Demo: Do-It-Yourself Mobile Apps And Content Management Coming
Developers on Monday demonstrated or discussed these applications and more at Demo Spring 2010, a semi-annual gathering of startups pitching their technology to potential venture and strategic investors and the press.
A couple of the demonstrations were of technology aimed at making it easier for consumers to build and publish their own iPhone apps, whether as a service to their friends and community or as a way to make a few extra dollars.
AppWhirl of Mountain View, Calif., for instance, demonstrated technology that CEO and Co-founder Richard Jordan claimed lets anyone make a mobile app within five minutes.
Users can go to the company's Web site where they can access a number of modules that enable them to build applications that utilize such capabilities as blog posts and email to work with a full range of content, including YouTube videos or Twitter feeds, Jordan said. Once the app is done, AppWhirl will help users submit it to the appropriate app stores.
AppVoyage of San Jose, Calif., showed what CEO and Founder Sagar Golla called the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for publishing rich mobile apps to multiple app stores.
AppVoyage lets non-programmers and marketers develop applications using templates and simple tools that take advantage of application modules including calendar services, location data, gaming information, and more, Golla said.
Applications created using AppVoyage can then be published by the user for any app store, including Apple's iTunes store and the Google Android app store, Golla said.
Denver-based Zerista demonstrated technology to help users develop custom mobile communities based around a specific group, club, association, or event.
John Kanarowski, president and co-founder of Zerista, said the Zerista Mobile Community Platform lets anyone create an instant mobile community with any content required. Users can modify the application's custom banner and color scheme, and make it available for any type of mobile device, Kanarowski said.
Users can also add such features as chat and the ability to post outside tweets, and customize the application with commerce capabilities. "We let you create a custom mobile community for any club, group, or team of any size, and instantly publish it as a mobile app," Kanarowski said.
Other developers demonstrated applications that allow users to handle document management tasks with their mobile devices. One of them, ABJK NewCo of Austin, Texas, demonstrated Zosh, an application which lets an iPhone or iPod replace a fax machine for handling many of the documents business users such as real estate agents deal with on a daily basis.
Zosh lets users receive, send, fill out, and sign business documents that have been uploaded to ABJK's website with their iPod or iPhone, said CEO Joshua Kerr. The company sends a link to the users that lets them open the document, read it, sign and date it, and forward it, Kerr said.
Stockholm, Sweden-based Visiarc helps overcome the problem of downloading and forwarding huge documents on mobile devices with its Mobile Documents application, said CEO and Co-founder Peter Lindgren.
With Mobile Documents, .PDF or Word or other documents are stored on a cloud-based server, but can be accessed by a mobile user without downloading them, Lindgren said. Users can also forward documents via email, or turn them into text which can be easily read on a mobile device. Mobile Documents was launched on Monday for Symbian-based smartphones.
For users who find themselves with too much content from the mounds of data they receive from search queries and Twitter feeds, Israel-based My6sense offers an option via its Attention API. Barak Hachamov, founder and chairman of my6sense, said his company's Attention API helps ensure that relevant content shows up at the top of any list of content.
The Attention API understands users' interests based on their behavior, Hachamov said. For example, it can filter out specific Tweets from all the Twitter streams customers follow to put the Tweets with the most relevant content on the top where they can be easily found.