Dotbite Year in Review 2021

A year of growth

If there’s one word that describes our year 2021, it’s growth. We’ve nearly tripled in size over the year thanks to good demand and exciting projects and can now count 18 outstanding individuals on our team, all of whom complete Dotbite in their way. In addition to innovative developers, we’ve also added a whole host of new positions in design, HR, and marketing, broadening our team and allowing us to meet new challenges better. Along with the growth, we recently opened a new office in the middle of Innsbruck and moved to our stunning headquarters in Vienna’s third district. Growth also describes our projects well: timebite has gotten several new features and got a whole new team, our app Quinn is in talks with several universities in the DACH area, and LEAD Horizon’s record-breaking amount of PCR tests are a role model for the whole world.

LEAD Horizon

Unfortunately, 2021 was also a year plagued by the coronavirus, which is why our longed-for Christmas party and the photo shootings for our new website were canceled. To avoid such disappointments next year, our team is fully committed to developing the LEAD Horizon Webapp. After the project successfully emerged from the prototype phase earlier this year, LEAD Horizon and the “Alles Gurgelt” initiative are considered the prime example of successful test infrastructure. Over the months, the project continued to evolve: the design was adapted to make the user experience even more straightforward, the school dashboard made it possible to start school, and 3G (vaccinated, convalesced, tested) at work was made much easier with the employer dashboard. With over 250,000 tests per day, we can proudly say that the development of LEAD Horizon makes us an active part of the response to the pandemic.

timebite

There is hardly a group as impaired by the coronavirus as students. We noticed this last year, too, when closed universities and canceled exams put a damper on timebite’s growth. This year, however, we are back in full swing. Our new Head of EdTech, Lukas Ott, and his team have developed numerous innovations and features that make timebite even more valuable for both users and employer branding customers. First and foremost, there were numerous user experience improvements on the user side, such as easier input of tips, intuitive buttons, and a useful search function. Then, for our customers, we created a great source of information on all university employer branding topics with the content area and our webinars and made our offering even more attractive with options such as the social media boost. Our blog area will also be ready by the start of the 2022 summer semester.

Quinn

Speaking of EdTech, the much-discussed “UG amendment” has caused quite a stir at universities this year. Especially the topics of studyability and ECTS fairness have increasingly become a focus. Dotbite has already created a solution for the Vienna University of Technology in 2019, which completely digitalizes the ECTS evaluation and adds additional value for students. With the learning diary Quinn, students can track their learning times, while the universities use the anonymized data for evaluation. This year, the app has received an update for the new form of studying “distance learning,” and due to the significant demand for Quinn, we are finalizing the development of the Quinn Dashboard, with which the universities can view all data daily and in an easy to understand way.

Hilfma

Just how crazy the last two years were is shown the fact that we were nominated for FutureZone’s App of the Year 2020 with our neighborhood help app Hilfma – and that the award ceremony didn’t take place until September 2021. Unfortunately, we did not quite win the award (congratulations to Stopp Corona from the Red Cross). Still, we are very proud to have received such positive attention with our project, which was developed from the idea to the release in the App Stores within just two weeks.

Connecting the dots

It has been an exceptional year for Dotbite in every metric. Our EdTech products are in incredibly high demand, especially for a year with so many interruptions, changes, and uncertainties of the academic routine. With the award nomination for Hilfma, we tasted a little glory on the big stage, but the app already achieved what it was made for: to help people in a bleak time. Finally, we can hardly believe the trajectory of LEAD Horizon ourselves. But to develop a project of this size and complexity and with so much impact on one of the most critical issues of our time also shows what tremendous strides our team has made this year. 

What remains from 2021 are the great memories of our company vacation with table tennis fever, Fifa and chess tournaments, and the occasional drink together. It’s been a fun ride with the best team we can imagine. And the best thing? We already have a couple of exciting new projects lined up for 2022. Don’t worry; we’ll tell you about them.