NETWORKING AT EVENTS iOS AND ANDROID

A whole day in the same hall, and no idea who is in it.

SpaceNet is a social network tied to events and conferences. You walk into a hall and the app shows you who is there, with a name and a profession. A message or a post is seen only by the people in the room. You leave with a contact, not a stack of business cards. The idea is Amer Skrobo’s, an entrepreneur from Sarajevo, and the build was backed by EU4Business. We did the development and the consulting, from the idea to the finished product.

Delivered in 2022, not publicly available SpaceNet OD, a Sarajevo company

Backed by EU4Business

01THE NEED

The idea was good. The way of connecting was not.

Amer knew exactly what he wanted. People spend a day at a conference in the same hall and leave without a word between them, because rarely does anyone stand up and ask who does what. He wanted an app that asks the question for them, and asks it only of the people who are actually there.

The first plan was to connect people over a shared Wi-Fi network. Join the same network and you see the others who joined it. We looked at that plan and proposed that the connection run on coordinates and GPS instead. The proposal was accepted in the end, and every decision after it was built on that one.

Why a circle, not a network. The same hall, two ways of seeing who is in it. The reach figure and the four rules of the circle, on a page of their own. Open the case study

02FEATURES

People, venues, one circle.

Google, Apple and LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is there for the business crowd

The name comes from the account; the profession and a sentence about yourself are typed in

Posts from the people who are around you at that moment

The view while the circle has no posts yet

Who is inside the circle, profession under the name, with venues in range above them

A profile opens on the profession, and the only button leads into a conversation

The conversation inbox, unread marked with a count

The green pill is the real connection state, not decoration

Claiming a venue, a pin at Baščaršija and a reach of 100 metres

The admin gets the same request, with the circle drawn at its real size, and approves or rejects

A featured venue carries exactly one sponsor alongside it

Reach, profile visits and sponsor visits, by day, by month and overall

NEED

Getting into the app has to be easy, with no fuss. An account that wants a password, a confirmation e-mail and a biography is a hurdle at the very door.

SOLUTION

Sign-in with an account the person already has, Google, Apple or LinkedIn. The name and the photo come from that account, and the only thing typed by hand is what you do.

BENEFIT

No password to remember and no e-mail to confirm, and access is fast: you are in within seconds.

NEED

A question meant for the room has nowhere to go. Nobody will stand up and shout it, and a message to one person misses whoever would have answered.

SOLUTION

A short post seen only by the people inside the hundred-metre circle at that moment, and it deletes itself after half an hour.

BENEFIT

The question reaches the whole room, and leaves nothing behind once the room goes home.

NEED

In a hall of two hundred people you have no idea who is who, and a business card arrives only once the conversation has already started.

SOLUTION

The home screen is a grid of faces within a hundred metres, with a profession under each name. Go silent for fifteen minutes and you drop out of the circle.

BENEFIT

The hall becomes a list of people instead of a sea of unknown heads.

NEED

If a message shows up only when someone pulls to refresh, the coffee is already drunk by the time the plan arrives.

SOLUTION

Messages travel over a live connection to the server, and the state of that connection is printed on the chat screen itself.

BENEFIT

A message lands at once, while the other person is still nearby.

NEED

The host of an event is not just another visitor. Their venue needs a reach of its own, not the same circle a person gets.

SOLUTION

In an app of its own, a company drags a pin onto the map and types a reach in metres, and the claim goes off for approval.

BENEFIT

A stadium is discoverable from five hundred metres and a small office from twenty, because reach is a property of the venue.

NEED

Before paying for visibility, a host has to see what the visibility brought.

SOLUTION

An approved venue can sit at the top and carry one sponsor, and the same visitor counts once however many times they walk through.

BENEFIT

Sponsorship is built into the app as a mechanic with numbers behind it, not as a banner.

The screens on this page are screens of the demo apps; the people, companies and figures on them are demo data.1

03DELIVERED

The product is done. The launch is not.

The app is built to the end and ready to publish. Development was finished in November 2022, and the product is not publicly available today.

Why the launch is still waiting.

A product like this does not launch with a click. It takes dedication: event by event, venue by venue, with the time and money to match. That moment is still waiting.

3 apps on one backend

100 m the circle around a person

15 min of silence and you leave the circle

30 min how long a post lives