Bizness Apps is yet another way to manage your small business from your phone

Many small businesses may wonder why they need a computer.

Today, Bizness Apps is giving them another reason to wonder, with the launch of its first mobile app product, Skipper. The San Francisco-based company offers a Web-based dashboard that allows a small business to readily create an app for its customers, like a restaurant offering a reservation-making app to its regulars.

It’s part of a major marketing and management trend for small businesses. While large and medium-size businesses move to an assortment of computer-based marketing and business management suites, customized app creation for small businesses is a very active category. Several dozen “create my app” platforms include Como, Appmakr, AppNotch, App Press, MobileRoadie, and IBuildApp.

Launched in 2010, Bizness Apps describes itself as “the world’s leading mobile app development platform for small businesses.”

The company says its platform has generated more than 400,000 apps, reaching 22.9 million end-users monthly. CEO and founder Andrew Gazdecki points to the simplicity of the apps generated on the platform, which includes templates for restaurants, bars, lawyers, realtors, and other small businesses.

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A restaurant might use the platform to click and select the takeout-ordering functions for an app for its customers, for example. Other available features for the apps — offered as native iOS or Android, or as cross-platform HTML5 — include mobile commerce and coupons.

The company usually white-labels its platform to web designers and digital marketing agencies, so they can offer the customized apps to their client companies. Bizness Apps claims that over 5,000 agencies worldwide utilize the platform.

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Before Skipper, a restaurant or local gym would have to go to the Web dashboard to manage incoming reservations, massage bookings, or takeout orders. Now, Skipper allows them to do that in the app, without using a laptop or desktop.

It also offers app-based marketing functions. A promotion, for instance, can be created on and sent from Skipper to customers on Facebook or Twitter, or via a push notification into the business’ app on the customer’s phone. A geofenced, geographically targeted area can be defined in the app. To create a new app for your customers, however, you still need to go to the web dashboard.

Unless you wanted to completely redo the look of the app or the appearance of your offers, Gazdecki said, the promotions can now be created entirely in the Skipper app.