rcard

iBeacon based networking for professionals

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Grabbing the audience award plus the 2nd spot on the podium at web2day startup contest

Offline events are from far the most powerful ways to start building relationships with new people. By seeing their faces, not just their profile pictures. By hearing their voices, not just reading their tweets. By talking to them, not just chatting through emails.

The solution? Go out. Get in front of new people. Tell your story. Find mutual interests, views and connections. Make real-life introductions, and receive some. Meetups, workshops, conferences, congresses, job fairs, conventions, trade shows… There are many events happening around you and where you can meet with like-minded and business-related folks.

Real-life networking is necessary. Not so much to grow your network, but to build a strong network of people who trust you and who you can contact when you need. The thing is that this kind of networking is not really scalable, and de facto pretty time-consuming. I guess you've already been in a networking event and ended up meeting with a bunch of 3 guys, including an uninteresting but very talkative guy or a sticking dude you couldn't escape from.

What if you could know who's who around before introducing yourself? What if we can replace name tags, badges and business cards so you can just let your smartphone network for you anytime anywhere? That's the idea behind Linkie.

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Your most valuable professional asset is your network

Your network is your most powerful ally to accelerate your business or boost your career. Especially if you are not a tech guy. Whether you are launching your startup, looking for job opportunities, recruiting talents or just hustling sales and PR leads while working at an established company. Connecting with the right people when you need them in your professional venture is like finding shortcuts in the labyrinth of life.

We live in an hyper-connected society where we are exposed to hundreds of requests everyday. Spammy emails, cold calls, LinkedIn requests out of nowhere or distant tweets doesn't work anymore except if you are a badass resourceful storyteller. Beyond a few exceptions you can read about in the news or enjoy in movie scenes, you have to know someone to unlock the doors before preparing your entrance. 

Finding a cofounder outside of your extended group of friends, schoolmates or colleagues is statistically very rare. Getting a meeting with prime investors is almost impossible without an appropriate intro. Joining a thriving company or getting on board a promising startup is unbelievable without a mutual connection or a preliminary story. Getting involved in a big project as a freelance is out of reach if you don't have strong referrals. Trying to sign a major client without cronyism is naive. Trying to get featured in a major news outlet without knowing a journalist inside is hopeless. That's how things work in 2014. Either you know the organizer, his cousin, the doorman, or you are out of the party. 

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The stub

When we started to code the first line of iOS client's few weeks ago, a problem appeared.

Location : Skype, Time: 3AM, Date: unknown

@Nenad : hey Fred do you think the web service will be ready in the next week ? @Federic : No, i need more time to setup/configure AWS. @Nenad : Ok, so let's stub !

I developped many iOS projects for clients and the problem was always the same. The API was not ready yet, and the documentation is only a few words about Parameters / Response.

To avoid loosing time and many exchanges with the client, i setup a little tool that saved my life many times.

Ladies and gentlemens let me introduce you ...

The STUB

By definition, stub is a small program routine that substitutes for a longer program, possibly to be loaded later or that is located remotely.

The main idea is to keep your actual API calls, and stubbing responses by a local file instead the remote server. For that we fake network data using (stubbed from file) with OHHTTPStubs (https://github.com/AliSoftware/OHHTTPStubs).

For a little sample check the following link : https://gist.github.com/nenadvulic/9600443

Our practice has been to write API response in raw JSON file as technical specification before any implementation. With this way you can iterate rapidely and continue your job without waiting for the API to be ready.