First, I’d like to welcome all of you to PowWow’s new site. We’ve officially launched the company and the PowWow product today. PowWow was born from the need to deliver on the promise of mobile. Tablets are being deployed in droves, but rich enterprise apps have lagged far behind. Companies want and need to move thousands of apps to tablets with an adaptive UI that includes the gestures, keyboards and other features that we’ve come to expect from mobile. Once they have the apps they need, they then have to be able to jointly edit and collaborate. Before today, none of this has been possible. Now PowWow makes it real for the first time.
When talking with the CIO of a major corporation, he told me about the issues they had when they first deployed iPads for their large North American sales force. The main thing was a set of rather boring applications – he called it the “Meat and Potatoes” of computing, that has to work before the sales professionals were comfortable using their iPads. Things like Time and Expenses, CRM, inventory control and more. They needed the meat and potatoes apps before they got broad adoption on the iPad.
It had a big effect on Jon Kaplan, my co-founder and me. It forced us to focus on core activities for mobile iPad users:
So we came up with 5 key things Mobile iPad users need before they will leave their laptop at home or on their desk:
1) They need to easily get their business mobile apps and run them on their iPad. That means IT can’t take months to get a new app on the system – especially a Web app. They have to have all their apps and new apps should be easy to add.
2) If you leave most Windows apps looking like Windows apps, they are unusable. Does that mean the whole interface needs to be re-written? No!! But it does mean they have to feel native.
3) iPad users want to use the iPad. They don’t want the whole OS – just give them the actual Windows or Web apps.
4) It needs to be easy for the users to work with their customers and teams, even if some of them are on iPads others are on Mac’s, and still others on Windows machines. Collaboration is critical to any solution on mobile devices.
5) Support needs to be able to help users in real time. With my laptop, my IT person can log on and fix just about anything. But not on my iPad. Support needs to help their users in real time – fix real problems and/or help users to use their apps.
PowWow seeks to help users work the way they want to work – wherever they are – and I might add, on their iPad. Let me know what you think. And I hope you come back often to see what we are up to.
Andrew Cohen, Co-founder and CEO.
