Newicon, TEDxBristol, And The Dawn Of A New Tomorrow

 Getting Involved

Newicon first helped TEDxBristol as a financial sponsor in 2015. After attending the excellent day of talks we felt we wanted to become much more involved, since a desire to share ideas, innovate processes, and push boundaries are fundamental pillars of our core company culture.

Discovering the Change

At the same time we were acutely aware of a problem in the way websites and web applications were normally developed using disparate technologies such as WordPress and Symfony. Websites, traditionally simple content managed pages, were becoming more like mini-applications with complex databases, whilst applications increasingly needed content managed website pages.

Building one using the technology for the other was either overly complex or insufficiently future-proofed. Simply put, managing these using different approaches no longer made sense.

So we saw an opportunity to literally disrupt the way we do business by innovating a single approach to creating sites and applications and simplifying the entire process. And the new TEDxBristol website was going to be our guinea pig. We would make building applications and websites both easier and much more flexible.

Creating the Change

Forward nine months and the beautiful new TEDxBristol website had been designed and built on a brand new platform – code name ‘Neon’ – using our new tools Cobe, Phoebe, Firefly and Daedalus – a content management system, generic form builder, file manager and dynamic data system respectively. And yes, there is a science/sci-fi theme to our naming.

With a complex database driving it, tedxbristol.com is much more like a sophisticated web application but easier to modify than most websites. Simplified content requests and intelligent access to the database mean it is also far more powerful and performant than would otherwise be possible.

Today …

Forward nine more months, several websites and many applications later and our platform is maturing nicely with plans to share the technologies on the horizon. New and enhanced modules, component based theming, powerful graphical tools and customisable application frameworks are either now integrated or being designed and soon to be so.

Through building client projects with our own creation we have forced ourselves to find better and more sustainable solutions to the benefit of both ourselves and our clients.

… and a New Tomorrow

When we started this journey we were blissfully naïve about how much work would be involved, where the biggest hurdles would be and how truly disruptive this would be on the business and indeed on our personal lives. The enormous benefits achieved so far mean we’re going to happily continue down this path and are really looking forward to discovering what new things we will innovate along the way.

Our company mantra is ‘New Tomorrow’ as we passionately believe looking to, and innovating for the future is how we will create new interesting and fun ways to positively disrupt what we do today.

Being involved with TEDxBristol has given us the opportunity to put our beliefs into practice and we are excited and proud to have been a part of the behind-the-scenes leading up to this years event. We also can’t wait to hear the speakers and learning how they’re positively disrupting today for a new and better tomorrow!

Roll on TEDxBristol 2019!