BetaKit recently covered Vancouver-based QuickMobile’s $3.3 million funding from BDC IT Venture Fund and Vancity to take its mobile event apps international, and at that time it also hinted at launching a more DIY mobile event app product for its existing enterprise clients. Today the company announced the release of SnapApp, a self-serve app that lets customers create and distribute custom event apps, with the ability to customize both features and branding. The company’s current customer base includes 25 of the Fortune 100 companies.
Primarily targeted at large multinationals that hold many internal meetings and public-facing events, the product came as a response to both trends QuickMobile observed, and customer demand. “Over the last year and a half, we have started to work with a lot with Fortune 500 companies. A lot of these large enterprises, they do hundreds, some of them do thousands of meetings every year. When you do that many meetings, there are a lot of things that come up all of a sudden,” CEO Patrick Payne said in an interview with BetaKit.
Payne said some of the barriers customers faced were the cost of building individual event apps, the ability to quickly rebrand the look and feel of the app and customize the features to accommodate varying departmental needs, in addition to security concerns and distribution. SnapApp aims to tackle these issues, with QuickMobile first building a master app for companies, which can include everything from program guides, meeting schedules and speaker lists, to more social functions like in-app chatting and networking. Then meeting organizers have access to the company’s QuickStart backend content management system (CMS) to start creating their own event apps, and distributing them to attendees within the master app itself via a pin or QR code.
The company will charge an upfront fee for the master app based on both the number of standard and custom features enterprises request. It will then charge a per-app fee either on a licensing or subscription basis based on any number of variables, ranging from the number of meetings to the number of attendees.
The all-in-one approach to a white labeled event app will help the company stay ahead of competitors like Cvent which has been very active in the space with its acquisitions of mobile event app providers CrowdCompass and CrowdTorch, in addition to other startups offer custom event app creation like EventMobi and Guidebook. The key differentiator for QuickMobile is its focus on enterprise, and the customization it offers in contrast to a more template-driven approach. That customization also comes with a big budget though, as its focus on enterprise shows.
Payne said the company is also responding to requests to turn its event apps into a complete enterprise collaboration and social tool to keep employees in the loop and up to date with internal happenings. “Since we started to talk about this and delivered it, a lot of organizations have said to us, ‘why don’t we put some other things in there, like our blog feed, or a video of our CTO talking about our product road map, and why don’t we start to integrate networking components into the master app. So that it begins to become that tool the entire organization is using year round just to communicate with each other,” Payne added.
QuickMobile will also be rolling an analytics component which event organizers will be able to use to see how users are interacting with the mobile app, so they can optimize them for both content and features. With its established client base and new focus on providing a year-round DIY app for companies’ internal and public events, QuickMobile will likely be able to continue building on its customer base, who are looking to create mobile event solutions but don’t necessarily have an in-house team that can build a new app for every event.
