Make An App For Your Mobile Phone In 10 Minutes… WHAT?

Here is another awesome self- funded DC based startup I should have covered earlier.

The company called PointAbout. I met one of their co-founders, Dan Odio over a year ago in a lounge in Chinatown. Great guy! First thing Dan did, he pulled out his iPhone and went right to the point talking about his company, PointAbout A week later, I was invited to their office in DC to meet the rest of their crew.

If you also blog, you can totally see the similarity between their business model and the ones offered by blog hosting companies like WordPress, bloggers, and SixApart. Let me elaborate. Remember your Web 1.0 days when you wanted to set up a website? You needed to find a Web hosting company, then you needed to have the expertise to build the site, etc. If you do, I am sure you also remember the cost associated with it. Well, that was about 10 years ago. You can now do most of that with a tiny fraction of the cost in a few hours using any of the blog hosting companies like what I have done here with my blog using WordPress. PointAbout helps you to build a mobile App for your services in just less than an hour with a tiny fraction of the cost. They let you to quickly mobilize the content you’re already publishing, like RSS & XML feeds, APIs and HTML content. Their AppMakr service helps you to build native mobile applications in minutes instead of months, across multiple phone platforms like iPhone and Android without any ramp-up time and no need for proprietary programming expertise.

I hope they are working on support for Droid from Verizon, and many more to come including the Nexus One that Google plans to introduce tomorrow during CES show in Las Vegas. Considering, there are currently more than 100,000 iPhone apps and 20,000 Android apps, and mobile app downloads are expected to more than double to 5 billion in 2014, this will be great market opportunity for PointAbout. Not sure anyone else out there doing the same thing though.

As for $$$, I am not a mobile app developer. From what I know, it cost from $10,000 to $50,000 to create an iPhone apps the traditional way depending on the complexity. PointAbout‘s AppMakr promises to deliver a quality app in less than an hour for only $199. If you want your app published under your own name or Apple’s publishers license, you need to come up with $499. It is an extremely simple product and doesn’t help anyone create complex non-RSS-enabled apps, but it seems that PointAbout has democratized app development in a way that hasn’t been done before.

I think AppMakr is fine for simple apps that deliver basic RSS content, but not sure it works for the more complicated that required push notification, custom graphics, GPS, peer-to-peer, and camera – similar to how WordPress, bloggers, and SixApart are good if you need to create a simple or a little bit better than simple site. However, you will still need to spend more to own your own site if you need to do ecommerce, etc.

Here are some of the Brands they’ve already mobilized:

more…

To start building your own app, you go on AppMakr and register for an account. Then you title your app. It automatically populates a list of suggested RSS feeds for you. You can select whichever ones you want to be in your app. Then, you can custom-make icons, splash-screens and headers.