Does Your Company Need a Mobile App?

Probably not.   The process of getting an app designed, developed, and tested is not a short or necessarily easy process.  That still doesn’t include submitting it for approval to be placed into an app store.  What you may be asking now is ‘Why did you even bring it up then?’  Well, what you could probably use is a mobile web app.

Here’s the difference, the former is what’s called a ‘native app’ that is downloaded on to your device. Think Angry Birds or Candy Crush.  If you’ve ever used Chrome, Safari, or Pandora on your smartphone then you’ve used a mobile web app.  In it’s simplest terms a mobile web app is your website in an ‘app wrapper’ using the devices’ browser.

If your website is designed to be viewed on a mobile device, (which it should be!) then you can get it wrapped up as a mobile app.  Anyone visiting your site on a mobile device can be given the option of placing an icon on the home screen.  Then ‘Boom!’ there’s a link to your website on their device and it has all the appearances of an app.  Once it’s opened it has the appearance of a regular mobile app but it’s actually a website being seen through the device’s web browser.

What Can Fiber Do for You?

If you haven't heard, Google is going after major internet and cable providers with their own service, Google Fiber.  They've already reached Kansas City, Provo Utah and Austin Texas and have targeted 34 other cities to release the product as well.  The main perk of Fiber is clear: speed.  By switching to this product you have three package options but the main feature is the gigabit per second download and upload speed.  That's 100 times faster download speed and 1,000 times faster upload speed!  The reason I'm talking about this today is that in the few locations that Google has released their product, small pockets of start-ups are swarming these areas.

Kansas City is most notable in doing this and has developed the Kansas City Start Up Village, a community of start-ups that have banded together to promote each other's businesses, and it has been getting a lot of attention.  In a discussion with Matthew Marcus, a leader at the start-up village, he confesses that Kansas City had already begun growing a pretty substantial entrepreneurial focused community but Google Fiber contributed to the explosion.  Most notably, he explained, is the effect that Fiber has had on sportsphotos.com and similar companies that rely on fast download and upload speeds.  By being able to accomplish a task that used to take days and now takes an hour, they are far ahead of any competition.  sportsphotos.com moved from Springfield to Kansas City to utilize fiber.  

Marcus also shared his experience trying to "break the gig" where he tried to run an extraordinary amount of tasks on his computer to try and overload the Google provider.  What happened was astonishing.  His computer crashed, meaning the hardware was actually the issue, not the other way around, something that no other broadband provider would able to accomplish.  

So what does this mean for businesses?  Because Google only allowed residences access to Fiber it is an absolutely perfect, and in some cases essential, for small businesses to get a piece of Fiber.  The scalability alone allows your small household run business to produce the same amount of activity that medium sized competitors produce.  Another benefit is the community of people that will surround you.  Kansas City has become a hub for successful entrepreneurs to get started fast and beat competitors to the punch and Marcus talked about the ambitious nature of the community. Imagine starting a business with a secret weapon that none of your competitors have and the startups surrounding you share that same secret.  It would be an infectious environment of excitement and stability. In these types of business situations thats half the battle.  You want to have the best product and be the first to have it.  Google Fiber greatly improves your chances to solve the latter part of this dilemma.