Finally, that app has arrived - you may have spotted birth cards and sugar beans about - and it has been baptized: Fons Jr.

An idea had been sprouting in the minds of Fosbury & Sons founders Stijn and Maarten since the co-working space’s early days. They’d been thinking of developing an app that would be perfectly in tune with their range of services in terms of look, feel, and content.

Claire Senden, who was tasked with thinking out the application (along with icapps, an Antwerp-based company who tailor-made the app for us), gives us the run- down. “We’ve launched at the end of January”, Claire says excitedly when we speak at the very beginning of February. “And we’ve already reached about 130 users.”

There were a few jobs that Fons Jr. needed to be able to do. “We already had a platform on which our members could book a meeting room, but we heard through the grapevine that it wasn’t all that user friendly or pleasant to use”, explains Claire. “So we did a little survey and asked our members which 5 basic tasks they felt such a platform should fulfill.”

The result was Fons Jr., a mobile application on which you can book meeting rooms, look up which companies and individuals work at our offices, consult the daily Coffeelabs menu, enlist the help of our ‘Spaceman’ for any practical issues, and check out which public events are planned.

And there’s one special feature: “You can scroll through our member base and invite someone for coffee, lunch or a game of pool. But you can’t start chatting to them on the app itself - you have to meet in real life.”

Fons Jr.’s aim is to let members connect in real life, not communicate through a screen. “The great thing about it is that if you are a member, you get the practical benefit, but you also get the added community feeling, which is what our offices are all about.”