The Distance

By sharing sharing our wealth of experience and wide range of pre-built development libraries, we can provide a cost effective development lifecycle. By removing handwritten forms; performing validation and implementing both data and location lookups on all data captured, we can mitigate a wide variety of common data issues ensuring the quality of the information. Apps can provide a wide variety of options for revenue generation including: By utilising mobile apps to improve business workflows and sharing data via the cloud, real time information can be utilised to help businesses be more efficient both in the field and in the back offices.

Combing a number of discreet business services into a single app, or simply digitising an existing process and make processes more efficient and profitable. Our mobile transformation experts will be able to advise what areas can be improved.

Phones and tablets have proven to be a very effective way to capture data, by simply replacing paper-based forms or utilising device hardware, traditional offline processes can be digitally modernised. Utilising the big brand techniques businesses can improve inter-employee communication as well as providing a platform to share and news and events. How much value would having your brand in clear view, in your customers pocket, on a device they use times a day? By build an engaging app proposition this can be achieved improving recognition and customer retention.

By creating an engaging app proposition and user experience user retention can be significantly improved through the user of digital programs and PUSH notifications to increase lifetime-value LTV of a customer.

Provide us with your contact details and we will send you an NDA so all your innovative app ideas are protected. We provide expert native mobile app development on iOS and Android devices to deliver the best quality user experience for you and your customers. We also offer cross-platform apps using Facebook's React Native platform and both using our app optimised backend system which we call The Core. App industry expertise We are one of the longest serving UK app developers and have been crafting apps since the first iPhone launched. Jenny Yang held many different jobs in Taiwan and the U.

In this mini episode, Jenny talks about her long, winding journey to Phoenix Bean Tofu and how immigrating to the U. In , Jenny Yang discovered a small tofu company in her Chicago neighborhood that made the fresh soybean curd she remembered from her native Taiwan. Seven years later, when Jenny learned the business was in danger of closing, she impulsively stepped up to buy it.

Choosing and taking care of a knife can be an intimidating process for home cooks. In this mini episode, Northwestern Cutlery owner Marty Petlicki and a culinary school director offer some knife tips and dispel a common misconception about what a sharpening steel actually does. Brian Scudamore was 19 when he set up his junk-hauling business with a used pick-up truck and a stack of business cards.

But his ambitions were always greater than being a one-man junk operation. Brian Scudamore wanted his company to have a brand as polished as FedEx or Starbucks, and he wanted it to be big. Today, GOT-JUNK is in three countries, and Brian is using what he learned about franchising to take other unglamorous home services and make them into big businesses.

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In the ice sculpture world of the 70s and 80s, swans ruled the roost. Jim Nadeau carved a swan every Sunday for the brunch service of the hotel where he worked. In this mini episode, find out how swans became standard in ice sculptures and what rookie carvers can learn from making them. In the s, ice carving was the province of chefs at high-end hotels that made the sculptures part of their decor for Sunday brunch.

Jim Nadeau came out of this tradition. Then, in , he got the idea to start his own ice carving business in the Chicago area. Santa Fe, New Mexico is home to around art galleries. The year-old gallery, which she bought in , is housed in an adobe compound spanning two acres, and the business takes a grounded approach to fine art. One dancer in particular has stuck around: They have adapted the event space for a modern clientele while honoring a promise they made to the founding family to keep the Sunday dancers on their feet and the big bands on stage.

App Developers UK | Mobile App Development | The Distance

The primary business at the Funk family farm is maple syrup production. But the farm also grows corn and soybeans to supplement the income from maple syrup. Mike and Debby Funk, the fifth generation to farm on the family land in central Illinois, met de-tasseling corn as teenagers. Every year, the Funks collect sap from thousands of trees that have been passed down in their family and boil it into pure maple syrup. From its origins in as a horse-and-wagon operation selling clothing to farmers in Dayton, Ohio, LION turns out everything from Teflon suits worn by medical personnel transporting Ebola patients to mini metropolises spanning 20 acres that can be set on fire to train fire departments.

Throw your hands up at me! In , Ann Christopherson and Linda Bubon opened a store in Chicago to sell books by and about women. Opening an ice cream store in Chicago is not for the faint of heart. Factor in a mostly deserted neighborhood and the Great Depression, and the idea of selling ice cream looks utterly harebrained. The modern office has gone from private offices to cubicles, and from cube farms to more open spaces with lower partitions. All those changes have been good business for Office Furniture Resources, which is marking 25 years of buying and reselling the chairs, desks and cubicles that make up American offices.

As an urban metropolis east of the Mississippi River, Chicago might seem like an unlikely home for a purveyor of cowboy hats, boots and shirts. For the Alcala family, now in its second generation of ownership, western wear has proved to be much more than a fashion fad. Bill, a veteran bartender, knows that even a humble tavern needs to keep evolving to survive. Of all the stories Bowlers Journal has told, the most enduring is that of its own longevity and close relationship with its readers.

The Richardson family arrived in Spring Grove, Illinois in , when brothers Robert and Frank each claimed 80 acres of farmland that had become available for homesteading. Successive generations of Richardsons tried their hand at cash crops, dairy cows and pig production. But it was the agritourism business that proved the most sustainable for the year-old family farm, which today is operated by the fifth and sixth generations of Richardsons. In , she and her mentor opened a classical ballet studio in the Chicago suburb of Evanston.

Athena Uslander is the Cyrano de Bergerac of brownies. The company she co-founded in , Silverland Bakery, makes sweet treats that are sold under the names of grocery stores and restaurants across the U. Silverland Bakery may not have the consumer name recognition of a Mrs. Fields or Betty Crocker, but Athena Uslander has the sustainable business and entrepreneurial career she always wanted. When Abdul Qaiyum, a young Pakistani immigrant, discovered Merz Apothecary in , the Swiss German drugstore was on the verge of closing permanently after nearly a century in business.

Qaiyum bought the store from the founding family and has run it ever since, transforming a modest purveyor of homeopathic remedies into a retailer that combines modern business savvy with old-world nostalgia. The Peter Troost Monument Company has been making grave markers, headstones and mausoleums in the Chicago area since The issue of longevity has a particular resonance for fifth-generation president Lisa Troost, who knows that the product she sells is a one-time purchase that is meant to last forever. Stacey Bales has worked in almost every department at her family manufacturing business, from the front office to the shop floor.

But when it came to running the entire company, she expected her father, Steve, to do that for at least another decade.

Stacey and her sister, Sara, found themselves in charge of the business without their father, boss and mentor. As students of history, Harlan Berk and his three children know that circumstances around them can change rapidly. The Jones family has been farming in Iowa for generations. They have weathered tough winters, the consolidation of small family farms and the farm crisis of the s. This is an edited and improved version of an episode we originally aired in February.

Woelbing wants to spur interest in organ music among a new generation of listeners and players—building a musical legacy alongside his business one. Alfred Woelbing made the first batch of Carmex at his kitchen stovetop in He was looking for a cold sore treatment and came up with a hit lip balm instead.

Nearly 80 years later, Carma Labs is still independent and running under family ownership. Find out what goes into the Carmex formula—both for making lip balm and building a company that takes care of its customers and employees over the long term. The Distance takes you inside a real-life cheesecake factory. Some of the audio world's most revered headphones are made in a cramped Brooklyn townhouse that used to house a fruit store.

But a wave of new development, including high-end restaurants and luxury condos, is transforming Fulton Market and prompting many long-time business owners to question whether the neighborhood can continue to sustain their livelihoods. Jason Fried co-founded Basecamp in and in launched The Distance.

All fifty eight episodes:

Shaun Hildner sat down with Jason to talk about The Distance and the kinds of business stories that interest him. From speakeasies to supermarkets, this packaging company never stops looking for new opportunities. Harry Holly invented a machine for molding hamburger patties that helped give birth to the modern fast food industry.

Laundry gets way more fun when there's free pizza, live animals and family-friendly entertainment in the mix. The inventor of the insulated pizza delivery bag saved one of America's most beloved foods from a cold and soggy fate. For schools that don't have their own music programs, this year-old education company teaches kids to toot their own horns. This lingerie store has tackled a vexing issue for many women — ill-fitting bras — for the last 27 years. Business Model Lily Liu was 16 years old when a talent scout approached her at a department store.

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Make It Rain Matt Stock is a business owner who loves marketing and has embraced the unglamorous job of selling a pretty mundane service: You Butter Believe It! Jungle Jim, I Presume? All the Art That's Fit to Print In , Deborah Maris Lader had recently moved to Chicago and was looking for a studio where she could make prints and meet other artists. Solo Act Bruce Roper never planned to start a business.

Diamonds Are Forever Jewelry tells a story. Neighborhood Fixture The neighborhood appliance store is all but gone from the American retail landscape. Help Wanted In , as Chicago manufacturer Wiegel Tool Works was emerging from the recession and wanting to hire again, company president Aaron Wiegel noticed that his job ads for tool and die makers were going unfilled for months.