Cloud-based Content Management for Mobile Applications

StorageRoom is a new cloud-based CMS that serves content to mobile applications on multiple platforms. Native mobile applications require content in raw formats such as XML or JSON, while current Content Management Systems are focused on taking content and serving it as unstructured HTML – and offer no or only bad APIs.
Many applications contain content such as news, announcements, scores, events or help sections, but keeping the content up to date without releasing a new version requires a central online content repository.

“I was involved in the development of many iPhone and iPad apps for different companies and we encountered the same problem again and again. Content is hard to include and manage. Existing CMS are unsuited for mobile apps and require you to host and maintain your own server. So exchanging spreadsheets or quickly hacked unreliable web-services were the norm, and a major pain while developing”, says Thriventures founder Sascha Konietzke.

With StorageRoom developers configure the required content types by picking various column types, input options and validation rules. Editors can then manage the content in an easy-to-use web-based interface and developers can query the RESTful API from their mobile applications. In addition, content can be exported from StorageRoom and distributed with the application itself for offline access and seamless synchronization. All of this is cloud-based and set up in minutes – and not days – without requiring any further maintenance.

The team expects to see creative usages of StorageRoom outside of the mobile world as well. “Due to its flexibility it is equally suited for desktop apps or games on different platforms. You could even use it for JavaScript widgets with JSON-P.”, says Konietzke.

The service can be found on http://storageroomapp.com.