Koombea: Blog

Mobile App Trends to Watch Out for in 2012

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:55:05 -0500

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 see the mobile app development making this year:

Location-Based Services: One of the many advantages to having a smartphone is that the carrier has a very high-functioning gadget around at all times. Knowing that, developers will be creating apps consumers can use while at specific locations tailoring the information they will receive. This gives businesses huge advantages when targeting certain consumers.

Social Networking: One of the fastest growing and most popularcategories,social networking apps will be more and more popular to develop in the coming year. Complex and user-friendly, these apps will have some steep competition, but there’s definitely an audience ready to try something new.

Mobile Commerce: Just like with Location-Based Service apps, mobile commerce apps will be trending for the same reasons: to target specific consumers. Scanning bar codes, price comparisons and mobile purchasing are just a few trends within that trend ready to take 2012 by storm.

Keeping up with the trends is one thing, but coming up with the next idea is even better. What are some of the things you wish your apps could do for 2012?

Koombea: An Office of ScrumMasters

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:17:25 -0500

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.

Kalculator: Old Koombea Classic Reborn

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:24:00 -0400

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.

The Craziest One

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:58:26 -0400

Meet Koth

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:30:48 -0400

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.

The Future is an On-Demand World

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:00:06 -0400

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.

Are we in another bubble?

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:00:06 -0400

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.

Still much runway left in the whole group-buying phenomenon?

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:00:06 -0400

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.

Founder Showcase Keynotes Packed with Valuable Advice

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:36:06 -0400

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.

Colombia IT: Our Top 4 Picks in a Sector that’s Starting to Come Alive

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:20:37 -0400

Colombia IT: Our Top 4 Picks in a Sector that’s Starting to Come Alive

HTML5 vs. The Native App

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 11:00:06 -0400

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.

Super Trip to South by Southwest

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:00:07 -0400

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).

Groups and eCommerce: A Powerful Combination

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:05:00 -0500

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.

Broadening the Definition of “Disruption”

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:20:17 -0500

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.

Another One Bites the Dust: Borders

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:35:38 -0500

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.

Gamification: User Engagement at its best

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:22:39 -0500

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.

The Silicon Valley Talent Shortage

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:00:06 -0500

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.

Congratulations, Badgeville!

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:01:22 -0400

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.

A few months ago we released Track-R, our...

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:12:44 -0400

A 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 app. Here’s a few links: Track-R Website, Track-R Rhodes source, Track-R RhoSync source.

Can Facebook make money – for its users?

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:10:03 -0400

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.