Today, at the Hopin 2021 Kickoff, over 10,000 people watched as the Hopin team unveiled the first step in Hopin’s 2021 strategy for hybrid events: the Hopin mobile app, available on iOS and Android.
Connecting people at events has been a part of my life for close to a decade—and the core mission of Topi, the company Eric Sellin and I co-founded, which was acquired by Hopin in September 2020.
Product innovation has been key to Hopin’s success—and we continue to ship new features and products faster than any company I’ve experienced before.
As we all know, this past year forced the event industry to go virtual. But face-to-face interactions cannot be entirely replaced, and Hopin is in a unique position to help shape the future of hybrid events.
Virtual events are something we’re pretty good at, and we’ll continue to innovate on that front. But hybrid is a different beast.
Attendees who physically go to events are not going to walk around with their laptops to watch sessions. Wouldn’t it be great if they had another way to watch and engage with event content?
Similarly, someone watching a stage online from home will want to network at the same time with attendees who are onsite. So how can they do that currently? Well, they can’t.
With the Hopin mobile app, our vision is to take the same great event experience on the Hopin web app—loved by millions of attendees and thousands of event professionals—and make it available for free on your phone.
You can discover new events, join events, and engage via chat, people, and polls. You can also see people who are attending virtually or physically.
The Hopin mobile app is also great as an additional device. Let’s say you’re watching a keynote on your laptop, but you also want to check out what else is happening at the same time. You can simply use Hopin’s mobile app. And if you are attending a hybrid event in person, it’s especially helpful since you will immediately be able to see where the action is.
Last but not least, the mobile app is perfect for one of our most popular features— one-on-one video networking.
The Hopin mobile app will match you up with other attendees who can then connect with you on video directly from your phone—just like the desktop version. (During our demonstration, I was matched from the studio in NYC with my colleague Brianna who was using the app at her home in San Francisco.)
We’re looking forward to releasing new mobile app features later this year, all designed to make people, not places, the heart of events.
Get the Hopin mobile app in the App Store and on Google Play.
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