Marketing

Is your business thinking about creating a mobile app to build your online brand? A lot of businesses are beginning to discover that they can reinforce their brands and interact with consumers at a more intimate level using mobile apps. This has fueled a lot of interest in Mobile App development.

However, one of the problems that has existed up until now is that most developers don’t have the low level programming language knowledge needed to produce native mobile applications. Also because there are several dominant players in the mobile market it’s hard to know which platform to pick and invest time and dollars into. In terms of real world dollars, most custom apps cost between $20,000 to $150,000 to develop and take to market.

Even with these obstacles, the benefits of putting your brand in the hands of your consumers is thought to far outweigh the costs. Apps are creating opportunities for companies to reinforce brand loyalty and help to collect better user metrics by allowing consumers to interact with brands where they are instead of where the companies think the consumer will be.

So to bridge the gap and give companies the ability to create apps quickly, Jeff Haynie and the gang at Accelerator have created a development tool that lets developers create apps without the steep learning curve. According to Jeff, in some cases, the developers can create their apps in less time than it takes to get the application approved through Apple.

Jeff Haynie recently gave a talk at the Dallas WordPress Meetup where he talked about the Titanium Mobile development platform. According to Jeff, by 2013 mobile will be 40% of all Internet traffic. Anything that’s not plugged into your desktop will be a part of that. The iPhone has led the market with apps and these apps have driven demand in the market. This has opened up opportunities to reconnect consumers with business brands.

“Mobile is being redefined dramatically today. We enable web developers to quickly create and commercialize mobile and desktop applications.”

Basically the Titanium Mobile provides an authoring platform that lets you get your applications to market quickly without needing a nuclear powered pocket protector. If you can write Javascript, you can write an application that installs on the device as a native application. Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile apps can provide the same key features that you would expect from any custom built mobile application like geolocation targeted reporting.

Along with Titanium Mobile, Appcelerator also offers a Desktop development solution that allows developers to leverage common code across multiple platforms. This platform is a direct competitor to Adobe Air, with 100 Million desktop installs in 2010.

During Jeff’s presentation he ran through a variety of mobile application demonstrations that showed the power of the Titanium Mobile platform and showed how mobile will be helping companies connect with consumers in the future. One of the best things he demonstrated was the reporting capabilities that Appcelerator can provide on your mobile apps. In online marketing stats are gold and Appcelerator allows you to track consumer usage down to the action buttons on the screens. If you want to know how people are using your app as well as when and where they’re using it, they can provide those figures.

If you’re looking for an open source way to get your business application developed and into the market in less time and for less money than traditional mobile apps, then check out Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile.

Look for the video of this session in the next few days.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Check out the Geeksroom Titanium coverage for another look at this event.