By Stacey Soble | 07/19/2010

Khiem Hoang originally developed Umbrella Salon’s mobile App as a solution to the problem iPhone users had accessing the salon’s website—now he sees it as a direct connection between their phones and the salon.

NESTLED IN SAN JOSE, right in Apple Corporation’s backyard, is Umbrella Salon. Considering the surroundings, there’s little surprise that Khiem Hoang, Umbrella’s business manager, was one of the first owners to produce a mobile iPhone application for his salon. “I was proud of our salon’s artistic website, but I was also frustrated, because more than 400,000 iPhone users in the area couldn’t access the Flash-based site through their phones,” he says. “We discovered it was more cost effective to develop the App, than it was to reprogram our site.”