By John Craig
My firm, Purple Forge, has developed a meaningful relationship as a supplier of mobile applications to governments at the municipal and federal level over the past two years. Given the integration of social and location-based information into our applications, we have been the defacto leader in implementing what is termed SoLoMo (or Social, Mobile, Local) with these institutions and borne witness to their trials and successes in leveraging mobile technology to engage with their constituents.
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This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
Obtaining a lighthouse customer is a critical first step in starting a business. It establishes your credibility as a seller, and creates a repeatable case study that captures the needs of your target market. The follow-on step is differentiating your business relative to the competition. Having something that others cannot easily duplicate or manufacture is critical to establishing a secure beachhead in your chosen market.
Sales may now be the least of your concerns. What may now undo you is your own marketing prowess. Your reputation is now dependant on how you execute on your next contract, and there are a number of key factors that hopefully you have prepared for.
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This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
On Oct. 17, the Government Technology Exhibition and Conference (GTEC) honoured some of the best innovations in government technology at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. Our client, the City of Calgary, was runner-up in the Transforming the Business of Government category for the iPhone application we developed for the city’s 2010 municipal election.
What was notable about the event was the number of honourees who were involved in mobile projects. The City of Mississauga won a gold medal for its MiWay mobile website for public transportation and the Ontario government’s OSAP group was also an honoree for its mobile application.
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This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
One thing that has guided Purple Forge more than anything else since our inception is our product philosophy. We develop mobile applications around a high-level concept called mobile community engagement. Sound catchy? Well, as it turns out, it is and has become both a point of market differentiation and a guiding mantra for those customers we choose to work with and the business verticals we target.
In 2010 the mobile application market was filled with companies offering custom mobile application development and do-it-yourself development services. It was a “Is there an app for that?” culture and everybody had a hot app idea they needed you to build. The problem was that when you dug a little deeper into the idea, there was no guiding philosophy. Over and over again, customers would tell me they wanted the same thing – a flashy, five-star app that would make them millions of dollars. These customers all had what I call “Angry Birds envy,” which is a condition where you think you have an app idea that is simple and addictive like the massively popular game Angry Birds.
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies, to share his thoughts on how startups can achieve market validation to drive revenues. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
The importance to emerging Canadian companies of being focused on winning deals outside of Canada.
As the co-founders of Purple Forge, Brian Hurley and I placed a significant amount of emphasis on exporting to the U.S. and around the world to get our business started. For those of you who don’t know Purple Forge, we develop and sell mobile applications as a service for politicians, event organizers, governments and interactive marketing firms. We are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada with offices in the U.S. and resellers around the world.
In 2009, we had a very simple idea — developing mobile applications for community engagement. The idea was to allow organizations to reach out to their key constituents to broadcast their news, events, social networking feeds and other information. These constituents would then share this information using their own Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then the organizations would ask these people to perform activities to the benefit of those organizations.
Cool, right? We thought so – and we wanted to prove it. So where to start? Well there was always the Government of Canada, which was in our own backyard. We knew the sales cycles are 18 months or more, and it was very conservative about adopting new technologies that hadn’t been proven elsewhere. We needed to find a customer who was willing to take a risk. Better yet, was willing to take a risk and would pay us to do it. That way, we could prove the value of the idea.
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By John Craig
