Sales mobility has traditionally been a hard thing to get right, but is crucial to the success of any modern salesforce. Showcase by Taptera is a native iOS client that does a stellar job of tackling this long-time challenge.

Event organizers are saying goodbye to paper mailers, programs and pamphlets and hello to the digital age. There is no denying we live in a mobile, social and local world and this doesn’t change just because we’re spending a few days at a conference or industry event.

At Taptera, we've done countless mobile application deployments and wanted to share a few "lessons learned" that could help others avoid common pitfalls.

It’s been a few years since enterprise mobility and “mobilizing” entered the common parlance of business executives around the world. Some of those execs have seen great success – grown revenue, increased employee retention, etc. – others have failed.

This week we at Taptera hosted a webinar alongside Box and Sunbelt Rentals to demystify for the hundreds of attendees the challenges surrounding document management. We focused in on the benefits of taking corporate content on the road — mobilizing it alongside one’s workforce, as we’re in the business of enterprise mobility solutions.

As anyone with a pulse on sales organizations knows, everything is going mobile. Every single company we interact with is either taking their first big plunge into mobile or is refining their strategy after a couple of years of experimentation. Common across all these organizations is a strong need to get their existing sales and marketing collateral into the hands of their sales reps, but many aren't sure how to do this, or even what to look for when choosing between the apps on the mobile market.

Smartphones and tablets have been a boon for on-the-go sales reps, who are constantly visiting clients, organizing meetings and trying to close deals from ever-changing mobile offices. Now voice-recognition technology could boost their productivity again.

In my job at Taptera, I'm always looking for ways to help employees use their existing data more effectively. That means we’re constantly looking at the existing platforms our users have and the SDKs that go along with them. Great SDKs are hard to come by, so it’s great when we find one that has all the features we look for.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mattress Firm, one of the nation’s premier specialty bedding retailers, today announced that is has selected

From local market sales people to traveling sales people there are distinct mobile applications that can help them keep track of their sales actions easier, communicate back to "home base" more efficiently and collaborate with their team members best while working in non-traditional locations and ways.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Taptera, a leading developer of fast and scalable, custom-tailored mobile applications for the enterprise, today announced that its marketing optimization solution,

As a CEO I run into a lot of people who ask me about my company, and of course I have a formal pitch. I run a lean startup that builds fast and scalable, custom-tailored mobile applications for the enterprise. The responses I get tell me a lot about my audience and their overall view of the value of mobile apps being deployed in the enterprise. Most importantly, however, the responses often highlight when there’s a sea change afoot in our industry.

Big corporations crave apps for their workforce to stay efficient and hip in the mobile age. Enterprise app developer Taptera is about to close its first year selling products with a cool $1 million in revenue by capitalizing on that demand for useful and well-designed applications.

As I mentioned in my post a few weeks back, local market sales people can benefit from specific applications being a part of their iPad regimen. The traveling sales person can similarly benefit but the apps that they need to use are a bit more expansive.

Software company Taptera, developer of applications Serendipity and Collateral, and which recently introduced voice-to-CRM iOS application Sophia, says enterprises face some inherent challenges in mobility, such as picking the right mobile device management partner to selecting an authentication solution.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Taptera, a leading developer of fast and scalable, custom-tailored mobile business applications for the enterprise, announced that Kevin Dew has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

In no particular order, here are the 40 finalists, culled from nearly 150 entries, for my upcoming Network World

Much has been written regarding how much you can increase your sales team’s performance by putting the right, mobile tools into their hands, many of which today are predicated on cloud-enabled access to the right data at the right time. According to Gartner, the mobile enterprise app market in 2012 is a $120.4 billion dollar business, which represents a 4.5% increase over last year.

Startup offers suite of mobile apps for employees, including productivity tools and more. Watch our Valley View elevator pitch session with Taptera CEO.

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fixmo, the mobile risk management (MRM) company, today unveiled the Secured for Fixmo SafeZone™ partner program at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 along with its initial community of partners who will offer defense-grade versions of their enterprise apps to run within Fixmo SafeZone.

Sales people all have their "secret weapons" - those little tips and tricks they've picked up along the way to help them excel. In a job with bigtime KPIs it's no wonder they often don't want to share their secrets, even with their bosses. What if there was a tool you could give them - that was already proven to be a productivity, selling and efficiency winner?

We all make mistakes. Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt we learned that Mark Zuckerberg's big mistake, thus far, was putting the company's proverbial eggs in the HTML 5 basket. As he noted, this was a choice that they made as opposed to building a native app and I admit, at Taptera, we're biased towards native apps. I'm not going to say "I told you so" since I've never met the man, however, I could have told anyone HTML 5 wasn't quite ready.

I’m biased. No two ways about it. I run what is very much a native app company. This doesn’t always immediately win with the enterprise. It’s often surprising to me how many large companies think that native application development is extremely complex. I think these companies should take a page from the Mark Zuckerberg playbook and remind themselves that the perks of HTML5 don’t mitigate the speed and reliability issues.

I just visited dozens and dozens of startup booths (so you don’t have to) at the massive Techcrunch Disrupt held in San Francisco, I also attended in 2011 and published my notes. I’ve been attending Techcrunch events since they were held in Mike Arrington’s backyard with beers, bbq, and a bouncing black lab over 5 years ago, they’ve come a very long way and Mark Zuckerberg said it was larger than his own Facebook conference.

At Disrupt, the annual conference in San Francisco, a booth was jammed into every inch of space, product demoes were taking place in the bathrooms, and entrepreneurs scrambled to leave a lasting impression in 10 seconds or less.

So, Disrupt is right around the corner. And, we’ve put a few things together with our partners and sponsors that we think will help make your conference experience great

Making mobile apps for employees to use at work on their smartphones and tablets seems like it should be a big market, and it is. But for one start-up, getting there has been more challenging than the founders anticipated.

Taptera was launched last year by two veterans of Genentech, Chris O’Connor and Dan McCall, to build secure, scalable, off-the-shelf mobile apps–tools like conference room reservations and corporate directories–that would be useful for employees to have on their office mobile devices.

It's still early days in mobile apps, and the driving idea behind our Quarterly Review of Business Apps series is to convey a sense of the scope and variety of interesting, useful and economically advantageous activities that business users and IT pros can accomplish using smartphones and tablets.

Taptera’s core value is simple: sales and marketing people deserve great mobile apps. Founded in 2011, Taptera builds fast, beautiful, and secure mobile apps for sales and marketing employees across a diverse range of industries. Taptera currently has four apps on the market: Colleagues, Events, Rooms and Collateral.

Just because you understand consumers and their social habits does not mean you understand their mobile interests and needs. There seems to be a sort of arrogance today around moving very successful services onto mobile platforms. As someone who spent nearly a decade building mobile applications at Genentech I can safely say it’s not so easy — it’s not just a different sized screen but also a different set of needs on the part of end-users.

I’ve been reading Wired since Issue 1 in 1993 and while that may date me, I’m not ashamed to say it since it also means I’ve been around long enough to witness many IT trends in the workplace. The most significant is today’s surge in mobile and social adoption in the enterprise.

Most businesses today are evaluating integrating social and mobile solutions into their core processes. Mobile in particular is fast becoming a necessary area of expertise for software pundits. The best strategies that leverage social and mobile do so to ultimately increase a sales team's time spent selling so that, without adding headcount, a company can grow lead generation and drive revenues.

As Social Media Today recently detailed, "part of the reason there's been a lag in the adoption of truly effective collaboration at scale inside most organizations is that efforts to date have been largely tool-driven, rather than focused on the why." SAP's newly announced Project Robus seems to be addressing this very concern. Their horizontal approach to bring collaborative processes to any application is admirable.

Darwinism is no stranger to IT. Given the pace of innovation, today's plum post is almost always one shift away from becoming tomorrow's pink slip. But the trends currently taking hold of IT organizations may have a broader impact on IT employment than we've seen in years.

The majority of U.S. mobile phone users have smartphones and many of those users are part of a growing and savvy mobile workforce. In fact, the global mobile workforce is on course to reach 1.3 billion people by 2015 according to IDC.

While Google and Apple have focused on putting entertainment on our phones, our productivity tools are stuck in the PC era. In many ways, productivity has almost been an afterthought on these devices. At the MobileBeat 2012 conference in San Francisco, it is clear that due to the consumerization of IT, mobile phones and tablets are becoming part of our work life.

In recent weeks I've been thinking more about an old article I read about UC Berkeley's campus paths and how they directly relate to workplace solutions and product architecture today. For those unfamiliar, as is the case at many campuses, parks, and other public spaces, grounds crews put in asphalt paths and encourage users to stick to the set patterns to get to common destinations.

At this year's recent AllThingsD Conference, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins made the point in her presentation that we are only at the tip of a very large mobility iceberg. For the enterprise, mobility is creating opportunities for competitive advantage and both CIOs and CMOs are eyeing it as a tool to benefit their segment of the bottom line. Historically, technology choices have been the domain of the CIO, however, with BYOD trending and new consumer-inspired enterprise applications entering the market, the sales force too is pushing the technology agenda with their CMO.

Making business easier doesn't mean the process can't be disruptive, too. Taptera co-founder and CEO Chris O'Connor talks about the ideas that inspired the founding of his enterprise app development company, as well as how the model morphed to match the changing face of enterprise. As the iPad continues to change procedure, Taptera is looking to keep the pace.

Mobile enterprise app developer Taptera has injected a little dose of Serendipity into sales reps' work flows through the launch of an iOS app that provides real-time social and location-based information to Salesforce.com mobile users.

Taptera is one of many startups -- and large enterprise players --hoping to tap into the demand for user-friendly mobile apps in the workplace. FORTUNE -- About a year ago Chris O'Connor and Dan McCall left their cushy IT jobs at pharmaceutical powerhouse Genentech to launch Taptera, a company that specializes in building white-label mobile apps for the enterprise.

Mobile, social, and the cloud are integral parts of enterprise applications going forward, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson said at a talk introducing the enterprise applications at Demo today.

Wow! You’ve got an amazing idea for the game-changing new product of the century. But no money to bring it to market. What to do? Start by begging for seed money from your FFF circle (family, friends and fools). If that fails, cast your hopes heavenward for an angel investor with start-up capital.

Everyone’s looking for a competitive edge both personally and professionally. Today, in countless cases, that edge comes in the form of a mobile app for iPad or iPhone and the use cases are, in many instances, fluid between the once-distinct business and personal realms of our lives. App developers don’t need to set out targeting users who self-define as “prosumers”, since many popular apps are adopted for personal convenience and are so relevant that they become necessities professionally as well.

Serendipity, the latest product from business app developer Taptera, helps Salesforce.com customers view potential sales leads around them on their iPhones. The app is taking a similar approach to Highlight and Sonar, both apps that help find people near you with similar interests. Serendipity works like this: Say you’re in a coffee shop and the owner of a business you’ve been trying to make a deal with posts on Twitter that he’s getting a latte at the same location. Serendipity will let you know so you can create a “chance” encounter with that person.

Taptera is a startup software company making mobile apps for enterprises that focus on extending enterprises’ backend data out to iOS, Android, and HTML5 mobile devices.

Even traditional software makers, including SAP, see mobile-app development as a less expensive way to connect customers with their larger-scale software systems.

Chris O’Connor and Dan McCall realized how expensive and time-consuming it was to develop mobile apps when they were working at Genentech, the cancer-drug maker acquired in 2009 by Roche Holding (ROG:VX).

Taptera, which builds enterprise iPhone and iPad applications, has landed $2 million in Series A financing in a round led by well-known Silicon Valley investor (and former Oracle exec) Terence Garnett, who will also be joining the startup’s board.

Enterpise-focused mobile app developer Taptera announced Wednesday that it has raised $2 million in first-round funding.

Taptera develops iPhone and iPad apps for enterprise customers. The company’s first app, Colleagues, will be unveiled this fall. It works as a mobile-optimized employee directory.