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We all know how frustrating it is to browse a website on your phone when it’s not optimized for mobile. Fortunately, there are companies out there who strive to make mobile website and application usage as functional as they are beautiful. Toronto-based Mobile Fringe has been working on solving this problem since 2009. By focusing on the efficacy of a small, highly-skilled team and the importance of finding the right tech stack for each and every project, this software development company has differentiated itself in the competitive world of application and website development. And they have the clients to prove it.
Mobile Fringe is a long-time customer of Speedyrails. We chatted with Jamie Simpson, CTO of Mobile Fringe, to learn more about the Canadian company and how Speedyrails continues to help them deploy, maintain, and scale their projects.
What’s the story behind Mobile Fringe?
Mobile Fringe was founded in 2009—right on the heels of the first iPhone release. The excitement of the App Store propelled us to start creating mobile apps and doing mobile development. Our first client was the Toronto Eaton Centre. From there, we slowly began to build a product designed for the shopping centre industry that included websites in addition to mobile apps. That’s how our product, Mall Maverick, came to be.
Tell us about Mall Maverick and what makes it unique.
Mall Maverick services over 150 shopping centres across North America. Our products include a custom CMS (content management system), websites, mobile apps, and digital directories. Mall Maverick is unique in that we are the only full service CMS for the shopping centre industry. Our mature platform offers shopping centres a full suite of digital products at an affordable price.
How did you find Speedyrails and what made you decide to host Mobile Fringe with us?
When we started building our platform, we had two important criteria that we needed the hosting team to fulfill:
1) They had to be Ruby on Rails experts.
2) They had to be located in Canada (and have Canadian datacenters).
Speedyrails was easily the best choice for these criteria, so that’s who we went with.
What has your experience with Speedyrails been like?
Our experience has been very good. Speedyrails is much more than just hosting; they also provide infrastructure and support. The client service and response times are the best I have seen in the industry.
Why is it so important for Mobile Fringe to use a managed hosting service?
Mobile Fringe is comprised of software experts and we do our best work when we focus solely on that. We wanted more than just a hosting provider; we wanted an infrastructure partner to help manage our growing business. Speedyrails has done a great job at being our partner in this.
What does using managed hosting give you time to do that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do?
Write more software and provide better service to our clients via our support channels.
What’s coming up next for Mobile Fringe?
For the foreseeable future, we will continue to bring new products to our Mall Maverick platform. We are also interested in blockchain technology and crypto-currencies; we’re looking forward to exploring what can be done in this space in relation to development.
Bonus Question: How do you disconnect?
To disconnect, I read, listen to podcasts, and have recently started to mediate (I highly recommend the Head Space app).
Want more time to focus on the work that you actually want to be doing? Find out more about our managed hosting service here.