For many small businesses, getting a mobile app created for their restaurant, coffee shop or retail store seems time consuming and expensive. But it doesn’t have to be. Lately we’ve noticed several applications popping up that make creating a mobile app as easy as creating a web page. One particularly neat example of this (and the newest app to create an integration with MailChimp via the integration fund) is Bizness Apps.

Bizness Apps is “making mobile apps affordable and simple for small businesses.” They make it easy for anyone to create, edit and manage an iPhone and/or Android app online without any programming knowledge. But, what good is your new app if your customers can’t get it on iTunes or in the Android app store? Don’t worry, the staff at Bizness Apps will handle that part for you.

Even better, thanks to the integration fund, Bizness Apps now integrates with MailChimp, making it super simple to add a newsletter sign up form to your mobile app and have all your new subscribers automatically added to your MailChimp list.

For a complete walk through of how to set up the MailChimp integration in Bizness Apps, check out this tutorial or this screencast.

One of the neat things about the integration fund is that it allows us to fund development work with a huge variety of applications – including those that are targeted to specific industries. For example, we’ve got hundreds of churches using MailChimp to communicate with their congregations and, just like any other non profit, they have a hard time keeping track of their members, ministries, contributions, events etc. Which is why I’m excited to announce the next integration to launch out of our fund.

Church Office Online’s flagship product, Church Membership Online, is an inexpensive, user-friendly and accessible church management software with to goal of helping churches use technology to keep track of their ministries, volunteers, attendance trends, contributions, plus manage events, meetings, fundraisers etc.

Now they are integrated with MailChimp, allowing churches to sync data from their Church Membership Online account into their MailChimp lists, all with just a click of a button. Sending regular newsletters to update your membership as a whole or stay in touch with smaller segments like youth ministry or the softball team just got a whole lot easier.

They even put together a nice step by step video that walks you through using MailChimp with your Church Membership Online account.

I’m excited to announce another graduate from the Integration Fund – KashFlow Accounting. KashFlow is an easy to understand accounting system for UK small and medium size businesses. Their online accounting software aims to make the world of invoicing, cash-flow management and VAT reports simple and streamlined, so you can spend your time running your business, not struggling with software.

As I work to manage the super-exciting influx of applications to the integration fund, one of the main things I think about is how will this integration increase the utility of our application for our users (read: does this actually help anyone)? Well, we have a gang of users in the UK and as much as I try to avoid all things accounting, rumor has it, its kind of a big deal. Small businesses spend an average of 5 hours every week dealing with accounting-related tasks like credit control, statutory financial requirements (what?) and chasing overdue invoices.

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I’ve been in the throes of managing our newly launched integration fund and I’m starting to notice a really neat trend. Many of our applicants want to build integrations with MailChimp for their own products, while also releasing the same integration functionality as an open source add-on for the open source application they’re using to power their product. This is really exciting because it means developing applications that integrate with MailChimp continues to get easier.

The latest project to be launched out of the integration fund is called MailMonkey and it’s an add-on for the free, open-source CMS Concrete5.

MailMonkey allows you to add site users to your lists in MailChimp and easily create special interest groups within that list. You can also add a signup form to your website, create and edit email campaigns, and view real-time statistics on how your email campaigns are doing, all from within your website dashboard.

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Since typing in a long API key code can be cumbersome– especially on mobile devices– Stephen Cerutti suggested we might add the ability to grab your key from a QR code. We thought it was such a great suggestion we went ahead and launched the feature in yesterday’s application update.

QR codes are neat because they store information, like a website address or string of characters, that you can then retrieve with your smart phone’s camera and an app that’s able to read them.

There isn’t yet an option in any of our mobile apps requiring an API key to use your QR code instead, but our Mobile Labs team is working on the next piece of the puzzle as I type this. The idea is that initially you can use your favorite app to scan the code, then copy/paste your API key into the application.