app economy

SXSW has traditionally been a stronghold for lifestyle technology.  Until recently, the Interactive crowd went as far as shunning the mere notion that enterprise business process or even mere productivity apps had anything to do with the social interaction of the creative minds that mingled amid the balmy spring weather of Austin.

As our modern-day society evolves into a more interconnected ecosystem via ubiquitous Internet connectivity and the adoption of diverse device usage, we are also noticing that there is growing demand for quality developers and programmers. This trend of a more forward-thinking digital society has driven companies to not only realize, but also prioritize developments in creating faster, more efficient and user-friendly digital services and applications.

Some of my favorite stories emerging from the app economy are those of apps that actually created platforms. In most cases, these platforms emerge from vision and strategy where the backend driving the app can and should be available to serve a larger ecosystem. The following stories are of companies that saw the potential of their functionality beyond their own successful apps.

Functionality infusion with Sincerely

At this moment, we’re in the thick of the U.S. presidential election season—the Republican nominating convention is about to start and the Democratic one is just around the corner. Only a few weeks ago, the world was abuzz with the London Olympics, and now many of us are thinking about Labor Day, Back to School, NFL games, elections, and on to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, into the holidays.

One period of my career that I always try to keep in mind was my time with Salesforce.com. It was 2002—the economy was in lockdown mode and everyone was looking for innovation on a budget. I started selling Salesforce Automation (SFA) as a multi-tenant SaaS solution, and it turned out to be exactly the right offering for the right market at the right time.

In the past year, we’ve seen a surge in mobile devices and smartphones plunging into mainstream, giving millions of people the capability to browse the Internet, watch movies and stream music anywhere, without ever having to find a place to sit down and boot up a laptop or desktop. In fact, in a recent Gartner report, worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users reached a whopping 419 million units in the second quarter of 2012, where open OS smartphone devices made up over 36.7% of all mobile device sales.

Platforms have become a driver of new technologies, businesses and economies. Many in our industry focus on companies looking to enable others to create and deploy on existing foundations. And so a lot of media attention goes to APIs that generate innovation, energy and attention from third party developers in what we call the “App Economy”. Yet, many platforms have been generating revenue with the simple strategy of selling access to their valuable data.