The Fubra Blog
Introducing the World Airport Codes mobile Apps
Greetings! Just a quick update on what the Fubra World team has been working on since finalising our Audit and Targets earlier this year. We first highlighted a few projects with a decent potential revenue that we could all work on and release within a very short period of time.
Our World Airport Codes (WAC) made the shortlist as it has been one of our most popular sites for many years even though we had not worked on it too much during the past couple of years. Nor had we spent any time as a team thinking about how to fully monetise the website… That is of course until recently!
For those unfamiliar, WAC is basically a giant index of vital details regarding over 10,000 of the busiest airports around the world. Providing authentic information on each individual airport’s mapped location, coordinates, runway length & elevation, timezone, airport contact details and of course the area, country and airport code.
We realised that despite WAC’s already high traffic, the number of visitors was continuously and consistently rising even further. Eventually we decided that now was the time to do something with the site to improve it for our high number of visitors so we began by researching the site’s traffic and trying to understand who our users were and why they used our website.
Our research demonstrated that over 20% of our visitors were accessing the site from their mobile devices. This encouraged us to design, create and release a mobile application for both iOS and Android users to improve the experience of the site for those accessing it from a mobile device:
The apps were developed to improve the usability of the site from a mobile device. By also implementing the desired features from the site into the app we have managed to create an application which really does allow the owner to view ‘Every airport in your hands!’
It would still provide the users with the same essential information as the site but direct to your mobile device, wherever you are, within seconds.
Our goal is to be the number one resource for all fields of airport information by members of the following industries:
Commercial Airlines
Travel Agents
Airport Personnel
Aviation Fans
Private Pilots
Freight & Cargo Logisticians
Flight Simulation Gamers
Avid Travellers
The apps are currently priced at a promotional fee of just £0.69 or $0.99 on both the Google Play and iTunes stores. This launch price discount is for a limited time only and will soon return to its RRP of £1.49 / $1.99 (US store).
Although the WAC app has only been available for little more than a week we have been experiencing a positive response from our users. With multiple daily purchases and some very satisfying reviews and ratings already:
“Finding an airport via it’s name or code is super quick and the design is super clean.”
“A nice and simple app that provides runway and airport contact information for thousands of airports around the world.”
“Bought this app as need to check airport codes for work and it seems pretty good so far.”
Available now on iOS & Android
We’re very pleased with how the app has come along and the comments we’ve received but if you have any thoughts, suggestions or feedback in general please feel free to share it with us and we can address these and try to work them into future updates.
Tweet us: @WAC_Official
Bringing Together Different Customer Data Sets
Most businesses have been there – you start up small, in a tiny team, with several key people doing just about everything, from admin to sales and (last, but not least) even office cleaning. The ball starts rolling, and more people come on board internally, when suddenly it dawns on everyone – we can’t continue shouting at each other across the office ‘It’s Jane on the phone calling about that contract, remember her?’
Fast forward this by a couple of years, and businesses think they know so much more about their customer than just their name and an email address, and that there are so many great ways of managing that data. In fact, in the digital age there is so much data out there that consumers seem to be more measurable than ever before.
There are bits and pieces of acquired data about the aforementioned Jane scattered all over the place – in the company’s internal support system as she has emailed before, in the list of newsletter subscribers, on a piece of PostIt note as she has rang up a few times, in the company’s Twitter followers list as she has retweeted one or two tweets, her name and phone number is in an old CRM system that the sales team uses, and she might also be registered as a user with the company’s online store but with her maiden name! Jane is essentially providing more and more data about herself and her behaviour. How can you capture all this and store it in an intelligent and cost-effective way? Read the rest of this entry »
WordPress as a CMS and Framework
Recently we started looking at redeveloping World Airport Codes and one of the important questions that came up was:
What framework should we use?
It came to a bit of discussion about what would be the best framework for the job and a split was found internally regarding which solution should be used. Like the agile company we are, we came across an issue and quickly tried to rectify it with minimal lead time.
Read the rest of this entry »
RTI compliant online payroll software
The team at Clear Books, a Fubra investment, is pleased to unveil our RTI ready online payroll software, Open Payroll. If you are an employer and are not sure what RTI is, you can read more in this article Real Time Information.
Clear Books started out as a pure accounting software play but from a very early stage we developed an integrated payroll module. This allowed our small business customers to process their payroll, email out payslips and instantly file joiners and leavers to HMRC.
To date our payroll module has only been available to our accounting software customers. It has never had its own marketing platform… until now.
With the launch of Open Payroll it is now possible to sign up and subscribe to our online payroll software independent of our accounting software.
Start running your payroll in the cloud. Here are five reasons that Open Payroll will improve your business.
- Anytime, anywhere access – you just need the Internet.
- Platform independent – works on Mac, Windows or Linux.
- Save time and quickly submit forms to HMRC online and instantly.
- Your employees have independent online access to their entire payslip history.
- No duplication of data – integrated with Clear Books, your online accounting software.
How long will Renegade Games be Renegade Games?
This is a guest post by Peter Zaborszky who founded Renegade Games Ltd in 2008, and received an investment from Fubra subsequently. This is an update on how the business is doing right now.
2012 bought a lot of changes to Renegade Games. While the website Top100arena revenues increased quite considerably, I decided not to develop any online games any more. The vision of SimRepublic that I wanted to create was too large for a small company like Renegade Games, either more capital was needed or a lower quality game, neither of which was an option.
After a lot of thinking about the project (the SimRepublic idea goes back to when I was 16), I decided to stop development on it, since there is a difference between never giving in, and never giving in despite overwhelming evidence you should.
Building a game that goes viral is a lot harder than I thought!
The story is positive from here though, as the change has bought some great changes to the company. After looking at possible websites to buy, and a deal to buy a price comparison site falling through, I decided I would create price comparison and review websites, and after some detailed searching I found a new industry, online backups, that needed a high quality comparison website, and also has the potential profitability for a review website to function (via adverts and affiliate sales).
After working on this backups site for a few months now, I’ve learned a lot about building these sorts of site, and I’m getting close to having a format that I can potentially replicate for other niches, which means I can scale the business. I’ve already started working on the VPN and Webinar industries, but these sites aren’t ready yet.
I’ll probably need to change the company name soon!
The site was launched 4 months back with about 12 reviews of online backup providers, and has since grown to over 50 services reviewed, with another 50 articles added that were category specific, for example how to back up your mac online, or linux etc etc.
Online backups are a fast growing industry, there are probably 60-70 major services currently, and this is growing by about 10 companies every year. It’s becoming hard for people to choose a service, which is why I decided to create a review website. These companies all offer different amounts of space, different features, and for a different price, so for someone to choose the right one, they might need some help. That’s where the website comes in, it has detailed reviews of around 55 services now, and the category specific articles I talked about.
Since it’s a growing industry, I’m hoping it will be a very lucrative industry to be reviewing. The site has grown nicely and has been featured on several large blogs, the proudest of which was MacTrast, where we have guest posted twice!
BestBackups had its first profitable month in January, and is showing signs of growth from here on!
Any opinions about the new site is highly welcome!