Seeking Development of App for Members

[pbdroid]

I work for a non-profit membership society (www.spie.org). Optics and Photonics professionals.

I'm just throwing around some ideas as I know nothing about mobile development ... but the purchase of my Droid really opened my eyes to how people are getting their information theses days. I see so many people with their heads buried in their phones, eventually there's got to be an app for everything.

I'm particularly interested in the My Verizon concept where you've got an app icon that opens to an icon menu. This would be ideal for my company and the tens of thousands of students, scientists, educators, engineers, etc. we serve and who are active in our society.

Some ideas I had for the apps within the app were:

· Profile maintenance and search
· Members Only App
· Events Listing
· Buyers Guide
· Blogs/Newsletters
· Daily SPIE Notes
· Communication Preferences
· Account Maintenance
· Customer/Member Feedback
· SPIE Store

My questions are ...

Is development of a professional app difficult for an experienced developer?

What's the scale of difference between developing a Droid app and an IPhone app?

What kind of time frame does it take to create a basic app with maybe some listings, forms for submitting info and a newsletter. I'm sure if we get hooked we'd want the moon eventually.

Anybody wanna talk some business? I'm in the middle of a strategic planning process and am hoping to push mobile applications higher up on the chain of priorities.

For a non profit ... we do really well, so I'm not looking for something on the cheap, rather some good info on realistic parameters and feasibility.

Thanks.

PM me if you have interest.