Three or more can be a crowd, especially in the age of Covid-19. Now there’s an app to track that, thanks to the work of two UCT graduates.
Cape Town residents Shannon Mark and Fergus Strangways-Dixon are the brains behind Crowd, a new smartphone app that allows users to track the population density of certain locations such as supermarkets and pharmacies. The app tracks stores including Woolworths, Spar, Pick n Pay and Clicks.
Mark said the idea for the app dated back two years and was initially proposed for another use. “It was around 2018 that we discussed it and the idea back then was more about saving people time,” he explained. “Our main value proposition was there is no way to know how busy public locations are. So we decided at that point that this was something we wanted to do. Through the years, we studied and toyed with the idea. When this whole Covid pandemic kicked off, we thought ‘hang on a minute, there is an added benefit here providing people with safety information’. That was the catalyst to get us to muck down and put hard work into it.”
Mark graduated in finance in 2018, while Strangways-Dixon graduated with an honours degree in computer science in 2019. Also part of the business are the duo’s school friends Craig Nicol and Adam Crawley, and Strangways-Dixon’s brother, Jesse.
Strangways-Dixon said the app works by collecting information on the number of users and customers present in each monitored location, displayed as a collective heat signature on the map. “We’ve made use of public and private data sets that specifically support these figures,” he said. “We’re only active in Cape Town and Johannesburg because the sets support these areas.”
Launched in mid-July, Crowd was first tested among Mark’s and Strangways-Dixon’s family and friends, before being released for public use. The app is available on both the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store. “Getting compliance with Android and Apple, they tend to have fairly inconsistent guidelines, enforcing some things and not enforcing others – we had to jump through some hoops to get it out,” Strangways-Dixon said. “They’re also very careful about who’s putting out health data and we’ve had to make sure we were compliant.”
Since the launch, Crowd has a daily active user base of 1 000 users and is being downloaded by new devices 50 to 100 times a day.
While the pair have ambitions to expand, funding remains a challenge in terms of supplying the information beyond South Africa’s major metropolitan areas.
For now it’s about “where the most users are, how the most people can be impacted and how it can be cost-effective”, Strangways-Dixon said. “We’re just a bunch of recent graduates, we don’t have big funding behind us. We’ve been doing it all ourselves. It’s a case of keeping it small, keeping it cheap, and trying to impact the major cities.”
Mark confirmed that they were in talks with several companies about funding and partnerships for the app. “We are looking at multiple growth strategies,” he said. “We’re fully committed to pursuing this beyond the pandemic. We feel the concept of saving time is more than strong enough for this project. And in doing so, we’re looking to expand as far as we can. It will be something that will continue to grow.”
Crowd is not the first local app developed to assist people during the Covid-19 pandemic. In March, UCT alumni Tamir Shklaz and Wisani Shilumani launched the Coronapp, an online portal that tracks coronavirus statistics and offers support to personal protective equipment (PPE) suppliers and those who need it.
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