Category Archives: Company

cropped-SSM_Logo2012

We Made the List, We Made the List

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When you are proposing to disrupt the way people think about things, its often hard to get noticed. Moving from mobile native apps to mobile website development is no different.  So when Torsion Mobile appeared on the inaugural Mobile Startups to Watch – the Final 40 authored by Jeff Vance, contributor to Forbes.com, Network World, CIO, Datamation, Wi-Fi Planet, Cloudbook and many others, we were excited. Native apps get a lot of ink but we think the future is not locked up in apps. We have focused on putting mobile website creation in the hands of those who can drive content. rather than programming. That belief is what gave birth to Torsion Mobile as a company and Mojaba, our first product.

We’re honored and in some impressive company.

 

We Are… Torsion Mobile and the Startup America Partnership

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Earlier this year, we were fortunate to be asked to share our experiences as a startup business, the startup community in Des Moines, Iowa and as a member of the Startup America Partnership. Some of our story is included in the awesome new video from Startup America.

We’re humbled to be in the company of so many great companies, each of which is contributing to keep our country and our communities moving forward.

To learn more or to join the Startup America Partnerhsip, visit s.co.com

Restaurant

Eating Immediately & Locally – 64% of the time

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For those of you that enjoy exploring the various culinary creations that your town or city may have to offer, you undoubtedly know what it’s like to read a rave review about a restaurant, only to find dead ends when trying to call or locate their establishment. If you’re a restaurateur, you perhaps know how important a mobile marketing strategy can be in enticing new cuisine enthusiasts.

A new study by xAd and Telmetrics, reports that the restaurant is the fastest growing mobile search category among smartphone owners. It is more local and urgent than categories such as auto and has a nearly 90% conversion rate. This Path-to-Purchase study found that smartphone restaurant searchers have the most urgent opportunities, with 64% converting immediately or within an hour of their mobile search.

Make your restaurant the “local’s spot”.

For those neighborhood consumers looking to grab some grub, there is every indication that mobility, proximity and communication lead to high engagement and conversion rates for local searches. Given the nature of a mobile handheld device and the immediate results it’s capable of producing, it’s reported that 65% of users who search for local restaurants using a smartphone are looking for locations that are within walking or driving distance, while 70% are looking for a business location and just over 50% are looking for a local phone number. From this, perhaps the most important piece of information restaurateurs need to focus on is how easily a smartphone user can call your restaurant, thereby increasing the chance of securing their business.

“Ensuring that consumers have easy access to restaurant phone numbers – whether individually-operated or the local franchise – is key to not only securing the mobile consumer’s business in the last phase of their purchase path but also for advertisers to be able to measure mobile traffic and monetize the leads generated.”
– Bill Dinan, president of Telmetrics

The point is, you don’t want to spend time crafting a meaningful mobile message and website just to have the consumer give up when they can’t find a number, make a call or reach a live person through the telephone. It’s important to maintain your smartphone marketing practices, but realize that consumer habits change across devices.

The purpose of reaching out through mobile.
Underscoring the great opportunity in mobile to acquire new customers by way of effective marketing, the report found that 75% of smartphone users notice mobile ads. These are the customers that are most likely to engage with ads that are related to something they have recently searched for, or with establishments that are within walking or driving distance of their current location. When advertising for mobile, it is important to keep in mind which consumer habits favor the more effective smartphone.

Smartphone owners tend to utilize 3 main functions when deciding where to eat—calling the restaurant, getting directions and looking up locations. A desktop or tablet computer’s large size and lack of data connectivity for example, can interfere with your site’s accessibility. On the other hand, an easy to find phone number or directions on a mobile optimized website can help a potential customer find your restaurant immediately.

Full tables, full stomachs, & full registers.
Whatever your goals may be for drawing in that new appetizer aficionado, 3 course connoisseur or desert disciple, make sure that your mobile web presence is just that—a mobile presence and not a desktop formatted site—and you will see an increase in visitors at your restaurant. At almost a 90% conversion rate among hungry smartphone owners, it confirms that restaurants need to go mobile to maintain full tables, full stomachs, and most importantly, full registers.

 

 

 

Bolo_2012

On the Road with Mojaba

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In this virtual world, there is something wonderful about meeting face to face and that is what the Torsion Mobile team will be doing next week at BOLO 2012 in Phoenix. For those of you that aren’t attending, BOLO means “be on the look out.”  So the 225 or so agency owners that attend should “be on the look out” for Mojaba® and some special offers just for them.

As a sponsor of BOLO this year, Mojaba will be cookin’ up breakfast on Tuesday morning as well as introducing keynote speaker, Tom Webster. BOLO attendees should check out their goodie bag for “Mojaba Memory” and a guest pass for a Mojaba-published site for their own organization for a YEAR!

Christian Gurney

Christian Gurney

Back to the face-to-face part, Mojaba co-creator and president Christian Gurney will be eager to answer all your questions about Mojaba.  He may even tell you what’s next for the Mojaba family of products developed just for agencies and marketing organizations. Or look for Brooke Benschoter who can give you lots of ideas for using Mojaba in every facet of your client’s businesses – internal or external.

Brooke Benschoter

Mojaba is proud to be a sponsor of BOLO 2012 and is equally excited about being part of the “ ‘normal’ is just not cool anymore” information and education BOLO is offering its attendees. See you there and if we don’t, expect us to share what we have learned ourselves.

 

Mojaba featured on Startup America Blog

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We’re thankful to have been included as a featured startup in the Startup America Blog this week. See the article below, or visit s.co to see the original post. And thanks to everyone at Startup America for all their hard work in supporting our country’s startups.

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By Christian Gurney, Co-Founder of Torsion Mobile – Today’s Featured Startup America member. 

What inspired you to start your company?

By 2015 more people will access the web with a mobile device than a PC, but only 20% of websites are usable on a smartphone. Mobile technology offers immense business opportunity, particularly globally. More Africans have access to mobile phones than to clean drinking water, according to Nielsen research.

“This is the biggest technological shift in the history of man,” said Gurney to the Des Moines Register in March 2012. 

Tell us something unique about you and your co-founder(s)?

Both of us have non-traditional backgrounds for a tech startup. Christian studied Archaeology in college and lived with Bushman groups in the Kalahari Desert. Co-founder Richard Kirsner has studio art and business degree. And both of us have been in tech for decades.

Our age (48 and 65) is also a little unique relative to our peers, but in line with what the Kauffman Group has shown – most founders are older than people typically think. We like to say that we’ve already made a lot of mistakes in our careers and we’re unlikely to make the same ones again. The balance of our employees are a lot younger, but we have a great mix to understand emerging technology and our customers and still have experience and maturity in the leadership.

What problem does your product or service solve?

Our product, Mojaba, helps creative professionals build mobile web sites for their clients faster, with more device compatibility and at a more affordable price – all without needing to learn programming or web coding.

What are your startup’s three biggest challenges to growth?

Getting traction with a wider customer base, finding the right mix of marketing channels to reach prospects and securing capital to accelerate our growth.

How will Startup America help your startup grow?

By encouraging a community of startups both locally and nationally, we get to interact with other founders tackling the same problems. We’ve also used some of the services targeted to startups and that’s helped manage our expenses.


Co-Founders, Christian Gurney and Richard Kirsner with our (very pumped) CEO Scott Case at Startup City.

Check out their product: 

Torsion Mobile is excited to announce the release of our new product, Mojaba. Mojaba is an intuitive Software-as-a-Service tool that enables creative professionals to build beautiful and effective mobile websites for their clients. We’ve been hard at work for over a year getting the system ready, and we’re excited to present it to the public.

After following the mobile trends, we’re certain that 2012 will be a year with an intense focus on mobile — mobile searching, advertising, commerce and Internet browsing will be key players this year. We want to help creative agencies embrace this shift and bring their clients into the age of mobile. To do that, we’ll provide cutting-edge features and services exclusively to marketers, advertisers, web designers and other creative professionals.

Mojaba has a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows agencies to build mobile websites quickly and easily. With Mojaba, agencies can organize by client and build multiple website drafts. Mojaba features include video, image linking, click-to-call, click-to-email, and find nearest (and nearest open) locations. Every element in Mojaba is customizable, for complete design flexibility, and Mojaba’s back-end, geo-location analytics are faster and more powerful than location tracking from Google Analytics.

Mojaba’s agency-only focus is important. There’s plenty of competition selling mobile websites (and website builders) to the end user. So we want to go beyond. By working only with agencies, we can provide not only a platform to build mobile websites, but also a database of materials to help agencies sell mobile to their clients. We have services to help agencies get the most out of Mojaba — we’re constantly updating the system, and we take comments and suggestions from our agency partners very seriously. In future releases of Mojaba, we’ll continue to provide the best mobile solutions in the market as well as the tools that agencies need to make their clients successful on the mobile web.

We have a very talented team of developers and designers with a penchant for building new and innovative features. “If we can dream it, we can develop it,” as our chief technological officer says. Often, that leads to advances in a matter of weeks.

Mojaba is the first tool from Torsion Mobile, but we’re looking forward to developing it as a global tool and an open door to exciting mobile solutions in the years to come.

Learn more:
Region: Startup Iowa
Mojaba:  www.mojaba.com
Team: www.torsionmobile.com

Click to join over 6,000 (and growing) Startup America members:

The Startup Job Crawl is This Wednesday — Are You Coming?

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We’re be back for the second-ever Des Moines Startup Job Crawl this Wednesday — and we’re hiring! We need two summer interns to help us do social media and design, and we can’t wait to meet the next generation of Des Moines startup talent.

If you want to work with a small team and gain real world experience, stop by and see us. We’re looking for hard-working and brilliant young minds to help move our brand forward . We promise you’ll get stellar portfolio pieces, experience and advice you can’t get at a corporate internship. Check out the job listings here, and get in touch if they fit your skills.

We’ll be on the 11th floor of the Midland Building (above Amici Espresso) from 5 to 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday evening, so come say hey! And don’t forget your business cards — we’d love to keep in touch after the crawl.

If you’d like to apply for one of our internships ahead of time, drop us a line at interns@torsionmobile.com telling us why you’re the perfect candidate.

Torsion Mobile to Present at i2iowa Investors and Innovators Forum on April 12

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Torsion Mobile CEO, Christian Gurney, will be presenting at the inaugural i2iowa Investors and Innovators Forum on Thursday, April 12, at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines.

The event is being presented by The Technology Association of Iowa as a showcase of Iowa companies in bioscience, Internet technology and advanced manufacturing. The goal is to match entrepreneurs with investors with funding resources that fit their needs, and to provide a valuable networking opportunity for entrepreneurs, investors and business developers.

“We’re delighted to be invited to share our story about how we’re helping creative professionals help their clients take advantage of the mobile revolution,” Gurney says. “It should be an extremely beneficial event.”

If you’d like to attend, you can visit www.i2iowa.org for more information.

What’s New with Mojaba 1.2

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When we rolled out the first two versions of Mojaba, we knew there were new features and elements to add. Over the past month, our users have given us great feedback and we’re excited to deliver the most extensive rollout of design features yet in this week’s release. With Mojaba 1.2, you’ll be able to customize virtually every aspect of your mobile site, from text color to button styling to the number of columns on your mobile website. Here are some of the highlights:

New features in Mojaba 1.2 allow for more design flexibility.

New Design Flexibility
The thing we’re most excited about is the design power in version 1.2. You can now individually edit each element — so if you want to make the Call Now button bright red, you can do that.

Nav Bar
The nav bar can hold up to five buttons in a horizontal row — just like on a desktop site. Use this tool for easy navigation around your site.

Grid Element
Create up to three columns on your website for more variety. You can lay elements side by side, avoiding the “stacked” feel with a vertical-only approach.

Headers and Footers
We’ve included the option for you to display (or not display) the header and footer on each panel. You can set the header/footer elements globally by clicking the “Edit Header & Footer” button at the top of the web builder and add images, text, buttons, etc., that will appear on every panel. Then determine which panels you’d like to display your custom header/footers on, or opt for the default header/footer.

Updated Text Element
Last time around, we gave you the option to resize the font size. Now you can set the color of text and place images within a block of text — with text wrap. You can float an image to the left, right or center by double clicking on it after you’ve placed it in the text element. You can also change the image width with a convenient slider tool. The best part — you can now pop out the text editor for a larger workspace.

The expanded text editor gives you more room to work and allows you to insert pictures into your text element.

Analytics
We’ve got new views in the Analytics tab:

  • First, you can see total visits, visits by time of day, mobile device operating system and length of visit.
  • Second, you can now click on a phone number or location to see where users were when they dialed or asked for directions.
  • Third, we’ve got content usage reports on which panels were viewed, which buttons were clicked and whether visitors used the click-to-email buttons.
  • And lastly, now there a location indicator on all maps shows a green inverted pentagon shape that corresponds with the location(s) associated with the website, which provides context for where a user was in relation to the location(s).

Watch for all these new features when we roll out Mojaba 1.2 later this week!

Mojaba featured in Silicon Prairie News

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Silicon Prairie News

Our friends at SPN wrote an article on the launch of Mojaba: “Torsion Mobile, a Des Moines-based startup building mobile solutions for creative professionals, released its first product, Mojaba, in early February with the mission to make mobile websites easier to build. . .”

Thanks to Macy Koch and the SPN gang! Read the entire Silicon Prairie News article here.

The Iowa Startup Fair is Today

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In Iowa we have a fantastic startup community, and we’re proud to say we’re a part of it. Today from 3-6p we’ll be at Amici for the Iowa Startup Fair. We’re excited to show off Mojaba and rub shoulders with Des Moines’ creative, innovative crowd.

The event is sponsored by Startup Iowa and includes over 90 exhibitors throughout Iowa, with hubs in Des Moines, Pella and Cedar Rapids/Iowa City.

See the list of participating startups here, and if you’re in the area (6th and Mulberry), stop by! We’d love to say hey.