OUR STORY
The Beginning
The team has roots in the early 2000s at Yahoo where we built at "Internet Scale" before there were packaged solutions available. We built tools used by Yahoo worldwide, as well as launched several Yahoo properties from scratch. We also helped to drive the internal Yahoo APIs out into the world as REST APIs before most people knew what REST was. In parallel, some of our team members came from Oracle and Accenture, working on business-to-business and e-commerce projects, state-of-the-art for the Internet in the late 90s and early 00s.
The Startup World - Games
After leaving Yahoo, we became the founding engineering team for Outspark, an online casual gaming platform. We built one of the first U.S.-based free-to-play, micro-transaction gaming companies using virtual currency, enabling virtual goods purchasing for in-game friends. We also made innovations available to game publishers in order to offer richer, more engaging offerings, and allowed new monetization and measurement options.
The Ad World
Next, the core team moved on to build a digital-out-of-home advertising network that used scalable cloud computing and a REST architecture to not only target the digital-out-of-home space, but to unite the experience across devices -- iPhone, Android, GPS units, Internet kiosks, and a continent-wide network of digital signage. If it had a screen and an IP address, we could serve ads and products to it.
And Then Semiconductors?
In 2009, we landed at Telegent where they make chips for watching TV on mobile phones and devices. Recognizing the need to move beyond the profit-margin roller coaster of a traditional chip company, Telegent saw the opportunity to add web and mobile software products to their chip portfolio and grow the business beyond silicon. We grew the team and delivered a suite of products that were very innovative. Products included a social-TV site and mobile app, a synchronized streaming site/app and a global advertising and services platform that worked with low-end feature phones and smart phones. We led Telegent's Android strategy, becoming an early leader in the fast-rising Chinese Android sector. We innovated a real-time web architecture that was able to scale on even the most low-end devices in developing world markets, long before real-time had broken out to the mainstream. In the process, we gained deep insight into how the global mobile phone market works, and used some of the same techniques we had developed in earlier products to deliver rich content to feature phones used around the world.
Back to our Roots
In mid-2011, Telegent was acquired by a larger chip company and we were able to take the opportunity to go out on our own and apply our lessons learned to the web/apps sector. In talking to a number of companies about our experience and what we offered, we quickly realized that we had all of the elements of a complete team from design/creative to business/product to development/engineering. As one of our prospective clients referred to us when they contracted us, we are a "team in a box." And as we've carefully grown, we've preserved that "team in a box" mentality and approach. Our colleagues are people we know and have worked with before. We all share the same approach to product and philosophy about what matters.
We've been working together for a long time in this industry. We like to make things simple and we like to focus on getting good product out the door. Our collective history together only touches on the range of experience we all bring to the table as individuals. From huge multi-nationals to second-mortgage-funded garage startups, we've done it all. And there are few technical or business challenges we haven't run into. So give us a shout hello@scal.io and let's work together!