On April 13-15, Moscow hosted 5th Russian Breakpoint Forum, an event which seeks to bring talented students in contact with the real-world digital technology challenges, so young people can find a starting point for their careers. Eastwind took part in a way which was new for the company: We had developed a mobile app and a Telegram-integrated chat bot for the forum, based on our proprietary event platform.
 
As was planned from the start, the bot and the mobile app got different functionalities to leverage to the maximum the capabilities of either of the channels. Our goal was to make communication and interaction between the stakeholders easy and convenient.
 
The mobile app allowed the users to view the event schedule and map, save info about all the presentations and speakers, get all the news as push notifications, and download presentations.
 The most fascinating feature of the chat bot was a 'Tinder’ for businesses and applicants. Businesses would fill out a form specifying their criteria for applicant selection – competencies and skills – and then the bot would send them the list of qualifying students. The student attendees would fill out another form specifying information about themselves and their competencies for the bot to generate the list of the most suitable companies.
 
Watching the behavior of the users we concluded that today’s interactive events need both bots and mobiles apps – all depending on what tasks the respective tool is meant to address and what audience it best caters.
 
We are currently working to expand the event platform capabilities by integrating other messengers and social networks. The plan is for the 'business Tinder’ to completely replace any other form of contact exchanges at business events.