Igor Faletski saw the future in 2006, on a student exchange trip to Prague.
Mobile phones were cheap and inexpensive access to a fast, reliable wireless network was a given - for a population with a standard of living substantially lower than what Faletski was accustomed to seeing in Canada.
At the end of the trip, Faletski and fellow Simon Fraser University computing sciences student John Boxall came home convinced that mobile business in North America was ripe with opportunity.
"We just saw the power of this mobile channel because in Canada in 2006, phones were expensive, they weren't that good, no iPhone, long contracts--no innovation, we thought," Faletski recalled.
"So we came back to Vancouver for our last year at SFU and started a club called Mobile Mondays. We would do events every two weeks and tell students how amazing it is to develop for mobile devices."
As it turns out a lot of the Mobile Monday members now work at Mobify, the company Faletski and Boxall founded to jump on the emerging mobile trend. Their first venture was a giveaway to fellow SFU students, a phone app of the Burnaby Mountain campus transit bus schedule. That led to a contract with TransLink - dial 3333 at mobile enabled bus stops around Metro Vancouver and you get updated information about the next bus at your stop.
After that came deals with BC Ferries and BC Hydro.
Then, with the arrival of iPhone came the deluge.
Mobify pivoted from developing apps to developing a behind-the-scenes web platform that allows companies to convert, pain-free, their conventional web pages into pages that can be viewed by a smart phone or a tablet.
It's the next big marketing opportunity for retailers. More than half of new Telus postpaid customers now opt for smart phones. Last week Pew Research found more Americans own smart phones than less-enabled cellphones.
Last October, tech analysts Gartner estimated that social and mobile presence will generate 50 per cent of Web sales by 2015.
Adds Faletski: "By 2015, Morgan Stanley said that mobile Web access will exceed desktop Web access and we think for that to really happen mobile sites need to be fast, look amazing and have the full functionality of the main website.
"We're focused on supporting that and empowering developers to succeed with our technology.
When you build a website you have to make sure it works on any device your customers might have.
"If you don't do that, then you're not going to deliver the best possible customer service to this channel and the customers won't be happy. They'll go somewhere else, like Amazon." So far, 20,000 companies have gone mobile through Mobify, including Starbucks, Lululemon and Conde Nast publications including Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
The company has 25 employees, many of whom were Mobile Monday club members, is selffinancing, and has no immediate plan to initiate a round of financing to support growth.
Mobify's marketing pitch to potential customers includes what it calls the Hundred Day Pledge.
"We pledge to our ecommerce customers that they will get a full return on investment within a hundred days from going mobile with Mobify. Consumers aren't just browsing websites. They want to interact with them. They will prefer this to going to the desktop computer and pointing at things with the mouse and clicking buttons."
At a recent event, staged by Vancouver mobile technology incubator Wavefront, Faletski told an international audience that some companies don't need a full 100 days to recover their investment.
Lululemon, he noted, did it in two.
ssimpson@vancouversun.com Twitter @ScottSimpsun
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
No comments:
Post a Comment