Silicon Prairie

DoApp

By Megan Malugani

It’s just another weekday morning at Caribou Coffee, except that the top dogs of Rochester’s most entertaining start-up are enthusiastically duking it out at the table closest to the espresso machine.

The only danger to customers in the vicinity, though, is that the fighters—DoApp founder and president Joe Sriver and CEO Wade Beavers—will accidentally and forcefully release the iPhones that they are using to air punch their opponent.

Using an iPhone application called the “Punch-O-Meter” that was designed by their fledgling company, Beavers biffs on his first air punch (“my wife beats me at this all the time”) and is easily outscored by Sriver. But then Beavers redeems himself with a more powerful punch, and Sriver doesn’t retaliate.

It’s all in good fun, of course. At DoApp—which in addition to the Punch-O-Meter has also produced the wildly popular “myLite” flashlight, the kid-friendly “myPixelArt” (a modern version of Lite Brite), and eight other iPhone apps available at the online iPhone store—big fun is serious business. “We’ve got a wall full of ideas. We always believe there’s no bad idea, just ideas that need to be modified,” says Beavers, a Rochesterite and former IBMer who last year joined forces with Sriver, an alum of Rochester’s IBM and Silicon Valley’s Google who is now living in Minneapolis.

Adds Sriver of his company’s potential: “We’re just getting our feet wet.”

From widgets to apps

DoApp’s roots reach back to 2007, when Sriver started a company called PagePow. PagePow created “widgets,” which in computer-speak are reusable snippets of code that enable bloggers and web content providers to easily include functions like mapping, ratings, and reviews in their content. But when Sriver recruited Beavers and chief technology officer Dave Borrillo (another Rochesterite and former IBMer) to join his company in March, 2008, the company changed its name to DoApp and focused on the mobile market.

“When we made a decision to go to the iPhone, not everybody was on board with the iPhone and we wondered ‘Is this really gonna take off?’” Beavers says. “We took a risk. We could still be doing widgets right now.”

The risk paid off, all right, and iPhone apps (a phrase that wasn’t even a part of the English language a few years ago) are all the rage. More than a billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s online app store since it opened nine months ago, Beavers says, and applications created by DoApp account for three million downloads. Some of DoApp’s apps have been free at the iPhone store while others have cost $.99. Apple keeps 30 percent of the profit from each download and DoApp receives 70 percent.

“We knew our apps hit the mainstream when we saw people holding up our lighter (“myLighter”) at concerts,” Beavers says. The lighter even caught Sony’s attention and eventually led to a deal for DoApp with Sony, which was promoting American Idol winner David Cook’s first hit single, “Light On.”

The DoApp guys are enjoying a bit of celebrity status resulting from their association with the hip world of apps.

When Sriver is wearing his DoApp sweatshirt and DoApp hat, strangers sometimes introduce themselves and excitedly describe their favorite apps.

Beavers’ kids are even impressed. “My 6-year-old son gave me a hug the other day and said ‘Dad, I want to work for DoApp when I grow up. You do fun stuff,’” Beavers says. “My 12-year-old daughter understands what I do. I worked for 10 years at IBM and could never explain it. I’d get that glazed look from her,” he says.

Sriver notes that Warner Brothers, Purina, and Showtime have all called DoApp about potential apps development.

“You make a good app and they will find you,” Beavers says. “If you build it, they will come, I guess.”

Next on tap

DoApp’s big push currently is building mobile apps for media companies and consumers. The big-picture goal is “continuous information,” so that media consumers can go from reading an article or an ad in an old-fashioned newspaper or watching the old-fashioned TV news at home to getting the same content—with enhancements such as geographically-targeted weather and traffic—on their computers and mobile phones.

The DoApp guys think about how they’d like their news and ads presented to them and then create platforms and apps to make it possible. Wouldn’t it be nice if school closings came to your phone directly? If you could click on a digital coupon and automatically receive directions to the store? If you could read about an upcoming concert and then simply click a button to add it to your digital calendar? DoApp’s “Mobile Local News” and “Adagogo” are starting to make those things happen.

For now, the seven DoApp employees (two in Rochester) all work out of their homes; the virtual office is just fine with them, thank you very much. And while there are no plans to create a traditional office space (Sriver does joke about taking over the Hampton Town Hall off of Highway 52, about halfway between the Cities and Rochester), both Sriver and Beavers are high on “Silicon Prairie” and the innovative, entrepreneurial tech culture flourishing here.

Remembering the three years he spent at IBM in Rochester starting in 1999, Sriver notes: “The technology and the programming and the ideas are the same here as anywhere else. Silicon Valley has the name of being the technology hub, but the ideas are everywhere and programmers are everywhere. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can do it anywhere.”