Panpan - Ask Everywhere

PanPan is a smartphone application that allows you to select an area, type a question (as if it were a tweet), and send it to our servers. PanPan integrates Twitter for identifying the best answerers among both PanPan and Twitter accounts, and forward the questions to the latter. For some kind of information, classic search engines and probably the classic web, are just not enough. Some examples: • "What is the best restaurant on the beach in Naples?", • "What are snow conditions and visibility on ski slopes in Chamonix right now?", • "Where can I plug my laptop at Dublin Airport?", • “Did they really use chemical weapons in Damascus? What is really happening there, now?” We are talking of location-specific, subjective and time-critic information. Sometimes the answers simply are not on the web; others they are, but users have hard time finding them, most of al from mobile. PanPan is a location-based Q&A platform still leveraging, besides the own user base, user base and other resources of several Social Media. PanPan inherits some basic features from Twitter: •140 characters (for mobile usage), • microblog effect (implicitly defined around any geographical area), • #hashtags (for flexibly classifying and addressing questions). PanPan focuses on putting in contact the ones who ask a question with those who can provide the best answers. So, if you ask about the best sushi restaurant in Naples, the question will be addressed to people who live in Naples and talk about sushi restaurants. If you ask about snow conditions in Chamonix, skiers and snowboarders who are currently there will answer. As for answerers, we rely on: a) common users, locally chosen based on their interests and knowledge; b) community members or attendees of given events, chosen on the basis of used hashatgs and geographical area; c) CRM accounts on several platforms, chosen based on the content of the question and the area.