Consulting Company For Development of Application
We have a request from a Swedish Client for a Consulting Company to help them with the development of an application for Apple's iPhone.
Summary:
Our client is looking for a consulting company within the Stockholm region to undertake the quick prototype development of this application. This would be followed by a full product development in combination with porting the application onto other platforms/operation systems. Knowledge of design or behavioural sciences is a plus.
Additional Information / Thoughts From The client:
One can say that the ideal candidate/supplier would meet 5 requirements. Having said this, I do not think there is any such company around, so it will always come down to balancing the pros/cons or combining the capabilities of two companies.
1. Mobile platform experience. Even though this project will start with iPhone OS for v2 our ambition is to quickly expand to also other platforms. It is important that the design is such that it allows for porting onto other platforms in an as cost effective manner as possible. This of course also applies to the maintenance aspects of the product. The most likely platforms/OSs are the most popular ones of course. A supplier that knows about these complexities already is of course highly suitable.
2. Art & Coding. The product needs to be "insanely great" in terms of interaction /design / graphics i.e. we need to strive to achieve a true wow! feeling when using it. We have some expertise in look & feel, design etc but I would be looking for a partner that can act as a sounding board in these issues and not only be a passive code producer. For the first version this takes a good understanding of the iPhone's capabilities (current and future). A definite plus would of course be if the supplier has an existing relationship with Apple. Another way of approaching this is to say that many other industries have a lot to contribute, in terms of good and attractive design. Maybe for example a game manufacturer would be able to add that extra dimension to make this product stand out?
3. Long term. I'm looking for a long term relationship rather than a quick assignment, fire and forget. This then means that the supplier must be financially stable so that I can expect him to be around in the years to come. It also means that his operation must be of a certain size in order to secure competence redundancy/backup. The ideal supplier will of course share in our vision of the inevitable success that this product will have and will allow this to reflect in a back-end heavy compensation model / risk sharing.
4. Time and resources now. The first phase of this project (the prototype) will need to be started pretty much straight away. We will try to limit the scope so that it can be executed by 1-2 people in no more than 4 weeks of work. Given the experiences that others have of having started from scratch with Apple's iPhone SDK this seems to be realistic as well. We are also talking about a mature supplier, one that can run a project/process oriented development and that understands what mature software development is all about.
5. Culture and distance/time. Ideally the supplier is would be located within the Stockholm region. Other suggestions will be considered.
If you are interested in this proposal, please contact us as soon as possible (in Swedish or English).