Sawyer Business School alumnus Sean Zinsmeister and faculty members Meera Venkatraman and C. Gopinath were published in the latest issue of the CASE Journal.

As the online trade journal of the CASE Association, the publication includes business articles that touch on various cases and areas of research.

In the issue, Zinsmeister and Marketing Professor Venkatraman, were recognized as the winners of the first-time submission award at the 2011 CASE Conference. Their case, “I Am Hungry: Cheap Eats in Cyberspace,” involved the free mobile app for Facebook and the iPhone called “I AM HUNGRY.” The app provides users with a list of nearby eateries within a mile of their current location.

The case is set in 2010, after a promotional campaign for the app at College fest, a heavily attended back-to-school event. The event was an unprecedented success in generating a following for the app, but the co-founders of the company grappled with the problem of converting users into dollars. The case presents the options available to the entrepreneurs, including charging restaurants a subscription fee or charging for each time the app is used, and asks students to decide what they would do.

The collaboration began in the summer of 2010, when Venkatraman was designing a new course titled, “The Business of Social Media,” which focuses on the impact of social media on marketing practices. Zinsmeister, an MBA student at the time, expressed an interest in the course because he had experience working for the mobile app I AM HUNGRY.

“I suggested to him that he and I could develop a case on location-based apps using his experience at I AM HUNGRY as the foundational source material,” said Venkatraman. “He agreed, and the rest is history.”

Strategy and International Business Professor Gopinath contributed to a new section of the journal called Industry Note. He co-authored the article, "The competitive environment of the US domestic airline industry in 2010," with Raghavan Parthasarthy. They discussed the dramatic losses, changes, and shifts the US airline industry has seen since deregulation in 1978.