The Sturgis Buffalo Chip Back Story

I've been a biker since my teens. I started on a Jawa 50cc moped (my dad had a Jawa bike when he was a young man in Romania) and the graduated to my first bike at the age of 15: a Suzuki TS180 Enduro.. I would "push" it to various trails and deserted beaches along the St. Lawrence river and meet up with friends. All my buddies had bikes and for us, they represented freedom. It didn't matter if rained or if we had to scrape ice off the seat. We traveled, camped and got into trouble.

Fast forward many years later to my 30th birthday.  A buddy of mine, Paul Graham, was selling his Yamaha Seca 650. He had offered to sell it to me after having lent it to me while he was away on various business trips but I turned him down. We had a one year old in the house and I didn't think my wife would be to crazy about me riding a bike. Little did I know that my wife, who had ridden on my original Jawa and Suzuki bikes, had purchased it and was planning on surprising me with it. What a thrill that day was … driving the bike around our 1 acre backyard with ballons on it in front of all my friends who had shown up for the surprise party. I still have the Seca 650, though it needs a lot of TLC. I'm probably going to need a new bike to make it to Sturgis, South Dakota for the Buffalo Chip this summer … it is a long way from Ottawa, Canada (26 hours to be specific).

Fast forward a few more years to 2012. I was on a business trip in San Francisco and my buddy Paul, who had moved from Ottawa to San Diego, invited me to drop by for a few days. He had since launched a motorcycle customization business as well as BikerBuddy, a company that manufactures active safety gear for bikes.

While sitting around the pool, I showed him what we were up to at FaveQuest. We had just launched MyEventApps, an affordable solution for building mobile apps and I was pretty excited about the product. To demonstrate the power of the solution, Paul and I built an app over the weekend. The app, called BikeQuest (now MyRiderApp) was aimed at bikers in southern California. It includes events and the best routes and biker friendly spots in the area. He couldn't believe how easy it was to build an app using MyEventApps and wanted in: we signed up his company, Dynamic Solutions Group, to rep MyEventApps in the motorcycle market. 

Paul's relationships in the biker business, coupled with our success in the mobile market in the last year eventually led to massive opportunity to build an app for Sturgis Buffalo Chip. With nearly 500,000 attendees, it is the world's largest music festival for bikers. Paul is heading up from San Diego and Bill Love (FaveQuest President and co-founder), Shawn Griffin (FaveQuest VP Business Development) and I are all heading to Sturgis in late July! We may post pictures :)

Read more about Sturgis and FaveQuest in the Ottawa Citizen right HERE.

Download the app by clicking below (Android coming in another 24 hours): 

Announcing the Justin Trudeau app

 

I was introduced to Justin Trudeau a few years ago at a United Way campaign. I'm sure he doesn't remember, but I do. He has a presence that you simply don't forget.

Fast forward to several weeks ago. I started to become much more aware of Justin's campaign through my social media channels and decided I wanted to help. I'm not a political person but I wanted to "Be part of the change" and, as CEO of FaveQuest, had the means to do something.

It was late in the game and I had noticed that the campaign had not yet included a mobile app. Since that is what we do day in day out at FaveQuest, I rallied the troops and we used our own mobile app solution, MyEventApps, to build an app as quickly as possible.We designed and built the apps for the various platforms (iPhone, Android & Blackberry) and they finally became available last night.

Why is mobile so important? Here some interesting trends and stats:

  • by the end of 2013, more people will be accessing the internet from their smartphones than from a computer!
  • 25% of North Americans access the internet primarily from their smartphones (i.e. essentially never use a computer) and that number is growing fast!
  • there are more smartphone activations around the word than babies being born!!!

Not having an engaging mobile presence can make you invisible to a growing percentage of the population and especially youth. We took it upon ourselves to build and launch the Justin apps as our contribution to the political process and the future of our children.

We hope you enjoy the apps and don't forget to get your picture taken with Justin by using the "JustinCam". Tell your friends!

EXTRA EXTRA: Read all about it in the Ottawa Business Journal!

Please click below to download the app for your smartphone:

 

 

Allan Isfan

CEO, FaveQuest

@isfan

Ride for Dad chooses MyRiderApps

In June of 2011, Shawn Griffin and Bill Love rode in Ride For Dad Ottawa. The ride was a great success that year, and part of that success was the large number (2,350) of riders who entered to support the event.

In doing the ride they learned a number of things. It was difficult to find a friend in a crowd of over 2,000 bikers, at the start, during and after the ride. It would be nice to know your location on the route. We all carried smartphones, but not many of us had a GPS on our bikes. It would have been nice to be able to engage friends and family back home in the ride. They had sponsored us, it would be great if they could follow along as we rode the parade route and poker run.

Earlier this year, Shawn joined up with Bill at Favequest, and one of their goals was to create great apps for riders, both motorcyclists and bicyclists. When they entered the 2012 Ride For Dad, they approached the organizers about an app that would help the organizers engage more on the social media, be fun, and provide useful functions for riders. It was from this experience that the Ride For Dad app was created.

The vision from this single app has led to creation of the MyRiderApp platform, a platform dedicated to creating truly great apps for riders. The MyRiderApps platform will be announced in the coming weeks.

Listen to Shawn Griffin, VP of Business Development at FaveQuest, talk about the Ride for Dad app on CFRA 1310. Shawn on 1310 re Ride For Dad

Download the Ottawa chapter Ride for Dad 2012 app here:

MyEventApps gets picked up all over

We work closely with customers, get to understand their business and develop solutions they love. The service has been the marketing and it has worked very well. The customers all come back and we grow together. We love it and they love it.

However, we were missing a great deal of the market that can't afford custom mobile solutions. Most solutions are too expensive and complex. After hearing this from many potential customers we decided to do something about it and developed MyEventApps. It allows event based organizations to get their own true native iPhone and Android apps for $750/year! We think this changes the game.

See what the Ottawa Citizen had to say this about this revolutionary product. The story got picked up all over the web including blogs and other papers like the Vancouver Sun. Our phone was ringing off the hook on Friday with interest from spas to malls and cleaning services. Things are going to get interesting.

If you wish to keep up with our story, please enter your email to the right and you'll get updates in your email when we have something interesting to share.

Ottawa Citizen, November 30, 2011

OTTAWA — An Ottawa startup is looking to democratize the business of building applications.

FaveQuest and its founder Allan Isfan has released its web-based MyEventApps program, which allows smaller businesses to create iPhone and Android apps in seconds.

To create an app for both Android and iPhone, a business needs to pay FaveQuest an annual fee of $750 …. click to read more

Canada Soccer App

I've been playing soccer all my life and now my kids play as well. It is a beautiful sport and it is so fantastic to see Canada embrace it as it has. Did you know nearly 3 Million people in Canada play soccer? That's amazing!

Our Canadian National teams are making an impact on the world stage and the games are very competitive and enthralling.You can therefore imagine how exciting it was for FaveQuest to work with the Canadian Soccer Association on their first mobile app.

 

You can check out the game schedule, add games to your personal calendar and get reminders and share all of that with friends on Facebook or Twitter. You can also get the latest scores, tons of videos, see what people are saying on Facebook and Twitter and even check out awesome photos. Take a look at the promo and go download it.

Cheers,

Allan Isfan, CEO

Press Release – First ever app in Inuktitut

PRESS RELEASE

Ottawa (September 15, 2011) – FaveQuest Corporation is proud to announce the release of the world's first mobile apps with content in Inuktitut (as well as English and French). These apps were built to help the Canada Council for the Arts communicate their Grants for the Arts programs. The apps run on iPhone, iPad, iTouch and Android platforms, and are available from the Apple iTunes app store and the Android Market.

FaveQuest Corporation is pleased to have been able to do this work for the Canada Council for the Arts, and to work with local graphic design firm Red Wagon Studio. The app “How to apply for a Grant” guides an artist through the process of applying for a Canada Council’s grant, while the "Grant Deadlines" app presents artists with a calendar listing of grant deadlines organized by art discipline.

“We've built many mobile apps, but never before have we had the opportunity to design and build something with content in Inuktitut. It's a beautiful looking language, and it was a thrill to bring the first-ever mobile app containing Inuktitut to the Apple iTunes store and the Android Market.” said Bill Love, Co-founder of FaveQuest Corporation.  “FaveQuest is proud that we are part of this  “first-ever” and we hope these apps will help the Canada Council for the Arts communicate with the Canadian artistic community.”

FaveQuest Corporation is based in Ottawa. We build websites and mobile apps for festivals, conventions, and other events. To learn more visit us at www.FaveQuest.com.

From Beaten to Bootstrap Award Part 3

It was an insane summer to put it mildly. We launched a brand new festival website for the largest comedy festival in the world – Just for Laughs. Then we launched an iPhone and Android app to go with it. We created a new site and iPhone and Android apps for Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest with an awesome trivia game. We've created several apps for Canada Council for the Arts (being announced in a few days), created a new festival site and Song for Canada contest for Canadas Walk of Fame. In the midst of all that we developed a brand new site for Saunders Farm with video, an interactive map and deep social media integration. We also added the Bonzai festival to Rochester Events suite of events. And if that wasn't enough, we also created a brand new iPhone app for the Canadian Soccer Association (popping out before the end of September).

That's a crazy summer and we can't complain. There were also some deals we didn't get and some festivals that wanted to use our tools but couldn't afford the price. You either say "too bad" or you realize … wait a minute … there's a pattern here. What if we could serve the thousands of festivals and events that don't have multi-million dollar budgets? And that's what we're going to do with a focus on the biggest hole in their web strategy – mobile ( with a sprinkle of social). While we will continue to take on large projects, we're building a new mobile platform that will allow us to spin straight forward event apps in hours rather than months and for a price smaller event organizers can afford.

It is time to scale our company and clean up. Let's see if we can truly earn our "Bootstrap Award" and "Startup to Watch" accolades.