Mobile apps have dominated the news for the last year, with seemingly every development software vendor adding mobile capabilities. With so many vendors offering mobile apps, how can any company know which option to choose?
The organizers of the annual IBM International Power event in the UK decided to help companies with this problem. They recently organized a “Data Challenge”, giving mobile app software vendors a chance to put their money where their mouth is.
The rules were simple: Participating vendors had one week to build a mobile application over the same sample database. At the end of the time, each vendor presented their mobile app to the event’s attendees.
Only 6 companies participated in the challenge, and mrc UK was one of them. The result: Using m-Power, they created a mobile application that far exceeded expectations. Rather than simply create a BI-type applications (like most other participants), they instead opted for a mobile extranet, complete with:
- A shopping cart ordering system,
- Advanced user-based security,
- Web pivot table, and
- A ranking report.
Additionally, the application is cross-platform compatible–meaning it works (and looks native) across all devices and operating systems. To top it off, the mobile app is available in three different languages (English, French, and Chinese). Like all m-Power apps, it’s designed to detect the user’s device type and language, and automatically display the appropriate app layer. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about m-Power’s approach to mobile and translation, check out this article.
To get a better idea of what they built, here are a few screenshots of the mobile application:
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If you think that’s pretty nice for just a week, here’s the kicker: Feeling that the 7-day timeframe was too long, mrc UK decided to start the development on the Monday before the deadline (Nov. 8th)…meaning they built the whole thing in only 3 days!
How about you?
Is your company considering mobile apps? m-Power lets you build cross-platform mobile web apps automatically. To try m-Power for yourself, sign up for a free trial.