Last month a Mini Maker Faire was held in Westport, Conn., to celebrate creators of homemade gadgets. The debut event, inspired by Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club, had been planned three months in advance. Michael Winser, who was in charge of the show’s website and list of exhibitors and potential attendees, heard of a tool for building customizable apps. He considered making one to announce the event. What, after all, would be more fitting than a self-made app for a do-it-yourself show?
But Winser was so busy he didn’t revisit the idea until a week before the event. He inputted the participants’ names and addresses into a spreadsheet, imported that to the app tool, and built the app in 15 minutes. It announced the event’s time, place, location, and had a news feed, photo gallery, and QR Code. “I literally spent more time gathering the data for the spreadsheet than I did editing the app,” says Winser.
The maker of the app tool is Yapp, (a contraction of Your App), which Maria Seidman and Luke Melia launched in New York City in early April. The idea is that average shmos and non-technics should be able to make their own private app, customize it for their event, and invite only those they want to download it to their smartphones. Yapp is currently beta testing their app template, and expects to start selling it in August.
Seidman, the former head of business development and new business incubation at Warner Brothers Digital, conjured the idea after moving to New York. When it was her turn to organize a monthly meeting of her Women in New York networking group, she became frustrated with email spamming and Facebook posts, which were public because most people don’t use the privacy function. So she scoured the web for an easy way to create a good-looking mobile application. The app generators she found assumed users had content elsewhere, required basic html manipulation for designs she found ugly, or “you needed eight manuals to use them,” she says.
To create the app she wanted, Seidman enlisted Melia, former director of software development at Oxygen Media and CTO at a social site for sports called We Play. “People want to express themselves with this new medium,” Seidman says. “We’re democratizing app technology.” Beta testers include a mountain climber who made one to document his climb of Mt. Everest, a private CEO summit, a conference for interns, a museum, and an engaged couple. The bride has leukemia and chemo is making it difficult for her to accompany the groom to planning events, so they used their app gallery to decide on the venue. So far, hundreds of beta testers’ invitees from 30 countries have downloaded yapps on their iPhones and Androids. Conferences, weddings, parties or social events make up roughly 60% of the yapps created. The remaining 40% is spread over assorted events.
