This project plans result in the design and development of a new type of location-aware mobile-social application. This application is designed to provide a new approach to event creation, discovery and management among groups. It provides user-location and social-activity aware information to users. By leveraging its end-to-end social mobile platform, users initiate activities and manage real-world attendance. Using the same system, businesses may engage with customers through direct and timely communications.
The project team plans to engage students in the research and development process. The application is designed to allow a user?s current social activities and interests to be taken into account when presenting location-based information. This will enable the application to use user-mobility and locatability to connect local businesses with potentially interested individuals.
NSF I-Corps: Coo-e Coordinator Commercialization – supported training in entrepreneurship and product focused research and development. The entrepreneurship training was conducted through the PI, student entrepreneurial lead and business mentor attending two NSF I-Corps workshops and numerous online training sessions. In addition the grant team engaged in customer research using ‘lean ethnography’ which resulted in over 100 interviews of individuals in our target demographics. The product driving the I-Corps research is called Coo-e Coordinator – it is social-software that makes routine social coordination significantly easier; presents highly targeted and desired local-product/service recommendations to groups of individuals engaged in routine social coordination in a dynamic and welcoming fashion; supplies individuals with a simple method for making product/service recommendations part of the group conversation; and generates novel, privacy respecting consumer analytics for local businesses. It addresses problems confronting both local businesses and consumers. For Local Businesses these include: experiencing low advertising ROI; unable to effectively monetize user-mobility; and lacking an effective way to collect and leverage consumer analytics. For Consumers these include: frustrations with planning and managing routine social activities; annoyed with mobile advertising; and lacking group-relevant product/service information while coordinating social activities and associated mechanism for easily sharing/making group recommendations. Coo-e coordinator can be considered a two-sided market platform with consumer-use driving local business expenditure. Our initial target-demographic are US college students with smartphones and the local small businesses they frequent. Our research efforts revolved around customer discovery on both sides of our market platform. We discovered significant demand for this product from both consumers and local businesses. We also prototyped, designed, and tested key aspects of our core product.
