Socialibrium

Relationship Management Simplified.

BACKGROUND
Managing multiple business and personal relationships has never been easy. People use phones, Short Message Service (SMS), face-to-face meetings, and social media to stay in touch. But the proliferation of ways to stay in touch also makes it overwhelming to track whether one owes a phone call, an email, a meeting, or a text message to a business partner, a family member or a friend. We try to stay on top of the game using to-do lists, Microsoft Outlook reminder, and spreadsheets.

Ray Bernaz, founder and CEO of Socialibrium, faced this problem when he was a technology project manager with a major bank, juggling business relationships with a few dozen stakeholders. Inspired by the dashboard in a Network Operating Center (NOC), Ray envisioned an automated tool visualizing the status of communications with all relationships that one has to manage. In 2008, Socialibrium LLC was born, aiming to provide professionals, as well as individuals, a tool to be on top of the game to manage the relationships.

CHALLENGE
First, the product needed to be created.
Bernaz envisioned the product would run on a broad range of platforms including Web browsers, netbook computers, and mobile devices such as iPhones and Blackberries. From a dashboard interface, users can see how well they are in touch with their business partners, clients, friends, family members via phone, SMS, email, or face-to-face meetings. If the status is red, indicating an overdue phone call, email, SMS, and a meeting, the user can initiate contact to the other party from within the application, which turns the status green. In a nutshell, the user can manage business and personal relationships with a personal network operating center.

As a one-person startup with a great idea and limited funding, Bernaz needed to build the product quickly and cost effectively. Since he had overseen many projects implemented by outsource providers, Bernaz recognized that finding a technology partner would be the best approach to build the product. He sent out RFPs and searched for companies that have extensive mobile development experience. The ideal company, Bernaz said, would have "the technical expertise, professionalism, personal supports, and fair pricing."

SOLUTION
The best user experience for different mobile devices.
Bianor stood out from a few dozen of contenders. "Bianor has completed many projects with established banks and telecommunications companies and showed deep technical expertise," Bernaz said. "And they offer the best value for what they deliver. Its location in Bulgaria, with only a few hours time difference from UK and U.S., makes it easy for me to talk on the phone or visit."

"We’re confident we could build a quality product for Socialibrium based on our battle-tested MobiSDPtm platform", said Stefan Lilov, Bianor‘s Chief Business Development Officer. MobiSDPtm is Bianor’s mobile application development platform. It provides tools and libraries to perform integration, communications with mobile devices and centralized services over the Internet, often cutting the development time in half compared to conventional approaches. MobiSDPtm has already been deployed in several major mobile networks and is used as the foundation to many mobile applications developed by Bianor and its partners. "MobiSDPtm provides the infrastructure to achieve seamless integration between mobile handsets and server-side applications," Lilov said. "It’s the perfect building block for Socialibrium products."

Visiting Bianor's office in Sofia, Bulgaria, Bernaz was impressed. "They have dedicated engineers for my product," he said, "and they also have a pool of experienced managers, quality control engineers, user interface specialists, and graphic designers to lend their expertise to this project". Bianor team developed the architecture based on Ray’s business ideas, and reviewed the many options and technology implications using them.

The first Socialibrium product, an app for the iPhone, turned out to be more challenging than either party had expected. The needed iPhone APIs have not yet been released by Apple, Inc., slowing the development. "It was frustrating. We were dealing with uncharted water," Bernaz said. "But on the other hand, I am glad we are doing something that has not been done before." With great engineering efforts from Bianor, the iPhone application was complete in early 2009.

"Bianor’s engineering teams are very creative. And thanks to their creativity and dedication, we have this product today. They are also very responsive, always making sure I know development status. Because of the unexpected technical challenge, Bianor spent far more development hours than specified in the contract. But, nevertheless, they kept their commitment and delivered an o utstanding product. I am truly impressed."

The second Socialibrium product, named "Scale," runs on the Blackberry, which has richer, more open set of APIs. The product became available in August 2009 after only two months of development.

"We have the know-how to develop the best user experience for different mobile devices," Lilov said. "For example, Blackberry has menu keys, a keyboard, and a different screen size than the iPhone, and we were able to offer advice to our client to take advantage of the differences."

BENEFITS
Short time-to-market thanks to the flexible architecture of MobiSDP^tm.
Starting with a product idea and leveraging the engineering and development expertise of Bianor, Ray Bernaz was able bring his idea to product within a short period of time without the cost and complexity of hiring a team of developers.

The resulting products, which can be downloaded at www.socialibrium.com, allow users to better manage their relationships by aggregating communication with clients, colleagues, family, and friends through channels they already use. The dashboard consolidates these channels and reminds them when that contact has been less frequent than they would like. Users can continue to use the tools they already use such as MS Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc. From the dashboard interface, users see the health of the relationships and initiate a phone call, SMS message or email directly from the interface. The relationship status is dynamically updated.

Furthermore, because of the modular, flexible architecture of MobiSDPtm that the Socialibrium products are built upon, additional products and features can be developed quickly in the future. Bernaz is considering expanding to other mobile devices and developing a Web-based version. Future versions could integrate landline phone call information in the same dashboard.

What the client says:
"Bianor’s engineering teams are very creative. And thanks to their creativity and dedication, we have this product today.
They are also very responsive, always making sure I know development status. Because of the unexpected technical challenge, Bianor spent far more development hours than specified in the contract. But, nevertheless, they kept their commitment and delivered an outstanding product. I am truly impressed."
Ray Bernaz, founder and CEO of Socialibrium