Startups == Overnight success?

Judging from all the tech startup stories, so many have gone from the value of nothing to millions, if not billions, within matter of a few years. To name a few :

• Facebook worth $100 billion - Launched February 2004
• Dropbox worth $5 Billion - Launched 2008, touted as Y Combinator's most successful investment to date.
• Also the highlights of Y Combinator, a angel investor that have invested in 313 startups, Loopt, Reddit, Clustrix, Wufoo, Scribd, Xobni, Weebly, Songkick, Disqus, ZumoDrive, Justin.tv, Heroku, Posterous, Airbnb, Heyzap, Cloudkick, DailyBooth, WePay, and Bump.
  
  Related article : Y Combinator Accepts Record 60+ New Startups For Summer 2011

From my point of view, these success stories only concentrate on creating a wrong perception of companies easily making millions overnight and therefore the stories are being told wrong and people need to get it.

Here is one article about a huge success story of a famous mobile game called Angry Bird :
Angry Birds creator could be worth $1.2 billion soon which ends with a conclusion, "Seriously, who predicted that something as simple as throwing birds at pigs could be so profitable?". The conclusion somewhat implies that the game itself is simple and pretty much straight forward and could perceive the readers as it was easily made.

However, according to article In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what's next), Angry Birds was Rovio's 52nd game, and they went nearly bankrupt before creating this massive attraction.

Another story is with Justin.TV which is said to be valued at one-billion dollar although I was not able to find a solid proof on this matter. The founders have accumulated tens of thousands dollars in personal credit card debt before they were accept into Y Combinator in 2008, which Y Combinator now accepts the fact that they have made one of the biggest home run with Just.tv.

There are tons of other stories similar to above, but I would like to point out only one thing. Given the fact that I am in Computer Science program, I often hear a lot about people in the program starting a new project that can potentially make them millions and was invited to a number of them. However, what I have observed so far is that, they tend to enjoy day dreaming about their ideas making tons of fortune instead of actually enjoying the process that involves in it. Also, because of it, most groups fail within a few weeks because they are often blinded by the day dreams to comprehend the amount of the effort it is going to cost them. They know that startups are hard, but they do not get how hard it is, largely because you are more likely to hear about startups when they are doing great but not when they are struggling.

The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact : Consumer

This post is a follow up of The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact.

Here is an interesting info graph published by Microsoft Tag. Some of the data may seem to contradicts with the main argument, but please consider that the graph given in the first article is limited to US border, while this one is global.

As shown in the graph, mobile usage is already changing the way people live and how communication is done within a society. A lot of things that used to be done via computers are now being done through mobiles. Also, thanks to the new cloud technologies,such as Dropbox, iCloud, etc, consumers can afford to become more service oriented rather than device oriented. It does not matter where you listen your musics from, it can be done from computer applications, mobiles, mp3 players, or websites. All it matters now is how good is the service since the consumers are not tied to just computers for digital services. With the new paradigm, consumers can afford to become picky since they have more wide range of accessible services that suites their taste since there are so many services/products are out for each of the platform and some offers cross-platform service.

The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact : Companies

This post is a follow up of The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact.

Please read up on The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact : Developers before proceeding with this article.

Before getting into details, for such shift in global scale would definitely impact thousands of companies, and society and therefore there will be a lot of variables to account for. Within this post, more so than the details or broad range of topics, I would like to briefly discuss a few main subjects. Namely, human resource, and capitals.

Human Resource

There is a great deal of demand, and not enough supply when it comes to hiring software developers nowadays. It is very simple. More consumers are starting to spend time, and money into softwares through mobile platforms, many companies are making millions, if not billions, off the new trend. Therefore, companies need more developers to ship out their product faster and better.

With this rapidly increasing demand for software developers, some of the companies starting to have problems with keeping their employees and attracting new ones. For instance, Google increased their employees' salary by 10% to keep their employee transferring to other companies.

Also, many companies are starting to adapt a new form of application processes. Before, it was mostly done through University Transcript. Now, to find a developer with desired talent, some companies would broaden their view of their potential employee by looking into their Github, Google Code, extra projects, etc account.

Capital

There are tons of a new software startups going online every day. How do these companies are able to start? Some would cut down their expense to minimum and dig into their savings until they start to make money. Some get funded from other companies or get selected as a incubator. As for the funded companies, some of these companies(very few) get ridiculous amount of funding in millions of dollar scale. This happens because they have seen companies like Facebook, Google, or Microsoft multiplying their capital in relatively short time. Now, with the smart phones opening up a new form of market, many companies are expecting this new market to be as explosive as the previous generation's computing/internet market. Thus, more money is being invested into the companies that are trying to come up with a new product for smart phones. Why? It's very simple really. More people started to use smart phones, therefore bigger market, and therefore more potential of making big bucks.

The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact : Developers

This post is a follow up of The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact..

According to the article, Flurry: Mobile App Usage Up To 94 Minutes Per Day, (TechCrunch Article) there is a big paradigm shift in how more people are starting to spend proportionally more time on smartphone apps than traditional browsers. Following the trend, many of the software developments will be and are being done in either mobile first or mobile only manner, but exactly how would this actually impact the developers?

More work

There are many(super-many) products that are accessible through both desktops and mobiles, which implies that a lot more work had to be done compare to the traditional 'computer-only(used to be windows-only)' development. To add a support for mobile access, developers not only have to design the system for wide range of support, they also have to throw in middlewares, libraries, analytic tools, platform dependent UX designs, etc, across all their products to ensure the synchronized user experience and data. This creates an enormous complexity in designing the system, in testing, and in maintaining.

More specializations

With the new platforms and their boom, more specialists are needed from everywhere. Some of the examples are mobile UX specialist, android developers, window phone developers, iOS developers, mobile-web developers, and of course, the tablet app developers. Also, because a large portion the apps have to be connected to the servers in the back end, there is a greater need in the backend developers that can design and write scalable systems.

Things will be done differently

Backend will have to add in supports for mobiles and optimization will become a key aspect since mobile phones lacks in performance compare to desktops. Also, the time needed to develop any products will be largely expended and therefore will come with greater cost.

The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact.

This post is inspired by Flurry: Mobile App Usage Up To 94 Minutes Per Day (TechCrunch Article)

Article Summary

"Mobile analytics firm Flurry has updated its report from last summer which compared mobile apps to web consumption and found that apps came out on top. In June, Flurry discovered that users were spending 81 minutes per day in mobile apps versus 74 minutes on the web. As of December, the usage of mobile apps has skyrocketed to 94 minutes per day, while web consumption dropped to 72 minutes."

In short, the average smartphone users have began to spend more time in their smartphone apps than they do on desktop browsers. With such paradigm shift, it is almost guaranteed to have a huge impact in many layers of this society.

In this post, I would like to discuss the matter in three different topics. How this is likely to impact the consumers, world of developers, and companies.

Consumer

Developers

Companies