A year after its launch, mobile app developer Mobiquity surpasses 100 employees

"Mobile is something that CIOs are thinking about not just for consumer-facing apps, but for software used inside the enterprise, too," Seibel says. "And it's quite a challenge right now to hire the people who know about things like developing for iPhone and Android, and user-centric design, and leveraging the cloud, and social." Seibel says that in its first year, Mobiquity has landed nearly 70 customers, and he drops names like iRobot, Boston Scientific, Weight Watchers, John Hancock, and WestJet as examples.

In addition to its Wellesley headquarters, Mobiquity has offices in Providence, Philadelphia, and Costa Rica. Seibel says the company's initial venture funding "will get us to our target of $100 million in revenue by 2014." He says about 60 percent of the firm's projects involve developing for iPhone, 35 percent for Android, and 5 percent for other platforms.

I asked Seibel what lessons from the Zefer experience he'd been thinking about as he tries to grow Mobiquity. He says that trying to hire the best people possible is something common to both companies. But at Zefer, Seibel says he built too much infrastructure and had too many fixed costs to survive a steep economic plunge. Also, he says, "Conventional wisdom is that you always design your start-up with your exit strategy in mind. That’s what I did at Zefer, and that proved to be bad advice. At Mobiquity, I’m not worried about making decisions designed at achieving a specific exit strategy – I’m focused on building a great company." (After his stint at Zefer, Seibel was chief executive of Demantra, an inventory management software company that Oracle acquired.)

It'll be interesting to see how things play out in this latest boom in tech services...