It takes three kinds of people to create a movement.
Activists
Artists
Intelectuales
Very rarely do we see one individual that is able to embody all three personalities. The ones who do, you already know there names. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates to name a few. There is a common thread among all three of these unique individuals. The ability to be an artist, activist and intellectual is not something that comes naturally. In fact creativity and critical thinking in the terms of economics come from two very different sides of the brain.
So what are those special attributes that allow a person to rewrite the rules and create a movement?
This day in age, creating a movement can happen fast because information travels with greater velocity every day. This idea of leveraging technology was something that Dean Grey, the CEO and Founder of Skylab Apps understood with crystal clear clarity. Like Zuckerberg and Jobs, Mr. Grey shares the unique ability to be an artist and intelectual who’s politics are driven by a moral code, not political correctives.
To create a movement, one must have vision, determination, chops and be a little bit crazy for believing you will be able to pull it off. When Dean founded Skylab Apps, it was about anchoring a decision for him, planting his flag, and then burning the ships so only path was forward. Getting to that decision would require the following steps:
I started to outgrow the community I was a part of. In order to move forward, I had to make the switch from entertaining and educating people around the world to equipping people around the world.
–Dean Grey
Erase the Labels
If you are not a trained musician but want to convey a message by composing a tune, don’t let the lack of a formal education stop you. Never let the question ‘Am I trained to do this?’ take root. Carve a path and walk through. This is the only way forward and create a movement
Success Tastes Sweet Only After Bitter Failure
Be mentally prepared to hear ‘No’ before you meet acceptance. Aim for rejection, it is not negative if something substantial comes out of it. Dean Grey himself had to endure failed attempts before he got to the summit. When you stop worrying about rejection, you put in your best effort.
Don’t Lose Focus on the Project’s Integrity
It is easier to fall off the wagon than getting on to it. Most people who come up with brilliant ideas after tasking initial success, lose focus on their goals and get off track. Persistence is the key. Have a small team in place whose responsibility is to assess the course of the project. Anytime they feel that the trajectory is misaligned, corrective steps can be implemented without losing time.
There Should Always Be a Scale For Measurement
Every action and idea must be scalable. When you find yourself thinking of the next big idea or about to create a movement, ask yourself “Will this be applicable to 500 people?” If the answer is no, alter the plan. If yes, improve it to fit a larger perspective.
Keep It Simple
An idea is great only when it is simplified. The more complicated it gets, the lesser acceptance it will receive. People tend to follow only those ideas which they can understand. Breaking down the idea into a simple concept also makes building an emotional connection easier.
During the inception of the idea it is pivotal to keep it centered on a core value. This core will decide if the project will go global or lose momentum.
Dean Grey is not a lone wolf on his path to creating a movement with Skylab Apps. The Skylab CEO understood that in order tocreate a movement he needed to get the right people on the bus. Luckily, like attracts like, and Dean would devise the most incredible team of C-level execs, entrepreneurs and ambassadors that share the same vision that he had.
This team of Artists, Activists and Intellectuals are top performers in their space.
The Intellectuals: who’s former associations and employment history stem from globally recognised brands like the UFC, Fanduel, Walt Disney, Success Partners HITACHI and Nike consists of Mike Pine, Tony Chaplin, and Tony Cerqueira to name a few.
The Artists: A creative team of world renowned dancers athletes and entertainers that consists of 8-time goldmedalist Apolo Ohno, 5-Time world Dance Champion Jeremy Wong, Alex and Kyle McCarthy, and other uber talented folks
The Activists: Consisting of some rebel entrepreneurs who dared to think outside the box and chase their own dream of success. Some of
the players are Skylab CTOGeorge Pslek, Digital marketing and sales masters Mike Filsaime along with Steve Wolf and the most cutting edge platform development and design team including Lauren Peters (formally Coca-Cola/ Wells Fargo) Bryan Farris (UC Berkley / Acumen Transit Hero) and Big Data with Sasha Treviso (Amobee).
This is how you create a movement.
For more information on how Skylab Apps is creating a digital movement, check out this link
Check out this TED Talks about how to start a movement.
Gamification in the workplace uses game mechanics to drive employee performance. Employee performance KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) are measured in real time – like a Fitbit for work – showing where employees are doing better, having them compete with their goals and past achievements. It is made to drive intrinsic motivation, the sense of mastery and control that comes when we know we are doing our job well.
Yet, most people think of workforce gamification as a thin game veneer applied to work, a “video game at work” that attempts to create motivation through points and badges, bells and whistles. And then, almost immediately, they disbelieve gamification. They are right – making work cute or “fun” or “game-like” doesn’t work, but using gamification like a fitness tracker for work works well, changing more than performance and affecting the culture of thinking and talking about employee performance.
“When brought into the context of business, this means that users of these applications are actively engaged in fun ways with other users who they can interact with through chat and messages, all while learning about a given company and their products.”
At Skylab Apps, we use our own app to gamify the way people working with us.
Here are five key elements of what workforce gamification really is:
1. Real-Time Performance Management
Performance management is a good idea: set goals and measure their achievement. The problem is that most performance management practices involve setting of annual goals, which soon become stale. In addition, communication with employees about performance is marred by the practice of ranking employee performance – which people (naturally, of course) find threatening, confrontational and discouraging.
So in practice, many companies are eliminating or re-assessing their performance management practices.
Gamification focuses on the here and now. Imagine a basketball coach who skids along the court, following his team as they invest all their body strength and skills to fight off opponents’ scores, and keep up their offensive within the team. The coach throws out his feedback in real-time so his players can fix their mistakes on the spot. If his point guard is taking too many shots in the first quarter, his coach will have him back on the right track by the end of the second.
Gamification brings this dynamic to your employees’ performance. Feedback is given on-the-spot, by showing performance KPIs and personalized benchmarks and goals within the gamification application, so employees can rectify flaws in real-time, instead of thru retroactive feedback that is weeks or months late.
2. Objective and Fair
New management practices are gravitating away from subjective evaluation of employees, and more in the direction of objective and proactive development of employees.
What this brings is a positive process that reflects both to employees and their managers how employees are progressing and which goals are being met, and transparently so. Research about performance management shows that managers are often unaware of the fact that their evaluations are subjective; measuring KPIs in real time can correct this. In this case, there are spillover effects into corporate culture – when evaluation is objective and fair, people feel differently about work and about whether their efforts and performance will be fairly recognized.
Gamification also reflects insights and results to employees (and managers) that effectively enable them to make changes in their work performance. In many cases, in case performance in a certain area is lacking, employees are directed to micro-learning so that they can correct their course and improve their expertise. For example, a new Urbn Pizza’s worker will be motivated to learn about the company he will works for!
Urbn Pizza
A Skylab’s Client, Urbn Pizza, integrates the gamification in the workplace by using this performance process.
3. Performance Measurement is Transparent
Many successful tech companies (Google, Intel, Linkedin and others) use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to communicate goals and objectives to employees. Results are tracked – and people can see the OKRs of their peers. This is a new degree of transparency.
OKRs are used by knowledge workers (product managers, developers, communications managers, etc.), and remain transparent to all their peers, so that every employee in the organization can see what every other employee is working on and setting as a priority.
Gamification is OKR for the workforce: rank and file employees, who don’t have goals like ‘launch new product’, ‘have a successful beta launch’ but are required to perform within certain benchmarks expected of them.
It lets the relevant employee to see how they are doing in comparison to their fellow colleagues, and in what fields they are performing better or worse than those colleagues. This instills a sense of fairness, and a clarity on what employees are supposed to focus on at work. It also lets companies set individualized goals, so that what is expected of employees is fair and achievable.
For example, on this screenshot of the Urbn Pizza app, an employee of one of the Urbn Pizza restaurant can go through a “Prep List” with actions like “Check Bathrooms” or “Check Kitchen”. These actions are proper to the employee experience. Here, it’s the server experience but others exist like Bartender or Cooks. Once the Actions are applied, they are displayed on the Community Recognition Wall. Every other employees and managers in the workplace will be able to see that actions had been taken. If one has been forgotten, another worker can comment the action and the problem is fixed instantly thanks to instant feedback.
4. Drive the Right Things: Behaviour
Competition is often viewed as a positive motivation method. Well, for many people it isn’t and can even be perceived as a source of unfairness. Sales managers tend to believe in this fallacy and want to manage performance with leaderboards displayed as “employees of the day” on the Urbn Pizza app.
Projecting different employee’s successes to one another on mediums like a leaderboard and showing actual sales isn’t a good idea. It’s true that sales are the objective, yet this isn’t what should be motivated, but rather the activities that drive sales. To generate better sales, gamification would want to drive behaviours and measure them: more calls, qualifying leads, meeting potential and existing clients, etc.
5. Gamification Isn’t a Game
What is the “game” part of gamification? It is the use of game mechanics – like calling out to employees to bet on themselves, showing them completion bars and more – to drive behaviour and engagement. Gamification creates a way for employees to monitor their progress at the workplace and act from a place of intrinsic motivation. In this, it isn’t a game, but it can be a game changer for work performance and culture.
Imagine a platform that allows the owner to make changes to the Mobile App in real time across 3 native platforms without ever needing to resubmit to the App Store or Google Play.
This is what Skylab Apps has created. When CEO Dean Grey set out to build a white labeled social media app where the app owner had 100% autonomy and control he ran in to a big problem. How could we deliver a custom platform if the app owner cannot not make changes to the finished product at the speed of their business or their community’s growth?
To solve the problem, Skylab Apps built a “command center” and attached it to the scalable white labeled social media platform. In essence, it is the equivalent of leasing a new Ferrari and being able to reconfigure the color of the car itself or change the side of the car you would like the steering wheel on at anytime in “real time” making as many changes as you want.
Sounds impossible right? Well, it’s not. Skylab has built it. In fact the Skylab Appscommand center is so robust it gives the app owner the ability to customize the color, content, positioning and user tags… and that is only the beginning.
The idea is quite revolutionary. Skylab Apps has really built a platform, not an app. Uber is an app, you download it, use it and when the company updates it, you may see some changes. The Skylab Apps Platform is not Web based or HTML 5. The platform is built to work simultaneously across three platforms:
Web App (w/Command Center CMS Controls)
iOS
Android
The Skylab Apps Platform similar to Word press but for the Native Mobile App. To grasp just how big this idea is, you need to understand a little bit about the app development world itself.
15 years ago, it was somewhat difficult to build a website. There was no Squarespace or Shopify. These were ideas back then, and until the advent of WordPress, the chances of you developing a desirable and functioning website without coding knowledge or a computer science degree was about as likely as winning the lottery. At best, the chances of pulling it off on your own was slim to none. WordPress forged the path that changed all of this.
Wordpress was open source and allowed a community of developers to create software plug-ins making it easy for user to ultimately build a website quickly with no coding experience or computer science degree needed. Later on, some for profit companies like Squarespace and Shopify that have made the user experience even more seamless.
Skylab Apps set out to simplify the process for the end user delivering on the promise of a seamless mobile platform across all major interfaces that tackled and solved all of the major problems that exist in the mobile app development space today.
“Skylab has revolutionized the rapidly growing cheerleading industry by providing cheerleaders, coaches, and gym owners the best opportunity to train, learn, and develop their skill-set as they strive to become world class athletes. By utilizing the Skylab platform, we are now able to use gamification to connect a global industry, and the result is extraordinary.”
Alex McCarthy | 5-Time world Champion & CEO / Founder of The Cheer Apps
Big companies are catching on too! Skylab Apps has a growing list of some major clients including Amway,Allysian Health Sciences and Jack Canfield Companies. In addition to the mounting success of Skylab App, the are attracting some huge talent from companies like Walt Disney, UFC, Fan Duel and HITACHI. Take a look at the Executive team and check out the endorsements they have gotten so far, it is nothing short of amazing!
“Skylab Apps technology gives me the platform to engage with my community through chat, trainings, and recognition all while giving my community a place that isn’t bombarded with traditional social media noise.”
Apolo Ohno | Short Track Speed Skater and an eight time medalist in the Winter Olympics / Co-Founder of Allysian Sciences
Skylab Apps understand trends at cellular level.
“We do not guess, we spot the trends and strategize.”
–Dean Grey | Skylab Apps CEO
Here is some Quick History For you:
The internet became mainstream in 1999
WordPress was start in 2003
Today 27% of the internet is powered by Wordpress sites.
Mobile Apps are a $77 Billion Market currently and expected to grow to $101 Billion by 2020
The only tech out there even close to what the Skylab Apps platform does is already antiquated or at best years behind what has been created by Skylab.
For more information or to request a demo to see the platform, please visit www.Skylabapps.com
The number of mobile platform users today is greater than the number of desktop users!
Consequently, businesses have realized the need to effectively use mobile channels platform for attracting customers. They have started new operations (or scaled existing ones) through mobile websites and mobile apps.
“Mobile devices have already ingrained themselves into our daily lives and business are realizing that this is something that can work to their advantage.”
While businesses with large wallets can afford to employ both mobile websites and apps platform, other companies might have to choose one of them. The choice between mobile apps and websites depends on their cost, usability, required features and the audience they serve.
That being said, studies show that users prefer mobile apps platform more than mobile websites. This makes for a strong reason to have mobile apps for reaching out to potential (and existing) customers.
In addition, there are various other reasons, too, that make mobile apps better than mobile websites platform.
#1 Mobile Apps Offer Better Personalization
Personalization is about offering tailored communication – Smart Chat – to users based on their PIIP (Proximity, Identity, Interest and Performance)
“Personalization is critical in making a mobile User Experience delightful”
Anthony O’Donoghue
With mobile apps, it’s easy to treat users with a personalized experience.
Mobile apps can let users set up their preferences at the start, based on which users can be served with customized content. Apps can also track and observe user engagement, and use it to offer custom recommendations and updates to the users. Furthermore, they can also identify location of the users in real-time to provide geography-specific content.
However, improving user experience is not the only purpose that personalization serves. It can also help improve conversion rate of apps:
When users are pampered with personalized content, they have a higher chance of making a conversion.
At Skylab, visuals and layouts are customizable, but the underlying structure is stable & standard. This creates total control for the client – flexibility within a proven and tested framework.
This is a massively-disruptive model
#2 Ease of Sending Notifications
For the last couple of decades, email has been the most widely-used business communication tool. Businesses have extensively used email (some almost abused it) to reach out to their users. As a result, email has lost the effectiveness it once had; its open rates and click rates have constantly dropped.Well, there’s no reason to worry.
Push notifications
The notifications are of two types: push and in-app notifications. They both are exciting alternatives for communicating with app users in a less intrusive manner.
The ability to send instant, non-intrusive notifications to users is so desired that it is one of the major reasons why many businesses want to have a mobile app in the first place.
In-app notifications are the notifications which users can only receive when they have opened an app.
In-app notifications
Push notifications, on the other hand, are those notifications which users can receive regardless of any activity they are doing on their mobile device. There have been instances where the push medium of notifications has delivered click-through rates of 40%.
At Skylab, we’ve got the full suite: outside the app, inside the app, and a master control center.
Notifications are the primary way users get information about activity in their apps.
#3 Making Use of Mobile Device Features
Mobile apps have the advantage of utilising features of a mobile device like camera, contact list, GPS, phone calls, accelerometer, compass, etc.
App using native feature : the camera
Such device features, when used within an app, can make the user experience interactive and fun.
Moreover, these features can also reduce the efforts users would have to make otherwise. For instance, users completing a form on a banking app might need to submit their photograph for completion of the process. The app can let users take help of the camera of their mobile device to capture and submit a photograph.
“Apps can utilize native features of mobile devices to enhance User Experience.”
Anthony O’Donoghue
The device features can significantly shorten the time users take to perform a certain task in an app, and can even boost conversions.
Add-on: Mobile websites platform can also use some features of a mobile device like camera, GPS, etc. Still, there are technological constraints in utilizing all the multimedia features of a device (which mobile apps can use).
Skylab has worked in the development of BlowBunny app. We use the native features which had been shown above to create Voting Contest. It’s one of the Gamificationadd-on features that Skylab can provide.
You can see the most recent posts and -following customizable tabs- the Leaderboard with the actual ranking, your own posts and the winners from the past weeks.
This fun contest renews every so often – admin choose the timeframe – and the winner earns a reward!
Customize the How to Win screen to display the contest info and reward
#4 Ability to Work Offline
It is probably the most fundamental difference between a mobile website and an app.
Although apps too might require internet connectivity to perform most of their tasks, they can still offer basic content and functionality to users in offline mode.
“The beauty of mobile apps lies in their ability to work even in offline mode.”
Let’s take the example of banking app again.
The app can provide features like tax calculation, instalment calculation, and determination of loan limit. These features can work even without the help of an internet connection.
Add-on: Even though mobile websites platform can use caching to load web pages without an internet connection, they can only offer limited functions.
#5 Freedom in Designing
Even with all the technological advancements in web designing, mobile websites have to rely a lot on browsers to perform even the most elementary functions. Mobile websites depend on browser features like ‘back button,’ ‘refresh button,’ and ‘address bar’ to work. Mobile Apps don’t have any of these restrictions.
A mobile app can be designed with a lot of elaborate functions, based on advanced gestures like ‘tap,’ ‘swipe,’ ‘drag,’ ‘pinch,’ ‘hold,’ and more.
Apps can use these gestures to offer innovative functionality that can help users perform a task better. For example, an app can let users move to a next or previous step using the swipe gesture.
Skylab gives you the ability to modify colors/branding + actions + bottom/side menu navigation.
#6 New Branding Experience
Since a mobile app is distinct from a company’s website, it has the liberty of offering a new branding experience to users. It means that the company can experiment with new branding styles for the app, which can be different from the regular brand style of the company’s website (or the company altogether).
Going a step further, companies can build mobile apps specifically to transition into a new brand style for themselves.
“Mobile apps can be used to create a distinguished brand for your product/service.”
Additionally, a mobile app can also allow users to customize its appearance, as per users’ liking. This can further help in the personalization front of the app.
Add-on: The concept of microsites work on similar lines. Microsites offer a distinct brand experience to users, as compared to their parent sites. They are often used to promote a sub-brand, an event, or a newly-launched service.
Skylab can implant a social media page and any website directly into the app. This enhances User Experience.
On this screenshot of the Allysian app, the Action-Buttons can be set in a different way and the different tabs at the bottom of the app as well
Allysian Science is One of the Skylab’s Clients. Its mission is to maximize human potential through advanced science and education, enabling people to become the best at whatever they choose to be.
Skylab provides to the Admin a wide Platform Settings Control as seen in the previous point. Admin can optimize and change the display as they wish.
Different courses and lessons about Allysian
The Brand story, aspirations, clients & partners, testimonies and others branding experience can be available with great refine design and layout on the app. New users can easily access to those in the Training tab. Each lesson give credit to the reader by just indicate that it has been completed. Each completed lesson will be displayed on the Recognition Wall where every users can like, comment and access to.
#7 Users Spend More Time on Apps
Mobile users spend 86% of their time on mobile apps and just 14% of the time on mobile websites.
“In today’s market, in order to be a successful company it is essential to go mobile”
Moreover, the average time users spend on mobile apps is also increasing — rising by 21% in 2015 from 2014.
Note: A point to consider here is that users spend a majority of their time on gaming apps and social media apps. Skylab has merged both of them to create a Gamified Social Media.
However, we also don’t have data telling us which mobile websites users visit more often (out of the 14% of their time mentioned above). Hence, it’s not possible to make a comparison.
#8 New Stream of Conversions
If you’re looking to increase conversions, mobile apps platform can be a great medium to push users down the conversion funnel.
Mobile apps can be used to acquire both top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) and bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) users.
For instance, utility apps can bring-in ToFu users, which can be later nurtured into BoFu leads. On the other hand, apps like eCommerce already have BOTF users, who have a higher possibility of converting.
Add-on: Since mobile apps are much more targeted in nature (through their content and utility), they can be used to tap specific users in the funnel. Mobile websites, in contrast, reach out to a diverse set of audience.
With Skylab, you already have a community of BoFu and ToFu. Those Users will jump on your app when it will be launched ! Companies focus on capturing new customers, but successful brands knows the importance of retaining & rewarding existing customers.
If your user base does not feel a compulsive need to check your app multiple times a day, you are unable to compete. We leverage this need for frequent engagement, exploration, and unpredictability.
#9 Brand Presence
Users spend a substantial amount of their time on mobile devices. It’s safe to say that many of the users encounter the apps they’ve installed on their devices, almost every day. This regular encounter can be viewed as a branding opportunity for the apps. For the record, a study shows that U.S consumers spend 5 hours on their mobile each day !
Even when users are not actively using a mobile app, they are still reminded of the brand associated with the app. The icon of the app acts like a mini-advertisement for the brand.
“Mobile app icons can work like innovative ad-banners.”
The Allysian Logo is its Brand’s Identity
The presence of an app on a user’s device helps influence user’s perception about a brand, subconsciously.
All of these Apps’ Logos become their own Brand Presence
This user behaviour can be linked to the Signal Detection Theory, which suggests that users process even those ads which they’ve ignored at some level in their minds.
With Skylab platform, we have implanted a GamificationEngine with gamified features to add value on what is already on the mobile market. This increases the companies’ value.
#10 Apps Can Work Faster Than Websites
A well-designed mobile app can perform actions much quicker than a mobile website.
Apps usually store their data locally on mobile devices, in contrast to websites that generally use web servers. For this reason, data retrieval happens swiftly in mobile apps.
Apps can further save users’ time by storing their preferences, and using them to take proactive actions on users’ behalf.
There is also a technical justification as to why mobile apps can work faster.
Mobile websites use javascript code to perform most of their functions. And the framework that mobile apps use can run almost five times faster than a javascript code!
“So, mobile websites are technically slower than mobile apps!”
While all this is happening in the background, users get to complete actions quicker on the front-end of mobile apps, again contributing to a delightful user experience.
Mobile App v/s Mobile Site — What Should You Choose?
Developing both mobile website and mobile app for your business can prove to be a costly affair. You might have to choose one of the two channels, based on your budget and business goals. While both channels have their own pros and cons, mobile apps, especially, can help you get higher conversions. Mobile apps offer greater personalization and operational efficiency, along with multiple other exclusive features.
At Skylab apps, we provide Mobile & App platform according to the client’s needs. We also bring an essential interest to the native features and add-on features which mobile platform can provide and support (Smart Chat, Notifications, Smart Tags…). Skylab has truly understood and incorporated all of these points we’ve just gone through.
The idea is quite revolutionary. Skylab Apps has really built a platform, not an app. Uber is an app, you download it, use it and when the company updates it, you may see some changes. The Skylab Apps Platform is not Web based or HTML 5. The platform is built to work simultaneously across three platforms:
“Skylab has revolutionized the rapidly growing cheerleading industry by providing cheerleaders, coaches, and gym owners the best opportunity to train, learn, and develop their skill-set as they strive to become world class athletes. By utilizing the Skylab platform, we are now able to use gamification to connect a global industry, and the result is extraordinary.”
Big companies are catching on too! Skylab Apps has a growing list of some major clients including 
“Skylab Apps technology gives me the platform to engage with my community through chat, trainings, and recognition all while giving my community a place that isn’t bombarded with traditional social media noise.”
Here is some Quick History For you:
Mobile 
