Travis Davis attends many meetings as a sales engineer, and wanted a way to organize all the information each meeting generated. By creating a mobile app for his iPad, he found a way to do just that and began a side business at the same time.

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As one might expect, the original idea for Meeting Mapper came to its creator during a meeting he was attending.

“I’m a sales engineer, so I attend a lot of meetings,” said Travis Davis, designer of Meeting Mapper and founder of Point N Time Software, LLC. “I don’t remember names very well.” Gathering notes on every meeting topic, along with the stance every attendee took toward the topic and their role in the discussion, proved valuable to making Davis’s meetings more productive, but the process was cumbersome.

Davis wanted a way to consolidate all the information relevant to a meeting in one place. Doing it on paper just didn’t cut it.

The design process began before Davis ever thought of making an app. It started with him placing business cards in front of him corresponding to all the people attending the meeting. This was helpful, but wasn’t a very dynamic way to represent the shifting opinions of all the stakeholders in the room.

What he needed was an app for his iPad, he decided; something that was intuitive and quick, that could be used while a meeting was happening. He saw an ad for Zco Corporation in CIO Magazine and decided to give them a call. He immediately connected with an account executive, who provided a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) so that both parties would be assured of complete confidentiality throughout the development process.

Davis also worked with a project manager, who made kept all the moving parts in order: Davis’s original ideas, the contract agreement, the developers who crunched code to make the app happen.

“We worked very well together,” Davis said. “I had some ideas, they came up with graphic design, which was great.” Some of the color-coding for participants’ political stance on the issues under discussion even has a patent pending.

Once Davis was satisfied with the work turned out by the developers at Zco, the app was submitted to Apple’s iTunes app store. Within a few days, it was approved. Meeting Mapper now has a $4.99 version for iPad and a $0.99 Lite version for the iPhone, as well as Meeting Mapper Fierce for use with Salesforce.com and Meeting Mapper Cloud for use purely online. Davis has worked with Zco several times since the app was released.

“It’s been out since the end of January [2012] and we’ve updated it four or five times” by October of the same year, he said. He’s currently considering an update that would link a user’s iPad Meeting Mapper data with Meeting Mapper Fierce on Salesforce.com.

“The team is very professional. They’re not calling you every day with sales pitches,” Davis said. “I miss working with [Zco] every day!”

Davis uses the app himself all the time, of course, but he’s building a customer base as well – starting with other people in his meetings.

“Every time somebody sees me, they ask, what is that?” he said. He tells them that the app enables him to export all his meeting notes as a PDF, and that he can analyze information he generates in one meeting or multiple meetings. “No one else is doing analytics on meetings,” he said.

Because the app sells through Apple’s iTunes app store, Davis can track exactly how many downloads there have been. As of October 2012, there are more than 500 users of Meeting Mapper and more than 200 users of Meeting Mapper Lite. In January 2013, Meeting Mapper was featured on Forbes.com as one of "10 Mobile Apps To Make Your Business More Productive in 2013."

Davis isn’t even running Point N Time as a full-time business, preferring to focus on his day job while Meeting Mapper attracts attention on the app store. Like any good businessman, he’s aggressive but patient, noting that it often takes more than a year for an app to really take off. Still, he’s hardly waiting around.

Buoyed by his positive experience with Meeting Mapper, Davis engaged Zco for a second time to develop an early childhood education app called SHAPES+. The genesis of that app occurred a long time ago.

“I’ve got the original piece of notepad from 26 years ago,” Davis said. The idea involves touching and identifying shapes and colors, and when the iPad came out with its touchscreen, his reaction was immediate: “Holy cow, this is the technology I want to do it on.”

Davis also has colleagues coming to him with their own ideas for apps, and he isn’t shy about acting as a consultant to them. “We’re already kind of eclectic when you look at Meeting Mapper and then you look at SHAPES+,” he said.

Zco is proud to have satisfied customers like Travis Davis of Point N Time Software, LLC. To see what Zco can do for you, visit www.zco.com or call (603) 881-9200.

Athletic trainer David Gottfeld was used to motion capture systems that were bulky and inconvenient. In an age of mobile technology, he believed, there should be a better solution. By defining his vision in a video and hiring Zco Corporation to do the software development, he was able to realize his dream.

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David Gottfeld is an injury prevention post rehab specialist who travels around the country teaching mechanical efficiency and injury prevention to athletes. As a visual learner himself, he was accustomed to using motion analysis software to help understand and improve his clients’ technique, but he found existing solutions inadequate.

“Current motion analysis systems are clumsy and complex,” said Gottfeld, now President of Kinesio Capture LLC.“We needed to appreciate the coaches' and athletes' time. We had to develop a simple yet powerful portable solution to help assist coaches and therapists with their clients and patients.”

This solution would use mobile devices available to all consumers – namely, Apple’s iPad and iPhone. The built-in camera on those devices would be ideal for displaying a real-time view of athletes with data and diagrams overlaid on the image.

Among the features that Gottfeld and his team required were:

Gottfeld and associates were so specific in their wants and needs for their app that they created a video showing the exact look and feel of the product. On the recommendation of a friend in the computer industry, they contacted Zco Corporation to do the actual development. Before they ever presented their idea, the Zco representative provided a reciprocal non-disclosure agreement for both parties to sign, protecting the idea. Gottfeld said that single action impressed him most.

There are actually four Kinesio Capture apps, addressing different segments of the market.

• Kinesio Capture Lite for iPhone is $9.99. It omits features like Side by Side and Video Overlay, cloud connectivity and the SRV tool.
• Kinesio Capture Basic for iPad is also $9.99 and has a limit of 10 videos. It omits features like cloud connectivity and the SRV tool.
• Kinesio Capture for iPad is $249.99 as a one-time purchase.
• Kinesio Capture Pro for iPad is $5.99 per month as a subscription.

Figuring out the ideal pricing model, Gottfeld said, was “tricky.” At first, the full app was a pay-per-download at a much lower price than traditional motion capture software – but still more than the one or two dollars typical of iTunes purchases.

“The problem is in the App Store, we are one of the highest priced apps,” Gottfeld said. “People had to buy an iPad and pay for our software. The barrier to entry was too high.”

The solution was a switch to a monthly subscription model. For $5.99 a month, users could download a free application and have access to 30GB of cloud storage as well as the most premium features: side by side and video overlay, video analysis tools, file management, and the SRV tool.

“$5.99 a month is a much easier price for people to handle,” Gottfeld said.

The paid Kinesio Capture apps have been downloaded more than 1,000 times. Gottfeld also uses the app in his own business; because his team of therapists and trainers had input into the design, it’s already optimized for their style of working.

By coming into the development process with a clear vision of their desired product, Gottfeld and his associates were able to quickly communicate their needs to their Account Executive and Project Manager. At the same time, Zco’s policy of offering a non-disclosure agreement very early in the customer relationship put Gottfeld at ease.