2018 in Review | Horizon State
What a year it has been. As we look back over the last twelve months at Horizon State, we thought we would share just a handful of the many highlights we have had. From record breaking meetups, to prestigious awards — the team have achieved a huge amount on all sides of the business, from all sides of the globe!
Events, Meetups and Conferences galore
From Wellington to Washington, Barcelona to China and everywhere in between — Our team have spent the last 12 months travelling the globe showcasing the many ways that the Horizon State platform can assist communities and enterprises with our dynamic, process-led decision making platform.
Although there are too many to list — here are some of the key events we attended this year;
Horizon State Community Meetup | Melbourne, Australia — 25th January
The event was a resounding success with over 400 people in attendance. The team was truly inspired to meet so many of our community members, the outpouring of support was beyond amazing.
Innovation for Impact | Sydney, Australia — August 23rd
Our Innovation for Impact event was a huge success and a whole lot of fun. Special thanks to Power Ledger and ShareRing for partnering with us to make the event possible, and a huge thank you to all our incredible Community members who turned out in force; we’re very fortunate to have such a committed and passionate Community! All the Horizon State team who attended enjoyed connecting with our Community over some drinks & laughs in person.
World Economic forum — Annual Meeting of the New Champions |Tianjin, China ‐ 18th — 20th September
Earlier in September the World Economic Forum held its Annual Meeting of the New Champions event in Tianjin, China. Horizon State was one of this year’s selected inductees and proud to be part of an exclusive showcase of the world’s leading technology innovators.
Crowd Sourcing Week | Washington D.C. ‐ October 24–28 2018
Horizon State was a proud partner of CSW Global 2018. The theme of decentralization took center-stage, as crowdsourcing continues to positively influence economies and industries worldwide. CSW Global featured 70+ international speakers from 35 countries taking part at the state of the art Carnegie Institution for Science auditorium.
Partnerships & Media Releases
We have been featured in many, many publications across the globe including Reuters, CNBC, The Australian, Scoop, GovInsider, Smart Company and ABC News, while forming some great partnerships with a variety of well respected industry leaders, including;
Awards and Industry Memberships
We were honoured to be nominated as a World Economic Forum Technology pioneer for 2018. The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers community included early-stage companies from all over the world that are involved in the design, development and deployment of new technologies and innovations, and are poised to have a significant impact on business and society.
It is important to be aligned with the key associations in the relevant fields, which is why we also joined the following in 2018;
A brand new brand
With the ICO and other activities in the crypto world behind us, we realised that to succeed in the B2B world we need to focus our message and create a unique brand around it. We needed to be able to position Horizon State as something more than a Token company — and to be able to promote and market our service to a variety of customers.
As a result of a concentrated branding workshop, we have rebranded our logo, design language and marketing materials. This has enabled us to move on from being just a crypto business to being a modern company that just happens to have blockchain elements to it.
Product Development
We have written a substantial amount of code this year! In total we have delivered 3 entirely separate blockchain based voting applications, utilising three separate chains — along with a design language system, a new website and a CRM to support our future growth. We have now created the foundations of our core platform — and will continue to develop some exciting new features throughout 2019 and beyond.
RemTECH Awards Voting Application
The system that ran the RemTech awards back in April/May 2018 was delivered as two separate applications, each having a different target audience and voting methods. We had set it up with a relatively complex voting data structure that provided capabilities of asking questions, grouping those questions together into campaigns (or categories), providing a framework for possible answers, and values for each answer.
The work on that piece of software was very quick and delivered a good product that was fit for the purpose. We had set out to prove that our assumptions around the structure of voting from a data perspective works, that we can send votes to the blockchain without having the user need to know anything about it, and that we can show results easily (while they were, of course, available on Etherscan).
Coinpocket — Our modern app for giving back
Coinpocket, which was released in September is our way of publicly and transparently committing a portion of the revenue that passes through Horizon State to charitable organisations. As Horizon State receives payments, whether that’s in the form of HST (our utility token) or fiat (which is then converted into HST) — a percentage is committed to our charity wallet.
We were thrilled to have our first 3 charities Red Cross Australia, Streetsmart and Care for Africa take part in the first Coinpocket campaign, and look forward to running other campaigns in the future as more and more customers come on board next year.
Horizon State Platform
We completed the development of our core platform in early November this year. From a technical perspective, the platform was developed and delivered as a web application rather than an app. The main reason for this decision was to allow a rapid pace of development and testing and to provide low friction for users. Right now, the platform works with Ethereum, NEM and Halo, which are all public chains and since the launch on November we have had a number of customers use the system including The Opportunities Party (TOP), MiVote India, MiVote Australia, Project Hydro and have run demos for a wide variety of organisations across the globe.
Having a working product that’s been in use a number of times now is a huge advantage for us as we gear up our sales effort to acquire new customers. The ability to fire up a demo for a prospective customer and show them how a vote is cast to a public blockchain and tallied thereafter gives customers a lot of confidence in the system — which is exactly what we want to achieve.
What is in store for 2019
2019 will be kicking off with a bang. Now we have delivered our core voting and decision making suite as well as our design language system, we will be focusing our development efforts on building out our turn key system which enables smaller customers to run various types of end to end votes themselves. In doing so, we will also be offering a tiered pricing model for our small to medium sized clients while offering an enterprise level pricing model which includes some unique features for our larger clients.
Trying to make sales and get customers on board without a product is always a difficult task, which is why the milestone of going live with v1 of the product at in Q4 of 2018 was so important. We’ve already started to see a steady influx of signed paying customers since then, and we already have others who will come on board in 2019.
A huge thanks
We would like to start by thanking our amazing team members who have been with us during the year, putting in a huge amount of effort on all sides of the business. From ideation to delivery, we are very proud of what we have all achieved and we could not have done it without our past and current team members.
To our community who have stuck with us through the year — we really appreciate all that you do to spread the word about Horizon State and the support and feedback we receive from you all. We hope you all manage to get a break over the New Year period, and look forward to sharing more great news with you over the coming months..
And that’s a wrap
We have begun to lay the foundation for a more connected and engaged society. By putting secure decision-making tools in the hands of communities, every voice can now be heard and valued. From polling and surveys, through to fundraising and formal votes or ballots, we look forward to a busy and prosperous 2019!
Wishing you all a happy holiday and a joyful New Year!
