As the mobile revolution continues to expand, smartphones are quickly replacing computers as primary content consumption devices. More and more people access their news, social feeds, and email from their phones as the post PC era goes into full gear.
Yet, if you take a look at the millions of websites across the Web, only a fraction of publishers even bring their content to the mobile device. Yes, there is always mobile Web, but the experience of the mobile Web and a site not fully optimized for mobile phone via a native experience is mediocre, at best.
Native apps provide faster access, more personalization, and most importantly, the ability to have the content pushed to the user via push notifications.
Uppsite, a relatively young Israeli startup wants to bring all Web publishers to the billions of people accessing content on their phones across the Web.
Except there is one slight problem. Just because someone publishes content on the Web does not mean that person knows how to code and develop a mobile app. In fact, even some of the leading technology sites have still not gone mobile with their own native app.
Uppsite offers an intuitive platform that enables web publishers to take their site and convert it into a fully-functioning native mobile app. In fact, not only does Uppsite take care of the publisher's development needs, the platform also submits the new app to the various app stores, including the Apple App Store, the Android Market (a.k.a Google Play), and even the fast-growing Windows Phone Marketplace.
The process of taking a web-based publication and converting it into a cross-platform native mobile app does not take weeks like it would for a development firm. It does not even take hours. We are talking approximately a two minute process, start to finish.
Now, to be clear, there are other WordPress plugins and services that convert and optimize a site for mobile, but in nine out of ten cases, the final result is a site optimized for the mobile web. That other one case is a glorified RSS reader. The app created by Uppsite is a fully customizable, feature-packed, engagement-based native app with support for push notifications and a personalized user interface.
So how much is this advanced technology going to cost web publishers who are already struggling to monetize their sites? Free. Not a dime!
Uppsite's basic package is indeed free and there are premium packages that add many features including advanced design capabilities and more importantly, app monetization.
Well, if you are not yet convinced, apparently I am not the only one who recognizes the need for Uppsite. The company announced a partnership this week with none other than the biggest blogging platform in the world, WordPress.
WordPress.com VIP users including many leading online publications and Fortune 500 companies will now see the Uppsite plugin pre-installed in their WordPress.com CMS. All they need to do is activate it.
Well, getting an endorsement like that from WordPress proves what I was thinking about Uppsite. There is a real need in the online community for a service like this and Uppsite does a great job filling that need.