A local mobile app developer's profile is rising like, well, a weather balloon.
Sevnthsin has doubled in size over the past two years to 14 employees today. The company's mobile site is on display this week as the
Mobile Site of the Day for Wednesday, Sept. 22, on the
Favorite Website Awards, a site where marketers and developers go for ideas and inspiration.
And last week it landed on the
front page of the Pioneer Press for attaching a cooler full of cameras and mobile devices to a weather balloon and sending it into the upper atmosphere. "We are doing this out of curiosity, as a way to test the limits of mobile-phone technology," Sevnthsin owner Jamey Erickson
told reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata.
Sevnthsin was originally the name of Erickson's band, which never took off. But his web-building business did. During college he started doing web work for various local bands. As those contacts generated more work, he eventually started a full-time company in June 2006.
Erickson's company still does work for local musicians, including Doomtree and Rhymesayers Entertainment, but his
clients now also include the likes of Target, Caribou Coffee, and Toyota.
"We basically help clients build a conversation with a twentysomething audience," says Erickson. It's a younger, tech-savvy audience that expects more two-way communication.
Sevnthsin has grown through the recession, and Erickson believes it's because the economy is encouraging companies to experiment with new technologies that cost less than mass media.
"People are trying to innovate and come up with new solutions as the world is rapidly changing around us"--from both a technological and an economic standpoint, says Erickson. "We see people willing to experiment with these new technologies, and experiment with them more seriously."
Sevnthsin plans to launch
another weather balloon on Friday, Sept. 24.
Source: Jamey Erickson, Sevnthsin
Writer:
Dan Haugen