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.

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 were interested in augmenting their current programming team with the right partner just like one of our Austin based client has done for a while now.  We’ll see where things go, but I have a good feeling about some of these opportunities.

There were also some great panels.  In particular, I enjoyed the panels on lean startups by Steve Blank and Eric Ries.  Other notable news was that mobile app, GroupMe, came out on top in group messaging, winning the breakout award and beating Grouped(in). 

Also, there was a new competition called the Startup Bus, which had a number of developers making the trip from different cities in three days all the way to Austin.  During the trip, these entrepreneurs needed to create their new startup and start to market it.  Some of the new apps that came out of this initiative were WalkIn, which takes care of giving you a ticket number while waiting at a restaurant and TripMedi, a site with information about different medical tourism destinations.

This was also the first year that SXSW was hosting a multi-country Tech Summit where I participated as a panelist.  It was an extremely rewarding experience.  There were sessions for different countries (the Brazil session was particularly well attended) in Latin America.  It’s satisfying to see the growing awareness about the talent that exists globally (including in Colombia).

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 days ago, European flash-sales site, Privalia acquired German rival, Dress-For-Less, for $280 million.  Additionally, Nordstrom recently acquired a members-only luxury flash sales site called Hautelook for $270 million.  These are substantial sums of money spent on such a relatively new category and it’s worth thinking about this a bit.

Clay Shirky, author of “Here comes everybody,” likes to say that the big change that we need to understand is that “group action just got easier.”  This new reality is currently affecting retail and ecommerce in a big way as mentioned above, but it will be interesting to see how other industries will be affected.

The opportunity to disrupt industries has never been greater.  As evidenced by recent events in the Middle East, status quo players caught in the headlights of oncoming innovations are certainly at risk.  In order to innovate, new players need to rethink industry dynamics such as how Groupon, Privalia and Hautelook actually turn the tables and focus on the demand side of the equation while, usually, limiting supply. 

Either way you cut it, if you have some unique insight into a specific industry and see an opportunity to take it, you should.  You may have some technical talent to make your vision a reality, but if you don’t, give us a call. 

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 Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, says when he states that “group action just got easier.”  This type of affirmation is more general and includes any area of life where groups can be coordinated (not just business).   As TechCrunch mentioned, one Egyptian father was so elated at what he perceived as the power of these new social media tools to help bring about change that he named his newborn daughter, “Facebook!”

What’s clear is that the world hasn’t known a time when global communication has been so easy, inexpensive and varied.  Dropping this capability into our laps so quickly doesn’t mean that the impact is immediately clear.  In business, every day sees copy cat players, but also completely new businesses that have found yet another way to reinvent some aspect of their industry.

More and more, business people are developing new ideas and are anxious to implement these.  Sometimes, they have strong technical talent to accompany them and other times they choose to work with companies such as ours.  Either way, as the saying goes, we are living in “interesting” times.

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 existing players who incorporate digital tools into their business model and disrupt others in the process.

Companies such as Amazon (in the case of book selling), Netflix, Apple (with iTunes) and others are prescient enough to understand that, aside from selling digital tools, there are big returns available for companies, which employ these tools and create a disruptive business model in an established industry.  The opportunity is so big that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and others established a US $250 million fund to invest in startups that do just that.  As Zuckerberg said, “we think every industry needs to be rethought.”

Today, startups such as Airbnb, Square and others have been founded by people with strong technical skills (in addition to business people).  Nevertheless, as we’ve seen here at Koombea, the opportunity is so interesting that business people with unique insight about an industry or an opportunity are able to develop a disruptive action plan and execute it.  Their lack of a technical co-founder need not be an impediment.

Indeed, we ascribe much of our recent growth as a company to the fact that the current opportunity to redefine industry competitive dynamics is so large that even founders with little technical knowledge can be well-served by a team member such as Koombea, which has even served as a virtual CTO and virtual Business Development partner at times. The result are founding teams which can quickly start validating their idea and gain traction while waiting to hire a full time CTO or technical team.

Certainly, there are advantages to having a technical person on the founding team. Nevertheless, we’ve seen cases where it may make more sense for the founding team to work with a company such as Koombea and hit the ground running fast through their existing process and infrastructure. 

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 strengthened my opinion that gaming has really been a part of almost every aspect of our lives and digital tools merely enhance the experience (and will continue to do so).

Of course, web apps shouldn’t simply tack on gaming mechanics in an ad hoc manner in order to obtain their results. This needs to be well thought out and included as one component of the total product design.  Needless to say, if implemented correctly, even the simplest gaming mechanics (reputations systems or loyalty programs) have been producing benefits for companies in a variety of industries.

 As Gabe Zichermann lays out in his book, Game-based Marketing: “in this socially networked, choice-driven world, the old methods of reaching consumers with advertising messages have simply stopped working.”  In an age when only 14% of consumers believe what advertisers tell them, old ways of connecting with consumers have to be re-evaluated.

Users are continually barraged by a host of activities (both online and offline) vying for their attention.  The levels of engagement that can be achieved through gaming mechanics are tough to pass by (unless there’s a good reason to do so).   For us, working with entrepreneurs such as the founders of Badgeville has opened our eyes to the possibilities of gamification and confirmed our conviction that working with startups is not only exciting, but extremely rewarding.

On a final note, as I was writing this post, I just saw that Zynga, the gaming company behind Farmville and Mafia Wars, is about as valuable in the market as Twitter.  

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 solution that common wisdom seems to discard is that of outsourcing part or all of a start-up’s engineering team.  Indeed, in Quora, there are a number of posts on this subject and most discourage taking this direction.  Nevertheless, Scott Dinsmore recently wrote a guest post for OnStartup and offers some excellent reasons for outsourcing including: 1. The need to stay lean, 2. You can test your team before “hiring” them and 3. Some amazing professionals will work for much less cost in different parts of the world. 

Now, not every startup team needs to outsource development, especially those with a sharp technical founder.  Nevertheless, the amount of opportunities within the market right now are too numerous to discount teams without a technical founder.  Obviously, there are ways for these teams to locate a technical founder, but other options such as outsourcing development can’t be discounted.

As a recent article in VentureBeat and the NYTimes mentioned, here at Koombea, we’ve seen the result of talented startup founders (many in Silicon Valley) such as Badgeville who need assistance in Product visioning and development work with a nearshore team (us) to develop innovative products.  After building more than 20 products for such teams and winning the 2009 Ruby Rumble, I believe we at Koombea have proven our chops.

Aside from our success at exceeding our customer’s expectations and producing consistent results for them, being located here in Barranquilla, Colombia has actually been a blessing.  In addition to counting on an unexploited talent pool of incredible capable and creative developers, many of our customers truly enjoy visiting this fun coastal city when, if ever, the need arises.

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 present their project and answer questions from a panel of judges. Badgeville received accolades from the judges for its concept, profitability and execution.

Earning the Audience Choice award is a fantastic honor. We extend hearty congratulations to Badgeville and look forward to what the future holds for this company.

 For more on Badgeville, check out this article at TechCrunch. 

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 social media, but having to send them to a different site – like Etsy – to make purchases, it will all be in one place. This development has some predicting the social networking site will turn into a virtual shopping mall.

 A few big retailers, like 1-800-FLOWERS, have been selling via Facebook for some time. But the new platforms coming out offer a way for the small business or entrepreneur to make money as well.

One company making a splash with its Facebook e-tailing solution is ShopIgniter. True, it’s not the only company to offer a way to make a virtual storefront on Facebook, but it’s quite sleek, which may be why the company was able to land $3 million in venture capital and is über-confident of future growth.

Wazala also has thrown its hat in the social ecommerce ring. Originally developed as a way to turn a blog into a store, Wazala recently announced it, too, could do Facebook.

The big question is, will any of these companies find success? Will Facebook end up being the new mall? Time will tell. Ultimately, any that do will have to hit on a winning combination of design, functionality and ease-of-use.