Bold Tech

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the vice president of IoT at Heed, LLC, a company that utilizes IoT sensors and other data sources to build a digital view of live events. We use those digital views to highlight new insights and generate engagement and content around the live events.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with BOLD! Technologies?

Some events can last up to seven hours and require as many as 100 sensors, so we needed a more efficient way to test our sensors to make sure they were functioning properly. We needed a partner who could build an app to automate the process.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided a general description of what we wanted the app to do, and BOLD! Technologies came back with a project scope and summary. They even provided detailed plans for the exact features and user journey. Once we approved, they built the Android app for tablets and phones, which allows us to click a button and test all of the sensors at an event venue. The app automatically tests each sensor one by one and sends a report on which sensors are functioning, which ones aren’t, and what the problem is.

What is the team composition?

We had three main points of contact.

How did you come to work with BOLD! Technologies?

We were working with another vendor who couldn’t deliver what we wanted, so we began looking for a new partner. Someone referred BOLD! Technologies, and I liked their past work, so I set up an interview. In the meeting, I liked how they engaged with the project and asked good questions, so I hired them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

This project lasted from March–July 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The end product will save around fours of preparation time, which is about half the amount of time it takes to currently get a venue ready. What used to be a lengthy manual process will now be accomplished with the click of a button.

How did BOLD! Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

They had excellent project management skills, overseeing the timeline and budget well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They thoroughly reviewed project requirements and specs, treating the work with a level of professionalism that I hadn’t seen before.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t know how they could’ve improved. Any issues came from our side.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Describe your project goals well and allow them to assist in identifying areas of improvement. Clearly define what decisions you want to make and which ones you’re okay with them making.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We're an Orlando-based dressmaker and tailor, the company shares my name: Sharon Picone Dressmaker & Tailor.

What is your role at the company?

I'm the owner.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with BOLD! Technologies?

My business required a complete website overhaul and rebranding. Additionally, we needed a presence on social media: Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

BOLD! provided me with a stunningly beautiful website and logo that truly reflects the look and feel I was envisioning. In addition, they ensured that my business had a presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest and that my newly branded business was consistent across all platforms.

The BOLD! Technologies team worked closely with me and responded to all my emails promptly (of which there were many) and patiently answered all my questions. They offered advice when necessary and kept the process on track in order to deliver what they had promised within a set timeframe. Their expertise is second to none, and I highly recommend BOLD! Technologies. You are assured of high-quality results when working with the BOLD! Technologies team.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in February of 2016 and continues to be ongoing for maintenance.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What distinguishes BOLD! Technologies from other providers?

BOLD! listened carefully to my ideas and the vision I had for my business. The team at BOLD! Technologies got to work immediately and wrapped up my project in about three to four weeks.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

CareerBook is a free online recruitment website that helps employers find the right staff for their companies and gives jobseekers the opportunity to jump-start a career.

What is your role at the company?

I'm the CEO of CareerBook, but I've also worked with BOLD! Technologies in relation to a charter school in Orlando where I'm the board chair.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with BOLD! Technologies?

We were looking for a provider of quick, efficient, and low-cost web development and design solutions.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

I've worked with BOLD! on several ventures. For the first company, CareerBook, it was to build a concept to take to crowdfunding platforms that related specifically to talent acquisition. I've also retained BOLD! to develop a website for a charter school in central Florida quickly – before the enrollment lottery.

How did you come to work with BOLD! Technologies?

I interviewed several competitors in the area before selecting BOLD!.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

Our project was less than $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

CareerBook took about six months from start to finish. The charter school's website only took about three days.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Is there anything that stands out about BOLD! Technologies?

BOLD! Worked consistently to provide excellent service for the charter school as well as CareerBook. What is most impressive is their ability to work intimately with their clients no matter what time of the day or night. BOLD! Technologies strives for total customer satisfaction at a reasonable price.

BACKGROUND

The company is a startup and will offer cloud-based, mobile-first business services that facilitate communication and learning. Three partners founded the company, and we’re located in Orlando, FL. We are six months away from launching. I am one of the founders and chief commercial and sales officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

The business challenge is connecting those seeking knowledge and experience with those who have knowledge and experience to offer, thus allowing these groups to connect seamlessly in real-time. This allows fostering cross-generational understanding and collaboration in today's multi-generation organizations in which the different generations do not think or act similarly.

The target market is corporations, professional associations, colleges and universities, and entrepreneurs/startups.

SOLUTION

The solution is a unique cloud-based, mobile-first communication platform that offers a variety of activities including one-on-one conversations, the ability for an individual seeking knowledge to query a group of people with the knowledge they seek, and the ability to live stream seminars from experts to groups of individuals seeking knowledge.

The service provider, BOLD! Technologies, was known to me socially. What truly set them apart was their tremendous interest in the idea, their passion for developing a unique and powerful solution, and their desire to partner in this business as co-founders.

BOLD! provided strategy, design, and has started development of the platform. The strategy development took about a month, the design took about two months, and development is just about a month in, with five more to go until launch.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

BOLD! Technologies has been a tremendous service provider and partner, from strategy through to the initial stages of development that we are in now. They've recommended numerous improvements on the initial solution idea that we are implementing. They are constantly looking to contain and reduce costs, and they are always aware of and recommending cutting edge technologies to enhance the product. BOLD! Has stayed below budget and are always available when needed, proactively thinking about potential improvements to the solution and not just following specs.

BOLD! Technologies is intimately involved in taking the idea to market as we approach initial beta testing with prospect clients.

BACKGROUND

My name is Brian Sikorski and I am the Vice President of the Orlando Fringe. The Orlando Fringe is an organization that produces the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival annually in Orlando, Florida. The Orlando Fringe is the oldest festival of its kind in the United States. This year we are celebrating 25 years as "Orlando's most unique cultural experience". The Orlando Fringe is a proud member of the United States Association of Fringe Festivals, The Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, and the World Fringe Congress.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

We have only a small handful of full-time staff members, the remainder of our team is part-time, contracted or only employed by us in May during the festival.

As Vice President of the Orlando Fringe, I lead a team to explore the creation of a smart phone app for our festival, one which our patrons will find useful year-round and could be considered a valuable tool to attending the festival. In the past we have had apps made for us as "favors" and their usefulness was poor. As a result, they were not used much and did not enhance the patron’s experience.

The app that BOLD! Technologies created for us has all of the features that we asked for. Using this app, our patrons can browse the over 130 shows that will be performed during our festival. The patron can create their own user profile and select shows as "favorites" and even rate them. In addition, the patron can purchase tickets within the app, get directions to the many venues, and connect to our social media channels. The ability to add notifications has allowed us to get information to our patrons directly as we need.

SOLUTION

As a non-profit organization with a limited budget, we needed to partner with a company that understood us and our needs. BOLD! Technologies was selected after meeting with a number of companies offering to help. We decided on working with BOLD! Technologies because we found that their approach to the project mirrored our own vision. Their team suggested improvements to the app that we had not even considered.

We are currently 10 days [May, 2016] away from the festival as I write this and I must tell you how well received the app has been so far. We expect that once the ribbon is cut, we will see a greater amount of downloads. It is our expectation that in the future, as we continue to work with BOLD! Technologies, we will find the app expanding and completely replacing our printed program.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

The app truly puts the festival in the patron’s pocket. With over 130 shows, it is easy to get lost and miss out on a great performance. This app allows you to search for shows on a specific day, at a specific time, at a nearby venue, read reviews about it, buy tickets, and get directions to the venue and even receive an alert when you have only 15 minutes to get to the venue.

At this point, we don't have any dislikes, nor have we heard any dislikes about the app. In the review process, prior to releasing, we had some notes for BOLD! Technologies and they were very quick to respond and address them. The first version was released and downloaded by users when we realized that we had forgotten to include a very important portion of the festival. We contacted Christian and his team, and they had a solution created, presented, and sent off for approval very quickly. BOLD! Technologies will stop at nothing to help you. As a local company, it is great to meet Christian and his team face to face. This level of personal service is truly a stand out from other companies that do similar work. You truly feel like you are part of their family.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and role.

I work for a cultural advocacy nonprofit for the Greek-American community. My company is a consultancy that works with many companies, primarily in the media and the nonprofit sector. I’ve got experience, so I can come in and advise companies and nonprofits on various tools to engage and grow audience and drive revenue.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

They created MyParea Mobile Community Manager to engage the Greek-American community and gain insights to analyze behavior.

Yes. We are an online private social network for the Greek-American community. My goal in consulting with them is to look onto the horizon, and working on how we need to position ourselves. Parea translates roughly into a party of people, and friends getting together. We're looking at an online to offline connectivity piece where people utilize their devices to plan events and things like that. It made a lot of sense to go with a mobile strategy to integrate our calendar of events, and be mobile first, moving forward. That’s the reasoning behind why we're embracing this as we look to regionalize our network across the U.S., and have clusters of activity in D.C. or New York. We want the ability to connect people based on their geolocation, their profile of interests, and circle of friends in the area.

What was your goal for working with BOLD! Technologies?

We had a mobile-optimized site that I would describe as being just good enough to convert the website into something that was manageable in the mobile space, but not something that could truly extract its full value. That’s why we looked specifically at the application environment. We wanted to be able to have dedicated real estate that people have the app, and they are able to relate to that MyParea app specifically about their mobile app activities. That really set a different perception among our community because everybody really needs to do responsive Web design so they can be viewed on mobile devices for their website, but it's not the same as all the special features that one could achieve by a true mobile app.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work?

With this particular nonprofit client, I don’t have resources on my end to any of the work. I do more of a concept and strategy development, and I have the ability to vet and ensure that I have solid vendors lined up to do the work. Since I’ve been in the industry, and I know a lot of the players that are out there, I evaluated BOLD in person. I was in Florida on business, and I immediately saw the purpose-driven nature of the calendar in terms of driving the community as the future.

This comes from somebody who had written a white paper in 2005 for the fourth largest newspaper company in the U.S. It addressed the whole paradigm of the newspaper dot-com needing to evolve into community dot-com. At the time, my main premise was that everyone would have a main profile related to their geographical area, and their center of their universe will revolve around their profile.

The reality of how things have played out in the era of Facebook, and everything else is that that's not sustainable, just to have people creating profiles. There needs to be a purpose-driven, utilitarian value to the community. We can take the data profiles of any of the existing social media – whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, and make it work because the calendar is always happening. Just by its nature, it's always coming at you with new content.

What made me enthusiastic about BOLD was the main premise behind what drives a community. What drives a community is activity. We’ve got plenty of communities out there with a lot of profile pages, but if nobody is doing anything, there’s no value. That’s why I’m going to a mobile-first strategy with MyParea, because it fits in with our goal to make it a valuable network where you can set up events and engage people. You can have a community that’s not just sitting there, but actually active.

What was your process for selecting BOLD! Technologies?

I’m pretty well connected in the industry, as well as in the Greek-American space. I’ve done projects for a number of Greek-American media companies and organizations. In the course of looking at various pages that I liked, I came across BOLD because of the prolific postings of community-based information. That is something that I’m very involved in, and it grabbed my attention. I started to look into the company and connected with one of the top officers there. I started the discussion to learn more about what they were doing. As I uncovered more, it became apparent that this is a very good fit between their strategy and deliverables and my goals. It was happenstance. I come across a lot of things in my feeds, and there is a lot to process. They stood out for that very clear value proposition of the calendar.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

They have a variety of levels. Their out-of-the-box platform is done on a revenue share basis. They have custom platforms, which I have now because I have several prospective deals where there is a custom requirement. For example, there is a nonprofit that wants a donation engine with a daily prayer. There are all sorts of nuances that various communities would want. I can start off with the basic, out-of-the-box app with some white-label opportunities for branding. I can also take it to the next level and customize it to specific requirements. I have sports-oriented communities as well as nonprofits that want a specific feature set that’s not there. BOLD is nimble in the ability to take an RFP, and build that on top of the existing platform for a custom app.

When was the latest milestone completed for that work?

I met with them at the beginning of July of 2013, and we were up and running in August.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

I don’t, but that has nothing to do with BOLD!. I am constricted by the resources from the organization. I’m driving the process with a lot of my clients that don’t have the knowledge base to understand this. There is a lot of hand holding involved and some arm twisting as well, to get the marketing dollars to drive traffic to the app. With our new budget coming on board for the National Hellenic Society, we're going into Q1 2014 with a huge push for the program.

In my experience, I like a soft launch to let me get more content in there to let my early adopters play around with things. That way, we don’t have any surprises when I put out the big press release. We're ready to have strong push to get people engaged in 2014. I’ve been very happy with the reports I’ve received from the people who have been looking at the app as well as the groups that I’ve reached out to, in order to establish themselves in our calendar. I feel confident that I won't be faced with any surprises because we’ve been working at it for a number of months, and we’ve been drilling down on all the potential. We're ready to go in January.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

I’ve worked on both sides because I was an executive for newspaper media companies before I was recruited to be a representative of vendors, whether it's software or something else. In my experience, the biggest challenge with vendor companies is that they have a platform, and they want to fit their clients into the platform that they have.

What stood out about BOLD is that they have that platform that is mostly out-of-the-box, and they truly focus on the discovery process. I can’t say enough about the discovery process and listening to the client to ensure you’re not trying to squeeze them into a solution that isn’t right for them. I’ve attended numerous meetings where we've vetted CMS systems and marketplace systems. In all the three major categories for vendors, whether it's content, community, or commerce-based applications, the biggest stumbling block for vendors is that they are not listening to the client. When I sat down with BOLD, they listened, and they understood the nuances of what MyParea was all about.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

The only thing is that I had the mindset that you had to have all three platforms – Android, Apple, and HTML5 – to cover all of the bases. In retrospect, the incremental approach where we went live with the iPad app – and now we're going to roll out the Android app and HTML5 – I would say it's good that we're waiting for the major marketing push when everything is on board. I don’t know necessarily that doing it incrementally would be the way that I would do it because I was approached by people who liked the app, but wanted to know when the Android app would be released. It will be coming soon, but marketing dollars are precious. I’m glad that we did it as a soft launch, and waited for the big push until all the components were there.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the CEO and Founder of Young Innovators. We bring market solutions to the childcare industry through technology-enabled components.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BOLD! Technologies?

I needed to hire an external resource to provide us with web development services.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to bring solutions to the industry.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I interviewed many other vendors before selecting BOLD! Technologies.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

BOLD! Technologies designed and developed our platform. They continue to provide ongoing services.

What was the team composition?

I work with about 5–10 people from UI designers, project managers, consultants, and engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

They’re excellent. The BOLD! Technologies team far exceeds our expectations.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The project was delivered on time and has produced fantastic results.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their culture, organization, and commitment are key to their customer's success.