Which phone do you own? The answer to that would only be valid a few months from now. Mobile devices are the party wear of this generation: you buy one for as long as it is ‘trendy’ and dispense it off as fast as it came in after the next advertisement is out. Every manufacturer out there knows that the time elapsed between the device going off the shelf and into the trash-can is diminishing. This is one scenario that TABit seeks to leverage.
The other is the rapid foray of tablet computers into the domains of sales, e-learning and marketing. Didn’t the fancy builder you went to, show his suite of apartments on an iPad? Tablet kiosks are as common as the air around you in any decently upmarket retail store. The adoption of mobile technology has surpassed any optimistic predictions that were staunchly made a few years ago. As manufacturers slice prices, increase features offered and businesses score brownie points with customers for being so mobile savvy in their demos, there are interesting challenges and opportunities that emerge. The challenges could be put in the following ways:
- BYOD: More devices, more platforms bring in more cost for development and maintenance. Also there’s this challenge to keep the experience consistent, whether your client picks up the latest iPhone or a feeble Android phone from the pawn shop.
- Content: I am a client, who got an app ready across all platforms for 50000 USD. Now when you tell me, I need to shell ten grand more to change the theme from magenta to lilac, it frowns me over. Is there a way to update content easily without perforating the bank every time?
- Reusability: I am an app developer. The requirements recur many a times. For e.g. two different retail outlets wanting to ‘mobilize’ their content yet the finer details vary, which means the reusable parts themselves are in a state of constant reflux. And by the time something seems vaguely reusable, the next paying client comes knocking at the door.
- Choice of features: There are a few providers out there who do package content in some way or other and provide apps at a reasonable cost in some time. But what of features that are unwanted and yet billed for? What about that nice little rating feature that is not a part of the services being offered? How can features be plugged and played and billed for accordingly?
The Innovation and Intellectual Property Lab at e-Zest solutions saw an opportunity to come up with something that not only solves the challenges above but it also maximizes on the design and user experience and plugs all those needless holes that draws out more of the client’s precious money and time.
TABit, the framework, was designed to be a hyper accelerated content delivery platform to deliver quality, enriched user experience apps across multiple platforms, with laughably easy content management and … less cost! How does it do so? Let us look at the challenges and how it meets them.
- BYOD (an advantage now): TABit employs tried and tested hybrid mobile app development strategies that follow the ‘write once, run anywhere’ mantra quite assiduously. This saves more time than learning a mobile platform mobility SDK and offers far more control of the user experience. More the platforms targeted, the cost per platform for the client is reduced.
- Content Management (just got easier): TABit offers capabilities to take your content to your customers in multiple ways. Do you have a website which contains some of the content? TABit picks and packages it for you! Would you be comfortable clicking and editing the exact app as it is, on the web? Easy as ABC with TABit! And if there is vast amounts of repetitive content like a menu for example, there are easy Excel sheets that need to be updated and uploaded… and voila! The app stands updated!
- Reusability and Choice (two birds with one stone): The components of TABit are highly reusable and work as plug-n-play. The reusability speeds up the development and at the same time, unneeded components are easily excluded from the build and bill. The rich suites of components are being added on constantly, based on recurring requirements. Currently TABit employs over 30 components that span the entire array of user experience ranging from interactive image and video galleries, personalized content capture components like bookmarks and notes, to hotspots, Social Media, rating feature, 360 views and the long list goes on…
Let us look at a diagram that explains the ‘syncing’ mechanism of TABit.
TABit also boasts of unique performance gains by caching content and keeping it offline. This means something else for the clients too. One need not worry about the precariousness of wifi or network: the entire content is cached and kept offline for fast and interactive use.
TABit has already begun creating ripples across myriad domains such as HealthCare, E-Learning, Real Estate, Automobile, Electronics etc. The little mobile monster has got its basics right and from the looks of it, this one’s going to stay!
