Back to the Moscone Center again this week… interestingly enough, Google Now thinks that I work at the Moscone, too funny. It gives me cards with time to work in traffic throughout the days when I don’t go over there!
This time we went to AppsWorld, another apps marketplace/tradeshow/conference sort of thing. While it was chock a block full of booths compared to some of the other shows, and definitely more oriented towards app developers, the bad weather on the East Coast (super snow storm Nemo) was a bigger topic than the products, since a lot of app companies are located in the Boston area and not being able to get home was a problem for a lot of the exhibitors.
Overall, the floor was divided into enterprise apps (with it’s own mainstage), build your app companies – Steve from @TheMobileSmith was one of our favorites in this category, and the ubiquitous and always present ad platforms/promo companies/traffic buyers/sellers were out in force. There were clouds galore, with award winners like GitHub sharing the floor with RackSpace (working on a complete rebranding it looks like), and more than a few payment processors, not all of whom were clear about how they manage Google Play’s TOS with their billing schemas.
So we could logically conclude that if you had some money, wanted to build an app and then buy installs for your app, this was a great place to be.
The Microsoft folks were pushing Windows 8/Phone/Surface apps and trying to garner more developers and Blackberry also had a big presence.
Other cool stuff we saw – ShinobiControls – makes some really neat, interactive graphing software to use inside your app. Pie charts, bar charts, lines, all of it re-sizable, interactive, available on iOS and in beta for Android. PluralSight– developer training site that seems to have all the major bases covered and their online courses are large and involved. LogoGrab – you can turn any logo into a QR code if the user has their app installed, clients included Nike in the demo we saw.
Interesting in an odd sort of way – AppGratis, who claim to have a huge user base to push one app per day to in burst campaigns.
On the security front, we like Arxan, who claim to be able to help secure your app from reverse engineering and hacking — not a foolproof solution, they admit, but it’s sort of like the Club for cars – the thief sees that you’re being proactive and moves on to someone else that isn’t. Along that same line, Appthority is a company that will vet your app and certify as non harmful, especially useful in the enterprise world.
Kudos as well to Mack Flavelle from Tapstream for successfully using pictures of deer doing who knows what really in his Friday presentation!
My brain’s pretty wiped at this point, 4 shows in two weeks is enough to kick anyone’s ass, so I’m sure I probably missed something really incredible that you can’t live without but that’s just the way it goes sometimes.