BlastOut

Project Description

BlastOut is a mobile app that allows people to interact within their own temporary social network. It facilitates local communications: within events and parties, but also at conferences, and enables people to make new connections easily. The application is a mixture of an anonymous image board and location-based forum, allowing users to upload a pic into a stream via their mobile app. The stream is geographically limited to a very close proximity of the one who queries. There is a commenting functionality and a way to share real-life contacts if wanted by both parties; otherwise, the communication is anonymous. The app was initially aimed at replacing ‘conference twitter streams’ but eventually founders retargeted it at nightclub parties.

Challenge

At the core of the solution, there was a demand for an extremely effective location matching algorithm. It should have given an immediate answer as to which posts to show to a user given their approximate geographical location. Besides, the customer requested a profound feature-rich filtering.

Solution

Logicify was working on the backend part of the application and quality assurance. The work started with the development and support of the API. With the help of our team, the product moved from support-heavy and ineffective for this case MySQL database to MongoDB, which is more native for Node.js. The effective implementation of the search and location classification algorithm provided by Blastout in-house engineers enabled the locality-based matching of the app. It made possible complex filterings like ‘give me 10 posts relevant to be sorted by the distance from me, with a proximity cap of 10km’. The solution heavily used in-memory storage features such as different collections of Redis to implement the filtering in a time-sensible way. The product was released to the mobile apps markets.