USOMC goes Mobile

United States Open Music Competition goes mobile United States Open Music Competition (USOMC) is a non-profit organization promoting classical music to young people. Annually, USOMC hosts a competition event and invites young musicians around the globe to participate. For the year 2014, we had over 1300 contestants participate in over two thousands events. On top of the awards for the winners of each event in the competition, USOMC also granted scholarships to qualified individuals for the continuation of their music studies. USOMC started this mission 22 years ago in 1992. I am a volunteer and vice president of this organization. Up until 2 to 3 years ago, USOMC operations had been mostly a manual process. (Musicians are not necessarily tech savvy.) A few months back, when I was elected to a vice president, I started to look into modernizing the whole operation of communications. One thought that jumped into my mind was using mobile apps to communicate information. Throughout the week long competition, our information booth would always be flooded with contestants asking questions, from, “Where is my event being held?”, “Where will I get my award?” to, “How may I claim my award?” One solution that came to my mind was to make a mobile app and make answers to these kinds of questions available. Simple, but a “big deal” for the USOMC organization. I, myself, know a little bit about programming, but certainly I will not have the time to do a full scale java or python programming. So, I set out to search for a tool, and I came across Appery.io. I was completely attracted to it by the ease of use. For most applications, I could just easily rely on drag and drop and I would be done. In many parts, I will just need a little JS programming, but never more than 10 lines long. This the beauty of it for an organization like USOMC, which does not have huge IT budget. As a prototype, I decided to try out the two most commonly asked questions: ”What is my event? and “Where is my event?” Within a day (yes, seriously), I already had an app that will accept the contestant’s name and list all his the events. Clicking on individual event, the app will lead him to a detailed page. Wow! I demonstrated this app to the board and it absolutely blew their minds. We decided that we woul make this app to be the official USOMC event mobile app. I think we are done with this year's app enhancements, but we just have so many different ideas for next year, and I will continue to rely on Appery.io's ease of use, but yet with powerful out-of-the-box components to finish my job. Thank you Appery.io(http://appery.io)!  Try out our mobile web from here.

Raymond Pak
Vice President, USOMC