The Mobile Revolution and the Church

7:00am hits, phone alarm goes off. Eat breakfast and check Twitter for morning news. Play your favorite Spotify playlist on your morning commute. Check notifications on your lunch break. Pay for coffee with the Starbucks app. Text family about dinner plans. Watch the hilarious Jimmy Fallon video your friend sent. Snap a pic of the breathtaking sunset. And much more in-between.

Sound familiar? Maybe the details differ for everyone, but one thing is the same for us all: mobile has become woven into our daily lives. With mobile passing the TV as “America’s first screen”, and people spending almost 2.5 hours daily engaging with apps alone, content consumed on a mobile device isn’t something to brush off as a passing trend.

In fact, we say with confidence that mobile has become vital. With the revolution of apps, mobile devices can now sync our daily, necessary, and leisurely activities all in one control center. People are relying on their devices to consume and communicate what is useful, helpful, and empowering in their daily lives.

[Enter the Church] These are the people that make up your congregation. These are the people that are actively seeking how to use their devices in greater and better ways. These are the people that can greatly benefit from your church’s resources beyond the Sunday service. With the global reach of the app stores, churches and ministries now have an amazing opportunity to enter the space of mobile technology and use it to provide a vital function in their congregation’s daily lives: hearing the Gospel, and staying connected to Christ’s Church.

This is a call to action. An action that we’ve seen countless churches use to fulfill their mission to spread the good news of Jesus, and use technology to be an active presence in the lives of those they shepherd. From more app downloads than members in their congregation, to increases in sermon downloads, to increases in giving, we’ve seen churches like The Village Church, Elevation Church, Fresh Life, and many others find great success through The Church App Platform. By making sermon archives, blogs, push notifications, giving, and other resources instantly accessible, apps can help you meet your audience in their context, on their time.

Think about the people that work weekends and can’t make it to Sunday services. Think about those that need your pastor’s weekly blog post to encourage their spirits. Think about the people who will share sermons via their social channels and will reach their friends and families as a result.

While there are a lot of overwhelming and uncertain ramifications that may accompany the mobile revolution, we challenge you to look at the great and powerful ways technology can be used for good. Here at Subsplash, we are passionate about using technology and delightful design to help make the most of your Gospel content. We want to see the Gospel shared to the ends of the earth. With The Church App Platform you can easily create and manage your own mobile apps, putting your content in the hands of a wider audience. We’d love to help you get started.

Delivering delight in 2013

Here at Subsplash, we treat each new year much like each person does, with new goals, hopes and dreams. In terms of our software, we've spent the past year or so making sure our mobile app platform is world leading as a content management system and hosting solution. Our platform has become more flexible, more powerful, and has more options than ever before.

By God's grace we've been able to make some big improvements to our software and are able to continue to focus on delivering quality products. One of our big additions over the past year was improving our world class encoding solution to make sure our videos perform flawlessly and to ensure the experience is as simple as possible for our clients. We have also added some incredible hosting solutions that ensure superb playback for media files and have redundant backups. There's quite a bit more that has been added on the backend, from more robust analytics and artwork helpers, to some seriously technical things that we won't get into now. We take pride in our work and want to ensure that our software allows each organization to have complete, "real-time" control over layout, features, artwork, content, and branding.

So, what's our focus for the next year? It's all about "delivering delight", which is one of our core concepts here at Subsplash that ties back into our days as a design consultancy working with some of the most recognizable tech companies in the world. And it's no surprise that this theme is our anthem for 2013 as we prepare to take our platform to new innovative frontiers that deliver delight to the millions of users of Subsplash apps! God has blessed us to have the opportunity to work with some incredible ministries proclaiming the name of Jesus worldwide, and it's our duty to ensure this software is a compliment to those efforts.We hope you enjoy the many things to come, both this year and beyond.

Cheers to 2013!

Is Paper Obsolete?

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There’s something to be said about a hand-written letter. Then again, there’s something to be said about convenience. As technology has evolved over the last few decades there are certain practices in business that have shifted significantly. Where filing cabinets, faxes, and legal pads used to be mainstream, they have now all been replaced with PCs, smartphones, iPads and servers. Is this a good thing, bad thing, or just a necessary evil?

As our culture has evolved it seems that technology rules our life more than ever. There are so many tasks that can be completed faster and more efficiently by utilizing technology. Long gone are the days of typewriters, calligraphy, and even hand-written letters. It’s really a shame though, there are certain aspects of these things that are not easily translated through the use of technology.

There is absolutely nothing more sincere than a hand-written thank you note. To know that someone took the time out of their day to not text or email, but to actually express their gratitude in a tangible form is really something. Whenever we can, we try to take that same warmth and apply it to our products. Those same qualities that we love about the personal connection through pen and paper, can be brought into technology, but it takes focus. We don't ever want to lose that human connection through our software, but rather enhance that ability to be relational.

The core offering of our product is an outlet to present media on. Not only is the majority of content accessed through technology, but websites aren’t cutting it - mobile devices are more commonplace than ever. That's why we always try to encourage users to integrate some of the same qualities into technology. When it comes down to it, we are just a bunch of creatives, using the the outlet that we have been given. Where it may not be as utilitarian as it once was, there will always be a special place in my heart for paper and print.

There's always going to be new technology coming out that is the latest and greatest and has the ability to make a significant difference in your life. I encourage you to embrace this - but please, don’t throw away your pens. Print can be really powerful.