Title	KRUMB
Product/Service	APP
Category	A01. Innovative Technology (incl. standalone solutions not in association with a brand or creative campaign)
Entrant Company	PROPHETS Antwerp, BELGIUM
Advertising Agency	PROPHETS Antwerp, BELGIUM

Name	Position
Strategic Director	Björn Joos
Creative Director	Tom Willemkens
Art Director	Jim Clijmans
Graphic Design	Micha Symoens
Head of Production	Kris Van Hauwermeiren
Creative Technologist	Lucas Caesens
Account manager	Sofie Desmedt
Developpers	Samuel Joos/Tom Bruyneel
Content Manager	Matthew Vandewalle

The Brief

In a society where mobile devices are taking over, the idea to start a location based social network doesn’t come out of the blue. As an experiment, Antwerp start-up Things World Wide, a spin-off of Prophets, decided to develop a native iOS and Android application that is 100% location driven. Allowing you to drop messages wherever your are, it was baptised Krumb. Until today, our social media and content sharing has been centered around two dimensions: social cercles and time. You follow the people and sources that you want, and get their content delivered on timelines. However, sometimes valid content is not produced by someone you know, and sometimes the value of the content does not depend on the moment. In other words: a complete stranger might have to say something on a topic that will remain relevant. The only trick is then, to disclose the content on the right spot. This is what Krumb is all about. Krumb radically puts location first. Krumb is an app to post your landmarks. It helps you discover and share what happens around you - with people in the future. A krumb can only be seen at the exact location where it was originally dropped. It can be a picture, a piece of text, a drawing or all of these combined. When you drop a krumb, you choose whether it stays put for one day, one week, three months or … forever. You can share it publicly, or limit to your followers or even a specific person. In the personal krumb feed algorythms determine which krumb is more relevant for you and thus shown higher. We launched Krumb in Beta in April 2015. The public version was launched in July. Today version 1.6 is available in both Apple Store and Google Play Store.

Krumb wants to make it easier for you to find out more about a particular spot. What does its history or future look like? What's it like in winter or summer? What kind of people are fans or have been occasional visitors? Krumb uses an innovative mix of techniques: GPS, Wifi and bluetooth. Using the latest ibeacon standards (BLE) so it will even respond to a very specific location if a third party installs iBeacons. iBeacon integration allows the app to serve content also on different levels of the same geo-coordinate (f.i. different floors in a museum). The combination of geo-localisation technologies makes it a very valuable app for both people and companies to use for targeted messages. In the personal krumb feed algorythms determine which krumb is more relevant for you and thus shown higher. For people with phones of the last generation, the app uses geofenced push notifications to pro-actively show you a krumb as soon as you are at a location where a friend dropped it. By offering a universal app for location based services, Krumb provides a new standard that people and brand can freely tap into. No need to install different app for every city or supermarket. A CMS is provided to content partner with which they can adapt the content of their Krumbs, without actually going to the specific location. This also works for iBeacons: the beacons are linked in the CMS to the specific location and the content provider can adapt his messages from behind his desk.

Our user monitoring and testing provided us with insights to further develop the interface. We adapt functionality (and especially priority of functionality) based on what we see happening. We did in depth analysis of the in app behaviour through tracking tool and user testing in collaboration with the University of Avignon (amongst 1000 students). We work together with several dozens content partners (tourism, culture, restaurants, publishers, event organisations, ...) in Europe, which we select carefully to make sure they add value in content (and not commerce) to make the app more valuable everyday. Through these partnerships we also acquire more reach, through POS of the partners and their own digital channels. The interest of partners is overwhelming. After the beacon hype, many brands want to use the technology, but don't know how to start. For a brand, it is almost unfeasible to develop apps individually to use the available technologies the way they can be used. With Krumb, we have created a tool that is free to use and that could become a standard in geolocalisation and iBeacon content delivery.