Asha Speckman
IMAGINE one day arriving for your haircut or dentist’s appointment. Perhaps deciding on your next hairstyle is mindboggling. The hair stylist interrupts your thoughts. You are handed a BlackBerry PlayBook and as you stare at it your life seems to flash by.
On that little seven-inch device your entire history of hairstyles procured from your favourite salon slides by as your finger glides through the electronic repository also detailing all your appointments.
In an instant your stylist can photograph you using a camera on the device, match your facial features with possible hairstyle concepts and once treatment is effected you can compare before and after photographs.
If you like the service, using your stylist’s PlayBook you can send a viral invitation recommending the salon to your friends. A short while later, while you are still seated in your chair, your stylist flips to a calendar on the PlayBook and secures your next appointment and simultaneously e-mails you a confirmation.
The entire process is paperless and completed from the comfort of your chair.
The exercise described above is an application that this month won Joe Diedericks of Pretoria the title of South Africa’s first BlackBerry App Master in a national competition run by Research in Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerrys.
Diedericks’ application, dubbed Salon Queen, is developed for the PlayBook tablet but can be adapted for use on any operating system.
It uses the core features of the BlackBerry PlayBook, which include e-mail, camera and calendar to create an enriched business tool that any salon could use.
Owners of businesses such as salons, dentistries and gyms can use the application to track sales, scheduling and customer relationship management.
Diedericks, 32, drew on his previous experience in sales and the beauty industry to share the invention that took five minutes to conceptualise and less than two months to build electronically.
“My idea of an application is that it is something simple, 123, works and the business owner can pick it up and say ‘this is currently happening in my business’ or a customer can pick it up and say, ‘wow this is great and I want to do business with you because this is simple’,” he said in an interview last week. “When I look at enterprise solutions I think we are making this complicated for ourselves. We need to cut back to simple stuff.”
Diedericks has won a PlayBook device and an all-expenses-paid trip to San Francisco from October 18 to 20 for the BlackBerry Developer Conference, where he will be exposed to the latest app development best practices and expertise from RIM.
His app will be prominently featured on the South African BlackBerry App World carousel when it is available.
Craige Fleischer, the regional director for RIM in southern Africa, said Diedericks’s app was selected as a winner because the concept was simple, yet powerful. Salon Queen could be easily adapted for other professionals, such as beauticians, dermatologists, dentists and personal trainers.
According to Fleischer, there are more than 370 000 app developers in the BlackBerry platform community worldwide.
“Africa is an important part of the expanding BlackBerry ecosystem and we look forward to bringing more opportunities like these for developers in South Africa and the wider region,” Fleishman said.
The South African community of app developers is considered to be in its infancy but is growing rapidly, according to Diedericks, an avid developer. In his seven years in the information technology industry, he has also developed a property searching application and is working on another for consumers. The latter would involve international companies and local retailers “coming onto one platform”. And that is all he is willing to reveal.