Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution (Part 4)

SM: What percentage of your clients are mobile clients?

CR: I would say the mobile phone platforms drive about 60% of our revenue base, 65%.

SM: What about media?

CR: Media is about 15%. One thing about our company is we only deal with larger media companies. So, it’s a model we’ve perfected over the years as opposed to working with longer tail content. It hasn’t been our niche. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution (Part 3)

SM: OK. Give me some examples of things that can be automated. Let’s say even 40%, 50%, 60% who knows, whatever is needed that can be automated, what is that piece?

CR: A lot of it has to do with how you manage the data that’s being transported to the device, whether it’s rich media like audio and video and things like that, those are very transportable across all of the areas. In our platform that we use for native development, we have our own Java scripting engine built into it. In that way, our application engine allows us to many of the Java script types of things that you could do in a website. We’re able to then pour our client framework over to all the different devices. So, what we’re able to do is say that pressing a button is abstracted from the Java script code. The native button push down into our client framework and so we’re just driving the behavior. It’ll look native just like an iPhone app, but it’s driven off of a simpler cross-platform way to think about designing it.  >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution (Part 2)

SM: So you’re saying that instead of 100% content transformation solution, middleware layer in between, your approach is that 80% has to be automated and 20% custom and that you have solutions for both the 80% automated and the 20% custom?

CR: Yes. We provide the design and the services for doing the customization. And we bundle it together because our customers want to buy solutions. That’s how we differentiate. We don’t believe in 100% [automation] for every transfer model.

SM: What is the landscape like? Are there lots of players doing these 100% automation solutions? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution (Part 1)

UIEvolution is a software development company with offices in the United States and Japan. The company creates software solutions that break through the complexity of connected services by delivering native and HTML5 apps that are managed from a cloud-based platform. UIEvolution’s clients include well-known, elite enterprises like ESPN, Toyota, AT&T, Microsoft, Samsung, Hikari-TV, and many Fortune 500 companies.

Sramana Mitra: Hi Chris. If you could, give us some context about yourself and your company UIEvolution. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 5)

SM: You realize that this is tying, to some extent, into a world that came well before you guys and well before social media as the world where automated customer service based on natural language processing and automated email response systems?

WO: Yes. It wasn’t a bad idea. It’s how do you provide a high level of service without having to hire 1,000 people? How do you solve that? I guess, we’ve taken a little bit different approach around how we position it with our customers, how we position it for the user and trying a different approach about how we can make that experience better and provide better results. So, in some aspects, it is definitely the scaling of that customer interaction and communication. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 4)

SM: How do you charge? What’s the model for companies to work with you?

WO: Our products … basically, you can license one product, or you can license all 12. For some of our products, it’s $200 a month, and some of them are in the $2,000 range. We work with those customers usually on a yearly to 24-month contract. Then we might work with a company that has one contract with us for a product, and we might be within 10 different divisions or 10 different shows or 40 different divisions of that company with individual contracts working with those different groups. That’s what I mean by partnering. We’re not just selling into one division. We work with multiple partners and layers within a company, which gives us a better perspective — understanding of what they’re trying to do, how it fits into the strategy. And then we work with customers around doing customizations for branding purposes or for pulling in a sponsor, helping them to do that. And then we offer execution and strategy in service offering, too. We sit down with them, say, hey, what are you guys trying to do, and how can we help you execute that? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 3)

SM: Interesting. I’d like to ask you some mechanical questions now. Can you talk a bit about Google’s policy for search engine ranking, and how does it take into account these kinds of social media mentions and activities and links and so forth?

WO: Ah, you’re going to get me there because I don’t know all the technical ins and outs on that one. I just know from how it’s been used and those counting the links out. When someone shares something from our platform, it creates a link into those social networking pages that drives back, so it’s creating an increasing number of links that tie back to your page as well as the people mentioning you. And then in one instance an individual created a video, and it got virally picked up by about 50 of the top blogs. They were sitting there talking about why this person had created this video. All of those aspects together, I couldn’t tell you which one was the lynch pin that really did it. But it’s a combination of the links out with the increased traffic coming back and all of those things that have taken place. Sorry I couldn’t help you more with the technical part. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 2)

SM: Interesting, very interesting. Now, what is it in your background that gives you the understanding of natural language processing and all this stuff?

WO: Ha,ha. Nothing. It was something, like I said, from my background, it was when I started the company – and even before I started the company – it was just something I noticed that happened and knew that people did. And basically, I went out and found programmers and people who knew that world to be able to see is this possible? And then to how do we build something to accomplish this goal? >>>