Also, Read our 5 Really Good Reasons Not To Make Your Own Mobile Application page

Learn how we quickly mobilize your brand by turning your web microsite into a native application(What is a web microsite anyway?)  Think of a “microsite” as a “child” to your main PC-based website.  If your main website is www.YourBrand.com, then your web-based microsite might be www.YourBrand.mobi, or http://m.YourBrand.com.  The beauty of using the web to create your microsite is that you have access to all the same data that your main PC-based site does.

Additionally, since your microsite is just a website, your existing programmers will know exactly what to do to make it based on your requirements.  We even have a robust development section to help them build the microsite out.  You get to use all your existing databases, image assets, and even much of your existing code to make a “child” microsite to your main PC website.  And since you’re developing to the web, the benefits to you are enormous.  You can use your existing analytics or multivariate testing methodologies on your microsite.

This Sounds great!  So what’s the problem?

Web-based microsites are much different than downloadable, “native” applications.  While building web microsites is typically inexpensive (because you’re just coding to the web) and fast, you also face some very significant limitations.  Chief among them is that web microsites don’t have access to the features of the phone, such as its camera, GPS for location, contact address book, accelerometer & more.  If you were to build native phone applications for each type of phone (i.e, Objective C for iPhone, Java for BlackBerry) you could get access to these features.

Well then, I’ll just create a native application, right?

That approach has serious drawbacks too.  Native phone applications are basically “software” instead of web development, meaning you need to find talented (and expensive) software programmers to create these applications.  But it gets worse.  Native applications must be re-downloaded each time you want to make a change.  So creating a native phone application severely restricts your ability to innovate.  In fact,  we would argue that by definition, a native software application will never be as good as a web application, because you put the majority of your resources into the web, and you can innovate on the web very quickly.  So if you were to code a native software application, it would be outdated the day it was released.

PointAbout solves this problem.  Our approach gives you the benefits of a native phone application and the benefits of a light-weight web application by combining the best of the two approaches.

When our thin-client native application launches your website or web application, we provide it with location and user profile data, so you will know exactly where in the world the user is, and also exactly who the user is (provide your users want to share that information with you!).  Our thin-client application also gives you access to the phone’s camera, address book, accelerometer, and more, so you can build a web application that looks and feels just like a native application.

Suddenly, an entire new world is open to you. Now you can customize how your web application interacts with each user based on their location and their profile information. You could, for example, provide special promotions to users near your physical store to entice them to come in. Or provide them location-relevant data from your online service. Only your imagination will limit this new channel of communication.

As a PointAbout white labeled application, you will also have access to the entire PointAbout Application Gallery – a gallery of web applications we’ve made location aware, allowing you to include a filtered list of related and complimentary applications along with yours to increase the stickiness and longevity of your application.

PointAbout makes your mobile website location aware. We abstract the user’s location via any means available, including GPS and Cellular ID triangulation across multiple carriers and handset platforms, so all you have to worry about is improving your existing web infrastructure to handle this location data. We can even help with that, through our Certified Developer Program of available developers to assist in implementing your vision with location data.

Additionally, you can use our API’s and widgets to take advantage of user location and profile data. Want to reach out to all the male PointAbout users between 18 and 35 who are in downtown Washington, DC right at this moment, and offer them your product or service? Want to ask all the female PointAbout users between 35 and 60 who are in San Francisco right now and give them a special promotion? No problem, this and much more is possible with PointAbout, and the privacy process is completely managed by the user, so they only share the data they want to share.

What if you don’t have a web microsite? We can help.

If you have a vision for your mobile strategy, but you don’t have the resources to implement it, we can help.  Through our certified development partners, we’re able to project-manage and implement the entire mobile lifecycle based on your requirements.

Watch a video showing how the process works

Here is a video detailing how our private-labeling process works:

See the benefits in action: Learn from our “best-practice” case studies

If you’d like to see how PointAbout clients are successfully implementing our approach in their businesses, take a look at our case studies and best practices.