Spot me if you can!

SpotMe is a personal handheld device for efficient face-to-face networking at conferences. It can store photos and relevant data of all the conference participants, a participant can then mark the people he/she wants to meet. As soon as a marked person is within a 10m radius, the Spotme alerts the user by vibrating and a photo pops up on their display. With the Spotme device all participants are kept up-to-date with all attendees at the conference. When a new person arrives, a photo is taken and transmitted to all devices within seconds.
Shockfish SA was founded in 1998 by three research assistants from the EPFL Lausanne. With the assistance of funding from CTI, a Swiss Government Fund and a loan from FIT, a non-profit group that helps high tech startups, they built a demonstrator prototype of Spotme. Based on successful trials with professional congress organisers, Shockfish secured a substantial round of investment to finance the development of the Spotme concept. As of August2002, Spotme has been successfully used at more than 20 high profile European events and a Spotme system has been sold to a leading congress rental company.