A new Columbia company has set a lofty goal– introducing a new iPhone or iPad app each week for the two years.
In order to achieve that ambitious objective, the startup group 52apps is asking for the public’s help.
“We realized pretty early on we could come up with a couple good
ideas, but we weren’t going to come up with 100 over a two-year period,”
52apps CEO Steve Leicht said. Friday was the first of the company’s
“Idea Days,” in which about two dozen South Carolinians pitched their
ideas for new “apps” that they believe could be created.
“Apps” are an abbreviation for “applications,” or small programs on a
smartphone or tablet that can perform any number of functions. These
range the gamut from calculator to calendar to games to nearly anything
in between.
52apps is the creation of Arkansas
college students Brendan Lee and Christopher Thibault. The two developed
several “apps” during their time in school, including an algebraic
formula calculator and other note-taking software. Eventually the pair
created a library of design features that allowed them
to create entirely new programs from scratch in a relatively short
amount of time.
Thibault’s family moved to the Midlands three years ago while he was
still attending the University of Central Arkansas. At church one day,
his mother met Bill Kirkland after seeing him use an app remarkably
similar to one her son had created. Kirkland, it just so happened,
was an entrepreneur at the University of South Carolina’s Technology
Incubator.
After learning about the Arkansas boys, Kirkland wanted to know more about their work.
“We built things to help us with homework to help make our lives
easier in going to class,” Lee said, “When we put them on the (Apple
iTunes) store, we realized a lot of people had similar needs to us. And
they ended up selling relatively well without any marketing on our
part.”
“Relatively well”… meaning their programs had been used over a half-million times, with more than 40,000 new downloads each day.
Kirkland had seen enough. He reached out to Leicht, a fellow
technology entrepreneur, and convinced him to meet with the
up-and-coming designers. Leicht was similarly impressed.
“It normally takes three to four months to build a half-decent
application,” Leicht said, “These guys said they could build it in three
or four days. So we tested them. We gave them projects and they came
back sometimes within 24 hours with working prototypes… Within a couple
of days, they had something you could put out and sell.”
Leicht agreed to manage the administrative side of 52apps, allowing
Lee and Thibault to focus on designing programs and finishing
school. Lee is now enrolled at USC, while Thibault is taking online
courses at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith.
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iPhone
Bloomberg reports that the first generation of Microsoft’s Surface tablets will only support Wi-Fi connectivity to start, and won’t be able to connect with carriers’ proprietary 4G networks. But as Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi notes in the Bloomberg story, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing since many people are happy having only Wi-Fi connectivity on their laptops and tablets, and are also wary of having an LTE-connected tablet that could subject them to overage fees if they exceed their monthly limits. What’s more, the Wi-Fi-only iPad is cheaper than its counterpart that has both LTE and Wi-Fi, so it’s not as though Microsoft is missing out on big carrier subsidies by forsaking LTE for the time being.