Siri, tell me what StudentUniverse did in 2011. OK, that might not work, but I’ll try to tell you a little bit about what StudentUniverse did in 2011 and why you should care.

We launched a new website.
If you ask a developer what he likes about our new website he’ll probably tell you about the service oriented architecture and how it’ll make us more agile. We’ll move even faster and make it easier for other companies to work with us. Our customers would most likely just tell you that we continue to deliver good student deals, fast. To deliver cheap student flights even faster we’ve worked with Google/ITA. If you asked a marketer, let’s call her Amy, she might tell you a thing or two about how it’s optimized for search engines. I’d tell you that it’s really a new platform and it’ll allow us to roll out new and exciting services in 2012.

We grew StudentUniverse Media.
And even faster than expected. We connected major brands and students. Our team advocated for the importance of reaching the audience as well as the importance of having a student discount. The marketing and media services arm has already worked with world-class brands.

We continued to improve our hotel search engine.
More student deals, more places to stay. We made it easier to navigate and faster too. We’ll keep adding hotel deals this year.

We brought more than 10,000 students to a private event at Fenway Park.
Our College Day event was like a speed-date with brands. We connected thousands of college students with leading brands as well as local favorites. It was a sunny day in Boston and Fenway Park has never looked better.

We strengthened our team even further.
StudentUniverse continues to grow and we have really exciting plans for 2012. To execute we have acquired more top talent. New group travel agents, new software engineers and more business managers. In 2011 I was pleased to announce that former CEO of Mr. Youth, Paul Tedeschi had joined us as the General Manager of StudentUniverse Media. It was also the year we could announce Mike Cleary as our new CCO and Evan Becker as Director of Partner Development.

We rocked group travel. 
We added clients and we sent thousands of students abroad. Marching bands got to go to Europe and more students studied abroad. If you’re traveling with a group of kids I recommend contacting them.

We acted like experts. 
We were on Fox News talking about student travel and the Wall Street Journal talked to us too. We like to think that we’re a startup, but we’ve done this for eleven years now and we’re getting pretty good at it.

We partnered with TripLingo.
Jesse and the team at TripLingo is going to develop an app for StudentUniverse. Their award-winning apps help users quickly dive into a new language, learn useful phrases and even talk like locals with the “slangslider”. We expect to release the app soon.

We signed up our 53rd airline partner. 
Enough said.

We teased. 
Yes, we get a lot of emails because of our student deals page. Student deals are coming and it’ll be great news for 18 million students.

These are just some of the things we did in 2011. As you can imagine we’re excited and we think we’re perfectly positioned to do great things in 2012.

Thank you for a great year and here’s to a great 2012.

Posted by; Atle Skalleberg, EVP