STARTUP – SOCIAL NETWORK

The matecloud UG was founded in 2011 by Micha Kruppa, Sabine Kruppa and Tomasz Porst. The mission of matecloud UG was to build an online plattform which would allow it’s users to find like-minded people online and get to meet them in real life.

The basic idea therefore was the exact opposite of what classical social networks like Facebook or StudiVZ were offering. Instead of connecting people online which knew each other offline before, we wanted to connect people online so that they could actually build up a real “offline” social network.

The resulting plattform allowed it’s users to easily find like-minded people and to agree on offline appointments. The plattform did not rely on categories (e.g. Sports -> Ball sports -> Basketball), since we did not want to limit the topics/interests that people had in mind. Instead the “matching” of users was based on free-text descriptions of the users desired activities. These free-texts were analyzed with speech technology and AI methods.

We used ontologies for example to allow to automatically anotate a text including the words “table tennis” with additional tags like “sports”. The same happened when users entered search queries. Doing so, we achieved very good results for both “precision” and “recall”.

I was the CEO and CTO at matecloud UG. I was responsible for the development of the concept and frontend realization as well as the implementation of the complex search technology which was the central element of the plattform.

Matecloud was focused on Berlin and was shut down in 2014 when the whole team moved to the Rhein-Main region and hence lost the local reference.

The technologies used were PHP, MYSQL, SOLR and HTML, Javascript and jQuery for the frontend.