Mizzou student creates killer app, school demands profits

Telling your university to keep its money-grubbing paws off your hard-earned profits? There’s an app for that.

In 2009, Mizzou student Tony Brown kicked ass on a school assignment to make an iPhone app. He and a few other students created NearBuy, an app that tracks apartment listings in your area and allows you to call a listing agent right after you see an ad you like. It’s a pretty bright idea and, no doubt, extremely useful in Columbia, where (as I discovered my senior year in a roach-infested hellhole) decent low-rent apartments near campus are a white-hot commodity. So, it’s no surprise that the free app was downloaded more than 250,000 times.