There Must Be an App for That!

Sean Carey founded HD Interactive in 2002 as a web development company doing a host of digital projects. In recent years, it has focused more on developing apps (application software) for Mac, Android, Barnes & Noble NookColor and other platforms.

The company has virtual offices throughout the Tampa Bay area but now has a base in St. Petersburg through the sales and marketing efforts of Kevin Hohl, who bases operations out of 8^th Street, near Tropicana Field.

Hohl is a vfamiliar face in the Central Avenue district.

He is on the board of directors of Creative Clay, which provides an outlet for art to the developmentally disabled in St. Petersburg. He also sits on the board of the Leadership St. Pete Alumni Association, which also plays an active role in the city.

As a licensed Adobe partner, HD Interactive sees a lot of the new software before others, giving it a bit of a competitive advantage in developing games. Adobe has used HD Interactive as a case study and included two of their games in ads currently running in Times Square in New York.

HD works with companies such as Hilton, Disney, Universal Studios, Siemens Energy and others for various projects throughout Florida and the U.S. But the experience gained developing apps has suddenly got clients knocking at their door to develop new apps for them.

HD Interactive is currently contracted to develop apps for outside firms and they have developed several new game apps of their own and plan to continue with that trend, which appears to be an obvious upward trend. Company owner Sean Carey answered a few questions this week to put the company's growth in perspective.

Q. What is your presence in St. Petersburg?

A. Besides myself, Kevin helps with sales management and marketing and wears a bunch of different hats. That was one of the really nice selling points of bringing Kevin on the team is how deep his roots are in St. Pete. He's got a great base of contacts in St. Pete where as I have that in Tampa and Orlando. He helped bring another geographical area to our company and we do a lot of work in St. Pete now.

Q. How much of your time is spent on apps?

A. It's gone from ten percent of our business to maybe a third of our business and it keeps growing and growing. By some time next year it's probably going to be more than half of our business. Probably three quarters of our company is still working on web site projects and other work from existing clients.

Q. You build up enough of a reputation through word of mouth?

A. We really don't need the web site anymore to sell client work so I figured if somebody comes across our site let's let them know about the apps that we create and lead them to our blog or Facebook page. I have probably three new leads a week at least that just come to us organically, so that we don't need to go out of our way looking for work.

Q. How do people find the apps?

A. They look on their iPhone, iPad or Color Nook and just look under the game category or new releases. We blog about them, put them on Facebook and have people writing reviews for us. That's really the biggest challenge in this industry is you can develop a super great game but if you can't get it in front of enough eyeballs it really doesn't matter.

Q. Who develops the apps? For instance, your MrMixit game?

A. We work as a team. Every project has at least two people on it. Usually there's one person that does the code and there's one that does the creative side of it. I'm in between as the coach just making all the recommendations and testing and steering.

Q. Any industry changes you're riding the wave of?

A. The Barnes & Noble NookColor. It's a very inexpensive Android tablet. Most people look at it as a competitor to the Amazon Kindle but it's an Android device so you can go into the marketplace and download apps. Barnes & Noble has their own app store and they're trying to be selective and not have a bunch of junk. Our word game Pyramix made it up to the fifth best selling app of the app store, but there are only 366 apps in their store compared to a million on iPhone and iPad. We're going to see if we can ride that wave a little bit.

Q. What competitive advantage do you have?

A. Adobe is [featured us] on Adobe.com and we're getting a lot of press as a result of that. It's great for our clients because when they come to us and say we want an iPhone and an Android app, often these other companies are quoting the iPhone and Android as two separate projects. By using Adobe Flash Builder we're able to build it once and publish to both platforms and save them a bunch of money.”

Q. Do you enjoy it?

A. It's a lot of fun. We've built up a nice business. We work with great clients and we do a good job but it's my dream to be able to eventually create games full-time and apps like this and not have to go through the grind of contracts and deadlines of all the stuff we've been dong for so many years.