Internet usage gets increasingly skewed from computers to mobiles, apps have become the lifeline for all our online activities. If apps are in focus, can app-makers be far behind?
Meet Ash Bhardvaj Kryptos: the app-maker helping colleges across the United States, Canada and Australia create and control their in-house apps without writing complex software codes.
Apart from the must-haves for any college app – class schedules, assignments, transcripts – the Kryptos app-maker also allows advertisements – from the local pizza store, for instance – that can be
controlled and tracked by the colleges themselves.
The beginning
The increase in mobile phone usage and subsequent surge in mobile apps
helped Kryptos Founder Ash Bhardvaj realize that not only would apps be
the new internet and the way users access information, but it will also be
necessary for any organisation – educational or commercial — to reach
out to its user base through apps. This led them to begin creating mobile
apps for universities to help them reach out to students with information
that have been going through legacy systems, aka the world wide web.
CampusEAI consortium’s EduTech venture fund invested $2 million and
backed the idea. But once they started creating mobile apps, another
realisation struck them that they were among the hundreds of mobile app
companies doing the same thing. Colleges were dependent on a third-party
mobile app development company to even manage and customise apps.
This problem led to their next idea: Kryptos decided to invest in a platform that would not only allow users to
manage or edit their mobile app, but would even allow
them to create new mobile apps. Thus, the Kryptos
AppMaker was born.
How it works
It’s a one-stop shop for creating mobile apps, tracking usage analytics and
inserting or controlling advertisements. No prior coding knowledge is
required to create apps. You can create apps across platforms.
As it uses a cloud-based system, there are no hardware or software
requirements. The platform can also be used to feed data onto other
platforms e.g. web portal systems, Apple Watch, and Google Glass etc.
Usage statistics can be tracked using built in analytics. Owners can add
advertisements, which they can earn revenue from and control those as
well.
Kryptos charges a license fee for colleges using its app maker, and also
has a revenue share agreement on transactions conducted through the app.
The advantage
According to Bhardvaj, the company now has 100 clients or members and
a niche in the education sector. They have more than 43 schools and 700
apps live on app stores. They reach one million students today. That’s a
captive audience for advertisers looking to tap the student market.
The team
“We are a young team; the average age of our team is below 30, about 12
people,” says Bhardvaj. “The experience I gained while shaping an idea to
a full grown operation in my previous employment helped me immensely
during the initial days of Kryptos Mobile.”
“My CTO,” says Bhardvaj, “brings great mix of technical expertise and
market sensibility.” Prior to Kryptos Mobile, he was a lead architect
working with one of the leading ERP companies in the world.
Outlook and plans
There are close to 4500 schools and colleges in the US alone, with
enterprise systems which need mobile apps to provide critical information
to students on the go, says Bhardvaj. In 2013, over 89% of the students
under the age group of 16-24 used smart phones. “That’s an audience that
we can almost entirely capture with our business model,” he says.
Kryptos is now looking to expand in India, tapping Indian colleges and
universities. They also plan to focus on the commercial market, especially
SMEB which usually don’t have a huge budget to create and manage a
mobile app for their business.
Bhardvaj says, “We are working on optimizing the platform so that
businesses can induce advertisements based on usage. We’re coming up
with a platform to consume different advertisement APIs.”
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