November 10, 2014
Startups often attempt to launch a product or service without full awareness of the options and developments in the tech industry. As a result, they often miss out on the ability to capitalize on a new idea before competitors or fail to innovate when they approach design from only one angle.
Before you launch a product, here’s some insight into new programming languages, novel models for inventive product design, and how the Internet is rapidly changing, all designed to give your startup ideas to work with for your future projects.
Consider Developing an MVP
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an excellent way to launch a product in a cost effective and timely manner. Essentially, your startup launches a product that offers core functionality, and then improves the app or product based on feedback and data collection. Many outsourcing companies specialize in developing MVPs, which means startups are increasingly turning to outsourced developers to provide insight into how this process works.
Just be aware that great products don’t have to take years to develop. With the MVP process, you can create quality products that still allow for plenty of room for improvement down the road.
Innovation & Design Thinking
Design Thinking is a methodology for creating a product or service that tries to find the nexus point between technical feasibility, business opportunity, and human desire. This nexus point represents true innovation for a startup.
At the same time, with Design Thinking, the goal is to take a more human-centric approach to ideation first, and not an entirely rational analytic approach. When you come from a more spontaneous ideation angle, you can often innovate faster and then do the necessary feasibility and technical analysis later.
New Trends & Capabilities
There are four new trends and capabilities making a huge impact within the software development circuit, allowing startups and their software development teams to innovate the design and functionality of the software product.
If you are looking at implementing the trends and capabilities highlighted below, it’s essential to find an outsourced development team that specializes in those tech stacks. There is nothing worse than a development team that is continuously learning throughout the project. In the end that could cause your project to be delayed and it might not even function correctly.
AngularJS for Single Page Apps UI
AngularJS is a JavaScript Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework that allows you to work on your core competencies while AngularJS handles all other tasks needed for a project. Essentially, standard engineering practices such as testable code are already built into this JavaScript tool, making it great for a startup project.
AngularJS is also perfect for generating single page app UIs. AngularJS can make dynamic UIs that users can interact with while also breaking programming tasks down within the MVC architecture, helping to clearly delineate programming functions even within huge programming applications. With this clear structure for sorting out programming tasks coupled with AngularJS’s deep versatility, programming teams can focus on only the coding that is essential to your single page app, and far faster than you could with JavaScript alone.
Javascript for Single Page Apps UI – Backbone.js:
Backbone.js is also another great option for building single page applications and other web development projects. One of the reasons a startup might want to choose this language to work with is because Backbone.js is designed to support the idea that server communication should be performed through the RESTful API.
There is currently a strong trend towards all content and data being processed through an API structure, and you certainly want to be ahead of that trend. The reason for this trend is that the browser is not the only client anymore. The world is now dealing with tablets, mobile devices, networked home devices, and even Google Glass. Backbone.js also helps you build a single page app with a proper structure, something that often isn’t possible with JQuery and MooTools alone.
SMAC Stack
For a startup to be successful in the tech industry, it should be familiar with the basic concept of the SMAC stack. SMAC stands for Social, Mobile, Analytics and the Cloud. Social represents services we all know, such as Facebook and Twitter, but it’s about using that data to build a product or track a customer experience. Mobile is about interfacing with customers and employees through mobile devices in order to attain connectivity around the clock. Analytics is about using powerful computing to analyze patterns and spot trends. Finally, the Cloud is about opening up a new frontier in computing, allowing startups to save data and work with powerful cloud networks for a cost effective price.
IoT – Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an important concept for any startup to understand. It represents the future of how people will interact with the Internet, social networks, and even their very own homes and cars. Essentially, IoT refers to how just about anything with an on and off switch is going to be connected, creating an ecosystem of products and devices.
This could refer to mobile devices, heating systems, toasters, coffee machines, home security, and smart watches. Startups need to look at these products and see where they can fill in a need for customers. It’s a huge growing phenomenon, and those companies that tap into it now will reap the rewards.
Ultimately, there are a lot of startups that could have benefitted from knowing about these latest trends in programming development, methods for ideation, and new products designed with connectivity in mind. Fortunately, outsourcing through Accelerance not only allows you to tap into all of these ideas, but it will also allow you to implement them in a cost-effective and timely manner.