New Technology Lets Businesses Create Mobile Apps that Pop
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Museums, publishers and other content owners are scrambling to climb aboard the mobile apps train and monetize their content. But creating customized mobile apps can be a cumbersome and costly process. Toura’s Mobile App Producer (MAP) 2.0 offers a solution that may benefit traditional content owners and other businesses as well.
MAP is a cloud-based content management system that enables content owners to create interactive, cross-platform apps and publish them simultaneously on smartphone and tablet devices. It offers a highly customized front-end design options that helps users shape the unique look and feel of their apps without the expense of a hiring an app developer.
Today MAP is able to create apps for devices running on Apple's IOS or Google's Android operating systems, but the company intends to welcome other mobile operating systems inside the tent in the near future, including webOS and Windows, Aaron Radin, Toura's co-founder and CEO, told BusinessNewsDaily.
The mobile apps created with MAP are not about producing things like documents, spreadsheets or presentations; they're about creating interactive content experiences. These apps orchestrate or curate the consumption of content and enhance the experience by providing real-time context for individual content. It's much like a guided tour that pulls together enriching text, sights and sounds to make the material come alive and pop.
MAP has been used to create award-winning mobile apps for the British Museum, publisher Wiley & Sons and the Corning Museum of Glass as well as a Concorde Experience app for National Museums Scotland.
Though the apps created to date with MAP exist in the art, culture and publishing arenas, Radin sees potential for their use in commercial applications such as business-to-business product presentations, real estate projects, travel and tourism and health care.
When compared with traditional custom application development, which can often cost from $20,000 to $100,000 and more, MAP offers significant savings in time and money. The cost for developing a mobile app with MAP is a fraction of that, Radin said, often at a savings of up to 75 percent, putting mobile app development within the reach of many more content owners.
Because MAP is Web-based, app creation is a simple process. Content owners upload multimedia digital content into their MAP libraries and then structure and design the content to create the desired experience. The app can be previewed throughout the process in both smartphone and tablet modes.
When the content owners are satisfied with the app they've created, Toura submits it to the App Store and Android Market.
Toura believes there's never been a better time for content owners to monetize those assets by creating a mobile app.
"This year is really an inflection point for the level of mobile content consumption," said Radin.
This story was provided by BusinessNewsDaily, sister site to IT TechNewsDaily. Reach BusinessNewsDaily senior writer Ned Smith at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @nedbsmith.
