If you've ever been to a conference you know how important the buzz around it is. You need to follow tweets to check what people around you are thinking or view check-ins to see who's actually attending. The same applies to a lot of events, be it concerts or sports events. The problem is, though, that there is a growing number of ways to interact with others around an event but no single platform that would combine all of that rich content. Gignal has an answer for that. Founded in Denmark by Natasha Friis Saxberg, the start-up offers a social media billboard for events that presents all social buzz around the happening in one place (check-ins, tweets, comments, pictures and videos).

Organizers can create their event in Gignal themselves, add the venue's address and tag, after which the system will collect everything people post around that area in given dates. People who are not attending the event but are following it online can submit their content through the dedicated tag. The billboard can be accessed from Gignal's website, projected on a physical wall or screen, checked through mobile web or on the event's website. Gignal's API is available too.

'Connecting with other people and sharing thoughts and feelings is a basic human behaviour', explains Natasha. 'Those connections often happen around events. With Gignal we wanted to amplify that atmosphere to engage audiences and foster collective connectedness'.

Existing tools capture and enable that sharing process but taken by themselves they don't provide the whole picture of what's going on. If you follow people on Twitter - you'll miss the content produced by people outside of your network. On Gignal you get an event overview of pictures, check-ins, Facebook and Twitter. This makes it easy for the participants to follow all the buzz in one stream, which in turn encourages them to share more content and amplifies the event to users around the world. Thus, there is a definite advantage in having all the different streams in one place.

Gignal's main target market is sport and music events in Europe and US since they attract the largest audiences who engage in a collective experience by sharing emotions and enthusiasm. Publicly launched in November 2010, Gignal so far enabled social media billboards for about 200 events, reaching approximated 400,000 people. The billboard, together with event statistics, widget and design customization, are available online for free for a maximum of 7 days. Events that want to present their social media buzz for more than 7 days will need a premium subscription.

'Every social network is our competitor', admits Natasha. 'Users either passionately follow one or are used to jumping across social media for content. Twitter walls and live video streaming services are also a competition. However, Gignal's strengths are that we can combine all the different content in one place and show you content from people outside of your network, sharing your event experience'.

Almost a year since their launch, Gignal's technical capabilities are all in place. The hard part now is to crunch music and sports markets across the two continents. 'Besides our aim to succeed, I personally love the process of being an entrepreneur, facing constant challenges and meeting all the wonderful people on the way', comments Natasha.