Keeping it simple

Apps just need to be good enough. No need to get too fancy or reinvent the wheel. While custom apps run from $25-100k, many vendors will create an app for you for less than $25k, and some for well under $5k. This is a summary of the vendors offering apps for less than $25k at yesterday’s 3rd Museums & Mobile online conference.

The key to a tour app on a budget is creating a ‘templated’ app. You upload content (“tour stops”) to the vendor’s online content management system (similar to creating blog posts), and then the vendor packages your content into their pre-existing framework, creating an app that gets submitted to the Apple or Android app stores.

Summary of vendors: 

TourBuddy: List of tour stops from 'Savannah Walking Tour', detailed view of a stop, and their GPS view. Good for large outdoor areas.

TourBuddy – $1-2k per app, with reasonably priced updates, and options for additional features. Inspired by the IKEA model of anchoring on a low price, yet delivering good design, Yvonne Jouffrault, says Tour Buddy is creating apps for organizations who want an affordable app, and don’t need a lot of customization. Jouffrault says GPS maps are one of their best features. The GPS works well for any large, outdoor location with a clear view of the sky. The map mode allows users to pan over a map to choose a tour spot, or see their location on a Google map. TourBuddy has created approximately a dozen apps so far, and their apps run on both Apple iOS and Android. Coming soon, TourBuddy is adding a web app option, a better organization of tour stops, and more visual styles. Later in 2012, Tour Buddy may add support for tablets and video. They have two apps with many ratings: their “Savannah Walking Tour” has a free and $10 version, and 4/5 stars in the Apple App Store; “Dutch Utopia” is free and has 3.5/5 stars. See pricing.

OnCell iPhone App: On the left, list of stops, and map view. On the right, a view from their sample web app.

OnCell – $1.5k for audio tours, $3.8k for multimedia. OnCell built their business creating audio tours run from cell phones, i.e., visitors call a phone number and enter stop numbers into the phone to hear recorded tour messages. Their call-in business has hundreds of clients in the US and Canada, including many major institutions like the Grand Canyon and 80+ other National Parks, the Met, the Smithsonian, etc. The call-in market is being disrupted by the tour apps, which don’t require visitors to make a phone call and burn their cell phone minutes. They have two apps so far on the “OnCell App” platform, the “New Orleans Jazz” app was published this summer, but has no reviews yet. See pricing.

TourSphere: Underground Railroad app, list of stops, a stop, and a keypad mode. Not shown is a non-GPS map mode.

TourSphere – $500-900/month for native apps. $400/month for web apps. They have a CMS for uploading content. No upfront fees, no contracts. The price depends on which combination of phone and tablet sized iOS or Android apps you make. Their ‘National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’ has 3/5 stars. See pricing.

Tristan: Browsing stops and viewing detailed information in the 'Canadian Museum of Civilization' and the 'Infinity of Nations'

Tristan – $8-15k per app for an exhibition guide and walking tour. Tristan’s authoring platform is called Autor. Vanessa Vanzieleghem, Tristan’s Global Sales Manager, notes that Autor supports up to 7 major languages, and publishes to iPhone, Android, Blackberry, iPad and creates a web app. Their more expensive, custom apps have ratings in the range from 2.5/5 stars (“Phillips Collection,” U.S. app store), to 3.5/5 (“The Art at Cowboys Stadium” and “Smithsonian: Infinity of Nations,” U.S. app store), to 4.5/5 (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Canadian app store).

GuideOne: Alaska Native Heritage Center app. Alternating between portrait and landscape orientations, the app has coverflow-like and map methods to browse stops. The stops play as videos. At right is a scavenger hunt, visitors go find the object and answer a quiz question.

GuideOne – $15k+ per app. Their “plug and play” apps draw on a number of preset modules: audio tours, zoomable floor maps and images, scavenger hunts and quizzes, membership/donation features, and links to social networks. GuideOne has lowered their prices and improved their offerings since the Spring. According to product manager, Juan Sanabria, their Alaska Native Heritage Center app launched in May (4/5 starts), the Inupiat Heritage Center app launching soon for iOS and Android. Their app for the Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, VA) was released in February, but has only garnered one review. Coming soon is a Boston Historic Sites iPad kiosk and Android and iOS app launching in launching in Spring 2012. Their apps have an offline mode, but the option to download content into the Alaskan app didn’t work for me on a high-speed network.

KanvaSys' Biosphere app: List of tours, map mode (non-GPS), a tour stop, and empty search results for "ecosystem" with no alternative suggestions.

KanvaSys – $20k+ one-time, or $8k+/year if hosted. KanvaSys is part of Ideeclic, a Canadian company which began creating web sites and educational games for the Alberta and Quebec school boards. Their platform is called “inSitu,” and they can skin it for different apps. KanvaSys’ latest app, “Biosphere” for the Environment Museum is free, but doesn’t have many reviews in the app store yet. Their “Cleveland Metroparks Zoo” app has a 3/5 rating.

Adlib – €2k EUR/ year for a 3 year contract, plus the cost for underlying Adlib Museum system, a local collection management system. The advantage is that the app content comes from the collection management system, so it does not need to be re-entered.

CMS and custom hardware from Antenna International.

Antenna International – Full pricing is not disclosed. Antenna is a big player in audio tours. They have two billing models. Their ‘Universal’ plan involves Antenna taking the risk, owning all the content, and handling all the logistics of the hardware. All visitors have access to the tour as part of their admission fee, and the museum commits to pay Antenna approximately 50 cents per head for 3-5 years. So a million visitors = $500k to Antenna, with no upfront cost to the museum. Their other main option is ‘leasing’ which costs $17-20/month per device. As with the Universal plan, Antenna handles logistics (headphones, maintenance, repainting damage, staff training on best practices, and delivers sufficient devices to meet demand). Often museums have seasonable demand, so Antenna will ship over a few hundred (rarely as many as 1000) additional devices for a few months. A baseline of 250 devices would cost around $55k per year. Prior to launching their proprietary XP Iris device, which is a touch screen and number pad, they had options to buy iPod Touches, but Antenna is phasing out commodity hardware, and pushing customers to use their devices. A downside of working with Antenna is that you usually don’t own your own tour, and especially not any celebrity voices they might recruit, so you can’t spin the content into less expensive tours, post them to YouTube, or use them for any other purposes in the future. Antenna has a new CMS, called “publisher” which allows organization staff to rearrange a tour, or upload a new piece of content. Examples of the CMS in use, offered by Ken Husband, was the marketing department adding a “stop” promoting a sale in the museum shop, or the curators removing a stop for an item which is on loan.

Other vendors at the conference are higher-end, full service firms who create custom apps. These vendors are often vague about their pricing, though  vendors try to keep costs down by reusing features between apps. Full service firms at the conference were: Art Processors, EarPrint, Espro Acoustiguide Group, GVAM, and Imagineear.

Why native apps?

With a native app, visitors don’t have to struggle to read your web site into their small screen. And while you should have a mobile-formatted version of your web site (a web app), native apps give organizations better branding with an icon directly on audience’s home screen, and provides a smoother and richer user experience. Plus, a native app can work when there’s no internet connection.

One important detail: Make sure you are the official “publisher” of your app, so that when you improve the app in the future, or change vendors, your visitors automatically get the new version of your app.

Update: 27-Oct-11. Added new information provided by Tristan.

Serious cloud computing is done in massive data centers, measured in multiples of football fields. The centers have redundant connections to the Internet, power direct from one or more local utilities, diesel generators, vast banks of batteries, and huge cooling systems. Centers house tens or hundreds of thousands of servers. Google has approximately 900k servers. The servers are small computers (think of a stripped-down motherboard from a laptop computer, plus a hard drive) stacked into towers. See videos below.

The latest trends involve slashing power usage, and containerizing (thousands of servers packed into shipping containers, which are plugged directly into the power, network, and cooling systems in a warehouse).

The scale is mind boggling, and so there are relatively few companies setting these up. Recently, a few companies have released videos. You can jump through these videos, and tune out the jargon.

Microsoft

New tour released this week.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOxA1l1pQIw

Google

A tour from 2009 of Google’s first container-based data center

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I

And here’s a video focused on security:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SCZzgfdTBo

Facebook

From a tour 3 months ago:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhOo1ZtrH8c

And a more promotional video:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUX3n2yAzY

Explosion since 2007

The term ‘cloud computing’ traces back to at least the 1980’s, and has exploded in popularity since 2007:

Organizations have been outsourcing the complex details of hosting many servers in data centers for years. Ever since the start of the internet, there have been “content delivery networks” like Cambridge, MA based Akamai who specialized in placing warehouses of servers throughout the world, and then routing web surfers to the nearest network. This was a workaround for the problem of a slow internet. Even with light-speed fiber optics, many factors slow down transmission speeds, and reducing the number of steps between a web user and the server usually translates into speed. For example, The New York Times outsources hosting of its images to Akamai. In fact, although it’s not a household name, at any-given time, 15-30% of the world’s web traffic is carried by Akamai’s network of cloud facilities. Akamai has nearly 100k servers deployed in 72 countries, spanning most of the networks that make up the internet. Other major players include Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.com.

Many organizations host their web sites on “dedicated servers” or “virtual private servers” for their web hosting, which are managed in remote data centers. For example, the New York Times uses dedicated servers at NTT America, a subsidiary of NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation). NTT is one of a dozen “Tier 1” providers. (IDEA also hosts our web sites on dedicated servers at NTT.)

What’s new is the proliferation of platforms and software — such as hosting all of an organizations’s email, or museum collection, or customer database, in the cloud. Ofter this is abstracted so the data is actually stored on multiple servers, which is the key to scaling to large numbers of users. My prior post on building social networks touches on this problem, that if you run our own software or use software designed to run on just one server, you limit the number of concurrent users. Setting up software to spread load across multiple servers is a hard problem, which is partially solved by many of today’s cloud computing providers.

Update: 1-Aug-2011: Added mention of Google’s estimated 900k servers. 

Host yourself with Open Source.

If you have the technical resources on hand, by far, the least expensive option is to use a well-respected open source system. These platforms are robust, reliable, and allow you to infinitely customize. They do not come with any guarantees, but they have active developer communities who fix bugs and security holes, and have tons of ways to extend and improve the site.

The costs will include a staff or consultant to (a) design a look & feel, and choose the features you want; (b) create the templates for the site; (c) install and configure the software; and (d) cost for hosting, e.g., on your existing web server, or a service like MediaTemple’s VPS for $30/month. One server can server millions of anonymous visitors, and thousands of logged-in members who access content which is personalized for them.

BuddyPress —  From the same team that created WordPress. A key advantage is that it is a blog-based approach, and BuddyPress can be added to an existing WordPress blog. It’s relatively easy to set up. See some sites running BuddyPress. Features include activity streams, extended profiles, friend connections, private messaging, WordPress blogging, extensible groups to discuss specific topics, discussion forms, and hundreds of plugins. Runs on PHP and MySQL on Apache. 

Drupal — Another well respected and solid platform. Drupal is also a generic content management system, and is more flexible than WordPress. The tradeoff is that Drupal is more complex to set up, but flexible if you want to add pages in your site which are neither blog pages nor social network pages (e.g., database-driven pages). If you set it up yourself, look into nginx for load balancing, and Varnish for caching. Runs on PHP and MySQL/PostGresSQL/SQLite on Apache or IIS. 

For more info on BuddyPress vs. Drupal, see thoughtful discussions and reader comments by Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology or Jennifer Hodgdon or Jennifer Lampton.

Overall, the quality of leading open source projects (e.g., BuddyPress and Drupal) is on par with leading proprietary/commercial systems. See my post about Open Source vs. Proprietary software.

Hosted systems.

Acquia Drupal — Provides hosting and support  for Drupal’s social publishing system. Customers get the cost savings and high quality of open source; as well as the accountability and support of a proprietary/commercial system. It’s a growth company, and they just raised  $15 million in series D funding.

Acquia provides hosting via Amazon’s EC2. This is a smart approach if you need your site to scale to millions of active users (meaning your site will need to run on a “cluster” of more than one server), as Acquia has figured out the details for scaling your site on EC2. Acquia charges a markup on Amazon’s prices, which is still a good deal. If you have a lot of logged-in users, you will need a more expensive plan. See “Dev Cloud” pricing. The comedian Chris Rock currently runs his web site on their system, and uses the “5 ECU” plan. See an article on Forbes’ blog on how Al Jazeera hosts with Acquia. They currently have 180 customers of their managed cloud.

In addition to hosting, Acquia offers support for Drupal via Acquia Network subscriptions. For $2.5k and up, your Dev/Ops staffperson or contractor can submit support tickets to fix problems with your site, and one of Acquia’s 20 customer support staff will process the request and forward it to one of 30 developers who answer questions and solve problems. According to Mr. House, a typical question would be to help choose which of the many modules for connecting a site to Twitter are best for your site. Between support (Acquia Network) and hosting (Dev Cloud), a typical cost for customers is $30-50k/year.

Bazaarvoice – Hosted service focused on controlling a message, and using social media for commerce. An example is including product ratings in the Macy’s online store (e.g., “How does your skirt fit? Too small, too large? Too short, too long?”), adding Q&A’s to product pages, or short profiles from customers. Approx 800 clients representing ~1.2k brands. Pricing not disclosed.

INgage Networks – A suite of hosted products focused on serving large organizations with existing networks. INgage currently has 50 clients, and their solutions cost from $75k to over $1m per year. The company was previously called, “Neighborhood America”, changing their name in 2010; and the product was previously called “Elavate.” Their platform won the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA)’s CODiE Award for ‘social networking solutions’ in 2008, 2009, and was a finalist in 2010. (No general-purpose social networking platform won a CODiE in 2011.) And their customers have won a variety of industry-specific and regional awards as well. Their system includes all the typical features of a social networking platform, see a spec sheet PDF. Customers include CBS, Adidas, Omni Hotels, and Nexxus. Their system can also be considered “social business software” (see below).

Get Satisfaction – A totally out-sourced site for delivering customer service. Members of the public can ask questions, share concerns or praise, and reply to questions. Optional private communities are useful for beta product support. Representatives from your organization can have accounts to provide official support or refute criticisms. It’s mostly designed for companies with brands or products that need online support. Prices range from free to $289/month. At prices of $99/month and higher, you get light customization to integrate with your site. Custom plans are also available with complete brand control.

Higher Logic – Designed to create private communities for not-for-profits and associations, with  integration to association management system (AMS) — e.g., to link billing & membership information with a member’s online profile and who/what they talk about. Mark Lowry, executive vice president of sales and marketing, says their product is less expensive than enterprise vendors, and that business intelligence about what members are discussing is valuable for choosing topics for conferences, or how to advertise new products and services. Higher Logic is not designed to post content  into public networks like Facebook or Twitter. Higher Logic has approx 250 clients. Like Acquia, they host using Amazon web services. Their Connected Community Product Suite runs on Microsoft .NET. The cost is approx $5k to deploy, and then $500-5k per month.

Jive – Provides both hosted (SaaS) and on-premise applications, and a suite of consulting services. They have typical features: community software, collaboration software, social networking software, and social media monitoring capabilities. Examples of not-for-profit clients are Operation Smile, Mercy Corps, The Clinton Global Initiative and TechStars. Their analytics are designed for marketing staff to monitors advertising campaigns, sales reps to track potential customers, and technical staff to monitor problems. Monitoring consists of issuing automated searches of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter using keywords and phrases you define. Jive Mobile is a web-formatted version of their web interface. Product documentation is locked behind their cumbersome membership process. Runs on Linux. Pricing not disclosed.

KickApps – A comprehensive suite of social tools and features, such as social networking; comments, ratings and polls; gamification with points, levels, badges and contents; private and public chat and messaging; groups; blogs; and calendaring. Create integrated experiences across your site, mobile app, Twitter, and Facebook. Customers includes Social Media Week, The Weather Channel, and several television shows. Monthly licensing starts at $5,000 per month, for hosting and basic support. Consulting services are extra.

Lithium – A hosted service. They have over 500 customers of their community platform and social media monitoring products. Their main focus is setting up sites for customers with likeminded love of a brand, but according to Erin Korogodsky, who heads marketing, Lithium also works for likeminded ideas. Two nonprofit clients the Taxavist site from lobbying group FairTax, and the WeAreTeachers community. In addition to typical features, Lithium includes principles of gamification, to encouraging engagement, e.g., by setting up activities with gaming dynamics with kudos, leaderboards, and voting up/down replies. Their analytics go beyond diagnostics (e.g., members, content, traffic), and include predictive measures (reputation, responsiveness, interaction, liveliness). They have strong links to/from Twitter and Facebook. Pricing is $12-15k/month, plus some upfront costs.

Ning – A hosted social network, analogous to creating a blog on Blogger, or WordPress.com. The advantage is that it takes 5 minutes to set up, offers limited customization to the appearance, and handles all the technical details. The limitation is that the cheaper plans have limited options for customizing the appearance, and regardless of the plan, you are limited to the features and overall user interface that Ning offers. Networks can be open to the public or closed. Pricing ranges from $20/year to $600/year, depending on the number of features and members. It’s free for North American K-12 and Higher-Ed, with fewer than 150 members. See pricing.

OmniSocial Suite – From Mzinga has all the typical features. They also have suite of features for delivering and assessing online courses. They emphasize that they deploy mobile applications, but do not explain how that works. If you have an in-house community (e.g., of staff) and you use Microsoft SharePoint, OmniSocial will integrate. They also offer several consulting services, for creating online courses, or keeping spam out of your network. Pricing not disclosed.

Software on your server

Two additional options worth nothing, which run on your server:

Elgg – Free, open source engine used by several well-known organizations. Activity streams push content to members; flexible API. Intended uses range from campus wide social networks for a school or institution, internal collaborative platform for an organization, or brand-building tool for a company and its clients.

SocialEngine – A content management system with social networking features. Costs $300-680, depending on the features, and your developers have full access to the source code. Runs on your own server, uses PHP. For scalability, use APC, memcached, and bcmath. See review.

Social business software

Unlike social networking software which is optimized for community members to connect with each other or share and discuss generally with the community, social business software is a bit different.

One branch of software is designed for customers to have controlled interactions and community (e.g., fans of a brand). This software has tools for monitoring chatter about brand on online networks, moderating or censoring undesirable content, providing online customer support, or collecting feedback/reviews from customers. This could be suitable for fans of a zoo or museum, but is not appropriate for a community of zoologists or curators.

Another branch of software is designed for employees and stakeholders in an organization to communicate, e..g, discussing documents or meetings.

Here’s a few…

OutStart Participate – General system for social networking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing (e.g., wikis). Integrates with Microsoft Office. Designed for use within an organization, not high volume use. Emails users about activity in the community. Pricing not disclosed.

Parature – Customer service software including customer support, help desk software, knowledgebase, case management, and trouble ticket helpdesk software. Pricing not disclosed.

Pluck by Demand Media – Provides software run on your own server for providing member profiles, groups, comments, reviews, blogs, photo and video galleries, and forums. Management tools for monitoring what user’s say. Used by major brands like NFL, USA Today, Kraft and Lowe’s. Runs on .NET. Flexible API. Pricing not disclosed.

Telligent Social Enterprise Suite – Includes all the typical features of a social networking site, including web sites formatted for mobile devices. Organizes content by type, groups, authors, and tags. Designed for in-house use, and will email employees daily or weekly email digests. A key feature is adding social context to Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Lync. Pricing not disclosed.

And some others who were lower-rated in the recent Hypatia Research report: Alterian, Day/Adobe, IBM Customer Experience Suite, Ingeniux Social Software Suite, Liveworld, OutStart, Ramius/Sixent, and Small World Labs.

Sources: Interviews, and public information from vendor sites. Data from Hypatia Research is from their 2011 research study “Benchmarking Social Community Investments & ROI: Best Practices & Vendor Evaluation Guide.”

Update 22-Jul-11: Minor edit to INgage Networks; moved text about Open Source vs. Proprietary software into a new post.

Introduction

The earliest museum automation traces to the late 1960’s, when the Met used mainframe IBMs to give museum staff access to collection information. Collection management systems were designed around the needs of back-office staff who were continually editing data records about museum objects. Many are stale, ugly, yet highly functional legacy systems that run on old Windows PCs, saving data on a server which the museum keeps in a broom closet.

Since the late 1990’s and the growth of the Internet, collection management software had a new job: to also make collections available to museum users (“the museum without walls”). The challenge was that the server in the broom closet was not designed to host millions of hits from the internet, so vendors created separate “web” modules to make put the collection on the web. At the same time, with the explosion of digital images and video, a new software genre, for managing digital assets, was born. Now, since many objects are photographed, the line between collection management and digital asset management is blurred.

The newest revolution is in mobile devices. There too, a line is blurring, as handheld audio tours and online collections can draw data from the same database.

Vendors and their products

Adlib Information Systems — Free-$140k. Adlib launched their first product in 1982, running on minicomputers, and now running on desktops, web browsers and mobile. Their Adlib Museum software is in use at 1.6k institutions in 25+ countries.

According to managing director Bert Degenhart Drenth, the unique benefits are: (a) Flexibility, museums can configure the system in any way they like; (b) Optional modules for Libraries and Archives; (c) An open and well documented API that can be used by third parties; (c) Mobile hand held device apps that interface with the collection management system for logistic purposes using bar code and/or RFID tags, called the “Adlib Mobile Suite;” (d) Free versions for small museums or private collectors with fewer than 5k objects; (e) Completely multi-lingual with 6 languages; (f) A plugin for Microsoft Office.

Technically, it is based on Microsoft .NET, with data stored in SQL Server, Oracle, or a stand-alone file system. An iPhone app is coming this summer, and Silverlight based in Fall 2012. Prices depend on the number of administrative users and chosen features. The full package of museum and archive features with a few users is in the $15-30k range. See a demo of the standard front-end for the public, and a custom front-end (switch to English) which was created using their API. Data can be stored locally or remotely, and there are many export options via a well-documented API. Their smallest customer is a one man operation, and their largest are national museums like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Museum of Ireland.

Azavea — $15-90k. Sajara is an web-based collection management system centered on digital media (photos, maps, documents, multimedia) with geographic metadata. The product was originally developed as a custom web app for the City of Philadelphia in 2005, and they decided to spin it off into a product. Being web based, it works well for organizations that wish to work together as part of a consortium.

It is an media database with taxonomies, geotagging and search, plus various options for watermarking or restricting access. It runs on a Windows server with data in SQL Server or PostgreSQL. It supplies GeoRSS feeds, saves KML files, has a search API, and has a smart-phone optimized version which works as a web app. Data can be stored locally on in the cloud using EC2. Pricing includes software and implementation, and depends on the services desired, which could include data loading, data migration, skinning, customization, or integration with other systems. Demos: PhillyHistory.org & Mural Farm.

FotoWare — $5-70k. A generic digital asset management system for organizing digital files. It was first developed in Norway 17 years ago, and 100+ Nordic and mainland European museums use it. There is a desktop product, FotoStation (Mac/Windows) for managing assets, and a web-based version for the public to use. The sell a standalone system for $600, but a museum will want to have multiple users and the public access their “FotoWare Index Manager” from a server; pricing depends on the number of administrative users and the number of images. There is an option to save data in-house or in a cloud, and full options to export data. According to Kurt Jackson, of their U.S. distributor, SCS, the key benefits are that it is easy to set up and customize, easy to use, they offer strong customer support, and it’s a reliable product that “just sits there and runs.” There is a live demo. Searches are slow, taking 5-20 seconds for queries which have not been recently searched; but the second time you search for the same thing, replies come back in less than a second.

Gallery Systems — The Museum System (TMS) is a collection management system with features such as various display modes and lightboxes, object relationships, taxonomies and  predefined metadata fields for tasks like loans and shipping. It runs on Windows server, and stores data in SQL Server or Oracle. It is not online. They have a secondary product which is no longer their development focus: EmbARK Collections Manager and EmbARK Cataloguer is for Mac/Windows, stores data on a 4D server, and has a web view. Pricing not disclosed.

KE Software — $5.3k and up. The EMu software has roots in collections management with their first version launched in 1997. According to Chris Fincham, the head of U.S. operations, the key benefits of EMu include: comprehensive museum management (collection management plus other administrative needs for a museum), workflow and project management, flexible metadata, various stats and metrics, and comprehensive web interface with support for mobile devices and kiosks.

EMu’s web interface, branded IMu (Internet Museum), includes tools for mapping objects on locality maps, plotting objects on floor plans, and generating custom guided tours.  The administrative interface is a client/server architecture, which can be set up on a Windows or Unix/Linux server, and administrative users use a Windows client.  Export is available in a broad range of formats. It exports in XML and several text formats. Pricing depends on features and the number of concurrent administrative users. They have 312 clients, and 5k+ users worldwide. Pricing increases with the number of concurrent admin users, plus there is a 20% annual fee for maintenance. Other possible costs could be for data migration, training, and customization/configuration.

Selago Design — $3k for nonprofits, $7k+ for commercial orgs. Based in Ottawa, Canada. Mimsy XG is a central data repository for museum staff to track the logistics of collections, manage interpretive content, and make the data available to the public online or via 3rd party tools. Selago’s approach is focused on low costs to museums, industry accepted standards to keep the software relevant for many years, and an open design that works with 3rd party tools. Like most systems, Mimsy has a client/server architecture. The front end is Java, and works on both Macs and PCs. The backend is Oracle, which is reliable. It supports multiple languages.

They offer two front-ends for the public/visitors (included in the price above). MWeb makes catalogs of data and multimedia, and has more search, display and customization options, and runs off a Microsoft web server. Möbius is a simpler product, running on PHP. Both can have the appearance customized by editing some HTML/CSS. (See product comparison chart PDF.)

Mimsy is used by ~125 sites, and has been available since 2004, and older versions  since the early 1990s. In 2009, there was a corporate merger, and lead programmer Andrea Boyes moved over from her prior company. The software is still actively developed by Boyes and other full time programmers. Some license fees are waived for nonprofits. Pricing is based on concurrent administrative users, and is $4k per user. Additional costs for the database server.

SydneyPLUS — Questor Systems merged with SydneyPLUS  in 2010. ARGUS.net is a portal, mobile app builder for exhibits, and collections management solution all in one package. Details about ARGUS are vague. Pricing not disclosed.

Vernon Systems — Vernon offers a conventional client/server system, and also a totally online, cloud-based system:

Vernon CMS, is priced at $5-20k (see pricing). It’s designed for medium to large museums, mixed collections with natural and social history, and museums who require sophisticated tracking of object activities. According to Paul Rowe, the joint CEO, “Vernon CMS was built to handle any kind of museum collection, rather than coming from a heritage of a specific collection type such as natural history or art museums. Many of our clients have mixed collections of social history, art and natural history.” The system is compatible with many standards. The collection can be put online via their ‘Vernon Browser’ which is based on JSP, and is typically on a server located outside a museum’s intranet. Available features include: cataloguing (cataloguing, location recording, links to multimedia), activities (loans, exhibitions, conservation), online access (for publishing to kiosks, intranets and the Internet), and thesauri (Art and Architecture Thesaurus and Chenhall’s Nomenclature).

eHive is a cloud-based collections managements system designed for small or geographically spread museums. Free to $3.5k (see pricing). It’s designed for museums that don’t have in-house IT support, don’t want to deal with any software and server hassles, or want the convenience of a completely web-based system. See features.

According to Rowe, the two systems will soon be integrated, “for museums that want to use the Windows desktop platform of Vernon CMS, but want to publish to the web using some of the functions that eHive offers.”

Web firms

The above companies sell dedicated collection management software with extensive back-office options for managing a collection. For organizations more focused on the web experience, several vendors at MW2011 create web sites, and have experience putting collections online. Here are two developers who highlighted their work with online collections:

Cultivate Technologies — Based in Philadelphia. Uses Drupal. Focuses on publishing collections online, collecting donations, selling items, and managing events.

Mediatrope Interactive — Based on San Francisco. Builds web sites using their proprietary “Sitebots” for web sites and “MuseumCentric” for collections, as well as Drupal. Their services focus creating easy to edit web sites, publishing collections online, managing email marketing, running online stores.

For a comprehensive backgrounder on the history of collection management systems, and also discussion of many products, see a 2008 report by Dr. Poma Swank. (See 9.5 MB PDF.)

Update 8-Apr-11: Clarified product line from Selago, and moved Selago to main vendors list.

Here are key points and comments Nancy shared about developing mobile products…

Mobile visitor experience

Mobile is dissolving the walls of the museum. Museums are becoming distributed networks. Visitors have experiences in the physical museum, with mobile products, plus a host of (increasingly mobile) information outside the control of the museum, like posting photos to Flickr.

Mobile itself is diverse, including both pocketable and portable devices. Mobile includes smart phones, but don’t forget 70% of the world’s phone users who have just voice/SMS phones — an important, but rapidly shrinking market share. Apps are reaching a small minority of visitors now, but app use is exploding.

Mobile includes podcasts and downloadable content like PDFs, eBooks. It can be devices that visitors own, or devices that are provided onsite by a museum. Mobile web sites, apps, and large-screen web sites all can be seen on smartphones and tablets.

Mobile should be understood as social media and projects should leverage its ability to create conversations, communities, and collaborations both alone and in combination with other platforms. Mobile projects should expand and create new opportunities for engagement, not seek to reproduce existing ones on mobile devices.

To make mobile products easy to use by many people, mobile initiatives should use standard interfaces and include clear, easy routes to find other mobile products and platforms. And people of all abilities should be considered (e.g., blind, poor vision or deaf), in creating accessible tools. This is increasingly easy to do with the accessibly tools built into modern smartphones and tablets.

In terms of mobile access to web sites, Nancy finds that 2% traffic to museum’s sites via mobile devices is pretty much average now. On IDEA’s WebExhibits site, we have closer to 8% mobile share, so it depends.

Money & resources

Nancy suggests that mobile web sites (web apps) can and should created by a museum’s existing web teams. It’s just a matter of formatting for a smaller screen. On the other hand, native apps (e.g., an app for an iPad) may be a better candidate for an external vendor. (See our post about making web/native apps.)

Even if vendors are brought in (e.g., to make an app), Nancy wants to see more economy of scale so that hundreds of exhibitions and museums can inexpensively leap into onto mobile devices. That means highly-reusable modules; not years of designer and programmer time for each new app.

Also, museums and the broader community should reuse with Open Source libraries both within and among museums. Within an organization, developers should try to reuse existing mobile code modules, so as to avoid writing new and/or dedicated code and using proprietary or dedicated systems. Moreover, the community will benefit from sharing code, tools, best practices and other learnings between museums.

Finally, Nancy says, “I don’t think anyone is going to get rich buying and selling apps right now.” Mobile can support existing revenue streams, but don’t try to think of mobile purely as a business right now. She’s giving a talk next week about business models at MW2011.

Research & measure

Embed metrics and analytic tools in every mobile product, and include audience research and product evaluation in every mobile project to inform iterative development and ensure quality.

Future-proofing

Too many projects die after the funding/development period, and that’s a higher risk with mobile since devices are changing so fast. What you make this year might not work on the majority of devices in 2-3 years. With the exception of simple apps for short, temporary exhibits, plan for the future.

That means building mobile websites on a standards-based content management system, so that you can port you content to future systems. It also means using vendors that allow you to export your own data in a standards-complient, or at least flexible format.

Digital content should be conceived for cross-platform use and re-use according to mobile content standards which will inevitably evolve.

Every mobile project or product must include a commercial or other plan for its sustainability and maintenance — That could mean cash or time, but there should be some way to update content and fix bugs down the road.

To learn more, see the archived one-hour talk and PPT slides, provided by MIDEA.

Web sites for mobile devices (web apps)

The easiest way to go mobile is to have a web site formatted for the small screen — often called a “web app.” Robert Pyles, CEO of TourSphere, advocates for web apps, saying “part of the mission of museums is maximum accessibility, and reaching as many people as possible,” which he says web apps allow. They are easier to edit than native apps, and will work on future devices that don’t exist yet. The downsides  are that devices need to be online to work (either on the cellular network, or by installing wireless routers in the museum), and interactivity is limited compared to a native app.

These companies offer web-based content management systems (akin to a blog engine) for quickly making mobile-friendly web sites.

TourSphere — For $399/month, no contracts, they will give you a web site at their domain, e.g., YourMuseum.TourSphere.com, with several templates, a media manager, maps, multiple languages, links to your current site via RSS, keypad navigation, surveys, and some other features. Pyles says, “Depending on the complexity of the app you can do get something going in one to three days.” Customers can make a full backup of all their data and images. Their sister company, Audissey Media, offers audio/video production, providing an easy way to produce additional content. They plan to launch a public beta next month at Museums and the Web 2011, and also plan to make native apps.

Guide by Cell — The “MOBI site” product produces a bare-bones mobile web site. Using an online administrative site, museum staff chooses items, uploads media (e.g., audio tour recordings), and enters text. The visitor’s interface on the phone is a scrollable list of items, which can be objects or topics. The system is suitable for a few dozen pages/topics. Pricing not disclosed.

Kanvasys — Offers web-formatted web sites, edited via their CMS. Pricing not disclosed.

Alternatives: A cheap and easy alternative to these services is to use the WordPress blog engine and the $40 WPtouch plugin. You can set up any suite of pages and posts, browsable by tag, delivering information and a tour. (You would not have keypad navigation, surveys or other interactive features of TourSphere.) If you want to put an extensive collection onto mobile devices, you’ll probably need a collection management system. Two options are the mobile plugins for the open-source Omeka, or using custom plugins and themes in the commercial, cloud-based eHive.

Native apps — semi automated

Native apps can be a better experiences than web apps. The apps can be preloaded on rental iPods at a museum, or downloaded to visitor’s phones/tablets, ready to launch. Apps are popular: There are currently 369k apps for Apple devices (77k publishers); 295k apps for Android devices; and 11k apps for Windows 7 devices (4k publishers).

Native apps are expensive and time consuming to create from scratch. Costs rapidly exceed $20k for a small app, and the development process strips museum staff of control. Costs are inflated because app development is new (since March 2008 for Apple, and August 2008 for Android), so there are fewer app programmers than web developers (since the mid 1990s).

To cut costs and speed development, several companies offer a semi-automated, modular approach, in which content and programming are separate. Museum staff can create the content (via a Content Management System, CMS), and the vendor’s programmers create a placeholder-based app with fixed bins for content. The app consists of filling the predefined bins with content from the CMS. Vendors differ in the features they offer (audio tours, calendar, panoramic images, movies, etc.), how much time it takes for updates to reach the app (instantaneous or a few days), the underlying speed and elegance of their user interfaces.

GuideOne — Their CMS is called “G1 Curator CMS” and they only target Apple devices. Their preset modules include: audio tours, zoomable floor maps and images, scavenger hunts and quizzes, membership/donation features, and links to social networks. According to Juan Sanabria, head of product development. the costs vary widely, from $12k to over $100k, with a typical price around $25k. They don’t have standardized pricing yet. Their apps are used on the floor in museums, and are not in the app store. The Detroit Institute of Arts has been distributing iPads with their app since March 2010, the Chrysler Museum of Art has been distributing a fleet of iPods since mid February 2011. An app related to Alaskan Natives is launching later this year.

Kanvasys — Based in Gatineau, Québec. Offers a variety of services for iOS and Android. The costs vary widely, from $8k to over $100k, with a typical price around $25k. Their free Eco-Odyssée app was released in Dec 2010, but has fewer than 3 ratings. They have 3 more apps available later this year. Their apps work online and offline, and content can be edited via a web-based CMS.

LookBackMaps — Free. Created by Jon Voss in 2008, this system was designed to provide mobile access to historical photos in various online archives. Museums or archives can create an account, and submit photos, location info (lat/lon), and some other meta data, and the site will make the image available to users via their mobile web site. The app has 3/5 stars rating in the Apple App Store.

MobileXpeditions —  Based in Dublin, OH. The company founders previously ran a Macintosh development company. Their first museum app is in the works for Ohio’s COSI (Center of Science and Industry). According to co-founder Mark Gilicinski, they are not sure about pricing, but hope to charge around $10k or less for apps. They are building a CMS. They currently have one art-related iPad app, which is used on Celebrity Cruise lines as a walking tour of contemporary art on their Solstice ships (2,850 passengers).

NOUSguide — Coming from a background of creating handheld audio guides for European museums, Nousguide has made the jump to commodity hardware. According to CEO Alexander Stickelberger, “we have long term relationships with our clients, and all of them shifted to the Apple iOS or Android devices.” NOUS can deliver apps (see list), or a full package with sturdy cases for an iPod Touch. NOUS has an extra focus on accessability, and has incorporated sign language in several apps. They also design the apps to work with or without network coverage. Stickelberger says the costs for an app for the app store is in the ballpark of $10-25k. That includes streaming content, and various interactive features. Adding their Mac-based CMS, the “NOUS Conductor CMS” in their all-in-one solution adds $25k.

NOUS’ SFMOMA Rooftop Garden iPod/iPhone app is free, released Jan 2010, has accumulated 33 ratings in 14 months, 3/5 stars; the sister iPad app released April 2010, also free, has 79 ratings, 3/5 stars. Stickelberger says their Red Bull Hangar-7 museum app has a couple thousand downloads every week. They publish apps under their name, and also white label under the brands of museums. Approx 50 apps are public (in the app stores), and another 100+ are distributed only within a museum.

Toura — Depending on the features and the target devices (Apple or Android), program director Chris Alexander said the cost is approx $5-20k, negotiated per client. According to their marketing rep, Christina Daigneault, the cost depends on how many apps a museum buys, the features they activate, which platforms (Apple and/or Android), and how long they want the app to be in the app store. When museum staff is done creating content with the CMS, with two-day turnaround, Toura programmers deliver a working app which can be tested or submitted to an app store. Currently, Toura has published 21 apps in the Apple app store, and 11 in the Android app store.

Toura’s most popular app is British Library: Treasures. The app was featured in Apple’s app store in mid January and was a top education app, but as is typical, download rates plummeted when it was no longer featured. The $4 iPhone app has 10 reviews in the UK and US, averaging 3.9/5 stars. The $6 iPad app has 41 reviews, averaging 3.3/5 stars; the Android versions have 35 ratings, and a rating of 2.5/5. The second most popular app is French Impressionism at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has 14 ratings in the Apple app store, 3.3/5 stars; and 11 ratings in the Android store, 4/5 stars. According to the Android marketplace, both Android apps have been purchased between 100-500 times.

Native apps — fully outsourced

To make a totally custom app, museums will hire design/development firms. This is costs more, makes edits harder if not impossible, and can yield better results. Often these companies have a pool of source code they can re-use from project to project.

LookBackMaps — Based in San Francisco. Jon Voss’ team also offers simple native apps, starting at $1-2k. Their first custom app for Historic New Orleans was released earlier this month.

Nousguide — NOUS, listed above, also offers full development services.

Tristan Interactive —Their free Infinity of Nations app for Smithsonian was released October 2010, has 13 ratings, 3.5/5 stars. Their free Canadian Museum of Civilization app, released Dec 2010 has 32 ratings, and 3.5/5 stars. Pricing not disclosed.

Alternative: The field is expanding. There are currently 77k publishers for apps on Apple devices. There are other museum-focused app developers (see vendors at MW2011 in April), and thousands of generic developers.

Audio production

Regardless of the methods used, if you have audio or video, someone has to produce it. The vendor, Earprint Productions, promoted their content design, audio production and digital storytelling. They have worked with several museums.

Alternative: If you write scripts in-house, tons a great voice talent can be easily auditioned and hired within a matter of days via voice123.com. Those audio producers will deliver great audio, inexpensively. Many voices are seasoned radio announcers. I’ll cover games in a follow up article.

Games

Another type of app is games, which can be appealing for some museums. Two vendors who showed their games are SCVNGR and Hide&Seek.

Update: Added new data for NOUS. Update 2: and Kanvasys.

Implementing a web-based content management system helps keep your site fresh.

Since we are not all born technical geniuses, we often rely on other to update our sites… a recipe for stagnation and delay.

Problem

It’s so difficult to update web content that the site becomes stale and visitors don’t return.

Solution

A web interface that’s easy to learn enables project staff to update web content as often as desired.

Discussion

Even if your web site has valuable content, users want new information on a regular basis. If project managers aren’t technically inclined, they typically have to rely on a web designer to post new content – which can lead to delays and frustration. With content management software (CMS), however, virtually anyone with web access can perform daily or weekly updates to the site, thereby keeping it fresh. In addition, forums, polls, and news management elements – all of which can help draw users – can be incorporated into the site and updated as frequently as desired.

Even if you don’t use CMS, you can still train staff members how to use basic html tags and provide them with html editing software so that they can make minor changes and updates to your site. You can also incorporate a “news” page with software that allows staff to publish daily updates using a web-based interface.

Separating a site’s design from its content makes a re-design less costly.

Problem

It’s expensive to pay for the services of a web designer, and doubly expensive if you decide to change the site’s design at some point during the site’s life cycle.

Solution

Separate a website’s content, design, and structure, so the design can be changed without impacting the site’s content.

Discussion

Just as fashion gives us limitless options for personal expression, there are a multitude of choices in website design to reflect your project’s purpose. Over time, it’s natural to want to change the look of your wardrobe and your web site. When your web content is fully integrated into your site’s design, however, it’s like hiring a Paris designer to hand-bead a couture evening gown – he must change each page of content manually. By keeping the structure and content of a site separate from its design, you can choose and change the design just as you would choose and change accessories for a particular outfit. You’ll pay much less for web design because the existing content will remain the same. You can buy off-the-rack, so to speak, without sacrificing style.

Problem

As a website grows, it tends to accumulate outdated content that detracts from the site’s effectiveness.

Like wilted sunflowers, outdated content can detract from the attractiveness and usefulness of your web site.

Solution

Content management software allows a project to set content expiration dates and implement processes for archiving outdated content.

Discussion

Launching a new website is like cultivating a new garden. With the framework of the site, you’ve planted the seeds. The effort you spend to develop content is akin to watering your garden. As content is added to the site, the seeds sprout and leaves begin to form. Eventually, your site blooms with a variety of interesting content that draws visitors. You continue to add new pages and sections, but unless you archive outdated content, you’ll end up with a garden full of weeds that obscures the beauty of the flowers.

Without staff dedicated to the task, it’s difficult to keep track of the life cycle of web content. Just as dried flower arrangements are beautiful, some web pages are suitable for an archival section of a site. Sometimes, though, old blooms and old web content simply need to be thrown away.

Content management software can help weed the wilted sunflowers from your proverbial garden by allowing project managers or other staff to set expiration dates for certain pages, and by setting up a process whereby certain pages can be automatically moved to an archive that’s still accessible to visitors.

The technical complexities of running web servers can be costly – but you do not need to do it yourself.

Problem

Hosting and maintaining a website is expensive and can be cost-prohibitive for many projects.

Solution

Utilize remote hosting and a content management software program that will keep the website running at a minimal cost.

Discussion

Hosting and maintaining a website involves hardware and software costs, as well as the expense of personnel to design the site and update its content. This has a negative impact on a project’s human and financial resources.

In contrast, content management software (CMS) can provide customizable template designs and a web-based user interface that results in a professional looking website. In addition, remote hosting allows for a well maintained website infrastructure at a fraction of the cost.

If you’re not using CMS, you can still save money:

1. Leverage your investment by conceptualizing your future needs as well as your immediate needs. If the framework for expansion modules is incorporated during a web site’s initial design, for example, the site can expand without incurring additional design expense.
2. Know your Webmaster. Today, software is available that makes designing a simple web site relatively easy. Make sure that the designer you hire is the real thing, and has a proven track record with clients whose needs are similar to your own.

With a simple, web-based interface, project directors need not deal with complex, impenetrable code.

Problem

The design of the website may look wonderful, but the project director can’t effectively place or update online content.

Solution

A simple, web-based interface allows project directors and authors to post web content, even when they aren’t familiar with web design or code.

Discussion

Most project managers and authors aren’t experts in the technical aspects of web site design. If they don’t have an interface that’s easy to use, they either have to go through a webmaster – which can be cost prohibitive – or try to place text within the source code, which can result in a disastrous alteration of a web page’s design.

Even when project staff members have a rudimentary knowledge of web-based code, they may not have access to the programs necessary to edit the code. Having a browser-based system to manage content that is easy to learn would empower authors to develop and update content themselves.

With content management software, staff can increase their efficiency by using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors or Microsoft Word to publish content to a website. Likewise, templates can be created to assist non-technical personnel in posting content.

Just as this June 24, 1959 evening rush hour traffic jam on Chicago’s Congress Expressway caused bottlenecks, so can webmasters who are responsible for posting web content. Allowing authors and project staff to post directly to a web site can bypass the bottleneck.

Problem

Relying on a technically inclined Webmaster to post content to a site is cost-prohibitive and can result in project delays.

Solution

Allowing authors and project staff to post content directly on the site, without having to go though an intermediary, streamlines projects and saves money.

Discussion

Typically, Webmasters are experts in the design and maintenance of the technical aspects of a website, rather than experts in the site’s content. Although their expertise is invaluable, it is unnecessary to have a technical expert perform what is essentially an administrative task.

Hiring a Webmaster to post content to a site can cause a project to incur a number of unnecessary expenses, including the salary of a staff member who must act as a liaison with the Webmaster and the cost of the Webmaster’s time.

As a project grows, a Webmaster can be a bottleneck to successfully creating and updating content for a website because of his or her time constraints or due to the necessity of back-and-forth communications with project staff. As a result, content developers and users get frustrated at the slowness with which the site is updated. Even “quick fixes” can take days to implement.

While content management software (CMS) allows authors to bypass the Webmaster and post directly online, projects that don’t use CMS can still take steps to prevent bottlenecks:

1. Use templates for content pages.
2. With a little training, an html editor, and a program to upload content to your web server, a staff person can post and edit text.
3. If you contract with a Webmaster, negotiate an agreement whereby he or she will work on your site during a certain window of time each week or month. Such consistency will let authors and staff know when the site will be updated, and they can plan accordingly.

A mobile Guernsey, such as Minnie, is not a sensible way to distribute fresh milk. To be effective, educational projects need to find a sensible and sustainable method of disseminating fresh information to users.

Educational projects have a wealth of valuable information to share with their target audiences. Because most people either have access to the Internet or know someone who does, disseminating information through a project web site can be extremely effective. Indeed, a project may even be judged by the efficacy of its web site.

While a web site is a crucial component of an effective educational program, the process of launching and maintaining a web site can be daunting.

Project managers and authors often find web site development to be a confusing and illogical process.

More often than not, project directors and content developers are not experts in the technical aspects of web design. Creating a web site can seem like an illogical and confusing process. Even when they have a solid outline and content for a web site, project directors must rely on technical experts for their hardware, software, hosting, design, and maintenance needs. When even the seemingly straightforward process of posting a new article to the site necessitates the involvement of a technical expert and a staff liaison, the development and maintenance of a web site can become a drain on the project’s financial and human resources.

Aside from the question of resource allocation, such a process means that those most intimately involved in the project do not have direct access to the site. Going through an intermediary, such as a Webmaster, can mean delays in posting information, which can negatively impact the delivery of fresh content to users. In addition, authors and project directors can feel disempowered and frustrated while waiting for critical content to be added to the site, and waiting again while changes or corrections are incorporated.

Over time, using the traditional approach to web design and maintenance can result in a site becoming overgrown with outdated or irrelevant content. Without constant vigilance, a web site can become difficult to navigate, links can become inoperative, and users can become frustrated when they can’t find the information they need.

In order to effectively disseminate educational information, projects need to find a sensible and sustainable way to provide users with fresh information. Content management software can provide a solution by giving content developers and project managers direct access to their web site.

See recipes for improving dissemination »