Wildbit: web dev firm focusing on products and location, opens first office in Old City

The Wildbit office on 3rd St. in Old City.

When the web product development firm Wildbit killed its oldest product, Newsberry, a few months ago, enough people wondered what the company was up to that Natalie Nagele, who leads product development, wrote two blog posts explaining the decision.

The reason, to summarize, was focus, Wildbit founder Chris Nagele told Technically Philly. The two are married and run the company together.

The two learned the focus lesson when they made the decision to stop offering consulting services and focus on solely products, Chris says.

Now, in their estimation, the company needs to spend more time focusing on its other two products, Beanstalk and Postmark, both web products geared toward their primary customers: other developers.

“What I realized is that it’s all about focus,” said Chris. “Its about focus on not just your product but on the features in your product and making sure you’re keeping things to a minimum. And what most people tend to do is keep creating new features and new features, but you neglect your core. To make something really special and amazing you need to focus on it.”

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ApostropheNow: P’unk Avenue launches hosted version of its open source content management system

Passyunk Square-based web development shop P’unk Avenue is angling for broader adoption of its open source web platform Apostrophe with last week’s launch of a hosted version.

Launched in 2009, Apostrophe, the company’s open source content management system, is built on Symfony and has, until the new launch, been for larger builds hosted elsewhere. With ApostropheNow.com, users can grab free and cheaply hosted options, meant to make the framework more flexible, said P’unk Avenue Geoff Di Masi.

“Think Apostrophe and WordPress,” said Di Masi, referring to the blog framework turned online publishing giant. “Apostrophe and WordPress are both open source projects. With both projects, you can still build a site using the code that we have open sourced on our .org websites. Similarly, we now both offer hosted versions on our .com sites.”

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Jarvus Innovations: Northern Liberties web development firm grows up

Updated, Fri., Aug. 26, 3:10 p.m.: Added detail that Indy Hall’s Alex Hillman is a partner in Dynamic Wear.

Before the sun rises on North Third Street, just south of Liberty Lands Park, one can spot delivery trucks in front of a local bakery.

It’s a scene reminiscent of Philadelphia’s past, and a reminder of industry that was active before white collar jobs began taking root in places other than Center City, like Old City and Northern Liberties.

One of those companies is Jarv.us Innovations, a small, private web development firm that has been renting office space at a rehabbed, former glass-blowing studio just down the street from the bakery, and it’s contributing to a growing movement of young workers that is interested in changing how business works.

The firm is the anchor tenant of the space, which it rents to partner companies and freelancers under branding that represents its collaborative workspace: “Devnuts.” What Devnuts means literally is that they’re nuts about web development. Figuratively, Devnuts is the mission of the collaborative inhabitants: actionably trying to change business and workplace culture.

The Devnuts model is not unfamiliar to coworking facilities like Old City’s Independents Hall: by making desks available to anyone — for a fee, of course — minds can meld and talents combine.

We’ve written about the organizations in the past — Jarvus and Devnuts — but it’s worth another look to see how the organizations are growing. Can this culture shift support strong commerce?

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Zivtech launches Houston Command Center open source glue for Drupal, Salesforce, other connectivity [VIDEO]

A demo of Houston Command Center, a tool designed to integrate common local and cloud-based systems, has been released by Zivtech, the Old City Drupal design shop behind the project.
“The main idea behind Houston is to create a single application out of a couple of disperate systems,” said Zivtech co-founder Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg. “The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, so it creates, in some sense, a central command center for all of your local and remote apps.”

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A recap of Standards.Next at Philly Tech Week

During Philly Tech Week, the folks at Comcast Interactive Media held the Standards.Next 2011 conference, featuring sessions from Opera’s Molly Holzschlag, CIM’s standards expert Kimberly Blessing and Happy Cog’s Jenn Lukas.

With the rate of change that we are experiencing in the industry, these are indeed exciting times for web developers – as well as challenging times for those on the front lines, advocating the need for standards across the web. Standards.Next gives these individuals a shared voice and provides them with a forum in which to pose difficult, forward-thinking questions to an audience of peers who truly understand the value in doing so.

Read the full write-up over at CIM’s Labs blog.

Matching cost with value in nonprofit web redesign

Good web design doesn’t come cheap. And when it comes to nonprofits, the value of web presence can be a hard sell, both internally and externally.

“We were just talking about this the other day,” says Greg Hoy, president of Happy Cog Studios, a boutique web development and design firm based in Center City. “Cost is always a concern with nonprofits,” he says.

Though nonprofits aren’t a sole focus — the firm works with businesses and technology companies, too — they are an important part of the business mix. The firm is currently working with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has previously worked for the Posse Foundation, Amnesty International USA and the local Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation.

Though the company lists on its project planner that web development projects start at $100,000, the company chooses the clients it works with and the rates that it charges on a project-to-project basis.

“[Nonprofits are] not the most lucractive,” for a web shop to pursue, he says. “But we like to partner with organizations that, through the work that we do, helps them do important work.”

That much is clear from Happy Cog’s nonprofit clientele. [Full Disclosure: Happy Cog and Technically Media, Inc. have partnered on contract work with the National Constitution Center.]

So, how does a nonprofit employee explain to his or her higher-ups that a redesign is worth the investment?

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