Digital Alberta put on yet another excellent event at Innovate Calgary on Monday night: The Mobile innovation Showcase. It was an exceptional discussion and meetup.
The panelists included Kris Read, Technical Lead, Poynt Corp; Colin Chong, Product Manager, AppCarousel, Wmode; Bryan Maniotakis, Creative Director, Mediumrare; Jeff Samis, VP Product and Market Development, Kryos Velocity; and Arleigh Vasconcellos, Moderator and Digital Alberta board member, The Agency.
For my part, I was really impressed at just how mature all these companies are. I’m intimately aware of Kryos Velocity’s journey as I helped with their revolutionary Velocity 2 launch. And, even though I thought I knew Poynt, the company continues to make great strides at an accelerated pace – they now have more than 10 million users (Kris wouldn’t give us the exact number, but was smiling coyly) and an increasingly developer-friendly focused innovative work environment.
Meanwhile, WMode has made great progress with their AppCarousel mobile app discovery platform.
Not tomention Mediumrare, which is a small boutique mobile app developer making very cool, world-class products for some big names like Nordstrom. Bryan Maniotakis had the best quote of the night was in regards to their Blue Nile build-and-buy-your-own-diamond-ring mobile app: “We were concerned people wouldn’t do big ticket purchases through apps. We were wrong. I think we might hold the record for the largest in-app purchase so far – a $300,000 diamong ring bought from within our app.”
And moderator and Digital Alberta board member, Arleigh Vasconcellos, sent me this additional tidbit:
The evening touched on everything from developing mobile apps for enterprise, to the latest in iOS trends, to app discovery and distribution. The panel dove into everything from current challenges – which the panel agreed was recruiting good staff, keeping up with the speed of the industry, and developing across multiple platforms and OS systems – to talking about the emerging trends including the rise of the table and the need to streamline the app and mobile software as a service discovery process.
A fundamental need for the industry remains, how do I drive users to my target audience. All in all the Digital Alberta Mobile Innovation Showcase was a great success. Stay tuned for the next industry segmented showcase.
Mobile has really heated up in Calgary. In fact, the Calgary chapter of Mobile Monday is slated to re-start next Monday night, March 5, at the Poynt offices at 6pm.
