ViziApps

Enterprises and small-to-medium-size businesses tend to first think of smartphone apps when considering a new way to increase user productivity or strengthen customer bonds. And of course, smartphones apps can address those needs very effectively.But now it’s time to also provide apps for tablets, to accommodate business users who enjoy working on the iPad or an Android tablet.

Smartphone use for business is exploding. Users view them as essential personal devices that can easily handle work as well as personal tasks.  As a result, smartphones often are selected and purchased by individual users and supported through their employer’s BYOD program. Tablets for business apps, on the other hand, are more likely to be selected and supplied by employers.

According to Gartner, the number of tablets sold in 2012 will hit the 119 million mark. That’s nearly twice the 2011 level of 60 million units. Tablet sales will continue to rise, the research firm predicts, with 450 million tablets sold annually by 2016. By then, enterprise purchases will account for 53 million units.

As the popularity of tablets in the enterprise skyrockets, employees, customers, partners and suppliers will need apps specifically created to run on tablets, taking advantage of those devices’ formats and superior presentation features. So businesses will have to find a way to build new custom tablet apps quickly and cost effectively. They will also need to be able to quickly update and maintain them throughout their life cycle at low cost.

The ViziApps mobile app development tool meets those requirements. With its drag and drop approach to design, ViziApps enables business people without coding experience to create apps for iOS and Android tablets.  Moreover, the tool’s visual design capabilities allow app builders to create graphics once for use in a tablet app and deploy those graphics across multiple mobile platforms. As a result, business people can plan and implement tablet app development projects in days or weeks, rather than months, and use expense reports to handle app subscription fees.

Create Own Apps, a website that reviews DIY mobile app development tools, has awarded ViziApps a 4-star rating. The site was created to help mobile app builders compare different solutions and find the right one for their mobile app development projects.

We’re delighted to receive this recognition for the ViziApps drag and drop tool, which is used by enterprises and small business to build mobile business apps for use in a wide range of industries. Read the full review here.

Mobile business apps will assume a larger role in the enterprise, as the IT industry relies more than ever on mobile devices, cloud services and other technologies.

In a new report, IDC Predictions 2013: Competing on the 3rd Platform, International Data Corporation predicts that the coming year will witness the IT industry’s accelerated move to “the 3^rd platform” – built on mobile computing and cloud services, as well as social networking and big data analytics.

“The IT industry as a whole is moving toward the mobile/social/cloud/big data world of the 3rd Platform much more quickly than many realize: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90% of all the growth in the IT market,” said Frank Gens, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC. “Companies that are not putting 80% or more of their competitive energy into this new market will be trapped in the legacy portion of the market, growing even slower than global GDP.”

In 2013, IDC expects IT spending to surpass $2.1 trillion, up 5.7% from 2012, with smart mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, and eReaders) experiencing nearly 20% growth. “Mini tablets” will enjoy wide acceptance during that period, IDC predicts, and will represent as much as 60% of the 170 million tablets expected to be shipped.  Other analyst firms also see a bright future for tablets, forecasting that global sales of those devices will span from $49 billion to more than $77 billion in 2015.

(For a concise overview of tablets in the enterprise, see James Kendrick’s ZDNet article, which points out the benefits and challenges those mobile devices present for IT.)

For all the different mobile devices that will be deployed for business use in the coming months and years, enterprises will require well-crafted, data-rich mobile business apps. The most effective mobile apps will afford enterprise users access to the data they need to work effectively wherever they are. DIY mobile app development tools like ViziApps, which streamline the app building process and hold down mobile app costs, will help enterprises build the apps they need. The no coding data management capabilities of ViziApps make it especially well-suited for this business need. Any company planning for the transition to the 3^rd Platform needs to include a plan for providing employees, customers, partners and others with mobile business apps that give them easy access to information wherever and whenever they perform their jobs.

The new iPhone, with its taller screen, provides a larger canvas for the mobile business apps you’re building with ViziApps. To help you make the best use of that space, ViziApps now provides iPhone 5 support.

Rest assured that apps you’ve already built with ViziApps for the iPhone 4 and 4S will run just fine on the iPhone 5. Now you can build an app for the iPhone 5 and know that when your users download it from the App Store, it will automatically be resized to fit their screen, whether they run your app on an iPhone 4, 4S, or 5.

For more on how to build an iPhone app, take a look at the ViziApps approach to mobile app development and sign up for a free account.

In response to customer feedback, we are always adding new features to the ViziApps mobile app development tool. By enhancing the tool, we’re enabling enterprises and small businesses to more quickly and easily design and publish mobile apps to promote their business and strengthen customer and partner relationships.

One of the newest features in ViziApps is Snap to Grid.

This feature lets app creators easily place widgets or other graphics in a design, positioning and sizing them just the way they want them to fit. By making it easier to align design components in an app, Snap to Grid helps speed ViziApps-built mobile apps to market.

A recent survey by App Central revealed that many enterprise mobility projects are not necessarily covered by IT budgets. Instead they may be funded by business units, marketing, sales and executive accounts. As a result, enterprises often must scramble to find the budget and technical resources needed to meet requirements for mobile apps that can boost employee productivity and enhance customer relationships.

With ViziApps, any enterprise group can design and build their own mobile apps at no cost. Then, after their app is completed, ViziApps charges a low monthly subscription publishing fee, based on number of app pages and users. Making updates to a published app is free. Updates are pushed to app users automatically, at no additional charge.

As a result, enterprises can take advantage of the ViziApps no-coding approach to mobile app development to design build mobile business apps in much less time than a traditional software development project would take. When the need for a new mobile app arises, users with sophisticated computer skills can create branded apps quickly. And because ViziApps fees are very low, both business units and IT teams can now provide mobile apps for use by customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and others on a very reasonable budget.

Recent enhancements to the ViziApps mobile app creation platform allow testing of spreadsheet queries directly from the ViziApps Studio. In other words, it is no longer necessary to go out of ViziApps to your mobile device to test individual spreadsheet queries.

In response to requests from our users, we added this new capability to speed mobile app development and eliminate the need for app creators to move in and out of the ViziApps Studio to test every query made to a database.  (To take advantage of ViziApps data management capabilities, sign up for a free ViziApps account here if you haven’t already.)

Now mobile app creators can use this new graphical query tester early in the app design process to verify which queries are working and to identify issues that require attention. Every spreadsheet query in the ViziApps graphical query tree now has a green icon that represents this new testing tool for that particular query.

When a user clicks on it, a pop-up appears with that query for testing.

The tester works for all query types. For update, insert and where condition tests, the app creator enters test values in the empty device fields and clicks the “Test” button. That simple action submits the query and then displays the results in a second graphical response tree. Both single values and array values are displayed, as well as any query errors that may occur.

See for yourself how we’ve enhanced ViziApps data management capabilities by streamlining the testing of database queries within the ViziApps Studio.

If you’ve been thinking about creating a mobile app for your business but haven’t made much progress, consider two approaches that could help you reach your goal.

#1 Make a do-it-yourself mobile app.

New, disruptive technologies are making it possible for business people with basic office software skills to develop effective, visually appealing mobile apps. And with a robust DIY mobile app platform like ViziApps, enterprise business units, as well as small and medium sized businesses, can create mobile applications without skilled engineering resources. This approach does not require a sizable mobile app development budget or the technical expertise of an internal IT group or an outside programmer.

Mobile application development platforms that provide a drag-and-drop process for designing and creating mobile apps offer a way to meet the mobile app gap many businesses are experiencing. In significantly less time that it can take to design and develop an enterprise-quality application, a business can design and build a custom mobile app and publish it in the Apple App Store or in Google Play.

At a time when businesses are looking at ways to provide better customer service, the DIY approach offers significant cost and time savings, putting affordable mobile business apps within reach of organizations of all sizes.

#2 Enlist Expert Services to Build A DIY Mobile App

Producing a sophisticated mobile business app that incorporates business data from a Google Docs spreadsheet or SQL server can be accomplished in days on a platform like ViziApps. But for some people, even a day or two is more than they can spare to build a mobile app.

Those businesses can still take advantage of the cost and time savings the ViziApps “no coding” mobile app platform offers. ViziApps app development professionals work with business owners and enterprise managers to design and create mobile apps for a tenth the cost (or even less) than the cost of a traditional enterprise application. Now, those businesses can get a branded web, native, or hybrid app to meet their functional and aesthetic specifications built for them at very low cost.

Depending on their preferences, we can utilize the features of an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone or tablet and provide access to whatever data our customers require. For example, we work on apps designed to expand revenue-generating channels, incorporating features such as geo-location marketing, mobile payments and mobile social media integration, as well as apps for internal use.

Whichever approach a business takes to creating a mobile app, the DIY path or the route leveraging ViziApps professional app design services, the result is an attractive, low-cost mobile app tailored to meet current business needs and be updated easily whenever those needs change.

Have you considered creating a mobile business app that incorporates location-based services (LBS) as a way of gaining new customers? Results of a recent study provide some interesting insight into consumer views on LBS. They reveal that consumers worldwide are becoming increasingly amenable to sharing their location in return for a good, convenient deal.

In its Mobile Life study, global consultancy TNS found that more than 60 percent of respondents who do not yet use location-based services want to begin taking advantage of them.

A summary of the study results makes a strong case for targeting consumers with an LBS mobile app:

“Almost one fifth (19 per cent) of the world’s six billion mobile users are already using LBS, with more than three times this number (62 per cent) aspiring to do so in the future… Savvy LBS users have realized that there is something to be gained from sharing their locations with brands and retailers – with one in eight (12.5 per cent) sharing their location in exchange for a deal or special offer…Beyond current users of LBS, a third of people globally (33 per cent) who already or would like to use mobile voucher coupons, highly rate receiving deals when they are nearby a store that they like. One in five mobile users (21 per cent) stated that they find mobile advertising interesting if it is offering them a deal near their current location.”

James Fergusson, Global Head, Digital & Technology Practice at TNS, believes that mobile users are beginning to appreciate the rewards of disclosing their location. “We are really starting to see location based services ‘come of age’. People are realizing that sharing their location often offers some kind of reward in terms of a discount or deal. It is the combination of time and context – directing people towards a deal when they can easily redeem it – that unlocks a powerful tool for marketers to develop precise targeting approaches.”

Building a mobile app that uses LBS does not have to be a complex project. The ViziApps drag-and-drop visual approach allows business managers, IT professional and anyone with basic computer skills to create a custom locator mobile app for iOS and Android devices.  It’s just one category of mobile apps ViziApps users are building with the online based do-it-yourself mobile app development tool.

The development cycle for ViziApps is a streamlined process. You develop and update our app by using the ViziApps Studio, which is available on both PCs and Macs and is browser based.

The development environment is a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG one. There’s no HTML5, CSS3 or JavaScript to deal with – no coding at all. Even connecting to backend data sources is done without coding.

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