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.  

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 putting air quotes around it, or – even worse – calling it a “web log.” A person who had a blog was a person seriously on the cutting edge.

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 we’re most excited about with our new website: it’s running on the clouds. Basically, we moved our old wordpress blog to tumblr, and made a small Sinatra app that runs on heroku.

Hope you like it!

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 startups on some of their projects like Advebs’Flowlett.com, Rhomobile’s Rhohub.com, MonaLisaStyle and several other who’s focus was to build SAAS web application companies. We can’t thank them enough for their trust, and hard work to get these out the door. While working with us, clients are simply part of the Koombea team and we look forward to the ones that we’ll work with in 2010.

Team

We invested a lot of time and resources into our internal process, training and client interactions in order to offer the best experience possible for both our clients and team. Our team grew to 14 people from 7 early last year. This year we plan to increase our internal training, become Scrum certified and move into other development platforms such as Cocoa(which we didn’t do much of in ‘09) and hopefully Android.

Process

The simple goal of becoming a great development shop influenced a lot our decisions thought-out the year like going full BDD (Behavior driven development), and implementing Outside-in and pair development.

Throughout the year we had our ups and downs in different projects, mostly when we forgot about our own processes. The key thing is that we learned and iterated to fix our mistakes quickly, and used our successes to solidify our process.

Rails Rumble

We participated in our first RailsRumble this year, and were lucky enough to come out ahead. Here was our entry: Hi, I’m

Blogging and Community

As mentioned above, we started our company blog in 2009, but really didn’t post that often. This year we plan to post more often in a couple of themes: Ruby on Rails, Startups, Design, and social media. Also, we plan to reactivate our initiative to promote Rails in Barranquilla and Colombia.

2010

We have some pretty cool products planned(internal) and working with some awesome clients. Will be posting more info soon.

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 idea and lots of thoughts on all of the features it needs to be AWESOME and they want to build everything.  As a result, it takes forever to launch.  And if it takes forever to launch, it becomes increasingly difficult to get feedback from users on what they really need from your product.

Another difficulty is deciding what features to cut.  Thinking about your MVP challenges entrepreneurs to boil their product down to the very essence of what it needs to do and then do that, and no more.  In fact, sometimes your minimum viable product won’t be a product at all.

I was at a startup dinner one night and at our table was the CEO of an enterprise software company*.  He told the story about a feature they were thinking about launching.  Instead of building it and then launching it, they simply added a link to the proposed feature in the existing product that took users to a form that asked users what they’d like to see in the feature.  It took them about 10 minutes to set up and they collected some great feedback about how to build the feature.  They launched a MVP that wasn’t even a product and got invaluable feedback that informed their product decisions moving forward.

It can be very difficult to look at a feature and determine whether it’s core.  To do this, you need to be talking to your customers, trying things out, and moving forward in small incremental steps.

There’s a great list of 10 Examples of Minimum Viable Product up over on Venture Hacks that provides some real world case studies about how real companies have developed MVPs.  Hopefully it will give you a sense of how to really cut your product down to the core features, even if that core isn’t a feature at all.

Have you built a MVP?  What was your experience?  What was the hardest part about defining what your MVP would be?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

*One of the rules of the dinner was that everything was off the record, so I’m being intentionally vague about the who and what.  But it’s a true story.  Trust me on this.

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 different than development engagements that most people are used to where they write up a big detailed spec, throw it over the wall, and hope that what comes back is what they were looking for.

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 these “two-pizza teams,” which Bezos calls them because each team can be fed with two large pies, have become Amazon’s prime innovation engines. “There’s a huge value in this small, nimble team approach,” says tech consultant and author John Hagel III. “But you can’t do that without this kind of computer architecture.”

Next time you are working on a two-pizza team and coding all through the night, use that opportunity to test your new company or product name. Call the pizza place during the dinner rush and tell them your domain name. Then ask them to spell it for you. If they don’t get it on the first try, go to your favorite who is, and keep trying.

Domains names should always be short, snappy and easy to pass on through word of mouth. Unless your product doesn’t depend on viral marketing, in which case please contact us because we’d love to talk to you. This is no easy feat in 2009 where almost all good domains have been taken by legitimate users or domain squatters.

Max has some kind of strange connection to his Mac…