Serial entrepreneur Rodger Desai swears he’ll be a do-gooder again. He once helped launch a micro loan company program for women in developing countries, and another time helped forge a cellular service that monitored disease data in Iraq. The 34-year-old entrepreneur’s current mission might be less lofty, but it could change the social and academic lives of American college kids.

Mr. Desai’s New York City-based startup Rave Wireless is using cell phones to help students do things like find campus keggers, locate local restaurants, write mobile blogs, and keep connected with university programs. The startup creates and runs wireless applications accessible from college students’ cell phones.

Rave is a blend of some of the fastest-growing and most generously funded tech trends in the Valley. Combine the ubiquity of cell phones with GPS and Internet-based social networks, and you can see why Mr. Desai has already raised $17 million from investors like Bain Capital. He’s also chosen a valuable market—universities—and so far has managed to convince 35 of them to sign up.

He’s launched services with SprintNextel, and he plans to follow suit with other major carriers in the coming months. He’s even piqued the interest of Microsoft, which wants to slip its mobile software onto every Rave handset.

SprintMicrosoft

Dorm Phone RIP

Rave has been on a rapid roll since it was founded 18 months ago “to help organize a student’s life socially and academically based on the in-the-moment lifestyle of today’s kids,” says Mr. Desai. The company creates mobile software for both social and academic applications, and students can access information through both text messages and mobile Internet browsing.

Its GPS-enabled “mood” applications enable students to locate each other through moods like “bored”, “hungry”, “scared”, or “studying”. Like the “presence” function on IM, students can set their phones to match a certain mood and find friends who are feeling the same.

Mr. Desai has positioned Rave between a trifecta of deep-pocketed players—the carriers, universities, and Microsoft—and has chosen a valuable vertical, college kids. He may have a winning formula; the dorm phone is slowly going extinct, cell phone users are increasingly using data services, GPS-enabled location-based technologies are finally hitting the market, and kids are flocking to social networks.

The carriers want to attract college student customers, as well as raise the number of data users in their subscriber bases. In turn, the carriers are willing to upgrade the campus wireless network so that students can get calls even in dorm rooms and students calling 911 can be located by emergency officials. Craig Carroll, Sprint’s national director for education, says the cost of building networks around campuses for Rave could cost between $30,000 to as high as $1 million per campus in some cases.

Microsoft also sees the potential to get its mobile software onto cell phones used by millions of college kids. Bill Hagen, Microsoft’s mobile solutions specialist, says Rave’s services are aligned with Microsoft’s “MSN Windows Live at EDU” strategy, which includes specialized email and IM applications targeted at students. Mr. Hagen refuses to divulge too many details of how the integration will work. But it’s likely that Rave-enabled phones could work in conjunction with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, or could help Microsoft expand its Internet-based IM service onto cell phones.

Universities and parents are also looking for a way to stay connected with kids, and Rave helps school administrators send messages and campus alerts. In fact, one in five universities using Rave’s service requires students to carry phones with Rave’s embedded software. That could irritate incoming students who have to give up existing cell phone plans, but many colleges are thinking cell phones should be mandated like laptops.

Students are hardly big spenders, however. Rave gets around that problem by targeting universities as its customers. The Rave service is passed to parents on the university bill. It’s the sugary cereal approach—sell to parents, market to students.

Bob Davoli, a partner at Rave investor Sigma Partners, crows about how big he thinks the company can grow. “There are only a few companies that can be verbs like Google: Have you Raved yet?” he says awkwardly, and optimistically sets the subscriber number at a modest 10 million.

Google

MoSoSo

With growth targets like that, other startups and established Internet brands are also rushing to Rave’s space, which the industry calls “mobile social software.” The market is so trendy it’s even got its own cutesy moniker—MoSoSo. Venture capitalists are funneling money into startups like WaveMarket, Intercasting, and flipt that use location-enabled phones to run social networks and community-based wireless services. Tasso Roumeliotis, the CEO of Rave competitor WaveMarket, calls all the attention to the sector a “VC frenzy.” And everyone knows how VC frenzies end—with badly misplaced investments.

It’s no surprise that financiers are drawn in. Mobile data usage is the fastest-growing and most lucrative sector for wireless operators looking to expand beyond voice calls. Wireless location-based services have finally started to hit the U.S. market over the past few months, with recent launches by Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless. Researchers at ABI predict the global market will grow from $981 million in 2005 to $8 billion by 2010.

Then there are the legions of kids who have signed onto social networking sites like MySpace (76 million users), Bebo (24 million), Facebook (9 million), and Tagged (2.5 million). Extending those users onto cell phones is a no-brainer. “It’s a natural extension of the service, which gives users an instant access to the community,” says Colin Digiaro, MySpace’s senior vice president of sales. While MySpace mobile can only be found on niche carrier Helio, the service will likely land on the major carriers next year.

Rave’s biggest competitor could be Facebook, which has launched a text-message mobile service with major carriers and universities in the United States. Facebook has been wildly successful targeting college kids online, and extending that brand onto cell phones is a snap. Facebook spokesperson Melanie Deitch says the company started evaluating mobile services early this year and will soon roll out a wireless application protocol (WAP) feature that will recreate the Internet browsing experience on the cell phone. Ms. Deitch admits, however, that Rave’s university-partnered service goes far beyond Facebook’s immediate plans.

So far, the reaction has been mixed at the company’s first test bed campus, Montclair, New Jersey-based MontclairStateUniversity. One student, 19-year-old Patrick McGrory, says he thinks only around 20 percent of the students on his campus are active users, Mr. McGrory immediately started using the service last fall to launch a mobile blog dubbed “Bored in the Dorms.” Mr. McGrory blogs daily and uses the service often for its GPS-enabled “mood” applications—the “bored” setting helps him find nearby friends, and “hungry” helps him discover local restaurants.

Going Viral

Mr. Desai needs students like Mr. McGrory—early-adopter, avid users who are willing to create content. That’s how the service will go viral and hopefully draw in the same number of users similar to the millions of inhabitants of Facebook. It’s also the way students will start flocking to the service, and see it less as a mandatory top-down service from the school, and more as an entity they created. Right now, Mr. McGrory, as well as 19-year-old student Kalim Sheikh, say students and parents were slightly unnerved when the service and the phones were forced on students at the beginning of the year. But nine months later, both are big fans.

Neither student uses Facebook Mobile yet, even though they are ardent users of both MySpace and Facebook. That could be Rave’s best indicator of success. If the company can keep its first-mover advantage, and leverage its wireless expertise over online-based competitors, it could become the de facto mobile service for college students.

That’s definitely Mr. Desai’s plan. He says the company will be profitable by the third quarter of next year, and has started signing up universities outside of its East Coast base, including the CalStateUniversity group. Cal State Monterey Bay CSO Gil Gonzalez says his university will implement the service next fall not only for students, but also for the administration.

Mr. Desai is already dreaming up his next project, which he says will be more humanitarian in nature. He’s a bleeding heart with a bank account. But for the time being he’ll have to put saving the world on hold, and focus on helping college freshmen find the biggest Friday-night rager