Alex Kac said he caught an entrepreneurial spirit from his parents at a young age. With that foundation, he has built a seven-employee company in Cedar Park that specializes in software for smartphones.
Kac started the business, WebIS, in 1997 after working as an employee for Apple. Despite enjoying his job, he decided to quit and pursue his own skills with smart technology. His timing, he said, was just right — he and his wife had just had their first child and Kac wanted to “provide a better life for him.”
“I was working at Apple at the time and loved my job, but there wasn’t much of a career path where I was,” Kac said. “Furthermore, I had learned some new skills that I was only somewhat able to use at Apple and wanted to explore more. And finally, I had a new son and wanted to provide a better life for him. My parents were successful entrepreneurs and I guess I just had the bug.”
WebIS started out small in its first few years, working with database-driven web applications. These days, Kac said, this type of work has been outstripped by new smart technology. But at that time, webpages were built statically. Kac’s first responsibilities included building e-commerce systems and lead generation systems.
In 1999, Kac took an interest in Palm Pilots and their Windows CE systems as a hobby. As his interest grew, the company’s focus turned to designing systems for mobile phones, instead of the web. When Apple released the first iPhone eight years later, Kac honed in on the new device.
“When the iPhone came out, we knew that was where the future was,” Kac said.
After Apple provided the company with a way to work with the iPhone, new opportunities turned up. Kac and the company began building the Pocket Informant application, which groups the company’s award-winning calendar, tasks, notes and contacts into one function Kac calls a Personal Information Management application. The company submitted Pocket Informant 2.02.41, the latest update, to Apple’s app store last week.
“Our flagship app is Pocket Informant, and we continue to release new and updated versions of it. We’re just about to release a pretty big update to take care of some issues that showed up for some people lately as well as continue to improve our apps,” Kac said.
WebIS also works on productivity software for other smart phones, including the Android and Blackberry systems. In the upcoming months, the company plans to announce a new smart cloud technology that will be available on both smartphones and Mac desktop software. WebIS will also exhibit its new, online calendaring and tasks function that works with mobile applications at MacWorld, which highlights the newest in iPhone technology.
While the short-term is bright and busy, Kac said a peek into the crystal ball of long-term plans for his company is foggy. Technology, he said, moves at a rapid rate, and the focus of WebIS could shift again as new devices and capabilities become available.
“Technology moves so quickly. Ten years ago we were just starting in the mobile market, now it’s all we do,” he said. “Ten years from now, I expect to see us in a lot more devices, whether they be mobile, cloud, desktop, auto or other application that we haven’t seen yet.”
For now, Kac’s focus is on expanding his company and getting ready for future technology challenges.
“Our goal is to break out into the 50 million dollar a year income range as a company to be able to provide world-class engineering, support to our customers and a great work environment for our employees,” he said. “I put it in terms of dollars because that is a way for us to measure our growth and how well we’re doing. If we’re doing the right things for our customers and our employees, we should be able to grow pretty rapidly.”
For more information on WebIS, visit www.webis.net.