PulseCity
Realtime Urban Social-Map Discovery Platform
A realtime social map that shows where life is happening right now — heatmaps, venues, events and conversations, without sponsored pins or endless feeds.
- Our role
- Product Strategy, Mobile Architecture, Backend & API Systems
- Platform
- iOS & Android
- Status
- Active Development
- Timeline
- 2025 – Present
System architecture
Rendering is decoupled from state synchronisation across four tiers.
Mobile client
Map rendering and offline-first local cache.
Realtime gateway
Duplex WebSocket multiplexing and presence.
Spatial & business API
Domain logic, clustering and authentication.
Data & indexing
Geography queries and spatial indexes.
Why city maps felt static
Overview
PulseCity was born out of a core observation: modern urban social life is dynamic, but existing map and recommendation services are static, advertisement-crowded, and disconnected from the immediate present. PulseCity transforms the city map into an active living canvas showing where life is happening right now.
The engineering challenge
Rendering dense live geospatial entities on mobile devices while keeping resource consumption minimal. Simultaneously, establishing a bidirectional SignalR pipeline capable of delivering crowd-density changes, live events, instant chats, and venue updates with low latency across mobile networks.
A living layer for the city
Vision
To create the definitive urban discovery operating layer. Not a social network built to trap users inside infinite feeds, but a high-utility spatial interface designed to push people into real-world shared experiences.
Product strategy
The product centers on three tightly coupled pillars: Spatial Presence (fluid vector map), Temporal Relevance (what is active right now vs. tomorrow), and Social Momentum (where crowds and communities are congregating organically).
Experience
Opening PulseCity immediately places the user within their ambient spatial radius. The map is free of cluttered sponsored pins. Dynamic heatmaps highlight lively quarters, while tap-to-expand venue cards reveal live activity, peer stories, upcoming happenings, and instant venue chatrooms.
Engineering highlights
Interactive 60 FPS City Map
Fluid gesture navigation with customized dark and ambient map styles tailored for high readability in direct sunlight and evening use.
Dynamic Geospatial Heatmaps
Algorithmic density surfaces that represent live foot traffic and community check-ins without exposing individual private locations.
Live Venue & Activity Discovery
Categorized micro-filters for cafes, cultural exhibitions, nightlife, and spontaneous community pop-ups within walking distance.
Realtime Duplex Chat & Feeds
Direct duplex message delivery via SignalR hubs, enabling attendees and venues to coordinate moments in real time.
Map experience
The map interface is built as a primary viewport, not a secondary tab. Camera movements use spring-physics interpolation. Clustered map markers gracefully expand into distinct venues as the zoom altitude decreases, maintaining clean visual balance at every altitude.
Realtime pipeline
By orchestrating SignalR hubs with geographically partitioned channels, clients only subscribe to delta streams within their active bounding box. When a venue updates its capacity or a live event begins, only connected clients in proximity receive the push update.
Performance
Engineered for responsive fluid client navigation. Memory consumption is constrained through viewport-based tile caching and offloading polygon geometry calculations to Dart background isolates.
Scalability
The backend is engineered for horizontal scale: stateless ASP.NET Core services behind Azure load balancers, with Redis handling distributed pub/sub channels and SQL Server Spatial indexes partitioned by administrative city zones.
What’s next
Extending PulseCity with peer-to-peer micro-communities, venue operations dashboards, autonomous event aggregation, and cross-platform web exploration experiences.
Technology stack
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