AMATEUR and professional athletes from the North-East are being encouraged to use a new social media app designed to catch the eye of clubs and talent-spotters.

Spoxio wants to connect the sporting world by allowing users to showcase talent by uploading videos and photographs to their own profiles.

The user’s footage can then be seen by scouts, who create accounts and request a message exchange with any rising stars they may have spotted, as well as general followers of individuals and sports.

Spoxio is available on desktop, iOS and Android. It can be used by anyone from footballers to fans, basketball players to boxers or even coaches to personal trainers.

Whether it is Newcastle winger Allan Saint-Maximin, Hartlepool's world title winning boxer Savannah Marshall or an up-and-coming golfer from the Durham Golf Union, Spoxio has been designed to allow everyone to join in.

Osasu Okungbowa, co-owner and chief executive officer of Spoxio, said: “To keep an eye on new players, as an agent or scout, costs a lot of money to travel to locations. We thought, hold on, we can do something to help with that and we developed the app.

“But we realised it’s not just the needs of agents and scouts we can fulfil, we can make it a social media platform where people can communicate and fans can be a part of it too.

“We created this platform that basically becomes a village for everyone in sport to come together. We want every household to use it.”

Spoxio’s creators have already got promising talents in Africa using the platform and it is hoped it will be the perfect tool for athletes at grassroots level to catch the eye.

Its owners do not, though, want the app to be ignored by the big stars – suggesting they too can use it to raise their profile.

Osasu said: “Eventually, we want top players, footballers, basketball players, stars of all sorts of sports, to use it.

“We want this to be a place where they can have programmes to see their lifestyle, see what they do. We want to get to that point as well as having the scouts on it looking for new talent and a place for people to communicate about sport.”

Rather than focus just on the UK or Europe, Osasu believes the market is much bigger than that for Spoxio.

He added: “To find a player from Brazil, you have to travel to Brazil and go to their grassroots clubs and start your search for players. Nigeria, Ghana, for example, it’s the villages where scouts or clubs have to go to to get players.

“We thought what can we do? There’s internet everywhere, so if the villages in Sao Paolo, Brazil, or Nigeria, all have internet then they can use an app like Spoxio to showcase their skills to people abroad.

“We realised it shouldn’t specifically be for scouts and players but it should be open for everyone to discuss sport. It’s a social media platform with a different, unique offering to the likes of Instagram and Facebook.

“It’s been a long journey, we have developed this for 18 months, but we know that we are going to get to the point where every household is using it and we believe we’ll get to that point.”

* Further information is available at spoxio.com or the app can be downloaded on iOS or Android.