Real-time social heat maps by Heatcord

Heatcord is a Swedish startup that has created a real-time social heat map that helps people find the excitement, places and crowd that fits their personality and mood of the day. Their vision is to crowdsource the world’s first social map.

Many people decide on where to go based on what other people do. No one wants to spend time in a fully packed IKEA and everyone knows the feeling of going to a nightclub, ready to have a good time, just to find out its empty.

However, how do we as consumers get a hold of this information? Heatcord, a Swedish startup, believe that they found the solution to the problem.

A crowdsourced social heat map

The Heatcord team has created an app that utilize a real-time social heat map, which shares real-time location and demographic information to the users. It helps people find the popular spots, places or crowds that fits their personality and mood for the day.

“Our concept is simple. We created a new way of mapping cities, where we give more value to the people in that city than to roads, streets and commercial venues,” say Gaston Laven, CEO and Co-Founder of Heatcord.

When you open the Heatcord app, you get a heat map, which is a layer of scattered colour spots on top of a regular map. The different colour spots represent the density of people in specific venues or places.

Heatcord is using crowdsourcing to generate the heat map. When you walk around while having the Heatcord app downloaded, you help contribute “heat” for the heat-map.

Each color representing the proximity of members within a community. Just like heat, blue stands for cold, which means low activity, whereas red stands for hot, meaning the area is buzzing with people.

 

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Snapshots of the basic demographics

The team behind Heatcord beliefs that a city is more than just roads, streets and commercial venues, which seems to be the elements that most mapping apps and location-based services focus on.

“We like to think of a city as the collection of memories, relationships and dynamics of the people that lives there,” explained Aaron Gonzalez, CMO and Co-Founder of Heatcord.

The build-in chat system makes it possible to connect with people, which are hanging out at the different locations. The app turn the venues into live chatrooms, and enables users to check with each other. You can for example ask if the food is good at a restaurant, or if the party is still going in one of your cities nightclubs.

The app can help create a snapshot of the basic demographics of a place that you plan to visit. You can get a clear view of the age, gender and other lifestyle criteria you find important, before you decide where you want to go. The app can work to either find certain groups based upon specific demographics, but it can also be set up to avoid them entirely.

“The thing that makes Heatcord unique is that it is a social heat maps and its crowdsourced. Everyone can help contribute with heat, and every single contribution help improve the maps,” said Mikael Stenberg, UX-Designer and Co-Founder of Heatcord.

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Experienced team with a passion for problem solving

The founder team of Heatcord consist of Gaston Lavén, who holds a Ph.D. and is the winner of Sweden’s inventor of the year 2011, Aaron Gonzalez, which is an experienced entrepreneur and is also Co-Founder of ESP Solutions International and Phoodster, and last but not least Mikael Stenberg, a graphic designer with experience from working with Blizzard Entertainment and Dreamhack.

“We are three friends with simple and innovative ideas, who share a passion for discovering and solving problems. A perfect combo when you want to create a startup,” said Gaston Lavén.

The idea for Heatcord arose from the founder teams own struggles. They wanted to find out if anything was going on in a specific venue in Stockholm as well as how the demographic was, but they quickly realized that there was no simple way of doing so without having to contact the establishment.

“We realized that we could not get a hold of this information in the major location-based services like Foursquare and YELP, so we decided to build a service that illustrates the distribution and behaviour of social groups as its happening,” disclosed Aaron Gonzalez.

The team has recently added Kalle Ollson, former Nordic Brand Marketing Manager for Samsung Electronics AB, who is going to help the startup with their branding and marketing mix.

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Focus on people

No startup gets success without running into a few challenges along the road. One of Heatcord’s big challenges has been creating the user interface and user experience. After they had created their first MVP (Minimum viable product), they realized that they focused too much on the different places and venues and not enough on the people.

“We literally killed 50% of the functions in the app, and managed to stay on track with our original vision,” declared Mikael Stenberg.

As a startup with limited resources, it can be hard to obtain traction. Heatcord is going to leverage the power of social media and use guerrilla marketing to get the job done.

The future looks exciting for Heatcord, as they expect to launch their private beta somewhere between June and July this year. They have been inviting various communities of early adopters and beta testers to join their private beta.

“We have been inviting people to sign up for the beta, mostly through different tech forums but also other channels and we plan to visit different universities in Sweden soon,” explained Gaston Lavén.