Slush grew very quickly from a small gathering to one of the biggest startup and investor events in Europe. But growing from hundreds of visitors to tens of thousands of visitors also came with a new set of challenges. As the venue’s size and complexity grew, visitors were struggling to find the companies they wanted to meet and find the stages they needed.
In 2014 a new approach was tried, rather than just increasing personnel and info desks, the mobile app with indoor maps, positioning and routing became a key source of information to visitors. Steerpath by Nimble Devices was selected as the engine for the positioning and navigation, as it worked offline and could be integrated weeks before the venue was built.
The response was tremendous. Miki Kuusi, Co-Founder and CEO of Slush: “Steerpath worked absolutely perfectly for us. It provided something to our 15 000 attendees, which they really loved to use, while helping them to find the right stages, demo stands and restaurants really easily through the app. Highly recommended!”.
Based on the experience from last year, this year there was no question about if there would be indoor positioning, it was simply required.
Implementation
Indoor positioning and navigation was enabled by simply uploading the Slush venue plan in CAD format into the Steerpath map management platform. From this the system could extract the exact locations of each demo booth, stage and restaurant and use those automatically to enable the navigation in the Slush mobile application. Any changes to venue could be immediately reflected to mobile application by just uploading the updated venue CAD file to Steerpath map management system.
To enable indoor positioning at Slush, the system outputted an installation map with each positioning beacon's location marked. Installation work was super easy to do with just a paper map and numbered beacons. No app or technical skills were required. For the 26000m2 venue 145 beacons were needed. One beacon covered 180m2. Once the beacons were placed, the system worked immediately, no calibration was required.