They look like apps but they’re really stealth development tools which give your customers the ability to build themselves their own app for your service

Let them pick and mix from among your content streams. Let them painlessly create their own unique but shareable experiential space. But above all, give them the means to brand the app as their own. Help them impress their colleagues and their customers. Their job is to share their brand. Yours is to give them a sense that this is quick, easy, sociable and fun. This way of looking at the future of apps came to me while watching this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dFS0daXZhg

The video lead me to imagine the following:

No longer will we be restricting ourselves to merely parading the latest phone apps that we’ve found or bought. Instead, we’ll be sharing ones we’ve proudly made ourselves. Not as programmers or geeks. Not even as something as esoteric or pretentious-sounding as ‘content curators’. This will most likely be a phenomenon that will seem so natural to us that we’ll probably not bother to give it a name. ‘Look at these new apps I found’ will become ‘look at these new apps I made’. And of course it will all be done without anything even remotely resembling programming and it will be stylish and cool.

There are some other valuable takeaways from his talk by Donald Farmer of QlikTech (NASDAQ QLIK). Here is the original header that I put together for this article:

The end of end users: they don’t exist in a social media world

In the old days, the end user was the last step in the chain of products, services and information. Now that last step is history. Pass it on.

I’m including the speaker’s company’s ad-format video below. It doesn’t reflect my thoughts on the issue of enabling customers to create ‘self-branded apps’ or the possibility that end users need to be reimagined as ‘content repurposers’ (user-facilitated remixing and mashups of content is something regularly talked about in new media circles, but his talk puts those aspects squarely into the ‘enterprise software’ arena) but it does help to get across some of the other new Business Intelligence features that he talked about.

Here’s a link to the press release which covers the release of the QlikView iPad app, the technology referred to in the videos.