2008: A pretty good year, actually

It's safe to say few people are sorry to see 2008 in the rear-view mirror. But even times as tough as last year have their successes. That was definitely the case here at Spoke.

A few of the things we're proudest of in the last year:

• From 12/07 to 12/08 our unique site visitors increased by 140%, same for our registered user. This increase in traffic (YAY!) put a lot of pressure on our infrastructure (BOO!).  Thanks to a lot of creativity and hard work from the engineering team we not only handled that but we're now making changes that will allow us handle significantly more traffic.


• We should also talk about data quality and the fact that increase in traffic didn't help us there but we should solve this issue quickly.


• We put in place metrics to  monitor, measure, test and act quicker to understand what our members want from Spoke.


• We spent time a lot of time talking with experts outside of Spoke about both what we're trying to do and how we are doing it. Not only did these conversations let us know we're on the right track, they got a lot of other companies excited about Spoke. If we are successful in these next few months we will have the biggest, most accurate database of business people in the Industry.

All this progress came despite sacrifices.  Like every other business, budget constraints are making us get everything we can from our resources. While that sounds really cool when discussing technology, we know that it's very hard on our most important resource: Our people. So a public salute to everyone -- Engineering, Marketing, QA, Operations, Client Services, Finance – for the extra hard work and the results that has delivered. While we have much more to accomplish, we have never been more proud of the team or optimistic about our future.