Announcing the Official Mass Mobile Month iPhone App, from Swift Mobile

This post originally appeared at Xconomy; republished by permission.

On the third official day of Mass Mobile Month, we’re extremely pleased to unveil the official Mass Mobile Month iPhone app. Created by Swift Mobile of Cambridge, MA, and available at no cost through Apple’s iTunes App Store, the app includes the full list of Mass Mobile Month events, as well as a map guiding you to the events, along with information about transportation options and local businesses around the event venues.

There’s even a built-in social media client that lets you post updates about the events to your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts, with hash tags pre-supplied. If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod Touch, I urge you to download the app, try it out, and tell your friends about it.

Swift Mobile founder and CEO Kathleen Gilroy demonstrated the Mass Mobile Month app at Monday’s meeting of the Web Innovators Group at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. The gatekeepers at Apple finally approved the app yesterday.

Last week I talked at length Gilroy and got the inside story about Swift Mobile—which is out to change the way smartphone owners experience large conferences and events.

The company’s main business is to work with convention centers to produce mobile apps featuring interior and exterior maps, local transportation routes and schedules, and guides to nearby restaurants and businesses. It’s already created apps for the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and the Hynes Convention Center, and it’s working on a dedicated app for the next national meeting of the Direct Marketing Association, which will be held in October at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Gilroy says she started Swift Mobile in 2007 after more than 20 years in the events and learning technology and podcasting businesses, working with organizations like Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. When Apple allowed third-party apps onto the iPhone and opened the App Store, “It was obvious to me that it was going to be a huge opportunity,” she says.

“With a smartphone, you can create a smart meeting,” she continues. “You have this computer in your hand that can access navigational information and do social networking, and you don’t have to lug around your laptop. It’s a perfect fit in terms of making a meeting a more valuable experience for everyone involved.”

The self-funded startup sold its first project to the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which used the Boston Convention Center app for the first time during the American Library Association meeting in January. The app’s information about MBTA routes and nearby businesses proved particularly popular with conference-goers, Gilroy says. “People were saying, ‘I didn’t even know there were any restaurants near the convention center,’ or ‘I knew what T stop to get off at.’ That was huge. All of these things are about saving time, which is your most valuable asset at a conference.”

For the library conference, 750 people downloaded the app, and each time they opened the application, they spent an average of 13.5 minutes using it, Gilroy says. (That’s an astronomical figure, by the standards of most websites or informational apps.) The app can be configured to show advertisements, with Swift Mobile and the venue owner or event host splitting the revenues.

Behind the app are a standard template and a Web-based backend that can easily be customized for any venue, Gilroy explains. The Mass Mobile Month app is essentially a one-off job, seeded with multiple events around Boston in place of the multiple conference sessions that would be listed in the conventional (pardon the pun) version.

Already, the company is in discussions with convention-center authorities in Atlanta, Orlando, Miami, Houston, Austin, and Rosemont, IL (the Chicago suburb adjacent to O’Hare International Airport) to produce versions tailored for their own meeting facilities. Swift Mobile’s agenda for 2010 also includes bringing out native versions of its convention center app for other smartphone platforms, starting with Android and BlackBerry and moving on to Windows Phone and Palm/WebOS.

“I think one of the things we’ve done with this model is figure out how to actually make money on mobile apps,” says Gilroy. And it turns out that the solution isn’t to sell apps directly to convention attendees—rather, it’s to sell the service of creating and managing the apps to convention centers and big professional associations, who see it as a way to add value to the events they host. I know that’s what it will do for Mass Mobile Month.