Mingle creates social x-ray glasses in a crowded room

Mobile application finds strength in connecting people at conferences or cafes

Making new businesses connections usually happens serendipitously when you are at an industry event or a dinner party, but who says that coffee shops, check-out lines and farmer's markets couldn't be the next place you meet a business connection?

Young application startup, Mingle, is revving up to make business connections anywhere you are, based on the industries professions that best compliment your needs.

First launched in August of this year, the mobile application allows users to digitally introduce themselves to other professionals in the area and specify the connections they are interested in making.

Andy Kim, CEO and Co-Founder, came up with the Mingle concept while in line at Costco.

"I had this accounting question in mind and wondered if anyone in this massive line with me was an accountant," Kim to me. "Then I noticed that every person in line was checking their mobile phones and several of them were refreshing their Facebook apps every few seconds."

From this curiosity, Mingle quickly started carving out a place for itself in the professional networking arena. The free application  has had more than 38,000 downloads and has transmitted more than 500,000 messages. 

The Los Angeles-based company saw the application take off recently when it received its first Apple employee that started connecting with fellow co-workers that they would have otherwise just passed in the cafe or courtyard.

"This is one of the greatest things we wanted Mingle to do," said Kim. "We really want people that should be connecting to have a new method to break down those social barriers that keep us in our own bubble." 

How does it work

Once a user has downloaded the application on their mobile device, they can then connect with either their Facebook or LinkedIn account and choose to display their profile with their education or profession.

Users are able to completely tailor how they display their professional connections.

If you wish to have an ambitious title and just say "recruiter" or if you want to be very specific and  list yourself as "Apple's VP of Marketing US."

Users can also choose when they wish to check-in as interested in making connections and under different titles. Since people wear many hats throughout their career, and even their day, they can alter their professional tag  based on where they are -- so a salesperson could list that as their tag at a Financial District Cafe and then choose to market their photography skills when they are at a wedding or art gallery.

It reminds me of the new radar function on Foursquare, but for specific people rather than events or restaurants.

Once you have chosen the profile you wish to transmit, people can then connect with you and send in-app messages.

The current demographics of users is split fairly evenly across multiple industries and is roughly 50/50 along the lines of gender.

Kim has been in talks with conference developers to use this application system to optimize the networking that goes on at industry events so that people can easily locate the connections that they want without having to stare at clusters of booths and struggle to read name tags.

Mingle can also be beneficial to the creators of the conferences since they can keep a real-time list of the attendees, ping announcements and distribute rosters and agendas to all those at the event.

"We have gotten into talks of partnering with conferences to make it easier to communicate and connect in those crowded conferences," Kim explained. "It seems silly that at these big tech conferences we still get these paper programs and a bunch of flyers to stay up-to-date when all we talk about it the transistion to mobile."

All of the features on Mingle are opt-in and locations check-ins are not stores for future use or aggregation purposes.

A similar application is Confidantly, which helps professionals find people they want to meet by aggregating information from events they attend. Confidantly is integrated with Eventbrite and Meetup to can scan and search close to 500,000 events.

Monster and LinkedIn also have some of the connection features available on their mobile apps, but not with the same location-based focus or ability to adapt your profile as freely to reflect changes.

"We like to think of our product as social x-ray glasses that helps people do effect networking," said Kim. "It's silly that we all can find the exact pair of shoes we want anywhere in the world but we can't find the associates we want to talk to, even if we know they are somewhere in the same arena as we are.  Hopefully we can change that."