Yair Flicker: Baltimore companies should keep app development in Baltimore

Yair Flicker, owner of Canton-based web and mobile app development shop SmartLogic Solutions, writes in CityBizList on six “objective reasons why Baltimore companies should keep app development in Baltimore—and why outside companies should bring their app development here.”

(You might know Flicker as the man who tallied the year-over-year progress of Baltimore’s tech community according to the amount of pizza bought by SmartLogic for tech events.)

He cites experience of local firms and cost-effectiveness among his reasons, but the article raises perhaps the more interesting question of why local companies would outsource, as it were, their development projects.

Flicker’s right to point out that it isn’t for a lack of experienced web developers in the region, and three of the Baltimore Business Journal‘s top five biggest web design firms are in Canton, the Inner Harbor and Fells Point, respectively. (Including digital agency r2i.) The Berndt Group, in Hampden, employs 27 people full-time and has been developing websites since 1993. Its list of clients includes Catholic Relief Services, the Abell Foundation and CityBizList.

But the disconnect between Baltimore companies and Baltimore development shops might be more the product of a broader disconnect between this city’s tech community and this city’s general business community.

As Andrew Hazlett of gb.tc writes, in response to Flicker’s article, “Several companies and many individual developers, designers and consultants have told us, even as they successfully build client bases in New York, the west coast, and abroad, they have had trouble connecting with customers in their own community.”

Maybe it isn’t so much that local companies haven’t looked at local development firms for web or mobile work, but, rather, local companies aren’t entirely aware of the app development shops in and around Baltimore city.
Read Yair Flicker’s full article at CityBizList.