With the strengths of a close team and fueled by early stage investments, via CAF it’s taken me a full 18 months to lift Civico to this point. In that time we have trialed, tested and proven our product with occasional setbacks and giant leaps forward along the way. We are now in the process of introducing our products and service to local authorities across the UK and Europe.
As some will know we had an opportunity to provide the live events partnership with the prestigious Personal Democracy Forum in the UK, Europe and the USA. The PdF is renowned world wide for exploring the intersection between emerging technology and democracy. This partnership encouraged us greatly and has lead to opportunities particularly in Europe indeed, for example we are currently working with the British Council to provide a cross-national live democracy event.
If anything right now our European and US profile seems to be much greater than that we have in the UK, which feels a little odd that serves to highlight for me a clear challenge, that is to grow our business and services across the UK in the first place. As the nature of our cloud service lend its selves, I shall continue to actively court international opportunities but right now building our relationships with UK councils, public organizations and events is my upper most focus.
Some could configure that this might be an odd time for me to entre the West Midlands fish bowl as we have just launching our new website and are right in the thrust of a major marketing drive to our primary client group. And if that wasn’t enough were already drafting out a range of new administration features for our quarterly upgrade. Give that we are supporting Councils to be open and transparent in their process it seemed intriguing to take an opportunity to do like wise? I also want to offer and take support when needed.
Almost 6 months ago and parallel to maintaining our existing client portfolio, we took the major decision to reposition the Civico venture as a fully Cloud based Software as a Service system. Our work for local government over the past two years, the growing calls for greater transparency, participation in local government, and the efficiencies that are inherent to emerging web technologies, were the drivers.
The upcoming six months could almost be titled Product re-launch and so will be a fascinating Journey with significant challenges for me to tackle. For those of you who find us a curious element of ambient art welcome and to those who are willing to engage a little further grab a snorkel were going in.
Blup!
Daniel Cremin
