With plans to welcome 45,000+ attendees to AWS re:Invent 2017, AWS turned to Mobiquity to design and build a bespoke mobile app to replace its out-of-the-box solution. The template-based solution had inherent limitations that were sacrificing the event experience and failed to showcase how AWS services could be used to deliver digital engagement.
The 2017 mobile app was a multi-channel personal assistant leveraging 13+ AWS services, which saw 82% adoption and 1.5M+ user sessions, marking a significant increase in usage from years past and reflecting AWS’ commitment to customer obsession.
Now that AWS owns its own code, it has worked with Mobiquity to enhance the app for the 2018 conference. The 2018 app expands upon last year’s feature set, which included robust session search, reserved seating, and gamification, while optimizing the stability of the environment with enhanced caching.
During the event, they could also use the app to participate in a campus-wide game and explore just added sessions.
New features included a calendar view that showed sessions of interest, the ability to filter sessions based on available seating, and information on sponsors. Also, new this year was a transportation companion, as traveling around the expansive campus has been a pain point in the past. The updated app allowed users to see real-time travel times from venue to venue by way of the re:Invent shuttles, rideshare services or walking.
AWS services formed the backbone of the mobile app; the backend is made up of 21 AWS services, including the serverless stack: Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, Amazon Cognito, AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS Shield, Amazon SNS, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, AWS NAT Gateway, AWS Config, AWS WAF, AWS STS, and Amazon Glacier.
The AWS re:Invent 2018 mobile app was officially launched on October 11, 2018 to all attendees and saw even higher usage than last year’s event. From 2017 to 2018, there was a 31% increase in average sessions per user and a 19% increase in conference users using the app.
In the meantime, Mobiquity has begun working on the 2019 release, having hosted the AWS events team at its Digital Experience Center for an ideation workshop resulting in a PRFAQ. We have a detailed list of improvements to make to the next app to ensure using the app provides an effortless experience for all AWS re:Invent attendees.
