As 2022 drew to a close Mark Maydon, commercial director of Crowd Connected, explained how the software company’s innovations last year set the stage for 2023’s developments.
The ‘blue dot’ on a mobile phone screen, shorthand for ‘I am here’, has become second nature thanks to apps such as Apple and Google maps.
As a location software company, Crowd Connected is on a mission to tackle a fundamental problem familiar to anyone who attends in-person events. The bigger the event, the bigger the problem; it’s the cost of getting lost.
Faced with an unfamiliar physical environment, we struggle to find what we came for. We frequently don’t get to meetings on schedule or leave at the end of the day having not met with all the people we intended to.
The ‘blue dot’ on a mobile phone screen, shorthand for ‘I am here’, has become second nature thanks to apps such as Apple and Google maps. But Google and Apple don’t map temporary event environments, and GPS doesn’t work inside a building.
Our indoor positioning technology was developed specifically for the challenging environments of temporary events and footfall analytics, so we were pretty chuffed when technology research group Gartner picked up on our tech, naming Crowd Connected as a Cool Vendor earlier this year.
Let’s talk floorplans. We’ve integrated with indoor mapping providers to take away much of the pain when it comes to deploying for an event (the blue dot just appears as if by magic on the digital floorplan). Our work with ExpoFP, an interactive floorplan provider, is a case in point. We wanted to focus as much on making it easy for app developers to add blue dot navigation to an event app, as on the end-user experience.
The third component of providing wayfinding/navigation on a mobile phone is the app. Post-Covid-19 we’ve worked with many vendors, including ExpoPlatform, Grip, Pathable, Realife Tech, Swapcard and Venuetize, to develop new integrations. For us, 2022 has been a breakthrough year, right from the start.
Back in January, readers of Exhibition World saw our research that suggested that the value of a typical exhibition would be 20% higher if visitors had no problem finding everything they were looking for. As we’ve become used to relying on the little blue dot to tell us where we are, humankind is losing the skills to use traditional navigation like static maps. Since then, app vendors have repeatedly told us that wayfinding is a key driver that has resulted in mobile app adoption jumping 100% at some events.
If 2022 has been about first movers and early adopters, 2023 promises to be the year when blue dot navigation at large-scale indoor events moves into the mainstream.
So, no more ‘where the hell am I?’ frustration. No more getting lost. Outdoors your phone sorts that for you. Now ditto for any indoor event.
The mission continues.
