Loccasion: Smartphone App for Effective Engagement between Organizations and Students (UC Berkeley)

Loccasion is a smartphone application that uses geo-fence technology to make the interactions between campus organizations and students more effective and sustainable. This application is intended to improve the way students receive information about clubs and groups that they are interested in because up until now, the distribution of flyers on Sproul Plaza is passive, inefficient and unintuitive. The goal of the Loccasion project is to streamline the process for campus promoters to disseminate information to a relevant audience. The team’s solution is to equip student organizations with a smartphone tool that can create events and announcements that are interactive and engaging. The user interface provides a framework for creating events – such as date, time, directions to venue and the ability to upload photos – enabling a simple way for organizations to create announcements and spread them to their targeted audience within a matter of seconds. Upon the creation of an event, a circular virtual fence with a certain radius around the student promoter’s smartphone is set up. Anyone who has installed the app on their phone can receive notifications once within the virtual border. Event organizers can tag their postings with certain keyword hash tags such as #engineering or #entertainment and users can subscribe to certain keywords to receive a stream of events on their smartphones.