“we’re making it easy to track, connect with and serve the millions of visitors…”

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

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Ayo Omojola is a the business co-founder of Juncanoo, and a candidate for a 2011 MBA at the Wharton School. Before Juncanoo and business school, Ayo had traded US Treasury’s and futures for Banc of America Securities for 3+ years, spent 18 months traveling, and was the co-founder of the Posterus Foundation a nonprofit focused on fundraising for education in developing countries.

Juncanoo provides an app and mobile website publishing platform for venues, including cultural, tourist and travel institutions, conferences, retail and sporting events. Our publishing platform, Forge, is in private beta with 40 cultural institutions from around the the world, 2 of whom have already published apps for the iPhone. (downloadable at bit.ly/muttermuseum and bit.ly/MWWAudio) with Android versions coming soon.

MO:
Juncanoo helps cultural institutions go mobile.  Why are you focusing on cultural institutions and not just the broader business community?  How did you see this as a need to be fulfilled?

Ayo:
We’re focused broadly on venues (or rather, organizations with physical spaces); we’re making it easy to track, connect with and serve the millions of visitors who walk through a venue’s doors each year. Cultural institutions are our first vertical (museums in the US see over 800 million visits annually according to the AAM), and we focused on them because institutions like museums already have audio guides and other mobile programming. These institutions are familiar with the power of mobile’s interactivity and recognize in this financial downturn the cost effectiveness of the platform.

MO:
Forge, your publishing platform is in beta release at the moment, with a limited number of partners.  How is the beta going?  What can you tell us so far?  How does it work?  Does it integrate with the existing website?

Ayo:
The beta is going great and we’re gathering great feedback. The goal is to get the arts and culture community familiar with using it and to get their feedback and input which helps us to adapt. We essentially want them to tell us how to build tools that solve their problems.

FORGE enables them to design their apps/mobile websites, and add content from right within their browser. Once happy with their app, they hit go, and it’s published to the Apple Store for review, and immediately to the Android Market and mobile web.

MO:
Why is it important to have both a mobile website and an app?  Isn’t one or the other enough?  What is the importance of going mobile?

Ayo:
We’re trying to champion the idea of an integrated mobile presence. Apps limit your reach – there are far fewer app enabled phones than data enabled ones. Mobile websites limit functionality and don’t allow you to harness the full mobile capabilities of a particular device. HTML5 and services like Location Labs (a really cool startup that gives access to carrier-level location data – very useful for phones without GPS or Skyhook access) are closing the gap, but to some extent apps will always provide richer opportunities for interaction, than mobile websites. We want to give our customers and users the flexibility to choose.

Going mobile is most important for building a community. Cultural institutions often have direct access (via email, social media, or snail mail) to less than 20% of the people who walk through their doors (measured by total visitation vs. subscriber size). Mobile helps them enhance their visitors experience in, and stay engaged afterward.

MO:
When do you expect Forge to be ready for full release?  What mobile devices will you support? What features will be available?

Ayo:
We’ll likely be in beta for at least 6 months, but I suspect after a couple of months we will open the beta to all interested institutions. We currently support iOS(download here and here) and Android (just released this past week for our 2 early beta launches – download them here and here) and we’ve done some work on the Blackberry, but we’re focused now on ensuring the best experience for our customers and their visitors. Once we perfect the experience on these devices, we’ll look more seriously at others.

MO:
You are the co-founder of both Juncanoo and, prior to that, the Posterus Foundation.  What did you learn from your first experience that has helped you with launching Juncanoo?

Ayo:
Nothing is more important than the team. During both experiences I’ve found myself incredibly lucky to be surrounded by a talented team with complementary skills. I’ve been involved in situations in the past, where we didn’t share a vision or complement each other as a team, and those didn’t work too well. As many will assert, the product can change massively, but without a strong team its difficult to weather those changes.

MO:
Can you talk about how you started the company?  Did you solicit investors or raise the capital you needed in some other way?

Ayo:
Femi (our infrastructure lead) came up with the idea; our initial foray was to power cellphone tours and SMS based games using Twilio’s (www.twilio.com) API. Twilio made setting up the infrastructure really inexpensive and easy, so we found we didn’t need a tremendous amount of capital to get started, and opted to finance it through a combination of savings and internal earnings. We’ve pivoted a couple of times since, but we’ve remained lean and I believe FORGE will really alleviate a pain point for our customers, which right now is all we’re focused on.