SummitPath: Turning Event Chaos into Strategic Navigation

💡 What Inspired Us

We've all been there — badge around your neck, schedule in hand, standing in the middle of a 50,000 sq ft convention center with absolutely no idea where to start.

At events like Web Summit, the opportunity is enormous, but so is the overwhelm. We watched smart, motivated professionals wander aimlessly, miss talks they cared about, and leave exhausted without making the connections they came for.

That gap — between the potential of a great event and the reality of navigating one — is what inspired SummitPath.

🧠 What We Learned

Building SummitPath taught us that event navigation is fundamentally a graph problem. Booths, stages, and people are nodes; walking paths and schedules are edges. Once we framed it that way, classical routing algorithms became powerful tools for a very human problem.

We also learned that the best navigation isn't just about shortest distance — it's about maximising value per step. A detour of 20 metres to catch a relevant keynote or meet a target investor is worth far more than a direct path to nowhere.

Mathematically, we modelled the routing challenge as a variant of the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), optimising for a weighted combination of distance and goal relevance:

$$\text{Score}(path) = \sum_{i=1}^{n} \left( \frac{R_i}{D_i + \epsilon} \right)$$

Where:

$R_i$ = relevance score of stop $i$
$D_i$ = distance to reach stop $i$
$\epsilon$ = small constant to avoid division by zero

🛠️ How We Built It

Layer	Approach
Routing Engine	Graph-based pathfinding with AI-clustered goal logic
Frontend	Mobile-first web app — no app store download required
Integrations	LinkedIn & event profile sync for personalised goal-setting
Discovery	Real-time social heatmaps surfacing live "buzz" on the floor
Privacy	One-tap Ghost Mode to navigate without broadcasting location

🚧 Challenges We Faced

Dynamic Replanning

Events are live and unpredictable. A talk gets cancelled, a booth moves, a target speaker appears somewhere unexpected. Building a routing engine that could reoptimise in real-time without overwhelming the user required careful thinking about when to interrupt versus when to stay quiet.

Cold Start Personalisation

How do you build a meaningful route for someone before they've used the app? Our solution was leaning on LinkedIn profile data and event registration details to infer goals before the attendee sets foot on the floor.