Toronto-based BNOTIONS opens office in Kelowna
Recently, it seems that BNOTIONS has been keeping us here at Techvibes busy. And with good reason. The company continues to grow and expand. I was recently at their Toronto-based office/playground. They have already outgrown that location.
And now they are expanding into British Columbia.
Here's my conversation with Alkarim Nasser of BNOTIONS.
Can you share why BNOTIONS is opening up in BC? What can the Vancouver community expect from BNOTIONS? Anything else?
The move to BC was motivated by a core value we all share at BNOTIONS- supporting personnel development. When Jack Myers- originally a Programmer in our Toronto office, decided that he wanted to support his expecting sister - we wanted to get behind him.
What originally started as an agreement to send him projects as he worked remotely, turned into an opportunity of a lifetime for us all. One night we approached Jack with the idea of branching out operations to Kelowna, BC. We had asked him to do some preliminary research to help us understand availability of resources, property values, local opportunities and investigate the start-up culture there. In return, we received a several page document outlining all this and the results were positive. The office would sustain by managing overflow from the Toronto headquarters, but what was very special about this imitative is that it allowed us to specialize in emerging areas.
What is happening at BNOTIONS that leads you to open a whole new location?
Our competitive advantage at BNOTIONS has always been specialization - internalizing the concept of doing one thing and doing it very (very) well. The focus has been in web application development to-date and slowly we've been expanding into iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android development.
The opportunity to build a new team focused on mobile allowed BNOTIONS to continue it's commitment to web, while creating a wing - equally specialized, in mobile development. The parallels in web and mobile are endless and enable the dynamic behaviour behind a majority of mobile applications in the market. The two camps combined can offer a unique advantage to clients when creating data-driven mobile offerings.
A second benefit to opening the BC location was the ability to extend our research and development capabilities. Technology is a run away train and a business model that includes perpetual research and implementation is the key to staying current. It helps us live up to the value proposition we have to our clients and keeps our talent stimulated with interesting challenges. We want to use this facility in the beautiful and leisurely Kelowna to be more experimental with our approach to development, while building consumer and business facing products.
Why is this important to the future of BNOTIONS?
The key to this strategy is to create two organizations that are relatively autonomous that can cross-pollinate expertise, cultivated by the best of breed programmers we hire across both locations.
There is one other benefit we are beginning to see now after spending several weeks recently on the west coast between Silicon Valley and British Columbia and building amazing relationships with many tech community folks. Our Kelowna office makes for a great liaison between Toronto and these areas and we hope we can use this office as a launch pad to continue developing these relationships.
Kelowna also has a quickly growing developer community - Okanagan Developer Group (http://okdg.org/). We hope our landing here can connect local developers to big business and big projects coming out of Toronto, Vancouver and San Francisco and vise-versa connect these businesses to specialized and highly-skilled talent.
I'm really excited to see the collaboration that will come between the groups in these areas.
