If you’re looking for a low-cost way to enhance the service you provide your customers, consider a mobile business app. With ViziApps, it’s free to design, build and test a mobile app. Then, for modest fees for cloud-based services to maintain your app, your company can provide a branded mobile app that provides customers valuable information wherever they need it.

And because many companies don’t yet have mobile apps tailored to meet their customers’ data needs, you have the opportunity to clearly differentiate your business.

That’s right. Today you can still make your business stand apart from your competitors with a data-rich mobile app. But that climate is changing. Offering a mobile app for the iPhone, iPad, and/or Android devices is rapidly becoming more than a nice-to-have option for companies. Soon mobile apps will be mandatory for a successful business.

Forbes contributor and CRM consultant Gene Marks makes a strong argument for the value of mobile apps for businesses of all sizes in his recent post titled “Your Business Checklist: A Website, A Phone Number, A Mobile App.”

“It’s time to stop playing games,” Marks writes. “Smart, boring, conservative companies are getting serious about mobile applications. Slowly but surely, they’re waking up to the potential..no, the need…to utilize these applications to develop more business and keep their customers coming back.”

A cornerstone of his argument is the fact that businesses can provide mobile apps that provide access to the types of data needed to do business – and with minimal investment.

“Think about it: we can all save whatever files, music, videos and photos, for next to nothing on Amazon, Dropbox, or other such services… [People are asking] Why can’t I view product specs, safety information and environmental releases about the products I’ve purchased” on my choice of mobile device?

It’s a fair question. But not every mobile app development platform provides easy robust data access. ViziApps does. With ViziApps, you can easily create a mobile app that provides the data your customers need. And it won’t require an expensive, months-long engineering project.

ViziApps provides a drag-and-drop approach to building a data-rich mobile app for free. (Ongoing maintenance starts at $29 per month for web apps and $49 per month for native apps. See pricing details here.)

What makes ViziApps different from other app development platforms is the way it allows the integration of databases, web services and Google Docs spreadsheets for mobile apps. Without doing any coding, people with minimal computer skills can create mobile apps that make use of backend data resources to provide a rich user experience. The online ViziApps tool can be used to create mobile apps for the iPhone, iPads, and Android phones and tablets, and to build web apps for any device with a full browser.

Start thinking about building a mobile app for your business now. Because, as Gene Marks says, “every business should be thinking about building mobile applications today. It’s not a fad or a passing trend. It’s customer service.”

Have you considered creating a mobile business app that incorporates location-based services (LBS) as a way of gaining new customers? Results of a recent study provide some interesting insight into consumer views on LBS. They reveal that consumers worldwide are becoming increasingly amenable to sharing their location in return for a good, convenient deal.

In its Mobile Life study, global consultancy TNS found that more than 60 percent of respondents who do not yet use location-based services want to begin taking advantage of them.

A summary of the study results makes a strong case for targeting consumers with an LBS mobile app:

“Almost one fifth (19 per cent) of the world’s six billion mobile users are already using LBS, with more than three times this number (62 per cent) aspiring to do so in the future… Savvy LBS users have realized that there is something to be gained from sharing their locations with brands and retailers – with one in eight (12.5 per cent) sharing their location in exchange for a deal or special offer…Beyond current users of LBS, a third of people globally (33 per cent) who already or would like to use mobile voucher coupons, highly rate receiving deals when they are nearby a store that they like. One in five mobile users (21 per cent) stated that they find mobile advertising interesting if it is offering them a deal near their current location.”

James Fergusson, Global Head, Digital & Technology Practice at TNS, believes that mobile users are beginning to appreciate the rewards of disclosing their location. “We are really starting to see location based services ‘come of age’. People are realizing that sharing their location often offers some kind of reward in terms of a discount or deal. It is the combination of time and context – directing people towards a deal when they can easily redeem it – that unlocks a powerful tool for marketers to develop precise targeting approaches.” sexedate

Building a mobile app that uses LBS does not have to be a complex project. The ViziApps drag-and-drop visual approach allows business managers, IT professional and anyone with basic computer skills to create a custom locator mobile app for iOS and Android devices. It’s just one category of mobile apps ViziApps users are building with the online based do-it-yourself mobile app development tool.

Neil Perlin, Hyper/Word Services

Many mobile apps let users add material to the app’s database. Think notes apps, reminder apps, or photo albums, for example. Can you do this with ViziApps? Yes.

I took advantage of this capability for an app that listed BBQ restaurants around Austin, TX, which I created for a conference in the Texas capital. I started with a list of restaurants in the database, in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Conference attendees could list the restaurants by name or city by tapping the appropriate button on the app page. Then, assuming that no Texan would trust a Yankee’s assessment of BBQ restaurants, I added a social media element that let attendees add their own listings. How did it work?

Tapping an “Add Your Own” button opened a page where users could insert a restaurant’s name, city, and web page. (I could have added additional entry fields like address or rating but wanted to keep the app simple.) Users could fill out some or all of the fields and tap a Submit button to send the entry to a “restaurants” worksheet in the Google Docs spreadsheet and get a “thanks for your entry” response in return.

Any user could then tap one of the “list…” buttons to see the new entry, and all the entries, in the list – a two-column table. Tapping any entry in the table opened a Details page listing all the information for the restaurant. (For your mobile app, you could narrow the choices by requiring users to log in and then only show their specific listings, but that could losethe social media benefit.)

Several thoughts about designing an app this way…

• This social media component is generalizable to almost any category of thing – BBQ restaurants, museums, golf courses, etc.
• Social media lets you tap into the “wisdom of the crowd.” For example, residents of Austin knew more about the local BBQ scene than I did. I took advantage of that knowledge by letting them add to the database.
• The social media capability lets contributors show off by adding a “Referred by” field that includes the contributor’s name on the details page. It may seem silly but it can be very appealing to contributors.

Some thoughts about design…

• Typing on a virtual keyboard isn’t easy. Try to offer alternatives to text entry, like a tappable table, picker, or wheel (for mobile business apps for iPhone or Android smartphones).
• Using a table, picker/wheel also has the benefit of “bounding” user entries. For example, ask users to type a city name and you may get the right name, the wrong name, a misspelled name, or no name. But giving users a preset list in a picker, for example, helps focus their entries.
• On the downside, these features use a lot of screen space that you may not want to spare. You could split data entry across several pages, but users might view the app as more complex than it really is and not use it. You’ll need to strike a balance among ease of use, comprehensiveness of data, and screen space.
• The app’s owner will have to periodically remove junk entries like “xxx” or MyTest” from the database, but this is pretty simple.

In summary, think about adding a social media component to your app. You’ll get user participation and engagement, and, with ViziApps, it’s pretty easy to do.

Neil Perlin is the president of Hyper/Word Services, a mobile and online help development, consulting, and training company. You can reach him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., www.hyperword.com, @NeilEric.

Charles Carroll Financial Partners, which manages over $30 million in assets, selected the ViziApps online tool over other mobile development solutions because of its simple, straightforward design process. The iPad app Charles Carroll created with ViziApps eliminates the need to carry a large set of documents to client meetings. In this way, it has streamlined business processes to the point where employees no longer rely on a paper-based approach to opening and closing discretionary management accounts.

“The iPad app that we created with ViziApps has added value and depth to the services we provide to our client base,” said Bill Hayes, Charles Carroll CEO. “Not only does this app give us a more professional appearance, it also helps us do business faster and affords us control over who has access to the accounts and documentation necessary in our line of work.”

Watch a video where Bill Hayes explains why he selected ViziApps.

“At one point, we actually tried to hire a development team to work on this project,” said Hayes. “Given the high costs and long time-to-market of their approach, we sought another option to help us implement our mobility strategy. With ViziApps, the ability for us to create our custom app, without having sophisticated development skills, was huge. We were able to accomplish exactly what we wanted in a constructive way during the build-out because we, and not an outside development team, controlled that process.”

• Using ViziApps, Charles Carroll was able to quickly create and publish their iPad app without the need for coding.
• The company was able to test and can upgrade their app for free; they only pay a modest publishing fee once published.
• With ViziApps, the app accesses data from Google Docs, and the necessary security and redundancy measures are provided to meet data protection compliance requirements

“More and more businesses are realizing how easy it is to create, publish, and update powerful mobile apps using ViziApps, where they have direct control over the entire process,” said George Adams, Co-Founder and CEO, ViziApps. “Using ViziApps, financial services firms and other organizations can now create their own branded iPad apps to access business forms, brochures, client lists, videos and other data resources to make highly visual presentations, wherever their meetings take place.” Молодая девушка резко намокла и захотела трахнуться. В этот момент рядом с ней спал парень. Интересует порно спящих? Смотри, как спящих ебут тут. В этот раз всё было наоборот. Девушка отсосала член дремлющему парню и поебалась с ним.

Thousands of users are now utilizing the ViziApps platform, with its drag-and-drop approach to creating mobile apps that include enterprise-class data management capabilities not available with any other solution. ViziApps 2.0 features powerful data management capabilities for accessing and managing information stored in Google Docs spreadsheets for use in both native mobile and web apps. ViziApps also supports accessing and managing information stored in SQL databases and other backend resources via web services for native mobile apps.