Me+Moo is an entertaining social app created as part of 5G RuralFirst. 5G RuralFirst is a digital innovation project run by Cisco with assistance from partners in business, government, and academia.
Me+Moo is an entertaining social app created as part of 5G RuralFirst. 5G RuralFirst is a digital innovation project run by Cisco with assistance from partners in business, government, and academia.
The 5G RuralFirst initiative intends to show how 5G technologies will revolutionise life in isolated rural areas. Adopting digital transformation will result in more effective business models for crucial sectors like:
The PR company managing Cisco's 5G RuralFirst digital marketing campaign is Harvard, a Chime Group subsidiary. Harvard hired Milo to develop a gamified social app around the concept of the connected farm. The gamified app would help Cisco disseminate the 5G RuralFirst story of digital transformation in rural communities.
The digital marketing team had the idea of utilising the IoT devices worn by a herd of dairy cows. The idea was to let people befriend a cow on a connected farm and follow her activities for a week. The cow's feeding, sleeping, milking, scratching, and resting data would be fed by the IoT sensors to the app. Visitors might engage with their cow, follow her life and welfare and learn about the connected farm. They could learn about the potential for digital transformation through 5G RuralFirst.
Our UX designers created a gamified social app which is designed to be both tongue in cheek and informative. It is reminiscent of a dating app, but with a gamification system and viral loops built in. Educational video-diary entries from Duncan the farmer give the user a unique insight into running the farm. The app showcased the lives of connected cows and the potential for digital transformation in rural communities with 5G.
The ‘moonitor’ at the heart of the app displays the cows latest activity. This includes her mood and the awards that both the user and the cow attain together during the week. In addition, we came up with a gamification strategy for social sharing. Users are rewarded for joining together to form herds, inviting their friends and sending each other “moosages”. The more active a herd, the higher they go on the leaderboard. This gamification strategy helped the 5G RuralFirst message expand virally at the same time.
Push notifications were implemented by our React Native app developers. This enabled users to stay informed of the cows' most recent activities and mood. In order to allow an admin team to moderate herds and "moosages," they also designed a post-moderation system. As a result of their app analytics coding, the Harvard digital marketing team can ‘Moonitor’:
Me+Moo launched on the 4th of March 2019, and rose to almost 10,000 active users in its first week. Not only that, but users continued to come back into the app and visit their cow. Push notifications from the cows helped obtain a retention rate of 20% by the end of the week. Close to 100k moosages have been sent, and the number of herds is well into the thousands and counting!
Within the first few days, the app earned over 10,000 users, which was great for such a niche app. It was the perfect tool to get our client’s project in front of journalists to generate awareness. The app was featured in an Android blog and garnered over 800 million pieces of global coverage. This includes several prominent news and media outlets.
Galen Driver, Senior Creative Producer
Me+Moo was developed as a cross-platform mobile app for iOS and Android devices using React Native. React Native is the most popular framework amongst mobile app developers for delivering universal applications that have impressive performance. It is a JavaScript framework that has been created and open-sourced by Facebook.
We used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for backend development. AWS is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 200 fully featured services from data centres globally. We used:
We have maintained a tight working relationship with Harvard and Chime Group ever since the launch of Me+Moo. To showcase the work that Cisco is doing on digital transformation we’ve several digital marketing campaigns:
Tapestry: Sounds of a 5G Orkney is a digital marketing campaign that showcases all that is fantastic about Orkney. The website shows how rural places like Orkney have benefited from 5G RuralFirst and digital transformation.
Tapestry is a piece of music inspired by the sounds of a 5G-connected Orkney. Created by Orcadian composer Erland Cooper, he named it ‘Tapestry’ because this is exactly what it is. A layering of all the different sounds of the islands, brought together by the people of Orkney and 5G.
The result is a sonic portrait of Orkney. A unique way to showcase the work of 5G RuralFirst and reach a broader, mainstream audience. It highlights what can be achieved when we focus on more than the bits and bytes alone.
Cisco Live is Cisco’s world-renowned annual customer and partner conference. It is designed to build the foundation for your digital future by providing you with education, connections, and inspiration. As part of the event we created an interactive kiosk that helped visitors get the most from the experience. The kiosk included an interactive map of the venue whereby visitors could see what was on and find essential information.
E-Flex is a digital innovation project developed by Cisco. It uses active electric vehicles (EVs) in real-world fleets to prove the value of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. Cisco is leading the project in partnership with six other organisations across technology, academia, energy and the public sector. We created the E-Flex interactive clock which displays timely statistics and information about the initiative throughout the day
Aside from their invaluable knowledge and expertise, their passion really comes through. I appreciated that they were as equally invested in the project’s success as we were. When we told them that we couldn’t get our partner’s data into the app, they helped us solve the issue. They still managed to deliver on time. No other agency would’ve stuck with us through that hurdle.
Galen Driver, Senior Creative Producer
Me+Moo is a cross-platform mobile application. It was created with React Native and released for iOS and Android devices.
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