It’s about Presence… so Open Your Present!

Third Place Winner at the SF Reverse Hackathon

Imagine moving to a new city fresh out of college for an amazing job you accepted. As you get settled into your work and apartment, you notice on social media that your old friends are going out every weekend and easily building new social lives. Unlike them, you’ve met some new people, but haven’t really gotten to know them well enough to call them friends; you see your coworkers almost everyday, but your interactions are limited to the occasional happy hour. Suddenly, the bustling social life you had in college has slowed, even though you’re trying to meet and connect with new people.

We started with brainstorming root causes and factors towards millennial loneliness, and spread them out on our board. From there, one of them stuck out: the difficulty of creating new meaningful relationships.

Our team aimed to combat this issue faced by many millennials: loneliness despite the constant presence of social media. Facebook’s mission is to bring the world closer together, which they have tried to implement through a never-ending feed of friends’ updates and lives. Facebook even created a separate app, Facebook Local, that keeps users aware of events around them, reminders of events around users that they could potentially join.

Although Facebook offered plenty information about lively happenings nearby, it actually failed to facilitate bringing people together, and let potentially meaningful relationships fade.

Our solution provides facilitation to those who have difficulty making new meaningful relationships, and offers each user the present of building friendship through arranged activities.

We’re currently working to bring this idea to life, and we can’t wait to meet you! If you’d like to be among the first to try Presence, please let us know at bit.ly/jointhepresence

We had a great time working on Presence at the hackathon, and we are so excited to keep working on it. Stay tuned!