CanWeNetwork suggests nearby business opportunities

CanWeNetwork uses fancy math to make predictions

Making every outing a potential business opportunity, CanWeNetwork launched this year to better connect professionals by building a mobile layer on top of the LinkedIn platform, adding a dash of complex machine learning techniques to predict outcomes of introductions. Open your phone anywhere and see who the sophisticated algorithm suggests you should be meeting nearby, be it in an airport, at a conference, or even near your office building.

In under 100 days since their launch, they have spread to over 100 countries, and say they have tens of thousands of users joining each month, with professionals meeting to improve business growth. James Sinclair, VP of Strategy & Operations tells AGBeat, “We think the key to business growth is identifying and attracting opportunity, which starts with a conversation – we are delighted to start those conversations.”

Who is using the app already?

While there are mobile apps that reveal your nearby Facebook connections, CanWeNetwork saw a gap in the marketplace for professionals to be introduced, so Sinclair said they “created an app that shows other professionals around you that we think you should meet and potentially start a conversation with, on the understanding that conversations are what lead to opportunities.”

“Giving people visibility to other like minded, similar or potentially valuable people increases the value of your network and is part of life. We all take jobs and meet people and then refer, recommend and do business with those people, so if we can provide a live leads list of potential people then hopefully we are swinging the odds slightly more in your favor,” Sinclair added.

The company says the majority of their users are those that want to identify people in their vicinity perhaps in a similar field or in a company they want to talk to and making connections, and the second largest group are business travelers (sales, marketing, creatives, business development) who when they have free time in a city or in an airport or a conference can look around and fill that time with a few relevant meetings.

Blackberry, Windows, and Google Glass, oh my

Already available on Android and iOS, the company says that by July 2013, Blackberry and Windows Phone users will have access to the app.

In summary, Sinclair explains, “We all operate so fast and sometimes don’t look outside the silo we operate in, surely if everyone walked around with a banner above their head saying what they do and who they work for, the speed, productivity and efficiency of business would increase, this is our version of the banner above a head. It will be a real banner when we get our hands on google glass!”