LOS ANGELES, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 03/05/13 -- CHNL (http://chnl.it), the social content discovery browser, today announced that design students from the prestigious, Sweden-based Berghs School of Communication are working with the Santa Monica-based social commerce startup on a design challenge. As part of the challenge, the students envisioned what kind of content and user experience will appeal to CHNL's socially savvy users in three to five years.

Berghs School of Communication is centrally located in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, and for more than 60 years has been consistently developing a program of study that mixes the strategic, creative and production aspects of design and communication into a cohesive unit. Berghs students were enlisted to design an outstanding service experience around users' social media content. About 50 students worked on the project to help CHNL imagine what future services they could offer in three to five years, with the purpose of improving life through making social content more meaningful.

"Integration between disciplines and working with real clients has been a key to Berghs' success over the years," said William Easton, the program leader (formerly head of the school). "And for this project students in graphic design and interactive communication worked together. Each group started out by doing some research about people's experiences with social media, before developing new services that would have the potential to exist in three to five years."

Prior clients that have worked with Berghs on the design challenge include multinational players like Mercedes, Siemens, Microsoft, Nokia and IKEA. The students were excited to discover they would be working with a California-based start-up like CHNL, and as part of the challenge, have been divided into seven different "mini-agencies" who could pull different communication skills.

John Wander, CEO of CHNL, added, "It is fantastic to be given the opportunity to work with such creative and energetic minds. It was amazing to see the solutions they came up with and figure out how we can implement some of these service design ideas. The winning team was comprised of seven individuals (Diego Fria, August Larsson Hernmarck, Carl Platon, Nils Bohman Strom, Eva Klingstedt, Karin Rapp, Marc Ostlund). It was extremely difficult to pick a winner as all the teams demonstrated out of the box innovative ideas for new features, technology, and new market segments."

"CHNL gave Berghs an ambitious and challenging brief with few limitations and a commitment to work with the students to implement the best solutions into real services to engage users globally. It was great brief and I think the quality of the responses shows that perhaps one of the only truly renewable resources we have is imagination. When this is directed at a challenging problem really exciting things can happen!"

Since announcing the addition of Groupon and Living Social, CHNL is set to become the brand of choice and trust when it comes to helping people improve their life through access, control and convergence of social content. To set up your "CHNL," visit http://chnl.it.

About CHNL
CHNL is the ultimate social content browser, bringing your online DNA -- videos, photos, music, news, and deals -- into one clean, simple and intuitive "channel." CHNL allows users to discover new, interesting, and personally curated content while never missing what's trending across networks. See what's being said about a piece of content, engage in the conversation, and share your social feed content across all your networks, all together in one place, on any device -- your channel. Located in Santa Monica, CA, CHNL is led by veterans of such companies as INgrooves, FiltrBox (acquired by Jive Software), and Topspin Media, with backing from the Giantstep Angel Network. To set up your "CHNL," please visit http://chnl.it.