You’ve come a long way baby!

Well happy 25^th birthday Windows 95, for 24 August 1995. A lot was happening when Microsoft launched Windows 95; Nelson Mandela put on the Springbok jersey when South Africa won the rugby world cup, the United Kingdom physically joined Europe with full services through the Channel tunnel, the tv series ‘Friends’ launched, Mel Gibson painted his face blue for the film Braveheart and in Germany DHL was formed. Oh, and Bill Gates and the team geek-danced to the Rolling Stones song, ‘Start Me Up’.

Since the launch of Windows 95 a lot of things have happened to change the product that is used by over 1.5 billion people every day; the mouse became ubiquitous, to be replaced  by the track pad and, in turn the touch screen, and that will probably disappear sometime soon. We went from the floppy disk to the CD and then online. The PC became a laptop, then a notebook and then a mobile phone. And Hotmail was still a year away from existing!

And this got me to thinking. Since 2012 over 50 cities around the world use [ui!] UrbanPulse as their smart city data platform and we’ve seen a lot of changes to the platform too:

• [ui!] UrbanPulse now runs fully dockerized on Kubernetes bringing previously unimagined flexibility and scalability to the delivery of [ui!] UrbanPulse features for our customers
• our monitoring is now based on ELK Stack, providing the latest stability and robustness tools keeping cities connected and in control
• we continue to add support for cloud providers including AWS, Azure and now Open Telekom Cloud, enabling clients to host their data and services where they want
• we added Keycloak as our identity access management, securing data and enabling clients to manage their own user accounts simply and efficiently
• we have grown our list of free CONNECTORS, enabling out of the box integration with over 130 of the most popular Smart City IoT devices, sensors and systems
• we have modernised the look and feel of our [ui!] COCKPIT dashboard design and provided many new features for our customers such as, dynamic theming, multilingual support, public and private dashboards, over 80 tile templates and analytics integration with Jupyter notebooks to name a few

Of course, there are things we are right on the verge of adding to that list, but we’ll cover those in future blogs as they happen. Like Microsoft itself, we are on a mission to empower every person and every city on the planet to achieve more. We strive to create local opportunity, growth, and impact in every country around the world. I can’t wait to see what we achieve by the time we turn 25. I wonder if the Rolling Stones will be available for the party?