Polar Mobile capitalizing on ‘the app revolution’

Ontario company Polar Mobile appears to be a prime example of a startup that is capitalizing on “the app revolution.” Founded in 2007 in Waterloo, Ont., the company says it now has 300 customers across 10 countries and more than a thousand apps available that count over nine million subscribers. In four years, the small Canadian company, now headquartered in Toronto, Ont., has grown into a telecom player, developing applications for Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Maclean’s Magazine and Canadian Living, to name a few. “Right now, we’re in a bit of an app revolution,” Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar Mobile, said in an interview. “Everybody’s app crazy. We’ve been in the app game for four years and have now launched up to 1,200 mobile apps.” Gupta said the company’s rapid growth, especially over the past nine months, is due in part to investments from key partner companies. “Some major companies have approached us to partner with us,” Gupta said. “Microsoft, RIM, Intel, Nokia, Samsung—all of these companies—have made investments into our company and they’ve come to us to help enable an app in their systems.” Duncan Stewart, director of research for technology, media and telecom at Deloitte Canada, said in an interview that companies like Polar can attribute some of their success to developing applications for a variety of fast-growing consumer platforms. “The current mobile ecosystem of smartphones and tablets is defined by diversity,” Stewart said. “… It is important when you are somebody who wants a presence in this rapidly growing ecosystem to get out there on each platform as rapidly as possible.” Stewart said app developers need to stand out. Consumers today are choosing from thousands of applications and it is easy for a single app to go unnoticed. “Presumably they have the ability to create apps that stand out from the crowd,” he said. “The apps catch people’s attention and rise to the top of the best-selling and most recommended lists.” Gupta said Polar acquired its first major Canadian account three years ago with Rogers Media. Its first major U.S. account was reached with Time Warner in 2009, and its first major international account was with The Shanghai Daily in China. Gupta said the company's specialty is making any app available on any platform, device or tablet. “ is to launch across all devices,” Gupta said. “So if a company comes to us, we’ll launch their apps across every device.” On July 18, Polar announced that it partnered with Torstar Corp.’s Metroland Media Group Ltd. to develop 500 new applications to help 104 of Metroland’s community newspapers distribute the news. The company says the news apps will be made available for a wide range of devices including the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and PlayBooks, as well as devices using Google Inc.’s Android and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone 7 operating systems. “The local newspaper space is an untapped opportunity in mobile, as the content is exclusive and the advertisers needs are unique,” Gupta said in a statement at the time. Gupta told The Wire Report that Polar is excited about the Metroland project because it is the first time a local or community-focused business like Metroland has attempted to go mobile. “If you think of all the mobile nature of local content, that gets pretty exciting for consumers, to be able to have access to local news, local information, sports, weather etc., on any device,” he said. Stewart said the rise of the specialized app can be compared to what took place with the emergence of Google Inc. and search engine optimization. “There were companies whose entire business was teaching other companies like Nabisco or the Royal Bank of Canada or whoever to do search engine optimization,” he said. “In the same way, people are developing apps that work well, that deliver good value to the user but also that stand out from the crowd.” Iain Grant, managing director of telecom consultancy the SeaBoard Group, wrote by email that Polar Mobile is succeeding because it is doing “good business” by allowing companies to create a presence easily across a range of devices. “ have a better mousetrap and the mice they are going after are in the hottest market,” he wrote. He said that the company appears to be employing a strategy of using its Canadian deals to impress international clients. Grant noted that Polar's advisory board consists of people who can help find clients in a “smaller marketplace like Toronto.” The advisory board consists of Jordan Banks, the managing director of Facebook Canada, and Greg Wolfond, president and CEO at SecureKey Technologies Inc. as well as the founder and CEO of Blue Sky Capital. Gupta told The Wire Report that the company is about to expand and open offices in New York, San Francisco, and Dubai. The new offices will focus on sales, he said, and although they will remain relatively small, they will help the company to continue to extend its reach outside Canada. “Canada is a great market to evangelize the product, to get attraction and to prove it to your customers,” he said. “It’s not a big enough market to grow your business. More than half of our revenues come from outside Canada today and we’ve only had one offer inside Toronto to date. case-in-point that we have to travel a lot to get out to find the business.” Right now, Polar operates with a staff of 40 employees whose average age is 27, Gupta said. He added that the app building process is affordable and takes approximately three-to-four weeks. Customers come to Polar with everything its team might need, such as content feeds, logos, and other material. Its project managers then configure, build and test the app before submitting it to all app stores covering all devices. Polar announced in late June that, over the next three years, it is extending its reach into the sports genre, developing apps for the Major League Baseball Players Association, the National Football League Players Association and the National Hockey League Players Association (NHLPA). Gupta said the company has already launched a “social tracker” app for the NHLPA and plans are in the works to launch similar applications for the baseball and football player associations. “It’s an app that aggregates the tweets of every single player. It’s a very simple concept and the traffic has been pretty strong on it,” he said. Polar is also behind successful sports apps for The Toronto Maple Leafs and The Hockey News, providing users with live sports coverage, standing schedules, videos, photos, news and blog content. There are significant opportunities in the ways in which the worlds of mobile and sports collide. Gupta said spectator sports create fanatics at a time when mobile users are addicted to their phones. “On average, we look at our smart phones 50 times a day and sports fans are always glued to the scores,” Gupta said. The company has also announced that Intel Corp. and Nokia Corp.’s new MeeGo mobile operating system will be launched later this year with at least 80 apps designed by the company. The success of Polar Mobile has led to some speculation that the company could be bought out. In a June 28 post on Canadian wireless industry blog Mobile Syrup, contributor Ian Hardy wrote that it is “just a matter of time before somebody snatches them up.” Grant acknowledged that Polar would be an attractive purchase for any company looking to compete in a market dominated by Apple and Google. “In so far as Polar makes tools that allow others to make applications, it would suggest that Apple has its own tools to do that and so does Google,” he said. “Polar’s tools would be in competition with some of those other companies. So you would look to who would be interested in competing with Apple and Google.” Polar would not comment on the company's value or its possibility of being purchased. Stewart and Grant also declined to speculate on the value of the company. Carmi Levy, an independent technology analyst, told The Wire Report by email that he would expect a company like Polar to be bought by a major smartphone or tablet manufacturer. “There’s a huge precedent in the mobile space for hardware OEMs like RIM to snap up developers like Polar Mobile,” he wrote. “As software becomes an ever-greater component of the typical device’s value add, hardware vendors are bulking up their coding savvy by acquiring firms like Polar.” For now, Polar is expected to expand. “A lot of Canadian tech companies start here,” Stewart said. “They grow here for a while and then, they expand globally. It’s what is supposed to happen.” dgrenier@thewirereport.ca

Polar Mobile capitalizing on ‘the app revolution’

News | 07/27/2011 9:13 pm EDT

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