Rombla

Rombla at MAX

This was my first MAX event and I was extremely impressed by the sense of community I saw and felt there. I have always respected Adobe as a strong technology company but didn’t realize how close they are to their customers. The openness and genuine dialog demonstrated by the Adobe team was like nothing I have seen before from a large technology company.

The response to Rombla’s introduction at MAX was extremely positive. I had a chance to demo Rombla for several members of the press and most of the Adobe product teams. Hundreds of you who saw the announcement have signed up and taken Rombla for a test drive. Many thanks for registering and for sending us feedback and suggestions. Please help to spread the work about Rombla. We are working hard on the next update that will be out in mid December. Please keep the suggestions coming.

The Rombla registration data suggests that most of the initial interest has come from Web Designers. I am excited to see what you can accomplish with Rombla. Please share some of your designs with the community. After logging in, click the Share button and then select the “Share with community” checkbox so everyone can see your creations.

The most requested feature is the ability to publish your sites to existing domains or new domains other than rombla.com. We are testing this feature now and plan to have it ready for the next update. You will be able to change the publish location for the sites you are currently building on Rombla sub-domains. Also, look for better help/tutorials, lots of bug fixes and several new features in December.

We have received several requests from Flex developers to allow the viewing and export of the site design source code(MXML and CSS) so they can be opened in Flex Builder. This was planned for post beta but we will move it up on the feature list if there is sufficient interest. If anyone else in interested in accessing site source files please let us know.

Tags: Adobe MAX Rombla feedback features update

Q&A with Bob Lang, Founder of Piria Inc. November 16, 2008

Company/Executives

Q: What is your role and background? Who are the other execs and what are their backgrounds?

A: I’m the founder and president of Piria. Rombla is the company’s first product.

Prior to starting Piria I was the president of Avanquest Software and ran the the US business from inception to more than $50 million in annual sales. Our customers included Dell, Motorola, and EarthLink.

Marc Ross is also a founder and our COO. He has a lot of experience building and deploying software for businesses and consumers in some very high-growth markets. He previously worked at JetMultimedia, CGI, Bell Mobility, Avanquest, and MediaPlaza America, among others.

Mark Zachmann is our CTO and a member of the board. Marc has more than 30 years of experience in the software industry. He’s taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology, written for PC Magazine, and founded ZSoft, which was a leading graphics software company that had Microsoft, HP, Dell, IBM, and others as customers. Most recently he was a Group Manager at Agilent Technologies.

Q: How big is the company? How many employees? Are you planning on continuing to grow the company?

A: Five employees and several contractors. We are in the process of raising a second round of funding to support our commercial release and expand marketing and operations in 1Q2009.

Q: How is the company funded? Are you planning on raising venture money?

A: Piria is currently funded by the founders, with additional seed funding from an industry partner. Prior to today’s announcement, we’ve been generating income from licensing, which has been plowed back into the development of Rombla.

We are currently raising a small round, which we expect to close in 1Q2009. These funds will be used to expand marketing and support operations when we launch the software commercially.

Q: Where did the names come from?

A: Pira comes from a beautiful coastal town in Uruguay South America called Piriapolis. This is one on my favorite places to visit. Rombla is a “gringo” spelling of Rambla, which is the famous lively promenade in Barcelona and is also the bustling commercial boulevard along the coast in Uruguay. I happened to be on the Rambla in Uruguay when I was contemplating a new company and found my inspiration there.

Q: What other products are you planning to offer in addition to Rombla?

A: There are a few products under development. The one I expect you’ll see next will be a social networking platform that can be deployed by small businesses.

Right now, our primary focus is on the launch of Rombla. We’ll incorporate many social networking capabilities into Rombla during Q1 2009 before you see them as a standalone product.

The web builder market and competition

Q: How did you pick this space? After all, there are a lot of tools out there already.

A: Quite simply, there was a need not being filled, and our team saw the opportunity to take a fundamentally different approach to filling that need.

The small business website building market is well established but there are few tools that can bridge the gap between the web designer and the content contributors.

Q: Hasn’t the use of templates essentially addressed this same thing, with designers or businesses buying and using templates just like you’re talking about?

A: The traditional template market, such as TemplateMonster and others, represents both the problem and the opportunity. Templates can help the business owner visualize their site and speed up the development process, but they are simply the graphics, not a site.

The designer or integrator must cut them up and write lots of code to turn them into a website. This typically costs $1,000 - $3,000 for a small business site. In the end, the business owner has a nice site, but it can only be edited and maintained by someone with coding skills. Romba offers all the advantages of templates, but in the form of fully-editable websites that don’t require you to write code.

Q: Aren’t designers already doing basically what you’re describing with Flash sites that they’re selling online through TemplateMonster and other sites?

A: Flash templates from TemplateMonster are written in Adobe actionscript programming language and require an experienced programmer with a development environment to edit them.

Q: What tools are you competing against, both in terms of traditional software as well as other online approaches?

A: For the small business owner, there are several template-based site builders, some of which are offered by hosting companies, and some by other types of companies that offer hosting as an option.

These don’t offer the level of design control or the extended forms and commerce features of Rombla. In addition, most others don’t provide a way to collaborate with designers to get professional results.

Rombla is designed to bridge both the technical skills gap and the design skills gap between web designer and small business owners.

Q: How are you planning on marketing Rombla? Do you have a reseller or referral program?

A: Rombla will be marketed to the web design community as well as the small business market. The Rombla marketplace is a place where they can meet, and it offers value for each of them. For the small business owner, he can easily find quality site designs that are immediately editable at a reasonable price. For the designer, Rombla offers a place to showcase their design skills and find new customers. They also have a tool to quickly apply and sell their design talent and collaborate with their clients. Once the initial site design is complete, the business owner can then maintain their site and easily experiment with content to optimize their site’s performance.

The product

Q: Who can I talk with who has used Romba?

A: Chris Fortier of Chris Fortier Graphics has been using Rombla for a few days. You can reach him at (403) 809-6096. And ask him to give you the URLs of some of the sites he’s built with it.

Q: Once a site is built with Rombla, can the site owner stop paying the monthly fee until he wants to edit it again?

A: Rombla is free during Beta. We will be announcing pricing before commercial release. We will be gathering input from the community during beta that will help set our pricing strategy.

Q: Couldn’t a business owner use this himself, without ever hiring a designer?

A: Yes, and I’m sure we’ll see some people go that route, but the sweet spot for Rombla is enabling collaboration between designer and business owner in a way that is cheaper, faster, and more effective than in the past.

I expect that you’ll see most business owners either hire a designer or buy an existing Rombla site. They know the difference that a good designer makes. And once the site is created, the business owner can easily keep it up to date.

Q: Doesn’t it make it easier for him to cut the designer out of the process, or at least marginalize him?

A: No, not really, it just helps both parties focus on the areas where they add the most value. Most business owners will pay a designer for design skills, but don’t want to pay a designer to do routine updates. For that matter, most designers don’t want the burden of handling updates, which is one of the reasons we expect that designers will embrace Rombla.

The other reason is that designers will be able to sell their designs through the Rombla marketplace, which provides additional revenue directly, as well as from follow-on work to modify a Rombla site.

Q: There are many Flash website builders already on the market. What makes Rombla different?

A: Rombla has a distinct advantage over current online Flash builders thanks to our innovative and unique use of the Adobe Flex 3 framework. Rombla does not simply load compiled flash objects onto a canvas and move them around as many other products do. Rombla is a native Flex MXML and CSS interpreter that loads and manages Flex source code in memory. This allows us to provide the designer with a graphical interface to the same powerful style capabilities normally only available to a developer using Adobe Flex builder. While Rombla already provides advanced style control, this architecture will allow us to dramatically expand these capabilities in the future.

Q: What is this “Gap” between designers and their clients you speak of?

A: It is a skills gap and actually there are two of them; technical and creative. All visual online builders attempt to bridge the technical skills gap but Rombla is focused on bridging both. A key ingredient in creating an effective website is artistic talent. Some people have and the rest of us don’t. Rombla seeks to improve rather than replace the relationship between businesses and designers. It provides tools for designers to quickly apply their artistic talent and collaborate with their clients of layout and content. Then clients can easily edit their sites online to keep it up to date and optimize content to improve effectiveness.

Tags: about piria, Interview, rombla

PIRIA LAUNCHES ROMBLA™

PIRIA LAUNCHES ROMBLA™ TO BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN  WEB DESIGNERS AND CLIENTS

Visual website builder enables designers to create
fully-editable sites that clients can easily update online

San Francisco, Adobe MAX Conference, November 17—Piria, Inc. today announced Rombla™, the powerful online “no programming” site builder that enables designers to create fully-editable websites using simple visual editing tools and then share them with their clients to edit and maintain. By making it easy for clients to keep their sites up to date, designers can focus on higher-margin design work rather than ongoing maintenance, marking a new chapter in web design.

Designers can also share their designs with the Rombla community to showcase their talents and attract new clients. Business owners select a design and customize it themselves or collaborate with a designer using Rombla to make major changes and additions.

The survey Internet Design & Development from The Industry Measure reported that designers are spending the majority of their time on maintenance and updates rather than on new site design. For their part, many clients have been frustrated that they can’t edit their own sites and keep them up to date. Rombla addresses both these limitations.

Through the innovative use of the Adobe® Flex®3 Framework, Rombla gives designers control over every element of every page, including style, layout, and content, without forcing them to write a line of code. And Rombla provides true WYSIWYG editing that’s powerful enough to meet the needs of designers and yet easy enough for their clients to use.

Rombla offers a rich design environment by tightly integrating with online design tools such as Adobe Kuler® color palettes, content sources such as Flickr, YouTube, and Google Maps, and utilities such as PayPal for shopping and payment. For example, within Rombla a designer can find content online and drag and drop it onto any page. In addition, Rombla includes a robust content management system that makes it easy to create forms and view data.

“We created Rombla to give designers and their clients a better way of working together,” said Bob Lang, founder of Piria. “Designers can focus their talent on creating compelling designs and their customers can contribute content and keep their site up to date. This frees designers from their least profitable task and gives clients a cost-effective way to modify their site’s content and optimize its effectiveness.”

Rombla also solves a long-standing limitation with online website building solutions that lock sites to a single hosting provider. Websites built with Rombla can be saved, shared, edited and published to any web domain. This allows designers who offer hosting services to easily deploy Rombla sites to their managed domains.

“With Rombla, designers can separate content from design, which really changes the dynamics of building websites,” said Chris Fortier of Chris Fortier Graphics in Calgary, Alberta. “I can now rapidly build out a site and then work collaboratively with the client to finalize the design and content, which is a process that’s far more efficient than what designers have been doing since we started building client sites more than ten years ago.”

Piria plans to expand Rombla’s site sharing capabilities with the Rombla Marketplace, which will give designers a way to showcase and sell their designs and design services. The Rombla Marketplace will be part of the commercial release in early 2009.

Rombla is available in beta at no cost now at www.rombla.com.

It is the first product from Piria, a privately-held firm founded in 2007 and headquartered near Denver, Colorado. For further information contact Bob Lang, president, at 303 435-7571 or bob@piria.com.

High-resolution screenshots of Rombla are available at www.rombla.com/press.

About Piria
Piria Inc. was founded in late 2007 by veteran software industry executives to create compelling Internet applications that fully exploit the web environment and rival their desktop counterparts. Piria’s first project, Rombla, is a visual web design tool powerful enough for designers and easy enough for small business owners. Rombla’s unique site-sharing capability creates a new way for designers and their clients to collaborate. Piria is based near Denver, Colorado, and has a development office in Montreal.

Media Contact:
Alan Penchansky
The Pen Group Communications
(305) 529-1944
alan@thepengroup.com

Tags: rombla launch

What’s in a name?

A little over a year ago, I was on holiday in one of my favorite places: Uruguay, South America. I was sitting in a café on the Rambla, a bustling boulevard along the coast, contemplating starting a new business. I was trying to come up with unique names that would have a URL and trademark available. The internet land grab has made this a frustrating task. It dawned on me that there were interesting words all around me and as Uruguay is just a side road on the web they may still be available.

I was in the beautiful seaside village of Piriapolis, founded by Francisco Piria early in the last century. I wandered over to the local internet café and quickly registered several domains that became our company and product names. So what about Rombla? It is a gringo variation on Rambla. I would like to tell you we changed the name from Rambla to Rombla because people had a hard time pronouncing Rambla. Truth be told, it was a twitter from Rafe Needleman. Back in April at the Web2.0 show, Rafe was kind enough to blog about our Alpha version. We were following his twitter when he mentioned “nice app but pity about the name. It sounds like NAMBLA.” A quick Google search later I decided we had to change the name. Rombla was available and easier to pronounce.. so here we are.

Tags: Piria rombla rambla name rafe needleman

Who is Rombla for?

In short, business owners AND design professionals.  When we started the Rombla project we set out to create the best website design tool for small business owners.  We wanted to eliminate the technical skills gap that prevented them from building and maintaining their own sites.  At Alpha stage, I put on my small business owner’s hat and set out to create sample sites to test Rombla’s capabilities.  I had no problem creating content and laying it out but I was quickly frustrated that I could not get the sites to have a clean professional look.  I called on a professional designer to help me with the site’s style.  As is often the case, necessity quickly became the mother of invention.  We were sending the sites back and forth and I could not work on the content while the Designer was working with the site.  Piria’s engineering team put together a framework that made it easy for us to share the site.  Then the designer started asking for more design control capabilities in Rombla.  We added many more design features but made sure that they were easy enough for me to use too.  That is how Rombla developed into a tool that improves rather than replaces the relationship between businesses and web designers.

Currently, we are working on ways to improve upon the traditional web design marketplace.  We are developing an online community where businesses and designers can meet and work together.  The Rombla community will offer social networking features for business owners and designers to collaborate and improve the effectiveness of their sites.  We will include a marketplace where designers can promote their services and sell their designs.  We are very interested to hear from you and get your input on the community features as well as the business model for the marketplace.

Please join the dialog.

Tags: Rombla rambla piria