VIPOrbit brings mobile relationship management to the iPhone

The American novelist F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that "There are no second acts in American lives". Proving that adage wrong is a minor goal for Mike Muhney: more importantly, he needs to stay ahead of his son, the increasingly famous TV star Michael Muhney.

Calling Muhney's new venture, VIPOrbit, his second act is especially apt because his first successful venture came in 1986, when he master-minded the first contact manager software, Act. Nearly 25 years later, Act, which Muhney sold to Symantec in 1993 and which now belongs to Sage, is still in active development.

"It's amazing," he says. "So many companies have gone since then."

Even in the DOS days, Act was astonishing: it implemented the tools to manage the hundreds of personal relationships anyone dealing with clients needed. Integrating a scheduler and contact book into a highly usable interface, it logged contacts, tracked personal details and kept notes. It arguably invented two software categories: contact managers and customer relationship management.

After Muhney sold it, he went quiet for a few years. In 1996, however, he was stopped in his tracks by a scene in the movie Indecent Proposal, when Woody Harrelson's architect character explains, "Even a brick wants to be something."

He says now, "I missed being in the game. And I had credentials I wasn't leveraging. I was getting older, and my aura was diminishing."

A 2009 Business Week cover story about the revolution in computing that was coming with apps for the iPhone changed everything.

"It was the final chapter of an epiphany that began in June 2009," he says.

"I had started drawing by hand what I wanted the screen to look like. I was frustrated with what the iPhone that I was dependent on didn't allow me to do enough of. The address book and iCal were not strong enough to keep the kind of information I had been accustomed to all those years with Act."

Knowing what he'd had before, he thought, "I can do it again."

A few weeks ago, the result, VIPOrbit, launched in Apple's app store for £5.99. Muhney's team is working on localised UK and European versions; non-US customers will get a free update from the US version. The software took a team of six people six months to write.

"That's more than what most people think the effort is in creating an app," he says.

"A lot of people think you can do it in a weekend – and for a lot of apps you can, but this is more like a desktop application."