We have an Appz for that...

It's been an interesting weekend as we fiddled with the Mix10 Appz and had a think about what it is we had done with it.  We've had some positive feedback from a couple of trial users who liked the general approach and were extremely impressed with the speed at which we'd put the complete application together.

The question they asked, and I suppose one we need to think about is what we do with that? 

Our business goals are clear, we still intend to license the technology to third parties and provide hosted solutions for some of our services.  However, the tactical appz like the MWC App and the Mix App have given us a boost in the web traffic, if nothing else.  To whit, as of this morning the Viafo website has had as much traffic as our previous record breaking month...

With this in mind I think we'll do a CTIA app - it's in keeping with ViaEventz anyway.  But what else should we do?  The World Cup (Soccer, you know the one that practically everybody in the world plays) is coming up in June - should we build an app for that and have it on our main platforms, which should, by then, include WinMo, Bada, iPhone and Android?  Or does that become a low revenue time sink for us?

To be honest, I don't know at the moment.  I'll let you know when we make the decision.

Mix10 Appz: Day 2

Quick update on the Mix10 App we're building.  We've got the features agreed and we've pretty much sourced all the content to add.  The goal of our solution is to make building mobile applications like this, especially those for events, really easy.

The tricky part, at least for us, is all on the back end of the app.  So we've been locked down over the course of the day working out how we can extract the schedule and attendee data from the online side of things.  We've got that sorted today, so we should have the application built for tomorrow... and, I'll be honest, if we can show 48 hours from thinking about the mobile app, to the app being ready for download, complete with the web interface built... well... then I'll be a happy CEO.

I'll check in tomorrow to see if we've got everything done and a link to the app...  Shame we're not even going - but we have to pick our events carefully at the moment and we're already off to Vegas later in the month.

Maybe next year... especially if somebody at Microsoft pays.

Moving onwards and upwards...

So, after a fairly significant pause, we've started showing more details about what it is we're actually doing.  In addition to the consumer news reader app, we've been busy through the summer building a number of working demos of the technology in a variety of spaces.  These have been driven partly by customer demands and also by topics that are of interest to us. 

An example of the later is the Event/Convention Management demo we now have.  I go to a fair number of events and I'll be honest, configuring the information that I want to have with me at the event is an absolute pig.  I want to know what items I'm going to, what the program actually is, what is going on in terms of press released and news feeds, where I should eat and a dozen other items.

That's where ViaFo comes in.  Using our off-the-shelf components we can rapidly build a convention access system that interacts with the event CMS and gives the event managers opportunities for advertising and other revenue generation.  We can pre-integrate a Twitter and News service client that will event allow for Tweeting with pre-embedded #tags and other similar services.  All of this with a simple web interface to drive the mobile client.

Additionally we've built demos for the healthcare industry, travel, logistics and CRM fields.

There will be a more professional look and feel for the website coming in the next couple of weeks and we're getting ready for the formal launch of the News Reader App.

Contact me if you want Beta access, we're still testing.