Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Blog

Pyxis Mobile's app contest showcases crazy creativity

By Rodney H. Brown

Late last month, I had the great experience of being a guest judge for the seventh annual App-from-Scratch internal development competition at Pyxis Mobile Inc. in Waltham. I came away with two observations: There are some really creative people in this industry in New England, and tablets are even hotter for devs than for consumers.

The competition sees a handful of teams from across disciplines in Pyxis developing apps that they think can be hits, based on Pyxis’ core mobile platform. This year, the teams were asked to develop an app for the iPad and make it applicable across as many different operating systems and devices as possible. It should also take advantage of as many of the latest features that the newest Apple Inc. iOS offered.

The offerings ranged from games to budget trackers to collaboration tools to the winner, an app called StoreFront. In a whopping 48 hours, the team behind StoreFront created a mobile e-commerce retail product that could be white-labeled for any retailer that wanted a mobile store. The app was ported to BlackBerry, Android, iPhone and iPad right out of the gate, and the team demonstrated its features by scraping data from existing retailers and incorporating it into the app – logos, product data, prices, pictures and everything. In two days.

One of the primary criteria for winning the competition was the potential market reach of the app, and StoreFront had that in spades. Any retailer with a web store but no mobile app could go mobile in a flash, and even a brick-and-mortar store without a web presence could have a mobile store in short order.

While the other apps ranged across the gamut in terms of marketability, not one of them lacked in creativity. But perhaps the most enjoyably creative part of the whole competition was the introduction videos that each team made, which were shown prior to their demos. Pyxis has some writers that could jump right into the staff at Conan O’Brien’s show, and a slew of naturally funny actors.

If every company let their employees have that much fun while creating truly valuable products, there would be a massive drop-off in employee churn in the tech sector.