Yapp was a mobile app I came across during one of my circumnavigations of the NY Tech Day show floor last week. This blog has a fondness for simple, effective software that can be mastered by small-biz types. Yapp fits into this category quite well.
Unlike the mobile app generators I’ve written about–EachScape, Infinite Monkeys, One Pager– Yapp is less of a generic tool and more of a focused appliance for scheduling and managing events.
With Yapp, you select from a gallery of cover-page templates for your virtual invite card, which then can be customized with a pic, and all the event details. Other pages in the card can include a twitter stream (with, say, the hashtag of the event), photo gallery, and the list of who’s attending.
There is also a function to add and manage invitees. And that’s about it.
Your guests receive an email with a link to Yapp’s app–say that three times–in the iPhone store or Android marketplace. The app is free of course.
For small businesses, Yapp can be a real time saver. Based on living in my small New Jersey town, it’s come to my attention I’m always receiving one-off emails from restaurants and stores inviting me to special events. Many times there’s minimal or clumsy use of graphics in these invitations. Yapp, on the other, hand can produce simple and professional marketing that would improve the brand-appeal for these SMBs.
Sure, Yapp can be used by everyone else for their own personal parties and gathering. That is a crowded space that they may not want to compete in.
Instead, I like Yapp more as small-biz software. If the developers can make it a little more interactive with a few special features for reservations or polling, then it would be more appealing.
Yapp is currently in beta.