Twin Cities' Third Iron's app unscrambles academia

Source: Pioneer Press, St.儲存倉 Paul, Minn.Oct. 26--Twin Cities software company Third Iron is working to un-Google scholarly research.The company's first product, a mobile app called BrowZine, was born of its founders' realization that people were frustrated with having to search library databases for academic articles instead of being able to browse them by subject."One of the primary ways information is delivered to end users is in a database format," Third Iron CEO Kendall Bartsch said. "The idea is that you're going to sit down with something that you want to search for information on. ... But you have to know what you want to find. We saw that all of this information was kind of hidden in these databases."Kind of like trying using a dictionary to find out how to spell aword. You have to know how to spell the word to find it in the dictionary.Within the BrowZine app, publications are displayed in a user interface similar to apps such as Zinio and Apple's NewsStand. Students and faculty can instantly access academic journals to which their institution subscribes.After about a year on the market, the BrowZine app has been downloaded more than 15,000 times. Its catalogue has grown from about 3,000 titles to about 15,000.Bartsch and co-founder John Seguin saw a need for such a service while working for digital periodical publisher ProQuest. While there was glut of information online for academics in their given field, the organization of it left much to be desired.They saw the solution in the burgeoning market for mobile apps.They turned to third co-founder Karl Becker, with whom Seguin had collaborated almost 10 years earlier to create a downloadable tennis video game.Becker is quick to admit that he wasn't well acquainted with library sciences: "The most time I had spent in a library was going there to study in college."But he did know how to write software.Another app Becker had built, Car Care, was there when Apple introduced its App Store in 2008.The three men, who lived in different states at the time, met several times during summer 2011, eventually deciding they needed to start a company.Seguin and Bartsch left ProQuest in May 2012 and December 2012 respectively, after scraping some money together.At that same, Becker and a fourth co-founder, Thomas Lund, began working on the app, writing the code in Objective C, the language that is compatible with Apple's iOS mobile devices. Bartsch, Becker and Seguin bought Lund out of the business in early 2013.It took Becker, Lund and a contracted programmer more than a year to write the code for BrowZine before it was ready to be sent to Apple for review.BrowZine went live in the App Store in October 2012.One of the company's first client institutions was the University of Minnesota library, which signed on in February after a two-month trial period.Jody Gray, diversity outreach librarian at the U, says the app has been popular, especially among graduate students and profe迷你倉最平sors who need to be well-read on the latest research in their fields."We've seen a lot of use," Gray said. "More than I think any of us anticipated."The company's tiered pricing structure is based on the size of a client university's student body.The U pays $5,092 per year for all Apple and Android devices.After a few months on the market, about a dozen university libraries had signed on. The three partners realized they needed more capital to sustain this growth.Knowing they couldn't raise the funds themselves, they turned to the state's Angel Tax Credit -- a program that allows investors to claim an income tax deduction of 25 cents for every dollar they invest in a Minnesota startup.With this cash, Becker was able to hire a full-time salesperson and two full-time programmers to aid in the development of the company's Android app, which had to be written in a different code language than the Apple version.With the help of the company's two staff programmers and two more contracted programmers, Becker was able to produce the Android app in half the time needed for the iOS app. The Android app was released in July.By end of the summer, the company had hired a second salesperson, a sales support staffer and an office administrator, bringing their total payroll to nine employees.Third Iron calls itself "Twin Cities based," but it really lives as a virtual company, with no physical office and each member working from home. Bartsch lives in Hugo, Becker in St. Louis Park; but Seguin is in Kansas. Their employees are as far flung as Boston and St. Louis.Bartsch says the company is now looking at ways to add value to the service and ways to expand the product itself."There are definitely other points of monetization in terms of the product itself," Bartsch said. "I think there are other services we could build into it."One of these areas is analytics. Universities are able to see whether subscriptions are going unused, and can pare them down accordingly.The company is also planning to introduce a version of the app -- which is currently only available for tablets -- for mobile phones within the next year.After its first full year on the market, BrowZine now serves 125 institutions in eight countries. They're hoping to see the number of customers double during their second year in business.The company's tiered pricing structure is based on the size of a client university's student body.Although many universities have been cutting their library budgets lately, Bartsch says he isn't worried about BrowZine being affected."Technology is one of the areas where libraries are increasing their spending," Bartsch said. "We wouldn't want to be in the print book business. That's for sure."Nick Woltman can be reached at 651-228-5189.Follow him on Twitter at @nickwoltmanCopyright: ___ (c)2013 the Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.) Visit the Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.) at .twincities.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉