Find a nearby bar to watch your team thanks to your cellphone

Barcelona (ACN).- The Catalan company Porpra has launched an application called “Watch around”, a tool for locating nearby bars which are showing football, basketball, tennis and rugby matches, along with motorbike and Formula 1 races. In this way, the user can follow their team wherever he is in the world, “Watch around” also allows bars to find out what users are looking to watch, so that they can choose the game they are going to broadcast in order to attract the most clients. Porpra has an 8.000 bar-database around the world that will grow exponentially thanks to Google loaning its database containing millions of bars.

Cofounder Pere Saurina was in New York five years ago with some classmates trying to find a bar where they could watch the match between Barça and Real Madrid, but they couldn’t find one. When the Smartphone appeared on the scene, a group of young Catalans started to work to solve that issue. With this idea in mind, last January they promoted the free application that allows users to watch matches from the main European football leagues in the closest bar. In spring, the application had a daily downloading average of around 800 people.

From football to all sports

Thanks to a favourable reception, the Catalan company Porpra has taken a step forward towards creating a similar tool that includes the most popular world sports. Now, iPhone, Android, mobile web and Blackberry users are able to download ‘Watch Around’. It is simple to use. The user just has to download the application (pay-per-use this time), in order to consult those bars which are screening football, basketball or F1 events. The user can find out if a bar that they know will broadcast a particular match or the bar can publicise itself using the application.

Pere Saurina highlights the importance of the application in tourist areas, where bar owners do not know where tourists are from or which team they support. If they use ‘Watch Around’ they can know what their clients are looking to watch.

Saurina explained that the company has made stickers which associated bars can stick on their door.  “It is an idea from the US, where it works so well” he said.

Looking for investors

Porpra has 8 employees and is located at the Science and Technology Park in Girona, in the North-East of Catalonia. The company is less than a year old and has benefited from public loans for young entrepreneurs. But now Porpra is looking for investors to allow them to keep moving forward with new projects.

Saurina explained they are developing more resources for users’ to download along with working on the sale of collected information regarding the application, to television stations and sports clubs. Porpra will soon be able to use Google’s database, meaning that the company will be able to access information from hotels, bars and restaurants.