Four Mannheim Business School Graduates, Alistair Bruce, Moritz Hertler, Stefan Reuter and Christian Uhrich, founded a start-up called spotted and were able to win the 20th European Business Plan of the year Competition.
Their business plan is a mobile app that aims to put the face-to-face interaction back into social networking. Spotted aims to help people with similar interests in a specific geographical area to network more effectively and set up meetings, for example at a graduate recruitment fair or at a party.
Users of the application have to create online profiles of themselves by extracting information from social media sites like Xing or LinkedIn. After viewing profiles of other Spotted users in the nearby are, users can contact specific people who are of interest via messaging and suggest an appointment for a meeting.
Alistair developed the idea for the project at the beginning of his MBA in Mannheim. While participating in a class discussion about MP3 players, he realised that Smartphones nowadays often replace face-to-face interaction. Therefore, he thought about developing a tool which could help people connect with others around them and thought about the role a mobile could play within this process.
During an entrepreneurship class, he then showed his idea to other students and convinced his three co-founders of the idea. The four of them then started developing the business idea and came up with a business plan.
Though being quite a success story and having been featured bei FT, the Spotted team has prioritized different projects by now. A more detailed footage on Spotted is available on the Financial Times Business Education pages.
