Handy code-free mobile app development resources for small businesses
Summary
Many small businesses still shrug off the idea of creating a mobile app but the case for doing so continues to become stronger, not just when it comes to engaging more effectively with customers but for empowering employees. I wrote about one example of the latter scenario last month: Ski and board shop Mount Everest in Westwood, N.J., created a mobile app to extend its LightSpeed point-of-sale (POS) solution so that the sales team is alerted when priority orders arrive. One is eco-friendly pet manufacturing company West Paw Design, which created an iPad app for its warehouse and inventory workers to eliminate paperwork and speed processes based on real-time information. As more people become familiar with mobile apps, this trend will only continue, and its a pretty good bet that this will accelerate dramatically over the next three years, if you consider ongoing data collected by the Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project. My past blogs about mobile application development resources for those interested in taking on that challenge still generate credible readership traffic, so it seemed like a reasonable juncture to update the list that I first started assembling in April 2012.