Simply Professional.
Professionally Simple.™

2002-2004 - 2005-2006 - 2007-2008

"Since the mid-1990's, web development has been one of the fastest growing industries in the world. In 1995 there were fewer than 1,000 web development companies in the United States alone and in 2005 there are over 30,000 such companies. The web development industry is expected to grow over 20% by 2010. The growth of this industry is being pushed by large businesses wishing to sell products and services to their customers and to automate business workflow, as well as the growth of many small web design and development companies."

From Articler.com

2002-2004

As the "dot-com bubble" grew and burst from 1998-2001, many companies had flourished and spiraled down. In 2002, as this trend was dying down, Kyle Perkins, at the young age of 15, had discovered his natural talent for web development.

This became a perfect time for a web developer to flurish, because there were over 9 billion websites already in existance. 90% of which had poor designs, navigation, and/or bad web etiquette styles (such as a splash page). Many sites were not very user-friendly, on the operation or the eyes. Most required users to "think where they are going" before they know what they need. Search systems were unreliable, and the web was getting too large.

Looking into the web courses that were available at the time at Southeast Raleigh High School, Kyle quickly found out that the "web field" was not a big focus during this time. However, that did not stop him. Taking the only course that was available to him, Kyle quickly aced out of basic HTML class and was automatically invited to the exclusive Web Development Team as a sophomore. Staying on this team for the latter part of his high school career allowed him to create the orignial company, Kaiba Software, based on a popular cartoon character and around the idea of developing software.

However, not getting into the business aspect of Web Services yet, Kyle worked three jobs throughout high school, one with a national retail store, one with a local air conditioning company, and the last with his father, Marvin Perkins, owner of Omega Farms. Around the beginning of 2005, the request for Kyle's services started to rise. People couldn't quite grasp the idea of "Professional Web Services" because all they could understand is that the web worked - they didn't care how.

With the support and experience proviced by SRHS, Kyle was able to obtain "verbal contracts" for the Lead Dogs, Lead Dogs, LLC, and the SRHS IT Club. Even though these were not paying clients, it helped Kyle gain some experience in the IT/Business field.

Not giving up, Kyle was persistant on keeping the business mindset up and running. He transformed his own 3.5'x8' closet into a testing/training office. Only having dial-up internet at the time, Kyle was only able to set up a small network and test/develop new web scripts on two Linux servers, mainly Fedora Core. This worked well until the end of summer in 2005, when Kyle graduated from high school and was proceeding to Western Carolina University, a college in a small town of Cullowhee, NC, and the business followed.

2005-2006

The summer of 2005 proved to be a real challenge for the Kyle and the company. Originally starting in Raleigh, NC, and moving to to the small town of Cullowhee, NC, it seemed like the company had to start over.

Through a stroke of luck, Kyle was attending a local student meeting with a newly established organization, the Freshmen Leadership Institute of WCU. At that exact same meeting, a representitive of WCU's Student Government Association, the biggest organization on Western's campus, was present, and was looking for a "webmaster" to run the SGA site, and they were willing to pay. Bingo: the 1^st official client.

Kyle met with the president of the SGA and knew that he had to expand...fast. While sitting in his dorm on October 15^th, 2005, Kyle did some business thinking and research. The first order of business was to rethink the whole structure, including the name. He first changed the name of the company from Kaiba Software to Shadow Development, based around the idea of "staying in the shadows" (the actual code) and opening up to "Development" to not only limit us to web development, but anything that we put our minds to.

Kyle also knew that he couldn't do this alone. He posted a few (literally) recruitment flyers around the WCU campus, and sure enough, someone replied. Through a quick interview, Zach Phillips was hired on the spot as Shadow Development's first official employee! A few days later, Keat Cahoon joined the team as a designer.

Through some rough times and long meetings with the new employees and SGA, the new SGA site was done. The president at the time loved what he saw, and so did the rest of SGA. This gave a message to the team that "we should expand."

As Shadow Dev grew in the buzz around the WCU campus, Kyle quickly found out that there was an new Entpreneural degree available at Western. Not wanting to go into computer science and Business Law was not looking like an option, Kyle declared his major for Entpreneurship. Through this major, Kyle was able to meet many teachers that would help along the devleopment path of the company, such as Prof. Christoper Birkel, Ms. Bethany Davidson, and Dr. Frank Lockwood.

Knowing this, Kyle quickly wrote a business plan for Shadow Development, basing it off what he knew naturally from business experience, and from what was learned in class. This allowed for a strong understanding of what the business was about, how it was formed, and where it was going.

Using the college as a catalyst for the business, the Entpreneurial professors helped Shadow Development grow stronger internally (operations, management) and externally (customer management, marketing). Prof. Birkel left after 2006, however Ms. Davidson and Dr. Lockwood stayed on the scene. Little did Shadow Development know that these two professors would be the biggest help of all.

Little did Shadow Development know, the second-biggest organization on campus, Last Minute Productions was looking for a new "webmaster" to take over, since the old webmaster was graduating. This started a big opprotunity for Shadow Development, because LMP is the entertainment source for Western Carolina University.

This started the whole "webmaster" ≠ "Web Developer" craze. As stated on this site:

Many so called "Webmasters" of today are self-proclaimed, all because they can use a visual editor and create a site in five minutes. But that doesn't always mean that the website will work. We progressively work through each page of your website, working with what you want, and design it in such a way that your browsing audience can find exactly what they need.

"Web Developers", on the other hand, actually work with the structure of the site, hand-coding the server codes, personally overseeing the database connections, and testing the content and styles in different environments to ensure the quality of professionallism for their clients. "Web Developers" do not use visual editors in development, and usually use a mixture of text editors and terminals. This allows for a one-on-one connection with the "behind the scenes" code, and allows the "Web Developers" to have almost free reign on what can be done, existing or not.

As the 2005-2006 school year came to a close, Kyle and Keat had to return back to their hometown of Raleigh, NC, for the summer. But this didn't stop the progress. Working over the summer of 2006 to get a new site ready for LMP for the fall, Kyle worked over a dial-up connection and Keat worked through a full-time job to get the site fully functioning. As soon as the first week of school hit, everyone at LMP was suprised. "It's amazing to see the look on peoples' faces when we show them what we can do. All that we are doing is just bringing them up to our level," as Kyle says.

Working through the events and new requests to fine-tune the LMP site, the staff of WCU started talking about Shadow Development. Buzz got around and soon, Shadow Development was being requested for web services around the campus.

2007-2008

2007 brought many good things, opprotunities, and improvements to the company.

As the 2007 year started, Shadow Development put in a request to redo the Western Carolina site. "Long story short: Western paid too much for not enough," as Kyle says. The exact amount and design aspects will not be disclosed for security reasons, but a lot of Western's hard earned money just flew out the window for something that everyone hated.

Kyle was able to talk to the head of the Web Committee for WCU, Newton Smith, and was able to get a word in for Shadow Development. The concern was raised that the money could have been put somewhere else and Shadow Development could do a much better site for Western if they used the same technology. Newton was in agreeance: Western made a bad decision, and he was not for it from the start. He agreed that the technology that Shadow Development was using was far superior to what Western had chosen to run, but since the majority of the staff didn't know how websites were run and managed, they went with "what sounded best."

However, Shadow Development was offered a loophole that Western didn't know about. This will allow Shadow Development to gain a "big enough roar" for Western to listen again.

One of the biggest advantages that 2007 brought was the joining of Dr. Frank Lockwood to the Shadow Dev Team. At the time, this was unexpected, but when the oppotunity arose, Shadow Dev took advantage of it. By trading a small percentage of ownership in the company, Dr. Lockwood promises to offer business advice to keep us on the right track!

One of the other advantages that 2007 brought was having LMP award us the exclusive "Board Member of the Year" and the very first "Marketing Member of the Year" awards (generically). This added to the reputation that "Shadow Development" means "excellent web service!"

Through some legal miscalculations, it turned out that Shadow Development was not registered with the state yet. Kyle, Keat, and Zach all quickly did some legal homework and found out that the same "Shadow Development" had already been taken. Since the team didn't want to deviate from the reputation-gaining name of Shadow Development, a nice little "Technologies" was tacked on at the end.

Yes, it is a long name, but at least we are identifiable from other "Shadow Development"s and it somewhat works as a marketing ploy: SDT is commonly mixed with STD. (We're not so proud of that, but if it works, then it works).

As the end of the 2006-2007 school year approached, SDT was offered a rare opprotunity: an available office space in a Business Incubator; basically, a business that helps small businesses grow (think of eggs). Located in between Cullowhee and Asheville (about 30 minutes from each) in Waynesville, NC, SDT moved into an official office space.

As the 2007-2008 school year started, Lionel Loquias, a friend of Kyle's, talked to the Japanese teacher at Western and had come up with an idea for an online-version of the japanese dictionary. Hearing this, Kyle jumped at the opprotunity. He quickly developed an AJAX-ified prototype of the online dictionary, and it has been approved by the University. Knowing this, progress will move a lot faster than Lionel or the Japanese teacher had predicted, and using the Shadow Dev team as a working resource, this project should be completed by the end of the year.

As the 2007 year came to a close, SDT heard news of a competition on the Western Campus known as the WISE Challenge. This challenge, which was the first of its kind, was developed to help Western students get a head start into starting their own business. As the advertisiment goes: "Have you ever had an idea for a new product, process or service and didn't know where to go with it?"

The bad news for this is that SDT was already an existing company, and could not enter. However, through the experience lent by Lionel, a new business entity was born (under the operating ownership of KP Labs, Inc, a code-based operating brach of SDT). ScrumIt, Inc was entered into the WISE Challenge, and the progress of this project has the backing support of the SDT Team, Last Minute Productions, and the Entpreneurial Staff of Western. From the gathered support, ScrumIt heads into the competition with high hopes!

Along with the WISE Challenge, Shadow Dev entered ScrumIt into another competition, this one being nation-wide, called NASCENT hosted by Ball State in Indiana. In the beginning of 2008, Shadow Dev had some good news: ScrumIt was 1 of 12 nationally-selected teams that would compete for a grand prize of $10,000! As the team prepared for the WISE Challenge and the NASCENT compeition at once, only good things can come from such hard work! Good luck to the Shadow Dev team at both competitions, and hope they win the total $15,000 prize money in total value.

Currently, Shadow Development is working on revamping old designs, the marketing plan, and operating policies for the company. Working toward the mission statement, "Innovating the Digital world by Inspiring what has never been done before!", Shadow Development plans on expanding our staff, so if you are a developer, designer, or office worker, Apply for a job today! Become part of a bright, energetic team bringing hope to this chaotic world! Who knows, you may have the next big idea since sliced bread with us!

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