Please describe your company.
Our company makes corporate training, HR compliance, workplace safety, a lot of IT training. It's all online, and it's also mobile online.
What is your role and responsibilities?
I'm the president and owner of LearnSmart.
What was your goal for working with Appetizer Mobile?
We make online corporate training. It's a fast solution, software as a service solution, meaning that the person has to be online to get our training. We also have a lot of government clients, or people that are in the field who don’t have access to their training through networks that aren’t their own. If a government employee is onsite and needs to access their training, they can’t get that. We wanted a mobile iPad app that would allow our customer to download videos and training that we produce to their iPad while they’re on an approved network. They can then watch it offline.
Please describe the scope of their work?
We designed it, and we're fairly talented on that. We wanted to make sure that we kept it within the framework of the brand that we offer. We designed the look of it, and we gave them the scope of the interaction. We designed the UI and the UX of how you interact within the system. They had to figure out the back end to communicate with our servers. They were the coders.
Why did you select the iPad as opposed to Android or iOS?
The original version of the app is about a year and a half old. We talked to them about two years ago when I was in Washington, D.C., on a business trip. Two years ago, the iPad had a stranglehold on this. This was well before Samsung and the other companies got a foothold in tablets. The main reason was because the iPad was dominant, but also because of the fragmentation. We're a niche provider. We're not Pinterest or Facebook, and we're not going to sell to all these individuals, and we don’t have the flexibility or the affordability to make seven different versions of the Android app. We have always told Appetizer Mobile we would start with the iPad and, because we have a close relationship with Microsoft, porting it onto to Windows. They said they could do that, but we haven’t done it because the service hasn’t gotten any traction. It comes down to iPad market share. We fully expect to expand it into Android.
What was your process for selecting Appetizer Mobile to work with?
I did a Google search to find them, and I put a few feelers out there. There are a lot of international firms that offer iPad and iOS services, but we really wanted to work with a domestic firm. We knew what we wanted, but we weren’t well versed in the iOS terminology, and mobile was still relatively new. I wanted someone who was flexible and wouldn’t be so rigid with us so that they weren’t going to help us learn and be flexible as we learn to make sure that we got what we wanted.
Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?
The fundamental need to download an app is fairly simple. The backend occupied more of the time for the build. The backend communicated and authenticated our access, used our user name and password that we granted the person and made sure that they didn’t have access to content that they weren’t permitted to have.
When was the latest milestone completed for that work?
The first version was done in July of 2012, and the most recent version updated for iOS 7 was completed in October of 2013.
Do you have any stat
I don’t have that available. Our product is not one that can be downloaded, and used without paying for our service. That wouldn’t be a fair representation. What would be a fair representation, is that we just had a presentation with a large multinational company. One of the gentlemen pointed out how much he loves the iPad app. It was one of the major differentiators in our service. I believe that mobile learning in my business will be the dominant way people learn in the future, and this is our first effort. People are very satisfied with it. It never had issues, and it consistently works.
Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?
With the exception of this app, we’ve always done development in house. Our company is about 15 years old, and in the early days of our company, we dabbled in some outsourcing, we weren’t satisfied. With Appetizer Mobile, we got exactly what we wanted, which was a flexible team. I haven’t worked with other mobile development firms to say whether they’re better or worse. I know they are a relatively small firm, and that we could get someone else to do the project on a grander scale or more quickly. As far as flexibility, and somebody working with a smaller company, they were exactly what we needed. I’ve recommended them at least three times since then. In my business, if you ask somebody if they would recommend someone to a friend or colleagues, that’s the best endorsement.
Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?
No. I was very happy, and I have no complaints.
