Enabling the Mobile Revolution (Finland, It’s Your Opportunity, too!)

When we founded Akumiitti back in the mid-1990′s it was all different. No VC money, no web browsers as we now know them and no Startup Sauna to boost the university entrepreneurship. In the last 15 years, we’ve seen the appearance of numerous Internet Services written in HTML as well as the rise and decline of Nokia. We’re now about to experience another wave of growth, this time it truly is all about the mobile revolution.

In the early days of the Internet, and when HTML was new, many businesses were first reluctant to create their web site. I can still remember our team selling the idea of getting into the “internet”. It was not that important for many first, it was more important to be in the phone catalog (remember those, anybody?). Gradually numerous companies were building simple or not so simple web sites for their businesses. What once was a bold move by the early adopters quickly became a necessity for every business.

Back to the future.  We live now year of 2012. People have their iPhonesand cellular networks are reasonably fast in most parts of the country. All those great mobile ideas (see for example this) once envisioned more than ten years ago by the pioneers are suddenly feasible. Smartphones are everywhere, 3G networks are fast and most importantly people are actually willing to use the phone for almost anything.

We have the population exceeding 7 billion people, but also more than 1 billion smartphones. People are more and more accessing all the services from the mobile phone instead of going back to their desk and using the “computer”. Makes sense, why not making that purchase, reservation or other transaction right away while you’re on the move.

The problem is that we still don’t have easy mobile access to every business. Many “transactions” you want to do while on the go are still not possible with your phone. Try for example buying a train ticket, ugh.

To make it worse, one thing Apple and iPhone did regarding the mobile services is setting the expectation level higher. People now expect the mobile service to be easy-to-use, responsive and quickly giving the function it was built for. And to make it worse, there are more mobile platforms coming up, Android is already here and Windows Mobile is an aggressive new kid in the block who’s dad got a lot fo money.

The thing is that while most of the businesses haven’t even got into the mobile yet, the game just got more difficult. Not only should they make the mobile services easy-to-use but should also support many mobile platforms – and have actual services available through the mobile phone. There are not enough mobile app developers in the world to make all those apps the way how they are currently done. And it’s only getting more complex all the time.

Enter the new world enabled and enhanced by AppGyver!

AppGyver make building great mobile services easy. Remember all those people who have mastered creating web sites in HTML? The good news is that all of these can now use their existing skills to enter the booming mobile app creation business. You may be wondering what’s the news here, couldn’t they do it anyway? Not really. Creating great mobile apps traditionally required learning platform specific languages,  creating every line of code on their own and doing this separately for each mobile platform. All of this meant that the cost of mobile app projects was way beyond typical cost level acceptable by  the business owners.

At this point you may be wondering what does this have to do with Finland? AppGyver is actually creating the foundation for the next industrial revolution. As we happen to have a lot of technically skilled people available in Finland and huge market pull for great mobile services, it’s actually a great opportunity for those being able to take advantage of this. AppGyver not only makes creating mobile services easy, it’s also made faster with ever increasing variety of ready-made modules. We already have more than 1000 developers from 50+ countries so quite many have already taken a note of this. The number of these developers will soon be tens and tens times higher, it’s a huge business opportunity for anybody paying attention.

So what’s the future going to look like?

Let’s take another look back. The first iPhone was released in January 2007, that’s about five years ago. The Apple App Store opened in July 2008, so that’s actually existed less than four years. In that time more than 25 BILLION (that’s 25.000.000.000) apps have been downloaded. OK, the count does include all the updates to each app but anyway, it’s a lot. But that is not my point. The point is that all this has happened in really short time. And we can for sure count on new phenomenons to change the world.

We can count on the following trends to continue:

  1. People want an easy and convenient access to all services they use daily or weekly, with any device, anywhere
  2. Mobile phone (smartphone) is one of the devices that will be used to access all those services
  3. However, most services are not easily accessible with the mobile phone (currently)
  4. There is a huge demand for great mobile services and really very few people can build those currently
  5. HTML5 is one of the standards that a lot of people see important in this transition. But it is not enough

What we have done in AppGyver is building a tool that helps all those millions of people with HTML skills to build great mobile apps. Not only can you do everything you need to publish your app with our AppGyver Studio, you can also take advantage of various modules and wizards making your life easier and easier. You still need to be able to program, of course.

Check it out, it’s at appgyver.com.