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Apps work up a storm

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Fast-moving developments in mobile communications are changing our work and social lives in ways that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. Much of that is down to the ingenuity of a new class of inventors and entrepreneurs who have seen the opportunities new technology offers and are building a lucrative niche creating applications, or 'apps', games and interactive online communities.

One such person is Leon Ho, founder and CEO of Hong Kong-based Stepcase, which provides both paid apps and extra options as in-app purchases, usually priced at 99 US cents. These are for photo sharing via a mobile network and currently enable well over 8 million app sessions per month.

'We are very focused on creating mobile photo solutions and have gathered many active users,' says Ho, who employs five full-time software developers and engineers. Ho is referring specifically to the company's Steply network, a photo-sharing community which is 'plugged into' all of the firm's own photo-related apps, as well as some designed by third-party developers.

Riding on a similar network effect, it was also possible to achieve 1 million downloads of the Labelbox app - for creating photo captions before uploading - within a month of its launch in March this year.

'We come up with solutions using a design-driven methodology,' Ho says. 'This means we look at how to make things easy for the user so that there isn't a steep learning curve.'

The team's starting point is to devise a mock-up of how a new app should work before considering more details of its look and 'feel'. Once that is clear, plans are handed over to the engineers to code.

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