Posted
12 days
ago
We made the Deloitte Fast 50 list for 2009! This means we are one of the 50 fastest-growing companies in New Zealand. Specifically, we're the 37th fastest-growing company, with 190% revenue growth over the past couple years.
This is a
... [More]
big deal for us because it shows that the things we believe in: open source, excellent web user experience, and a focus on the humans who use web technology, are all qualities that are appreciated by the business community.
Across the 50 companies, the three most popular inspirational companies mentioned by the 50 company leaders were Google, Apple, and Xero. Here at SilverStripe, we get a lot of inspiration from Apple in particular.
One point I find significant is that the entry criteria to make it onto the list, 145% growth, is only 6 percentage points lower than the peak of 151% in 2007. So even in this global recession there's still a lot of Kiwi companies growing fast. That's wonderful news for the New Zealand economy as a whole.
We'll celebrate the recognition a bit before hunkering down again to meet end-of-year deadlines.
Thank you to our clients, the open source community, and all the employees of SilverStripe. Those are the three pillars of making it all happen.
Cheers! [Less]
Posted
12 days
ago
We made the Deloitte Fast 50 list for 2009! This means we are one of the 50 fastest-growing companies in New Zealand. Specifically, we're the 37th fastest-growing company, with 190% revenue growth over the past couple years.
This is a
... [More]
big deal for us because it shows that the things we believe in: open source, excellent web user experience, and a focus on the humans who use web technology, are all qualities that are appreciated by the business community.
Across the 50 companies, the three most popular inspirational companies mentioned by the 50 company leaders were Google, Apple, and Xero. Here at SilverStripe, we get a lot of inspiration from Apple in particular.
One point I find significant is that the entry criteria to make it onto the list, 145% growth, is only 6 percentage points lower than the peak of 151% in 2007. So even in this global recession there's still a lot of Kiwi companies growing fast. That's wonderful news for the New Zealand economy as a whole.
We'll celebrate the recognition a bit before hunkering down again to meet end-of-year deadlines.
Thank you to our clients, the open source community, and all the employees of SilverStripe. Those are the three pillars of making it all happen.
Cheers! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
We are very proud to be the Gold sponsor of Webstock 2010! We have massively enjoyed attending all the prior Webstocks and we've gotten a lot out of the sessions, the speakers, and the hallway conversations. It's really surprising how
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much you can learn from talking to someone whilst waiting in the queue to get a coffee.
And of course, being a Wellington-based company ourselves, we are delighted to support the Webstock crew in furthering Wellington as a globally-recognised centre of excellence for all things web.
In addition, early 2010 marks the tenth anniversary of SilverStripe as a company so that's another reason to celebrate and show our support of world-leading web creativity and development.
For us, Webstock is about pushing the boundaries of what the web is, and how we as humans interact with the web. Hundreds of like-minded people under one roof, figuring out how to shape the web and learning about others' experiences in doing so. Just awesome.
See you at Webstock! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Are you responsible for managing your company or organisation's websites?
In the recent SilverStripe newsletter we announced a survey for website managers.
Whether you're running your site on SilverStripe technology or not, we want
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to hear about your experiences – particularly any problems you might have with performance and robustness of the sites you manage. We're listening!
We are looking for the best place to focus our efforts next, and we'd appreciate if you could take a few moments to answer some quick questions in a survey. Initial results are encouraging with the majority of respondents reporting no or infrequent problems of performance and robustness, although noting that when something does happen it can have a major impact.
When filling out the survey, you can be as anonymous as you like. Any questions you answer will help us a lot.
If you haven't already filled it out, you can start the online survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=_2fCLUylyq3MEwKgx3rz_2bEyg_3d_3d
Thanks! [Less]
Posted
2 months
ago
We are very proud to announce the opening of SilverStripe Australia Pty Ltd! We have had many people in Australia tell us that they would love to have a SilverStripe team local to them to help out with their SilverStripe website development efforts.
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We listened and now SilverStripe has a Melbourne office.
SilverStripe Australia is headed up by Shane Weddell. Shane is an Aussie who has deep knowledge of the CMS market and technology in Australia. He has well over a decade of project management experience dealing with complex projects. His extensive PM experience coupled with his recent sales leadership roles combine to make him the perfect person to head up SilverStripe Australia. Owen Windsor and Marcus Nyeholt bring heaps of deep site development and system architecture experience to the Melbourne office.
Shane will continue to build up his team in Melbourne by adding developers so they can deliver sites locally to Australia. Our Australian partners will rely on the SilverStripe Australia office for assistance, and likewise, SilverStripe Australia will rely on our Aussie partners for help as needed.
You can continue to count on us here at the Head Office in Wellington for all the great web application development and website work we're known for. If you're in Australia, feel free to contact Shane in Melbourne when you want a local SilverStripe team to help out.
Welcome to Shane, Owen, and Marcus! We'll try to keep the Aussie jokes to a minimum, or at least we'll make sure they're really funny. [Less]
Posted
2 months
ago
If you're based in the San Francisco Bay Area, you now have local access to professional SilverStripe services!
Quinn Interactive is a 15-year-old company specialising in website development. Quinn has a talent for both design and CMS
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implementations, and has worked with organisations like LEGO and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). Quinn's skills and experience make them an excellent addition to our SilverStripe Partner Program. We have worked with developers at Quinn to ensure that they have an appropriate level of knowledge in our software. We encourage you to contact them if you want a San Francisco company to build a website or web application on the SilverStripe platform.
Phil Quinn, president of Quinn Interactive, met with us recently. He took the opportunity to explain why he felt SilverStripe is such a good choice for his firm and his customers.
Welcome Quinn!
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Posted
2 months
ago
We're extremely proud that a website built by SilverStripe was recognised at the inaugural New Zealand Internet Industry Awards this month.
The Ministry of Health website thelowdown.co.nz won the Societal Impact award. The website provides
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young New Zealanders at risk of depression with a source of inspiration, information, and online counseling – and is seen as having saved young lives from suicide. The website is highly interactive and contains a lot of engaging video content thanks to the involvement of two agencies, Draft FCB and Oktobor. Information about the website is available in our case study of The LowDown.
The awards evening brought together over one hundred of New Zealand's top minds in the internet industry. The evening was a thoroughly enjoyable formal dinner at Parliament, with Vint Cerf presenting awards and speaking on how internet use has evolved and grown. The internet industry awards were in memory of Liz Dengate Thrush, an internet entrepreneur, and wife of Peter Dengate Thrush, the current chair of ICANN.
We'd also like to extend our congratulations to DigitalNZ and Xero for winning the education and business categories respectively.
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Posted
3 months
ago
At the end of August New Zealand's first Open Government Data Barcamp will take place at the National Library in Wellington. The barcamp is an open, participant driven event organised and run by people who have an interest in making government-held
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data freely available.
As an open source company and one of the sponsors of the event, SilverStripe strongly stands behind the open data philosophy. We believe that collaboration fosters innovation and that taxpayer-funded data should be available without restrictions over the Internet. While data itself can do a lot of things, it needs to be put into context to be useful for others; having data freely available allows people to create value and develop innovative services and applications.
Government agencies, as part of their work, collect a substantial amount of non-personal data - from geospatial and environmental data to statistics. In most cases public money is spent to research and obtain this data, so it should be accessible for everyone to use.
SilverStripe works with a range of government agencies helping them to make their data available for citizens in a meaningful way, enabling them to collaborate constructively and make use of the data on a personal, regional, and national level.
To find out more about the New Zealand Open Govt barcamp go to http://groups.google.com/group/nzopengovtbarcamp [Less]
Posted
3 months
ago
It's only weeks since we welcomed nine new staff to SilverStripe, and it's already time to welcome seven more. With our latest additions, the SilverStripe headcount is now more than 30. Our second office floor, which was empty only two months ago
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, is filling up very quickly!
Andreas Piening, Jeremy Warne, Mateusz Uzdowski, Mark Stephens, and Stephen Wake all join as great additions to our development team. This not only enables us to complete customer work more quickly, but it lets us increase our internal product development work. Lee Middleton joins us to manage SilverStripe's busy sales and marketing team, and Julian Meadow provides our customers with further project management and business analysis expertise. A very warm welcome to all!
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Posted
3 months
ago
You can now watch an hour-long video explaining SilverStripe's involvement with demconvention.com, the official website for the US Democratic Party's 2008 National Convention. During its 96-hour peak period, the website recieved 2.6 billion hits, 3.2
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million visits, served 350,000 hours of streaming video, and took the prize of busiest SilverStripe website ever.
The video is a recording of Tim Chambers and I talking at the monthly Washington DC Web Content Mavens group. Tim Chambers is one of the founders of Dewey Digital, the company appointed the official website producer for the convention. Dewey Digital is now one of SilverStripe's official partners. Dewey was responsible for the website strategy and design and, as we discuss in this video, the selection of a CMS platform and the delegation of the technical build to an appropriately skilled company.
In the talk, Tim elaborates on the most important criteria when selecting the SilverStripe software and company, explaining the seemingly unlikely selection of an open source package from New Zealand:
Open source, allowing buyer confidence (the software can be trialled before selection), and allowing the 2012 campaign to reuse ideas, code, and content if wanted. (Oh, and providing a good price!)
Scalability, for obvious reasons: this would be the busiest convention website in history. Caching to static files was a required component of this.
Easy content authoring, to ensure that the system could be used by volunteers, without user error.
Multilingual, to ensure the Hispanic community could be effectively reached with Spanish content.
Able to provide blog functionality and integration with Flickr, YouTube, and other systems easily.
Commercial support, because there needed to be a professional firm responsible for delivery.
Following this we discuss the various traditional and Web 2.0 features of the website, characteristic of a more IT-savvy political campaign. We show and explain screenshots of the content authoring interface, providing insights into how a busy Denver team worked around the clock to update the website with speech transcripts, and other critical information.
We also talk about the technical infrastructure: five Redhat Apache servers, a CDN, and separate infrastructure for the Silverlight streaming video. We noted that the interest in Obama's nomination, combined with a Slashdotting, surpassed the 1000/hits per second mark, yet the website remained responsive to visitors.
With the talk hosted in Washington DC, the talk also mentions some of the non-technical details such as how the convention needed to contain a Colorado voter focus. It also meant we had a very active audience who asked plenty of useful questions. It was well worth the jetlag to do the talk, so we hope that it makes for useful viewing! [Less]
