basic concept

coVer is an app that should help you to organize and overview your social relationships in times when the whole world has to social distance themselves from the people around them. In times like these, it can easily happen to lose track of people. People you otherwise meet on a regular basis for example at your university canteen for lunch or at the football field when training. As a matter of fact those contacts often referred to as weak ties can have a huge impact on your cognitive functioning, creativity etc. and help as well as your close contacts to maintain a healthy mind.

Other applications that mediate those who help and those who need help during lockdown situations and risk group protection due to #Covid-19 play an important rule right now but may not be needed two years from now. These applications focus on connecting people who don't know each other to solve a current problem. Fair enough!

Our application faces a different approach, which makes it useful in non-crisis times as well. The social human only has the capacity to maintain a network of a certain number of people. Mostly to people they are deeply connected with. As a result people often just forget to contact all the other people they usually have interactions with. As daily life in #Covid-19 wouldn't already make it hard enough for people to adapt, keeping track of all your loose contacts becomes even harder than it normally is. We focus on taking on the challenge to organize your loose contacts and help you to keep an overview. It can not only be a stress relief but also an opportunity to free up some capacity in your social interactions, which you can invest in relationships that have an higher emotional priority. In other words: Have more time for the people that really matter!

feature spotlight

The basic function of this app is to give users an overview of the communication with their contacts. In our prototype we already tried out many more functions and committed ourselves there. The most important ones are explained and described here.

Direct Interaction

Start interacting with your contacts directly out of the app itself (messages, phone calls, other social media channels). After completing your interaction, the app tracks some information. This happens intuitively and without extra effort, so that the data will always be on hand when needed.

Collaborative Interaction

Application allows to form a group to interact with specific persons (e.g. grandparents) to prevent social drifting collaboratively. Being part of a group can help to provide an healthy environment for all people participating. Social interactions go along with memberships in groups. An adjustable function in our app helps to maintain an overview of the interactions between group members. Supporting groups by giving them the opportunity to organize their social interactions. Interactions can help to fight social drift.

Smart Reminder Functionality

By setting up individual frequencies for each social interaction, it is possible to foster your network of weak ties and loose contacts/friends in a simple and efficient way. Hereby, the remember-to-call-somebody-stress in the back of your head is taken away from you. So you can use your 'social capacity' for the people that really matter.

what's next?

Up to now we developed a first strategy to turn this idea into reality. So far we could manage to build the foundation for further development in coding, gather information from more than 550 people in a survey and got feedback from multiple incubator-mentors like the one from KTH university (Stockholm). This puts our team in the position to fully concentrate on the next upcoming big steps.

To keep progressing in our app development, we need to further implement our #features while making sure to keep it as simple and efficient as promised. For that reason we are going to consult with a design team and are as well planning to establish one by ourselves in the near future. As a matter of fact, expansions like these always need to be perfectly planned. Along with that comes the responsibility to develop a solid business model that ensures a profitable project and funds further developments. This as well supports our aim to start a business from ground up.

business model: There will be a free and a premium version of the application. Our business philosophy aims to improve social interactions for all user groups, including users of the free version. Beyond that, a premium account can offer further benefits, such as statistics, calendar integration or a boost mode to efficiently contact a larger group of costumers in a shorter amount of time. Nevertheless, the focus will always remain on the social aspect. Market research and surveys showed that there is a need for such applications [see link below]. Especially for applications that work between complex CRM-systems and own Excel-sheets to keep track of your contacts and/or customers. Therefore it is conceivable that individual persons can use this service for networking or SME's can completely convert their CRM-system to our application. These two cases of course only represent examples. In general the application can relieve the burden of the otherwise too complex and overpowered CRM-systems of well-known manufacturers by breaking down and simplifying to create an easy-to-use and intuitive assistant.

vision

The vision of a project is always the driving force of the group and provides motivation and enthusiasm to continue despite setbacks. Our vision includes the implementation of additional functions, but also influencing the way in which current and future communication is conducted. In a certain way, an innovation in the organization of communication and communication itself is to be achieved. Our project will have a share in this. Such an application could further improve social interaction and as a result would have a positive impact on mental health as well as eliminate social drift completely. In addition to that we can see our application as an innovation booster in the form of a motivator to build and maintain your network e.g. after graduating at university. All of these advantages while creating more social capacity for your loved and close ones.

the journey is just about to begin...

(The idea of the app originates from the #Covid-19 crisis)