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.

With all the noise going around about the Groupon IPO and Google Deals poping up, you’ve got to wonder how big can this space get? According to a recently released report by Local Offer Network, a daily deal aggregator, $1.1 billion in revenues were generated in the US last year from group buying.  The company estimates $2.7 billion in revenue for 2011 representing a 138 percent growth rate.  According to the report, there are 322 group-buying sites in the U.S. with 117 of these created only in the first quarter of 2011. What gives?

As author, Clay Shirky, has stated, “Group action just got easier.”  I believe that group-buying is a subset of a trend to take advantage of the fact that the tools currently exist (and are quite accessible) to organize groups of people like never before.  Group buying sites organize take advantage of this fact in order to quickly amass a large client base for product and service businesses. 

 It’s interesting to note how the industry leader, Groupon, with yearly world-wide revenues of US $4 billion, got started.  The company’s founders set out to change the world by enabling “group action” for specific causes and ideas promoted.  Kickstart does this today for creative projects.   The daily deal offering was started in Chicago practically as a side project to keep the original project going and quickly exploded in growth in terms of members, but also in terms of revenues.

Hence, when we consider the potential of group-buying, I believe it certainly has more runway left to grow before people start getting tired of this.  However, I believe this is only one instantiation of a larger disruption taking place where getting groups of people with similar beliefs, ideas or interests together can create new value and continue to change the world.

This Wednesday June 15^th, the seventh Founder Showcase was held in San Francisco.  This year, Mark Shuster, General Partner at VC Firm Greylock Partners, and Naval XXX, founder of Angelist, gave the two keynote presentations packed with valuable advice for entrepreneurs including suggestions to raise money if they can (even if they don’t need it), to be prepared for the moment when funding dries up, to focus on traction and to expand your network using tools such as Angelist.

 The winner of the showcase was a company called Kaggle focused on offering prizes to analytics professionals for solving tough business problems.  The company has already gained traction enlisting thousands of such professionals and solving a handful of complicated business problems.  The company beat out a number of contenders including an iPhone app called Nexercise offering points for excersing. 

 All in all, the event, run by Adeo Ressi, was quite a success and offered excellent networking opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs alike.  A topic that came up during Mark Shuster’s presentation (and written about in previous posts here) was whether or not we’re in a bubble and his conclusion is “duh” of course. J He mentioned a number of transactions (e.g., Color) with ridiculously high valuations. 

 Whether this constitutes a bubble (or isolated overvaluations) could be debated, but that debate would probably miss the main point that Shuster and XXX were making.  The opportunities available to digital entrepreneurs interested in creating real companies that deliver real value to their customers is not only large, but requires less capital than ever before and this event was a testament to this reality. 

There’s been a lot debate lately about whether we’re entering an era where the web continues to lose importance with native mobile apps dominating the mobile web and general web landscape.  A recent NYTimes article makes the opposite case stating that the quickly evolving HTML5 standard will bring the web back to prominence.

Our view is that this debate misses the point and, as in many cases having to do with the web, it’s not a winner takes all battle.  Although it may make life tougher for companies who need to develop for a variety of platforms (in addition to the web), we believe that each platform has its advantages and is appropriate for different audiences and, if companies want to reach these audiences, they’ll have to offer their digital experience on the platform that each audience prefers with some audiences requiring multiple platforms.

This doesn’t mean that HTML5’s evolution isn’t excited.  It might seem self-serving for us to have this world-view as we provide our clients with talent to develop applications on a multitude of mobile(thanks to Rhodes which we know pretty well) and web platforms.  The reality is, that if we thought we could serve our clients better by steering them towards one platform, we would organize our company to be successful in such a world.

The reality is different, however, and we don’t feel that would be sound advice.  Customers have a lot of power and more and more, they are demanding to use the platform or platforms that they choose and not the one that makes it easier on developers.  So, while some experts are bullish on HTML5’s ability to make native web apps less necessary, we feel that all the important platforms (including HTML5) will see tremendous growth and customers will reap the benefits.