Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution (Part 3)

SM: OK. Give me some examples of things that can be automated. Let’s say even 40%, 50%, 60% who knows, whatever is needed that can be automated, what is that piece?

CR: A lot of it has to do with how you manage the data that’s being transported to the device, whether it’s rich media like audio and video and things like that, those are very transportable across all of the areas. In our platform that we use for native development, we have our own Java scripting engine built into it. In that way, our application engine allows us to many of the Java script types of things that you could do in a website. We’re able to then pour our client framework over to all the different devices. So, what we’re able to do is say that pressing a button is abstracted from the Java script code. The native button push down into our client framework and so we’re just driving the behavior. It’ll look native just like an iPhone app, but it’s driven off of a simpler cross-platform way to think about designing it. 

SM: Give us some examples of the kinds of clients you work with, and what kind of use cases are you experiencing?

CR: It runs across the board. We’ve done storefront applications for companies like AT&T and Verizon, you know, media storefronts, application storefronts. We do sports applications, which may have dynamic game tracking built into them. We’ve done a few in the hospitality space. On the TV side, we’ve done – again, using the same technology – we’ve done EPG type applications where you’re selecting from VOD content or looking at a menu of channels and content that’s available. It’s a pretty wide assortment. We don’t do a lot of casual games or gaming applications. We stuck to rich media and content-centric applications. We’re starting to see enterprises wanting to get more involved. So, applications that have utility for increasing productivity, whether that’s in hospitality, like restaurant type applications, or sales force automation for field sales and things like that. We’re starting to see more interest in that. It feels like enterprises are beginning to embrace more mobile applications. The other challenge that enterprises face today is that they used to tell all of their employees what phones they could use, and today, a lot of enterprises are loosening that up. So, if somebody wants to use an iPhone, he uses an iPhone or whatever, which has added a software challenge with their employees for a lot of these enterprises.

SM: OK. Now, let’s say I have some sort of media company with somebody with a substantial amount of content on my website, how do I budget this process?

CR: There’re a couple of ways to look it. The way we do it is because we’re a user experience company, we tend to work back from the UI and see how much application you want. That’s really what drives the mobile app features. So, we take our customers through a design-centric approach to determine what the capabilities and qualities of the application need to be. Then we marry the technology to it to create the overall solution in a cost-effective way. It can vary. If it’s a very simple application, you can have applications for thousands of dollars. But if you’re doing something sophisticated, where there has to be a bunch of backend integration either by us or by third-party systems integrators to [create] proprietary backend systems, then it can be millions of dollars for applications like this. It really varies.

SM: In your client base, what kind of adoption are you seeing? Are people spending millions of dollars on mobile enabling their Web applications?

CR: We’re seeing, over the last two years, a consistent budgetary increase. It’s deals like – it’s starting to slow down – 200% or 300% budget growth right now in mobile. It’s because smart phones have hit a high scale point where they’re so relevant to the market today that when we started in mobile in the early days of feature phones, typically any budgets that were coming out were coming out of marketing, branding [budgets]. They didn’t expect to make any money. They didn’t expect to have a ton of financial turnout for those investments. They were brand building. So, in major media companies, everyone needed a small mobile app. But it was treated that way, so the small budget was tied to other marketing expenditures.

What we’re seeing now is that in many cases, mobile is potentially, the most important investment people are making today. We’ve been talking with a lot of customers who believe that they should start thinking about the mobile website, mobile experience first and then – because it forces you to pick the key features that you want to deliver – add on a richer, broader Internet experience. A lot of our customers are beginning to change their mentality about the flow and process of how they think about mobile. Instead of being a reactionary thing where you would go out and do transcoding just to do it, they’re saying, ok, maybe this is the center now. I’ve heard lots of executives talk about how in four or five years 70% or 80% of their Internet traffic could be coming through mobile devices. The use case is moving so rapidly. We’re seeing a dramatic change in budgets. So, what does that mean? If you’re [in charge of] a very large media-centric company, you’re spending lots of money at this point. If [the company is] small, a boutique or something like that, then you’re still spending lots more money, but it’s still proportional to your overall spending.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution
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