The official mobile app of South by Southwest 2015 is available in the App Store starting today, and it’s a must-have for those who don’t want to miss out on anything new at next week’s huge music, film and technology conference in Austin.

That includes a robot petting zoo, a medical technology exposition and the opportunity to connect to SXSW’s pervasive, “hyper-local,” wireless social networks.

Those ad-hoc networks, which debuted in 2014 at just a few dozen SXSW conference sites, will be available at every one of the confab’s events, which as of this week total 5,400 (and counting) says Scott Wilcox, the show’s director of technology.

The networks are designed to make the latest SXSW feel more like it was in days gone by, when the event’s much smaller size made serendipitous meetings easier to follow up on, Wilcox says.

The goal is to take some of the chance out of “chance encounters” that could lead to a new partnership or relationship between attendees “who bump into each other at the show” for the first time, he says.

With more than 100,000 attendees expected, an increasing share of that kind of SXSW networking will be done wirelessly this year.

This week, Wilcox and his 37-person tech team will begin deploying the network using 1,000 short-range wireless beacons at 265 meeting rooms, conference halls and music venues across the Capital of Texas.

That’s up from just 60 iBeacons last year, says Jeff Sinclair, CEO of Eventbase, the Vancouver, B.C.-based events-software start-up that built the app, called SXSW GO.

It’s the largest-ever deployment of the technology, which is based on a low-energy version of Bluetooth, augmented with extra location and security features of Qualcomm’s GIMBAL wireless scheme.

This year’s software has a new attendee-matching feature that will allow showgoers to find others with similar interests, Sinclair says.

The feature, called Around Me, will use SXSW attendee registration data, as well as content tags that app users add on their own, to recommend potential networking matches within a venue.

This “hyper-local networking” ability was also tested by Eventbase at the Cannes Lions advertising and creative show in France in June 2014.

Still, SXSW “is pushing the envelope” of event networking by rolling it out at every venue and session, says Sinclair, whose 50-person start-up received a $2 million investment from SXSW in November.

A related feature of the app will let music fans find out who’s playing at a particular venue as soon as they walk in.

That feature, called What’s On, is likely to get heavy use by those who use Austin’s crowded clubs and bars as their own personal music-discovery service during SXSW.

Also new this year will be a track of 85 sessions during the Interactive portion of the show dedicated to medical technology, including 12 taking place on what will be called the MedTech Expo stage.

The health tech component “has grown organically out of the Interactive show,” SXSW’s Wilcox says, thanks in part to the popularity of wearable consumer-health gadgets.

As for the petting zoo, images of the robots inside it will likely become familiar soon to consumer-technology fans across the U.S. [USA Today]