The Koombea team is hitting the road again! This time, we’re headed to Las Vegas to attend the Future Insights Live event to learn about the latest in the web, development, design and mobile worlds.

This 5 day-event (of which Koombea is an event partner!) will bring together web developers & designers, mobile developers & designers,entrepreneurs, start-ups and agencies all under one roof for a week of learning, inspiration and networking!

We have a booth in the exhibition hall right across from Heroku, a company whose product we use a lot! We love those guys. We are definitely looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones at our booth, attending some of the technical workshops and hearing Tony Hsieh talk about his new Vegas Project. 

Jonathan, our trusty CEO, will also be giving a talk (or two) during the event - stay tuned to our Twitter feed (@koombea) to get more info about where and when Koombea will be in the spotlight!

Tweet at @koombea and use the #FILive hashtag if you’ll be at the event or if you’d like to meet up with us!

By: Koombea Senior Mobile Developer, Oscar De Moya

It’s been quite a while since our mobile team started to develop native iOS apps. A few years ago, after completing our training, our CEO asked us to work on a very challenging project. He told us to build a noise cancellation iPhone app, just using software… At first we thought it was just another joke. This isn’t exactly a common project or anything our clients generally want, but when Jonathan asked us for a time estimation we were dumbfounded. Who was this maniacal CEO we were working for?

Anyway, we spent around a week reading about all the theoretical stuff (physics, sound theory, waves, math, similar experiments and so on). We even reached out to a few Electrical Engineers to see if they could help, but that didn’t result in anything. Still we kept going. Finally, at the end of the week we concluded that what we were trying to do was pretty close to making a nuclear bomb with a bottle of coke (without Mentos). But we knew we couldn’t do that. We had spent an entire week (maybe longer) trying dozens of experiments and tests without any results. And then it hit us. Failing fast is critical to the success of any long term project. Jon expected us to fail. He just wanted to see how quickly we would do it. 

After that we started working on more common projects, like connecting to APIs and storing data in databases, but our team talked about each step we made and, as a whole, we committed to the best method. We would succeed quickly or fail and then adjust and keep going. This became the base for Koombea’s custom iOS framework. Our framework is more than just source code and design patterns. It’s a teamwork and collaboration style in which we are all the architects of the core of our mobile apps.

In line with our agile methodology, our framework makes us work faster and more effectively than using the base iOS SDK. New developers may be confused sometimes, because our framework involves so much that is unwritten. There are no documents that describe how we collaborate or the culture that supports collaboration. Thus, it’s on us to help new hires acclimate to our work style and add their own tweaks to keep it fresh.  

If you would like to learn more about our mobile team, get in touch by emailing us at Contact (at) Koombea.com or pinging us through the contact button at the bottom corner of our site.

Some of Koombea’s finest made their way to Austin, TX in early March for the annual South By South West (SXSW) Interactive Festival. Our CEO Jonathan Jonathan was accompanied by our business guys, Ben, Nicolas and Brad to enjoy everything SXSW 2012 offered for startups and the tech world a week before the festival turned its attention to music. It was a whirlwind of excitable techies, marketers and Austinites.

During our time in Austin, our group spent time at the Lean Startup Track where we enjoyed listening to different talks and meeting some other great startups. We especially loved the talk given by the new U.S. Chief Technology Office (yes, this is a real position), Todd Park (@todd_park).

Todd was incredibly enthusiastic and inspiring. Usually we hope to learn one or two good things from a single talk, take them back, sleep on them and then implement. After hearing Todd, we felt like that figurative fire under our rears was turned up several notches. We’re always doing as much as we can… Now we’re going to see if we can’t do even more.

But the trip wasn’t all business, we also had some fun when attending some unexpected events and experiencing what the city of Austin had to offer - like eating some Texas fare at Rudy’s BBQ and going to some SXSW 2012 night events.  

We met up with our long time client, Rallyhood! Always nice to see them. We went to a MySpace party… guess they’re still around. We also spent a lot of our time with the nice folks from .CO. It’s a way better deal to buy .CO these days.

If you’d like to see more photos we took at SXSW 2012, please visit our Facebook page.

One of the reasons Koombea runs so smoothly and efficiently through various projects is due to an office full of ScrumMasters certified by the Scrum Alliance. With almost all employees certified - Koombea has development down to an art.

What is Scrum?
For those of you who are baffled by this term “scrum,” here’s an explanation. Scrum is a simple yet effective framework used to complete complex projects - mostly in software development - to streamline production and effectively get projects done on time.

The word “scrum” originally comes from the sport rugby. The term was used as an analogy in the Harvard Business Review comparing the rugby scrum formation to high-performing, cross-functional teams in the business world. The term and framework stuck - streamlining production and development since 1993.

To become a ScrumMaster, applicants must complete the Certified ScrumMaster course to fully learn the framework and the processes. 

Koombea’s Advantage
While many firms and Fortune 500 companies use the Scrum framework, not many have employees certified by the Scrum Alliance. Almost all of Koombea’s engineers are Scrum Alliance-certified, ensuring an office full of hardworking and efficient engineers.

Check out the projects completed using the Scrum framework over at Koombea’s Work page.

When the iPhone came out four years ago, we had some serious complaints about the default calculator. As engineers, it’s safe to say we’re picky about our numbers. The default calculator didn’t support complex operations and it lacked a reusable history. So, immediately after the original iPhone SDK was released, we got to work on Kalculator. It had every feature your average nerd or tech geek wanted on their iPhone. After Kalculator’s first release a few years went by without enough updates (too much client work!). Shame on us for neglecting our mathematically minded baby!

Today, we’re happy to announce that Kalculator has been completely rewritten and redesigned to support a variety of new features and a slick look to complement iOS 5 (coming out tomorrow FTW). We hope you enjoy it. As always, let us know what you think. We love to talk about coding and calculators. 

You can download Kalculator here!

P.S. The landing page was written using responsive HTML5 and CSS3. 

Since our inception we’ve been mostly a Ruby on Rail and design shop. For the better part of this year, we’ve dabbled into mobile in a big way in both Android and iPhone development. So far most of the work we’ve done has been for client, until now. 

Today we’re announcing the release of Koth the Viking - our first iPhone game ever. It’s a very simple yet addictive game, where the player must help Koth go up the endless hill in order to get to the top of Moggee Mountain. The mountain’s treacherous slopes changes every time you play, thus you won’t get bored next time you visit the dentist.

You can get it now in the App Stores -> DOWNLOAD KOTH! 

We hope you enjoy it! If you have any feedback don’t hesitate to contact us at support at koombea.com.

On the list of entrepreneurs who have built up a great track record of envisioning the digital future (e.g., Jeff Bezos, etc.) I think you’d have to include Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings.   That’s why it was great reading Om Malik’s recent post about his interview with Reed about just that future.  In short, the future is more on-demand services than ever.

 Om starts the post talking about Netflix’s impressive subscriber growth from 14 million to 22 million in the last year.  He goes on to mention the company’s focus on big data in order to improve user interaction. 

 Hastings believes that the broadband era of the Internet has just begun and that experiments such as the 1Gbps Google Access Fiber project in Kansas will be a great showcase of what will be possible in the future. He also likes the way countries such as Australia, Brazil and Costa Rica have made fiber broadband to the home a top priority. 

 Finally, he said that, in about 10 years, the predominant way to watch video will be on-demand.  I think that time is actually already here for today’s youth, many of who don’t have the patience to wait to see what broadcast television decides to transmit.   He gave an interesting vision of television and televisions sets comparable to the current state of smart mobile phone platforms such as the iphone.

 It’s always interesting to gaze into the future, but it’s important for me to remind myself that more times than not, these visions turn out to be wrong.  Indeed, there are really tough issues in terms of economic stability, scarcer natural resources and others that are clouds on the horizon.

 Nevertheless, it’s definitely my view that we are much more at the beginning of a deep transformation of the way business is transacted and the way society interacts with each other.  That makes for many challenges, but also much opportunity for creating new, viable “digitally enhanced” business models and that’s one of the reasons we’re so passionate about this environment and excited about its possibilities. 

In recent months, there’s been a bunch of brouhaha concerning alleged collusion among some Silicon Valley angel investors interested in keeping early stage company valuations from getting too high.  Additionally, Ron Conway and Yuri Milner announced that they’d be offering every new startup to graduate from Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley accelerator, $150,000.  To some, these developments connote the makings of a new Internet bubble comparable to the 2000 bubble. 

Personally, I’d disagree that we’re in a bubble environment.  I believe that today, more than a decade later, the promises of the Internet (i.e., new business models, industry disruptions, etc.) are finally gathering steam and leading to a massive change in how business is conducted (without mentioning the social and political upheavals being felt).  The reason for this is that, with greater bandwidths, massive user population, more powerful and less costly tools and compelling success stories the ground is fertile for all sorts of new businesses to be funded.

Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz, of Andreesen Horowitz, makes his case a lot more eloquently in a recent blog post where he lays out a number of reasons that he things we’re not in a bubble environment:

• Public market comparables – Ben makes the case that bubble era valuations were 10 times higher than current comparable multiples.
• Venture capital flows – When excessive amounts of money flow into venture capital firms, investment decisions tend to get clouded.  However, whereas venture capital firms raised over $200 billion from 1998-2000, the amount raised between 2008-2010 is below $50 billion. 
• Inflated expectations – Some Internet ideas (video on demand, etc.) that weren’t ready for prime time in 2001, are viable options today.  Increased bandwidth, cheaper computing power, clouds computing and about 2 billion Internet users make for profitable business models.

I just can’t help believing that we’re living through one of those rare moments in history when the actual changes taking place are more disruptive than what people actually consider them to be.   Either we’re in a bubble, or there really are tremendous opportunities to rethink business models and industry competitive dynamics when compared to the amount of entrepreneurs who can create the new companies required of such disruptions.  I’m placing my bet on the latter.