Awaiting its official launch,
Shindig Mobile has found a new type of client, the college campus. The makers of the fully customizable event series app—whose clients include
Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Live Arts,
Second Conf, and the
American Association of Cancer Research—will work closely with
Campus Philly to discover how their cross-platform mobile technology can serve the higher education sector. Shindig is currently hiring a sales rep and expects to add a few more positions at the beginning of next year.
“Campuses throw lots of events with lots of people who always need to know what’s going on.” Corey Floyd, CEO of Shindig, says. “There’s extra-curricular activities, student orientation. [Shindig] has a lot of mapping capabilities. The system can help people with navigating buildings and finding a class.”
Normally, when an organization wants patrons to track their events, they build and distribute an individual app with separate versions for Android, iOS, mobile web and other platforms. According to Floyd, this can easily cost $100,000. Shindig provides a comprehensive events-app structure from a central platform that’s already hooked into a distribution channel and can publish across all mobile devices. The client adds data and branding using mobile web templates, similar to the way a blog works, drastically reducing the price point.
The Shindig concept began as the 2010
Philly Beer Week App, which Floyd and several Shindig co-founders, including Johnny Bilotta, Kevin Lee and Michael James—who are all longtime
IndyHall members and successful app contributors—built after a conversation at
Coco Heads Meetup. After Beer Week, a few contributors moved on and Salas Saraiya, and later Mike Zornek, joined the team. The Beer Week apps, they discovered, had implications for a larger problem.
“We were building [the Beer Week apps] as a one-off.” Floyd says. “We built one for iphone, then one for Android; it was starting to get hard. That’s when we put together this concept of building a platform where we could put [all versions] out at one time.”
“We built a backend that worked for us and it worked well. About a year ago we started thinking, ‘if this system works for us why not make it available for anyone to use?’ So what started out as finding a destination for beer in Philadelphia can now be ‘How can I get to my class?’” Floyd says.
Shindig’s official launch and party is planned for late October.
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Source: Corey Floyd, Shindig
Writer: Dana Henry