-Tim

Another great app we’ve been working on is version 2 of Send Postcard. Check it out on the apple app store, its a great way to keep in touch with friends and family. Send a real postcard from your phone.

We are also laying the ground work for our second game. It is going to be very different from Cometkaze. If you are a Unity 3d developer and have an itch to build the best RPG ever. Contact us and we can get you involved.

As part of the being ambassadors we will be putting on some events in the near future so stay tuned.

“Think you have a good business idea? Entrepreneur Monkey will let you know!
Developed by a Venture Capital firm to help entrepreneurs assess the viability of their business ideas, Entrepreneur Monkey asks 23 easy to answer questions with multiple-choice answers. If your business idea passes muster, then Entrepreneur Monkey will dance for you. If your business idea isn’t mature enough, well, he does something else…
The questions we use to assess the viability of a business model are:
How many customers are there for your product/service?
How easy is it to find your customers?
What are your customers’ spending patterns for similar products/services?
Will you have repeat sales, or is it a one-time sale?
What is the dollar value of your product/service?
Once you’ve sold your product/service, does it need any ongoing sales support?
Does your customer perceive your product/service to have any competitive advantage?
Does your product/service have to be customized for each customer, or is it cookie-cutter?
How long is the sales cycle?
How easy is it to get into this business?
Can you list you top five competitors?
How many promotional activities will you need to “keep you name out there?”
How many “entry points” are there for a customer to buy from you?
My market changes frequently.
High Margins or Lots of Sales (high volume)?
How important is your product/service?
How much will you be able to up-sell?
How much will you be able to cross-sell?
How comfortable are you that the cost of your “raw materials” will be predictable?
How expensive is it to enter this business?
Does your product/service have a short or long life cycle?
How much of the money you make will you have to put back into the business to keep your market share?
How much will it cost to stay on the “cutting edge?”
Good luck, have fun, and we hope the monkey dances for you!
- Entrepreneur Outfitters”

The iPhone version is awaiting approval and should be out in a few days. It will also be free.

It is a great honor to see our work being compared to the very apps that inspire us. How can we help you build the next game changing app for your industry?

How things used to work:
In the not too distant past software engineering was looked at very similarly to every other engineering discipline. So naturally as an industry we took the tools and project management life cycle methodologies from other engineering disciplines like mechanical, and structural engineering and tried to reapply them to software development.

This never worked well, but it worked. And to some extent it was necessary software development tools and languages were very primitive by today’s standards and back in the day, software was even harder to build than it is today. The prevailing method for managing a software project was known as the waterfall method. Specifications would be fully drawn out before coding began, and once coding started it ran for months and no changes were allowed during the coding phase. Software updates were released quarterly or even semiannually and everything was ridiculously expensive.

The waterfall method never really worked well. There are three fundamental reasons why the waterfall method isn’t the best way to make software. First, a software program is not a bridge. %100 percent of the time you start a software development project you are not completely sure what the end product will look like. No matter how hard you plan you will end up enhancing the design as you build the product. The second reason is the waterfall method does not leverage the creativity of the developer writing your program. With the waterfall method the specs are written in stone so to speak and even if the developer can think of a cheaper easier or better way to do things they are bound by the specs. Finally your requirements change much faster than semiannual cycles. Today’s business cycle is much more fast paced. If we started building an app now and said it would take two years we couldn’t even count on the phone hardware being the same by the time the app was released.

So out of the waterfall method grew the agile movement. Agile is built around 4 key concepts. First, build the most important features first. This sounds elementary but it is of paramount importance. The most important features must be built first so that you, the client can test if it is even worth your time and money to build the additional features. Second, iterate quickly, instead of releasing quarterly or even monthly release every week to two weeks. That way the client can play with what was built, test it. Third, the customer is a part of the development team. In other words the you the client have to be available to help make decisions as tradeoffs are presented. Last but not least, no code is safe from being thrown out or rewritten. Every iteration you, the client get to reorganize your priorities. At times these priority change may mean throwing out code. The goal though is for the program to change quickly and start providing you value ASAP.

Agile development is by far the most exciting way I’ve ever come across for building new apps.

Option 1: Hire a mobile developer for your staff. Salary typically $100,000 (More if you are in silicon valley) plus 401k and benefits.

Option 2: Contract with a Silicon Valley or West Coast developer. Cost, well over $100 an hour usually more like $120 to $200. Get the value of a development team, pay only when you need it. Get motivated, native English Speaking, creative professionals

Option 3: Contract with Total Integrated Mobile and pay east coast prices. Less than $100 an hour. Get Silicon Valley skills and a lower cost of living premium. Still get the value of a development team, and pay only when you need them. You still get motivated, native English Speaking, creative professionals. You aren’t paying for the high cost of living the developer in Silicon Valley has to pay.

Option 4: Contract via eLance or some other similar site. Your cost per development hour will decrease dramatically, your cost for managing the project will go up. You will also probably need to have a lot of technical expertise to correctly specify what you are looking to build so that the non-native English speaking developers will understand and build what you want. (Even though the cost is so low, we will not use this method for our in house projects, it’s too risky.)

Option one is great if you can find the right developer and you already have great graphic designers on staff. Assuming you also have lots of different projects to keep him busy so that you can continually get your money’s worth from him.

Options two and three are great when you have an app idea that must be pulled off elegantly. Contracting out to an English speaking team is great on many accounts. The team is already working together on other projects, so you don’t pay for a ramp up period like you would if you built your own team. The team will have processes in place to make your app faster than if you went out and hired your own team. Since making apps is their lively hood there is a really good chance that they take their craft seriously and will make you happy in the end. Option 3 is just cheaper because overhead is cheaper for a development company on the East Coast.

We’d love to talk with you about your next mobile initiative.

All in all though we are still glad we took the time and spent the effort to develop Cometkaze. Our studio’s portfolio is much stronger than it was before Cometkaze. And while the game has not been a business success yet, we consider it an artistic success, in that the design, gameplay and fun ended being better than we expected when we set out to build it.

We are excited about the many opportunities that have presented themselves recently. And are working on our next project now. Thanks for reading the blog!

Day 23
One download and one sale. 25 Active users 43minutes and 58 seconds of use. 47 updates downloaded