin board is an archaic and extremely inefficient way of advertising products and services. Not only is it a waste of paper, but many of the flyers are placed on top of one another, making it difficult to find information.

“Deepak thought ‘Why are we using this dated system of bulletin boards even in this age of technology?’” Pooja Reddy said. “Why are we still using this ancient system of posting on bulletin boards? And then bam, it hit us. Why not create Stony Brook’s own online bulletin board?”

Wolfielist is similar to the popular website, Craigslist, although its target demographic is college students.

Similar websites have been launched on other college campuses across the country. At Washington University, two undergraduate students launched a website called Symblia, where students can buy and sell products and services. Over the course of nearly three years, the website has expanded to several colleges across the country, including the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

A few students at Eastern Michigan University started another website, CollegeGenius.net. It is essentially the same thing as Symblia and Wolfielist in that students can buy and sell products and services from each other. CollegeGenius is used at many large schools in Michigan, as well as one school in Chicago.

Symblia, CollegeGenius and Wolfielist all require registration in order to insure safety for both buyers and sellers, a feature that Craigslist lacks.

The founders of Wolfielist surveyed a group of students and asked them what they wanted from an online bulletin board. According to Pooja Reddy, 96 percent of the students wanted a website where they could buy and sell textbooks as well as electronics.

The website has four basic categories including personals, buy/rent/sell, housing and services. These major groups are broken down further into classifieds like ads for tutors, carpools, on-campus jobs, apartments for rent and prospective roommates. However, according to Pooja Reddy these are the very basic foundations of the website. The founders plan to add new features and expand the website to other college campuses.

Wolfielist had a soft launch on March 12 to gauge consumer response. Pooja Reddy said that there are currently more than 100 registered users. To help increase the use of this site before the summer, anyone who posts at least one ad on Wolfielist before April 30 will be entered in a raffle for an iPad.