‘I didn’t even know there were any restaurants near the convention center,’ or ‘I knew what T stop to get off at.’ That was huge. All of these things are about saving time, which is your most valuable asset at a conference.”
For the library conference, 750 people downloaded the app, and each time they opened the application, they spent an average of 13.5 minutes using it, Gilroy says. (That’s an astronomical figure, by the standards of most websites or informational apps.) The app can be configured to show advertisements, with Swift Mobile and the venue owner or event host splitting the revenues.
Behind the app are a standard template and a Web-based backend that can easily be customized for any venue, Gilroy explains. The Mass Mobile Month app is essentially a one-off job, seeded with multiple events around Boston in place of the multiple conference sessions that would be listed in the conventional (pardon the pun) version.
Already, the company is in discussions with convention-center authorities in Atlanta, Orlando, Miami, Houston, Austin, and Rosemont, IL (the Chicago suburb adjacent to O’Hare International Airport) about the idea of producing versions of the app tailored for their own meeting facilities. Swift Mobile’s agenda for 2010 also includes bringing out native versions of its convention center app for other smartphone platforms, starting with Android and BlackBerry and moving on to Windows Phone and Palm/WebOS.
“I think one of the things we’ve done with this model is figure out how to actually make money on mobile apps,” says Gilroy. And it turns out that the solution isn’t to sell apps directly to convention attendees—rather, it’s to sell the service of creating and managing the apps to convention centers and big professional associations, who see it as a way to add value to the events they host. I know that’s what it will do for Mass Mobile Month.
