Who we are
telepark was established in January 2000 by Dipl.-Inf. (Univ) Patrick Thomas [Linkedin | Xing] and was primarily a multimedia software developer: from interactive CD-ROMs for the German Postal service to Infoscreens at Siemens AG and Business-TV video productions. Patrick has a Master of Science degree from Munich Technical University in Computer Science and Mass Communications and used to work for Fujitsu Personal Systems Inc. (European Marketing Manager and Country Manager D/A/CH) and Edgar Online GmbH (Managing Director) prior to founding telepark.
In 2006, telepark was repositioned to take advantage of two trends:
- AJAX technology (to make Web software interactive and fun to use)
- Outsourcing (to create software with a worldwide team of experts)
We decided to focus on Web software development. Tools that support our project business and be attractive to small and midsize companies.
Our first Web software product was teamslide for live Web presentations of slides and images. teamslide was techcrunched in April 2006 and was very well received being the first Web Conferencing solution which did not require any plug-in's or downloads to run. The original idea was that a Windows-only company such as Siemens should be able to collaborate online with Mac shops such as their creative agencies. WebEx and other solutions did not prove truly cross-platform. teamslide is available online and used by telesales, coaching and medical professionals.
Our second product was telepark.wiki, the basic idea being to combine three basic elements of publishing and collaboration:
- hierarchical tree menu (keep order)
- visual editor (create content)
- Web access (share and centralize)
telepark.wiki has become a Web application we could not live without. It is the master engine for all our project work and the central repository for internal information and collaboration. All telepark employees and collaborators can access this data online, anywhere and at any time, with telepark.wiki identifying and complying with very fine-grained user specific permissions. We use telepark.wiki to manage protected areas where our clients can download confidential material and leave comments and feedback, as well. There is no easier way to setup and run a Web-based project site or a company Intranet. Click here for more information about telepark.wiki.
Our third product was telepark.contact... a Web database for contacts and addresses. We used Microsoft Outlook before and had some major issues:
- no central database accessible online for the whole team
- no fast fulltext search
- no easy way to segment contacts into groups
Then came the idea of applying the "tagging" principle made popular by Flickr to contacts: to be able to add any number of tags to any contact and to retrieve contacts based on tags or tag combinations. It proved immensely powerful. Thus was born telepark.contact, the first tag-based CRM Customer Relationship Manager. Meanwhile, we integrated a cool Webmailer and, in version 3.0, a Web calendar. Click here for more information about telepark.contact.
Finally, all along, we developed and deployed a product which only in 2009 was made available for years and finally became available as a product on August 10, 2009. Click here for more information about telepark.cms.
telepark @ Olympic Stadium
This picture was taken at the Olympic stadium in Munich in 2003. We programmed the 1970s style scoreboard controller hardware to display our little logo while developing a project for the art duo M+M. Called "Olympic Pong", this was one of the most challenging and exciting "almost-pro-bono" projects we worked on in the past. The task was to develop an interactive, two-player Pong game running on an old DOS PC using the tens of thousands of gas bulbs and circuitry from way back. Big thanks to James (Jim) Brannon who designed the original system in 1972 and retired to California and to our friends at Penplan Consulting for final coding (in some ancient version of Turbo Pascal; we earlier tried GLPRO but it was too slow).
