The New York Times has an article this week about buying homes in Croatia. As the self-appointed president of the Boston Chapter of the Croatian Chamber of Commerce, I have to say I’m intrigued. Enjoy!

In the past, we used to distinguish between Technology Companies, and Technology Enabled Companies. The difference was pretty clear – the former developed technology products, while the latter used technology to enable the product or service delivery.

In the technology space, mobile companies used to be a distinct type of companies, which usually developed products or services specifically to be used on mobile devices and on-the-go. In the last few years, this has changed. Since Apple created the mobile apps market, and mobile devices with 3G and GPS became widely used, mobile became more than just a distinct technology arena. It is now the enabler of new products, services, and business models. Here are some examples for products and services that are not directly related to mobile, but would not be what they are without it:

1. Pandora – The internet radio service was launched in 2000, with a unique technology to match songs their user’s music taste. Despite of their cool offering, the service never really picked up, but with the release of their iPhone app 2008, they immediately reported an unbelievable boost in the rate of new user registration. The ability to steam music on the go, which was not available in first 8 years of the service, was eventually what enabled its success.
2. Zipcar – I’m one of the many fans of this popular car rental service, which allows you to rent a car by the hour from accessible locations across big cities. Their website works very well as a way to access the service and book cars, but the idea of a mobile application simply upgrades this completely. Regardless of where I am, if I need a car, the app locates the available cars near me and books one for me (and if I can’t find the car I booked, I can honk the horn from the app).
3. Facebook – It can be interesting (or not) to read that my fried “Had a great time at the U2 concert today”, but it’s much more exciting to read “I’m at the U2 concert now!” and see a picture of Bono which was taken 2 seconds ago. That’s “live” social networking.
4. Yelp – I don’t always know where I’m going to eat when I’m going out, especially as a tourist in a place I don’t know. There aren’t many things more intuitive than having your mobile device find you top rated restaurants around you, at a certain price range and that are currently opened. It’s one of the things that just make sense. And if it did not exist, someone would have had to invent it.

The common attribute of the above companies is that even though mobile presence is a key contributor to their success, they are not mobile companies. There are complex and unique processes involved in creating their service, product, or content (which is often user generated). These happen in the non-mobile side, but the mobile platform is the one that delivers a compelling value to the users. It’s the Enabler.

Please enjoy our new website pictures, courtesy of one of our multi-talented engineers, Ilija Veselica. Thanks, Ilija, for sharing your gift with us all!

The world is coming to the idea of the MVP, Minimum Viable Product, which is a short-cut way of saying build the simplest product that will accomplish the goals of your organization.  This is a terrifically clarifying mode of thinking, and leads to all sorts of useful decisions about what NOT to do, which will allow you to be as productive and efficient as is reasonable. It’s a great habit, and leads to really nice things like sustainability, profit, iterative development, etc.

The problem with an MVP is that if you’re not careful, you can create a product that has the kind of limitations that will force you to have to start over at some point when it would be really inconvenient to do so. Like anytime in the next ten years. Or ever.

A Minimum Viable Platform is just like a minimum viable product, except that the philosophy of Platforms applies: make sure that the entire scope of the application is considered at the beginning, and important ideas that will become more important in the not-too-distant future are included. Think about features like multi-lingual, multi-currency, additional layers of administrative or user control, security, and extensibility options like an API. Really REALLY tough to retrofit most of these.

So, make sure to think about this even as you are working on the prototype that will get you your first dozen or hundred clients. Soon you’ll be scrambling to meet their needs. The time to think about these features is now.

I speak to many smart people in my wanderings around the tech world – educated, large vocabulary, neat stories, good experience, etc. The “successful” ones, with terrifically successful companies, fame and fortune, share most of theses traits with the lesser successful ones. Which got me thinking: what IS the difference between the crazy-successful smart people and the run-of-the-mill MIT/Harvard/etc. PhD/MBA/whatever???

The answer, I’m very, very sorry to say, is (mostly) a blend of timing, whether it’s when he/she graduated, who was on their floor in school, what they happened to focus on, and when they had the time to get involved in a venture – either because they found time or money due to an inheritance or lost their job: all of these can be found under the broad category: luck.

Sure I’m simplifying this, but really, if you know enough people, you will agree that there are only a very few highly successful people in business (not Hollywood. That’s another planet…).  And if you’re really honest, you’ll also note that the success that they’ve achieved is only partly derived from their intellect, drive, focus, talent, and anything else that they have going for them. The rest has to be chalked up to luck.

So, I guess that the lesson here is, in business, make sure that you’ve got as many “lottery tickets” as you can. You do that by keeping your eyes open to opportunities, work with great people and always be open to take a reasonable risk. You just might get lucky!

Inc Magazine which ranks companies based on rate of growth ranked extensionEngine #1008 for 2009. I know it’s primarily a self-promotional thing, but it’s still pretty cool, and we’re proud of the news. We’ve grown quite steadily in the past 10 years, and plan to continue this rate of growth for the next 10. Thanks for all the support!

Yes, I know, I know. “Cloud Computing” has been talked about and actually used for some time now by many companies, my favorite being 37 Signals with their products. We at extensionEngine use Basecamp for project management and Highrise as a CRM and if you look closely, you can see Amazon’s Cloud powering the whole thing with terrific alacrity. What I mean is that the amount of money and effort behind the various Clouds has reached such a critical mass that we’ll all start considering a Cloud option whenever we build something. And then, in a few years, I think it won’t really be an option – it will be the way we talk about hardware. Very few benefits will remain to manage, let alone OWN (God forbid) a Server. Your children (or grandchildren) will laugh as you regale them with stories about how you spent thousands, millions of dollars buying, configuring, mirroring, backing up, securing, powering, etc. etc. your own servers.

The reason for this post is this article, outlining the 100 Coolest Cloud Vendors. 100! CoolEST! Meaning that there must be 1 or 2 HUNDRED Cloud vendors out there that presumably are uncool. Sad for them, but that kind of goldrush is likely to produce a lot of very cool, and very good technology that we’ll all benefit from.

i-Nalysis announced that it has closed on an angel round of funding that should allow it to reach its next milestones though the coming months. extensionEngine CEO Bob Allard is a board member of the company and advises founder and President Drew Hession-Kunz on strategy and how best to not lose sight of the big picture when trying to bootstrap a startup.

OK. Now that I’ve got your attention, let me elaborate. It matters, just like all foundational decisions matter when deciding what and how you’re going to design and develop a software solution. It just doesn’t matter the way some people think it matters.

I’m writing this because it seems that I’ve had this discussion at least a dozen times in the past few years, and every time I give a call to my team and ask: “what is better, Drupal or .Net?” or something similar. The answer I get is always something on the order of “it depends, but most likely based on the fact that the company wants to do something long-term and add lots of customized features, it doesn’t matter.”

That doesn’t mean that the process will be the same, but rather that the time, effort, work and outcomes are likely going to end up in a similar place. With Open Source, you sprint ahead early, setting up a working framework in almost no time at all, and things are looking great. Then, a curveball feature requirement comes into play and things grind to a halt as the team searches for a plugin that meets the need or, more likely, works to develop custom code that does the job.

In a parallel universe, the .Net team has started out slowly, using their experience and the vanilla framework to get started. It’s all “custom”, but then there’s plenty of help out there in the community and the system is ready for anything. Six months into the project, when those pesky custom features are tackled, they don’t pose nearly the challenge as they do for the Open Source team. Nine months in, and both teams are basically doing the same work, and any cost savings at the beginning has turned into a wash.

So, the lesson here is, when choosing a development environment, make sure to think strategically about the long term, and don’t worry too much about how much “savings” you’ll get from the cost difference of Open Source versus Licensed. In the end, this is only part of the problem, and not the most important part.