Discover the city

Students are moving more and more for education purposes. This often means establishing in a brand new city without knowing anything about the place. The first goal of this application is to facilitate one step of the moving-in experience for students by giving them the opportunity to explore those new surrondings.
BONDS is the best way to discover places of interests and get local tips at the same time.

International Student Mobility

With locals

Because saying 'yes' to every new propositions and keep growing our circles can definitely be exhaustive, everything is intended to be simple on BONDS.
The community of students already established in the city is here to provide experiences. In small groups or individually: they'll show all the beauty of their neighborhood, with specific interests so everyone stay on track.
Ultimately, the idea is that the newcomers become 'includers' and show the city themselves!

Making Friends in a New City

Through a social media

More than another service on top of the pile, BONDS is essentially using the platform most used by young people to actually connect them. Far from all the complexity of a traditional social media, this one's goal is to support human interactions and knowledge sharing.

The Rise of Social Media

The Idea

Bonds got out of a brainstorming on how we could improve the moving out experience of students thanks to social networks. Following this reflection we focused on improving mainly the social experience of these students through the discovery of a new city.

Discover the mindmap we built for the project

How did it all started?

Many things can push a student to move to a new city. But whether you are a freshman or a senior, one of the main concern when moving in a new city is to discover the places of interest as well as meeting new people. The idea is to create a social network where students who wants to show their city could connect with the newcomers.

By downloading our free app, student seeking to discover or to show a city and meet new people will be able to easily connect with each other.

Who is it for?

We are targeting two types of student: senior students who are willing to show the city and students who are new to the local community
We firstly need a database of 'includers' who are students who know the area and the city pretty well. Then, they will be able to offer their services to the 'newcomers'. They also are students who are just arriving in a new city and who are looking for advices and points of interest.
By targeting only the students at first, it is easier to find common interests between people, especially if they are from the same school. This system also facilitate access control allowed only with a student e-mail adress.

How does it work?

When they subscribe, the 'includers' are asked for three things: their school, their interests and their availabilities. In that way the service will firstly be able to tell how many 'includers' of a specific school are present in a city. The 'newcomers' will be able to navigate and sort experiences by interests (architecture, restaurants, nature etc...) and thus to find common interests other than school.

The process:

Step 1: Sign up into the mobile app and provide basic infos: Name, Age, Location, School, Interests, Small Bio
Step 2: Look for an experience into the catalogue and filter them by interests and location
Step 3: Your turn to show the city by sharing your availabilities and a small description of your tour in a new 'experience card'

Team

Alizée Dard

Co-Founder

I'm a 21 years old student, passionate by travels and the discovery of new cultures I enjoy meeting people. Found of art and beautiful things of nature I spend my sparetime drawing or travelling around.

Joffrey Sebault

Co-Founder

Technology and people oriented, this project is the perfect opportunity to combine my two passions. I moved over 3 different continents during my studies, and was constatntly looking for places to see.

Gwenaël Viel

Co-Founder

24 year old business school student inspired by human relations and technologies. Inspired by human relations and technologies, I always thought that we could do more as students to integrate others.

Haipei Wang

Co-Founder

Formerly being an newcomer to Saint-Etienne, I understand the loneliness one could have in a city without friends. But I believe we together can build a better and warmer community for students.

System

In order to create and lauch the concept we still need few steps.
This is exactly where we need your competencies!

Design

Most of the UX and UI of the app are already created.
Anyway, we still need some corrections to make the app perfectly usable and glazed.
A UX/UI designer could help us to improve the interactivity and fluidity of our actual design, making it ready for lauch!

Check out our awesome design

Development

Concerning the development itself, we don't have the requisite knowledge at the moment.
But we do know what competencies we need in order to develop and launch both Android and iOS apps!
The languages required by the developers are Java and Objective-C with an essential proficiency in Android and Swift SDKs.
We are well aware that most of the people are specialized in only one of those two technologies, that's why we will probably need two people.
We estimated around 600 hours per app, considering the main features: creation, sorting and research of 'experiences' as well as a messaging part.

Build an Android app Build an iOS app

Security

A huge concern when developping a social media is data security.
Since we are creating a messaging feature, we will need to also create a secured server.
By doing so, we will be able to garantee that all the information exchanged on our app - like coordinates - will stay safe!

Design a secure messaging server

Access

Our main target are students and they constitute one of our main feature.
In order to provide the number of student available from a specific school, we need to be sure of their status.
For that the safest and easiest way is to check this student status as soon as they sign in to our service with a fast and secured process.
As '.edu' student email can easily be faked we choose to link our app to SheerID, a service that will handle the checking of student status in just a few steps!

Sheer ID verification system