InfoPoint® History

The Early Days

Don Steiny started InfoPoint® in late 1993. The mission of the company was to help small businesses use the Internet to increase their business.

At the time, few people had heard of the Internet and it was not clear to the average businessperson how the Internet would help their businesses. The largest dollar business in Santa Cruz County at that time was tourism. InfoPoint® created a community guide with good search engine placement, dynamic information and a large selection of local businesses. This was a "portal" before the term was used. InfoPoint's community guides still exist, partially in cooperation with Great Western Phone Directories. The revenue model was that each individual business paid a fee to create the site and then an annual fee after that. Many of the businesses that InfoPoint established a relationship with at that time are still InfoPoint customers. InfoPoint received the 1996 "Friend of Tourism Award" from the Santa Cruz County Convention and Visitor's Bureau for its innovation.

InfoPoint® as a Web site development company

A few years into the Web many people started making Web sites and for many small businesses a business card site was fine. Our goal was to develop a team that had artists, programmers, and service representatives to provide everything that was necessary for a Web site. We moved in the direction of creating sites with a strong programming component. We started working with customers in a wider geographic area.

InfoPoint® built a team working with small (less than $60 million) businesses and help them develop ways of increasing productivity and ways of creating a strategy that uses the Internet to organize their business in ways that gives them competitive advantage.

InfoPoint® takes a larger view of the meaning of "technology." It is not just computers and software, but human behavior as well. Businesses are mental models realized in the real world, computer programs are mental models realized in the real world. We pride ourselves in the degree with which we work to understand human behavior. You are almost as likely to find InfoPoint® employees talking about Homer and Thucydides as about JavaScript and SQL.

One comment that gives us great pride is: "you explain it in a way that makes it so easy to understand."

InfoPoint® Now

After the crash of 2000 Web design became much more of a commodity, However InfoPoint® had developed high ranking in the search engine, it had a well architected development environment and a number of customers who got their mail and ran the businesses through Web sites they had developed. Several of the team member continue to work together and InfoPoint® has been involved in a number of projects, such as the RichWeb project in Oulu, Finland; and research at FountainPark in Helsinki. Our interest is in collaboration and how collaboration works with innovation.

Contact us today to see how InfoPoint® can partner with your company to combine our expertise and create something that really does shape the future instead of reinventing the past.

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