Our Unusual Business Model
Unlike most small tech companies, we have an unusual 80/20 business model. We spend twenty percent of our time and resources doing chores for mid-size enterprises and eighty percent of our time doing what we love: building things that users love to use.
Our chores pay our bills. Our explorations keep us excited, innovative and most importantly happy.
The chores range from boundaryless projects with artificially flavored deadlines, feature creeps and creepy features that run wild.
Working with customers without ears for a long time would ordinarily bankrupt any team's patience. However, we learned to ignore the noise and focus on our own ideas and flight plans. Frankly, ideas are a dime a dozen. It takes a highly cohesive team to run with an idea and gain traction in the marketplace. Easy to say, very hard to execute.
Our focus is on the execution and we are on our best execution ever!
The Founder & the Crew
Kabir, Mohammed (goes by ko-bir) incorporated EVOKNOW, Inc. in 2002. Before becoming the CEO / Chief Software Architect / Master Code Chef, Chief Dev Ops Engineer / Chief Unsolicited Call Fighter for EVOKNOW, he had two other startups: INTEVO and Integration Logic, Inc.
Even though Kabir's experience with VC funding, enterprise consulting, extreme customer profiling, comes from his previous startups, his experience in building software started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K computer in his high school. His first software sold for twenty dollars a license via Walnut Creek CDROM distribution during his junior year in the college. His software experience ranges from writing
DSP benchmarking tools for a UC Berkeley startup to multi-million dollar web platform for the financial and telecom industries. Trained as a hardware engineer, he has a keen interest in Raspberry PI and has some gadget projects in the works.
Oh ya, he also wrote a dozen books on web programming, web server, Linux, security, and optimization. Even though most of his books have been translated into major languages around the world, he strongly feels that the time for printed reference books are long over. Stack overflow rocks!
EVOKNOW currently operates at 12 exaFLOPs. Granted some of the exaFLOPs don't kick in until the afternoon.
It is a very creative and friendly environment where employees often find ways to make fun of each other.
We have resident photographers, drone pilots, evil phone number and python snake owner,
tank for massively multiplayer role-playing games, PC-haters, Apple fanboys, unethical hackers, aspiring musicians, Rocklink PD volunteer,
and of course, the most interesting man from Bangladesh!
All our employees work from Rocklin, California.
There is an API for it!
There seems to be an Application Programming Interface (API) for just about everything we want to build in software. We love consuming the REST API services
to speed up our work. Integrating a dozen APIs in any Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or proof of concept (POC) is very common in our shop.
The hardest thing in building a software that we are excited about is avoiding feature creeps. Feature for the sake of coolness is so not so cool for doing quick market trials.
We have to constantly remind ourselves that a feature with a strong business use-case must outweigh one with limited edge-case even if it is 3x cooler to create.
Unfortunately, we often fall for the cool factors, which is bad, really bad!
Raspberry PI
We are extremely fascinated with the Raspberry PI boards.
We have built talking, blinking, vibrating Minecraft characters using the Raspberry PI Zero boards.
We even built 64x192 LED grid displays that we powered with Raspberry PI to show Minecraft scenes.
We have also used Raspberry PI III for computer vision (CV) work.
Although, Raspberry PI boards have a lot of competitions, we still believe that Raspberry PI board and
its foundation's mission best suits our need for tinkering in the imagination engineering space.
We are exploring some cool IOT devices for B2B space using PI.