I have started a series of posts which I called Scylla and Charybdis – or why startups are hard. The idea is that on pretty much anything you can err on both sides and only a relatively narrow middle will let you succeed. One of those that will merit an entire post shortly is the adoption of new technologies. You can be too early or too late! The particular technology I want to talk about today is HTML5.

For some time now we have had several of our portfolio companies explore whether they can replace part or all of their native mobile clients with HTML5. Until recently the definitive answer was no. Pretty much everyone who tried decided to go back to entirely native apps. But given that I just upgraded my phone to a Nexus 4, I figured it might be a good time to revisit this point.

So this past weekend, I started poking around HTML5 frameworks and also decided that it was time to write a little bit of code myself. My son and I wound up writing a very minimal HTML5 game, which you can play here. I came away pretty impressed as to how easy it was to write something that was relatively usable out of the box on both a computer and a phone.

So I am beginning to think that for new startups just getting going, this could be the year where choosing HTML5 is the right bet. Would love to get everyone’s views on that!