Over the last 18 months or so, we’ve been working on a project that’s been completely unrelated to our usual business of site search, web analytics, content categorisation, Internet filtering, and the occasional search engine marketing engagement. We’re pleased to announce that this work (which must remain confidential at this time) looks like it will go commercial. Our development sponsor is now looking to ensure full ownership of all intellectual property and the assets related to the project, and after advice from our legal people it seems the best way to do this is to sell First Hit outright.
The purchaser is not overly interested in our traditional business. Under the terms of the sale they have allowed us to transfer our search and filtering business to a new company, and today I’m proud to announce Stratify Pty Ltd - the newly-formed company that will take our business to the next level.
Stratify is headquartered in the University of the Sunshine Coast, so the contact details advised in an earlier post are still valid:
Stratify Pty Ltd
USC Innovation Centre
90 Sippy Downs Drive
Sippy Downs Qld 4556Phone 1300 72 49 71
Fax 1300 72 56 71
Stratify will operate a little differently from First Hit. Firstly and most importantly, we will be growing the consulting side of the business to augment our expertise in site search, web analytics and Internet filtering. This is something we’ve wanted to do for a while now and the new corporate structure seems like as good an excuse as we’ll ever get to do so.
Secondly, we’ll be using the Internet a lot more in our offerings and delivery. Right now we’re working on a brand new service that provides companies with a full Internet usage report for their organisation, using just their proxy log files and categorisation/ analysis by ContentKeeper. More on this in a future post. Plus we have a bunch of other ideas to make life easier for existing and new clients.
Thirdly, we’ll be opening an office (by the end of the year) in Canberra. Given the high proportion of Government clients we have (from our Endorsed Supplier status and Web Services Panel membership), it just makes sense to do this.
What’s not going to change is our focus. These are the things we will keep our concentration on:
- Information discovery, search and retrieval
- Web analytics
- Internet filtering
- Content categorisation and management
For all our existing clients, we’d like to say a big thank you for your support over the last four years. We look forward to being bigger and better as Stratify Pty Ltd, and as always we welcome your comments, feedback and suggestions about how we operate. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
