Introducing BuildBoard

We're unashamed conference junkies here.

Rarely a week goes by when some of the team aren't being inspired by our industry’s finest, meeting customers or just propping up the bar at an event or conference.

A highlight for the design/UX team is Build. Held in Belfast, Build is "a week-long design festival made up of a conference, workshops, practicals, an evening of film, lectures, a craft beer festival, a pub quiz, meetups and parties". Phew! It's no surprise then that it's quickly established itself as a highlight on the web conference scene, so we are delighted to get involved with the event this year.

We sponsor a lot of conferences but we wanted to do something special for Build, so in additional to the usual swagfest, we've pushed the boat out and created a bespoke web app just for the event in the form of BuildBoard.

BuildBoard is designed to track and measure conference activity and sentiment by collating data from Twitter and Foursquare. Some of the key features:

• A cluster map shows where people are now. Useful if you want to know 'where the party’s at'
• A list of the popular festival venues where people have checked in
• Trending topics from Twitter about the conference
• An event tracker showing what's on now, and a countdown to the next event
• A noticeboard of useful information for attendees
• Other ‘colourful’ statistics and facts

For the techies, the app was built with a 'mobile first' approach and is completely responsive across a range of screen sizes and devices.

From start to finish the whole project took about 4 weeks and we worked with Jim Newbery, a fantastic local developer who really pulled it out of the bag.

We're really excited about how BuildBoard will be used by the attendees at Build. If you're there, find us and let us know what you think. We'll probably be at the bar :)