February 2012
1 post
Mobile App Trends to Watch Out for in 2012
With a new year, comes new trends and goals - especially for the mobile app world. Being such a huge part of the world and consumer’s everyday life, the main intent these trends serve is to make lives easier.
To keep up with the competitive market, developers will be releasing some innovative and boundary-pushing products this year to attract the most users. Here are a few trends we...
January 2012
1 post
3 tags
Koombea: An Office of ScrumMasters
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...
October 2011
2 posts
Kalculator: Old Koombea Classic Reborn
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...
The Craziest One
September 2011
1 post
3 tags
Meet Koth
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...
June 2011
5 posts
5 tags
The Future is an On-Demand World
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...
Are we in another bubble?
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...
3 tags
Still much runway left in the whole group-buying...
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. ...
4 tags
Founder Showcase Keynotes Packed with Valuable...
This Wednesday June 15th, 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...
Colombia IT: Our Top 4 Picks in a Sector that’s... →
April 2011
1 post
5 tags
HTML5 vs. The Native App
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...
March 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Super Trip to South by Southwest
Well, I’m back from an extremely productive and fun trip to South by Southwest (SXSW), New York and other places. Incredibly, SXSW Interactive had 40% more attendees this year than last with almost 20k people. For those who didn’t go, SxSW is not just about awesome bbq and parties(although, I must admit I had the best). I was able to meet some impressive entrepreneurs and quite a few who...
4 tags
Groups and eCommerce: A Powerful Combination
By now, everyone is familiar with how Groupon has been able to parlay a relatively simple solution of helping local businesses by getting groups of people to make a purchasing decision in one day usually by offering substantial discounts. It seems that we’re still discovering more ways how the combination of groups and ecommerce can provide substantial returns for a host of startups.
A couple of...
February 2011
4 posts
9 tags
Broadening the Definition of “Disruption”
When thinking about the impact of digital technologies, I have the bad habit of focusing on what’s happened in vertical industries such as in music, media and retail. In the process, I forget about how disruptive these new tools are within social and political spheres, but recent events in Egypt and the Middle East have served to remind me of this fact.
All of this reminds me about what Clay...
5 tags
Another One Bites the Dust: Borders
With the announcement last week that Borders, the second biggest bookstore chain, has filed for bankruptcy, this is yet another company couldn’t quite seem to cross the chasm, to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Moore. Following a long line of companies such as Blockbuster, Toys R Us and others, this seems to be one more case of companies within industries that are being transformed by new or...
3 tags
Gamification: User Engagement at its best
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the growth of gamification, the use of gaming mechanics to increase user engagement and direct user behavior. One of our clients, Badgeville, has seen tremendous success with their white label social rewards and analytics platform and we’ve had the great fortune to interact with some sharp entrepreneurs in the process. This particular experience has...
The Silicon Valley Talent Shortage
Recent articles in the media have been focusing quite a bit on a Silicon Valley talent shortage. According to Indeed.com (by way of GigaOm), job postings in IT have increased 69% and Google among others was in the news for offering a valuable engineer substantial compensation not to jump ship to Facebook. Within this context, it’s interesting to think about possible solutions to the problem.
One...
October 2010
1 post
6 tags
Congratulations, Badgeville!
We’re very excited to congratulate Badgeville for winning the Audience Choice award at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt.
Badgeville, a Koombea client, uses “game-based techniques to create highly engaging web experiences.” The company was one of seven startups to make the finals for the Disrupt grand prize (which ultimately went to Qwiki). Narrowed down from a field of 27, the finalists had to...
September 2010
3 posts
5 tags
WatchA few months ago we released Track-R, our PivotalTrackermobile(iPhone/Android) app. It uses the Rhodes and RhoSync framework that allows it to work on both devices with the same code base. We are now releasing the new version powered by RhoHub.com hosted RhoSync in a few days, plus a few other goodies. Last Friday we were invited by the awesome crew at Rhomobile to do a quick walkthrough of the...
7 tags
Can Facebook make money – for its users?
The new Twitter stole tech headlines this week, but by now anyone who cares has heard all about it. So let’s talk about that other social media giant, Facebook.
People have been trying to figure out how to successfully market products on Facebook for ages. Now, companies are starting to develop practical ways of turning a Facebook page into a virtual shop. Instead of just engaging fans with...
6 tags
Bloggin’ in the free world
A note to our readers: As you may have noticed, the blog hasn’t been updated in some time. But that changes starting now. So in honor of new blog posts, it’s only fitting that we kick things off with a few words on the subject.
Remember when blogging was new? Sure you do. It was circa 1999. TMZ didn’t exist. Shakespeare In Love won an Oscar, and no one could say “blog” without...
January 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Fresh new website from the clouds!
Hey there, thanks for visiting, feel free to browse around and check out our redesigned website. We feel like its more an iteration from our last one, rather than a complete new concept, but truly shows what koombea is right now.
There are nifty improvements all around with an easier-to-browse work page, straight to the point stuff all around, and an easier way to contact us.
The thing...
3 tags
2009 Report Card, 2010 Goals
Last year, we launched the Koombea blog, and with it our first post, where we clearly defined our identity for the year:
Our goal is to develop in advanced frameworks like Ruby on Rails, CakePHP and Cocoa whenever possible.
Here’s how we did:
Clients
First on the list was finding and focusing on the customers that aligned with our goals. We were lucky enough to work with several...
October 2009
1 post
4 tags
Thinking About Minimum Viable Product
One of the core concepts of a lean startup is the idea of Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The idea behind Minimum Viable Product is to build just enough of the core of your product that you can get it to users to begin getting feedback—maybe even get some of them to pay you for it.
But a lot of startups have a hard time wrapping their heads around MVP. They come to the table with a great...
March 2009
2 posts
What Is Scrum?
Here’s a good, concise, description of Scrum.
At Koombea, we use Scrum to help our clients focus on the features that will add the most value to their business. It allows us to launch early and iterate to get your business up and running. It also provides our clients with the flexibility to make changes to their products based on the changing needs of their business. It’s very...
3 tags
Put Your Name Through The Pizza Test
Pizza is a key part of the startup life, no matter what entrepreneur you talk to (anywhere in the world). Jeff Bezos says that innovation must occur in “two-pizza teams”:
Small, fast-moving groups of five to eight Amazon employees now could go hog wild with new ideas, such as customer discussion boards on each product page and software to play music and videos on the site. Since then...
February 2009
2 posts
Magic Max and Expose
Max has some kind of strange connection to his Mac…
var disqus_url = '';
Must See TV for Entrepreneurs
I was talking today with my friend Aaron who is starting a great little company called Zealog. Zealog let’s you track whatever you want with your friends in fun and super cool graphs and charts. People are tracking everything…water drank (drunk? drunken?), miles ran, pounds lost, even somebody’s fights with her mother.
We got to talking about starting businesses and he...
January 2009
7 posts
Koombea Wallpapers!
Can’t get enough of Koombea? No prob! You can now have the ultra-awesome Koombea wallpapers! Get ‘em while they’re hot!
1680x1050 (Widescreen)
1280x1024
iPhone
var disqus_url = '';
3 tags
Steve, Get Well. Soon.
The team here at Koombea are huge Mac fans. There’s not a PC in our shop (ok, there’s a few in QA). We’ve taken inspiration from Steve Jobs’ vision, his design, and his creativity. Now, he’s sick and has taken leave from his job at Apple. There’s been a lot of news about what his illness means for Apple and for the stock price and pundits have been weighing...
4 tags
Half A Million Dollars? Puh-leeze.
Clicking around on FriendFeed today, I ran across this blog post from Peter, a startup founder with a dream. And an apparent lack of $500,000. They’d done some asking around and had come up with an estimate of $150,000 to build the site they were thinking about. They’d hired some consultants and the consultants said 12 weeks * 2 people = $150k. Plus other startup costs and...
4 tags
To NDA Or Not To NDA
The other day, we had a potential client ask us to sign an NDA. We declined. And naturally, we didn’t get the business. The experience led us to an internal discussion about NDAs which in turn led to a discussion on Twitter about NDAs and there was no consensus. The question posed was, “If a potential client wants you to sign an NDA before telling you about their job, would you sign it?”
...
Colombia: #1 destination for 2009
Colombia has been featured at the Boots n All Travel (link) website as the ultimate destination for 2009, srsly, it’s beautiful and awesome here, safe and cheap as can be.
So if you decide to come down here, come give us a visit!
var disqus_url = '';
4 tags
Rails Ninja
At Koombea, we take programming as serious as a martial art, Jonathan is no exception
var disqus_url = '';
New Year, New Site
Koombea has been around since September 18, 2007. Last year was a great year for us. We went from two guys in an unused optometrist office to nine guys in two cities. It’s been a long rough road here. We’ve had our ups and downs, and learned so much it’s hard to list. The most important thing we’ve learned is what we are and what we are not. Koombea worked on several...