Volea - Your business in Your pocket

Volea (which means "to toss / to hawk goods" in Latin American Spanish) is a mobile-first web app built for the millions of informal vendors who power the streets of Latin America — tiendas de barrio in Bogotá, plazas de mercado in Lima, vendedores semáforo in México City, puestos ambulantes everywhere. These vendors run real businesses: they manage stock, track sales, give change, build customer relationships. But the existing tools — Square, Toast, Shopify POS — are built for boutique cafés in Brooklyn, not for someone selling chicles at a traffic light. They're expensive, in English, and assume you have a counter, a card reader, and a fixed location. Volea is different. It's free, in Spanish, works on a cheap Android phone, and takes 10 seconds to record a sale. Open the app, tap a product, set the quantity, confirm. Stock updates atomically. The customer enters their email and a beautifully designed receipt arrives in their inbox within 3 seconds. The app supports six Latin American countries with native currency formatting (COP, PEN, MXN, ARS, CLP, USD) and a full English translation for vendors near tourist areas. There's a 30-day analytics dashboard with revenue charts and an hour-of-day heatmap so vendors can see when they actually make money. The whole product was built in 48 hours using IBM Bob as a development partner driven through the Bob shell. We wrote detailed track plans, handed each to a Bob session, iterated on the output, and combined four parallel tracks into one shipped app. Volea is mascot-first: meet Chavo, an animated SVG street stand with four moods — neutral, happy, empty, and alert — whose umbrella literally flies away when stock runs low. The addressable market is enormous: over 40 million micro-enterprises in Latin America, with only ~20% having access to formal credit. By building a documented sales history from day one, Volea creates the financial paper trail that unlocks microloans for vendors who've never had one.