Howdy folks!

Hello is a simple app that helps people make friends and have more fun at conferences.

What does it do?

The idea is fairly simple: When you arrive at the conference, simply say which seat you're sitting in, via Twitter. You can then browse the rest of the audience and see else is sitting around you, what their interest are, and whether you have anything in common. You can also search the audience for specific names or skillset (php, designer, marketer, etc).

Why did we build it?

We built the app in four days with ASP.NET MVC and the amazing help of Matt Lee from Red Gate.

Microsoft has been a huge supporter of our conferences (Future of Web Design and Future of Web Apps) so we asked if we could allocate some of their sponsorship budget to build an app on the Microsoft stack, testing what it was like and how well the technology works.

We normally code in Rails and we were absolutely blown away by the power of the Visual Studio environment. The debugging, Intellisense and database design functionality was extremely mature and powerful.