Celebrating 20 Years 2008: HP Buys EDS And Presidential Politics Get A Taste Of Social Media
2008 was a milestone year for a few reasons. One of the biggest was the historic election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the US. For technology geeks, the most interesting aspects of his campaign was the use of social media to engage with voters. Social media was well and truly going mainstream and mass market, and companies everywhere were trying to figure out how if fit into their own marketing and customer service ecosystems.
Celebrating 20 Years 2007: IPhone Released And Optimation Picked For Doctor Registration
What were you doing in June 2007? Maybe, like thousands of others, you were lining up to get your hands on the first iPhone. Once again, Apple changed the game and iPhones are now just about the most popular smart phones on the planet. Here at Optimation, 2007 was also a big year as we won a highly contested multi-year contract to redevelop the Medical Council of New Zealand’s core practitioner registration system.
Celebrating 20 Years 2005: Google Starts Digitising The World’s Books & New Zealand Culture Goes Global With Te Ara
2005 marked the year Google started digitising the world’s books. It was also the year YouTube hit our screens with the first of thousands (millions?) of cute cat videos. Here in New Zealand, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage was celebrating a major innovation of its own with the launch of Te Ara, the world’s first fully online national encyclopedia.
Celebrating 20 Years 2000: We Survive Y2K And Form An International JV
1 January 2000 came and went and the world didn’t collapse in a smoking pile of motherboards. School projects would never be the same as we welcomed Wikipedia into our lives and our printed encyclopedias slowly got relegated to use as doorstops. And it wasn’t all work as Sony brought out its PS2 gaming console.
Celebrating 20 Years – 1998 Google Is Founded And Vodafone Opens Its Doors In NZ
1998 was a banner year for the tech industry, both globally and here in New Zealand. The founding of Google marked the beginning of the end for old-school technologies like paper phonebooks while in NZ, Vodafone Group PLC purchased Bellsouth New Zealand and Vodafone New Zealand was born. At the time of switchover, Bellsouth had just 138,000 customers. Today, Vodafone has over 2.5 million.
1995: EBay Launches And The Rolling Stones Start Up Windows 95
It was 1995, and something was about to happen that would change our shopping habits forever as a little start-up called eBay took shape in Pierre Omidyar's San Jose living room. This was also the year the Rolling Stones famously (or should that be infamously?) licensed their rock anthem ‘Start Me Up’ to Microsoft for the launch of Windows 95.
1992: Game Of Minesweeper, Anyone?
The year was 1992 and Microsoft had just released windows 3.1. The GUI interface was nice, but the really compelling feature was the inclusion of Minesweeper with the OS for the first time. Meanwhile, at a kitchen table somewhere in Wellington, Neil and Sharon Butler were coming up with a plan to start their own company - a little business known as Optimation.
Share Your Memories As We Celebrate Optimation's 20th Anniversary
It’s hard to believe it, but this year marks Optimation’s 20th year in business! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be celebrating by taking a trip down memory lane. We'll be reminiscing about big moments in IT history and revisiting some of our own milestones as we grew from just a handful of staff back in 1992 to over 260 Optimates today. The story-telling will continue as we build up to anniversary events being held in Auckland and Wellington next month.
Practice Makes Perfect
Here at Optimation we say that people are the most important asset of this organisation. So I thought it might be time to explain a point of view from my position of leading the consulting practice, focusing on how we organize and support our people.
Big Data, Big Change?
Unless you have been in a cave for the past year you will be well aware of the hype around “big data”. As usual it’s being driven by the software vendors and great promises of leading to the holy grail of innovation, that other over used buzz word and subject of a hundred articles in Harvard Business Review and the like.
