Golden Gekko is a mobile app developer, with a very tight focus on marketing and advertisers. GoMo News has had quite a lot of contact with the company in the past, and we were glad to catch up with them again today. I talked to Caroline van den Bergh, Head of Product and Michael Campilho, Business Development Director about a new mobile application service from Golden Gekko called Tino – a platform to let anyone create mobile applications, no matter what their level of experience is.
What is Tino?
Tino is a web-interface for creating mobile applications. Just as long as you can drag and drop, you should be able to use Tino. It’s designed with commonly used “editorial” tools in mind – so people who maintain blogs with sites like WordPress should be right at home. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean Golden Gekko is aiming low. It’s been designed so that companies right up to mobile operators can use it – you can get as involved with Tino as you want. The UI is extremely user-friendly, but it doesn’t have to be simple if you don’t want it to be.
What’s the reason for making it?
Golden Gekko claims that this is something that customers have been asking for over the last years. A big part of the drive for Tino is that translation doesn’t really work on mobile. A lot of people who are used to web development have been getting stuck in the mud when trying to go mobile. “Mobilizers” are a quick way to simply transcode from web to mobile, but it’s not precise and you still end up with sites or apps that weren’t actually designed for mobile. With Tino, Golden Gekko is attempting to make creating apps specifically for mobile much, much easier.
I quizzed them about how much this would cost – after all, if it’s being aimed at both the non-professional, home market AND at mobile operators, it must have one hell of a bendy pricing structure. Tino does indeed have an extremely variable cost. The pricing isn’t set in stone – Golden Gekko is happy to meet people half way. At the top are large brands, operators or OEMs. They will want guarantees for support packages, like customer service and the like. That’ll come at a high price. But there are also publishers and content owners who don’t have the cash to do something bespoke, or just want to test the app market. So the pricing bands include a lot of variables. Eventually, Golden Gekko would love for Tino to be a consumer product, when consumers are more ready to simply play around with apps.
What we think?
While Tino is pretty interesting by itself, it’s the future of the service that I find more intriguing. Or, at least, the future that Golden Gekko sees for the service. According to Caroline, four different TV production companies have contacted them asking how “interconnected” apps can be used when watching TV. This is something Golden Gekko is looking at working into Tino, along with other incremental releases. This is a service that will be release in phases and iterations. Data collection analysis will be built in, along with options for a device cloud.
But that depends on whether there’s enough interest in the service for it to survive, first.
