On April 5th 2005, Mike, our MD, set out on his own with the fledgling iShare Maps application and a vision focused on web services and open source. In the first of a series of articles celebrating our 20th birthday, we thought we’d find out what some of the team were up to whilst Mike was busy setting up Astun. 

Before we begin, let’s help cast your mind back to 2005. Elvis and Peter Kay (with a bit of help from Tony Christie) dominated the charts. Johnny Depp was a wondrous Willy Wonka, Harry Potter had a run-in with a goblet of fire and the Sith were hellbent on revenge. Prince Charles married Camilla, Tony Blair won his third term as Prime Minister and Shayne Ward won The X Factor. We celebrated when London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics and spent time debating how good Daniel Craig’s Bond would be. Doesn’t it all seem so long ago?

“The acceleration was something else”

Mike Smith, Renewals Manager

Mike was busy travelling around the south of England and South Wales selling PlanWeb, MapInfo and other GIS products, accompanied by his trusty Nokia 6310. He has fond memories of his wife getting a Mazda RX8, which had a rotary engine and impressive acceleration, around this time.

Unfortunately, the book Mike started writing in 2005 has proved less adept at picking up speed than the Mazda. As Mike is now semi-retired, we hope his book will finally make it over the finish line. 

“I felt like a right Yuppie”

David Renn, Sales Support

2005 was a little different for David, then the GIS and IT Manager at Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council. Riding his bike 14 miles along a disused railway to and from work a couple of times each week proved to be a fun alternative to driving. At work, he regularly flagged down Barbara, the Tea Lady, and her well-stocked trolley, as she made her way through the team’s large open-plan office. David remembers that having a PC each was still a novelty and colleagues were jealous of the space afforded to the GIS Team who had to accommodate map chests, light tables, drawing boards and large format plotters. When on the move, David could be found sending or receiving emails using his Blackberry. He claims, “This made me feel like a right yuppie”.  

Paper maps were still in widespread use, so the team were in the process of digitising key data sets such as the Land Terrier (land ownership records), adopted highways and planning constraints into Stockton’s corporate GIS. At the time this was ESRI’s ArcInfo\ArcGIS. David and his colleagues were also in full swing improving Stockton’s fledgling Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG), and Local Street Gazetteer (LSG), plus building content for the Council’s fledgling website. David reflects, “Web mapping was just starting to become ‘a thing’, but it would be another year before we were able to deliver it”. It’s a far cry from these days when Astun provides web mapping services to many local authorities, including Stockton.

2005 also brought the arrival of David’s son who is a week younger than Astun. He’s now a full-time fireman. 

“Happy staff makes happy customers”

Andrew Smart, Account Manager

This mantra, embodied by Virgin Mobile, still resonates with Andrew. As a fresh-faced Customer Service Advisor for Virgin Mobile, he found that 2005 was all about having fun although it also sparked his interest in service delivery and process improvement. He was having such a good time that he’d go on to complete three roles at Virgin over the next eight years. 

Like Astun, Virgin held regular summer get-togethers but on an elevated scale. Venues included Richard Branson’s estate and Longleat. Andrew also remembers helping set up VFest, gaining free entrance in the process. These days, you’re more likely to find him hosting our User Group or one of our frequent webinars. 

One of the job’s perks was having access to all the latest mobile phones, such as the Sony Ericsson K750i. GIS didn’t play a huge role in mobile phone use in those days as far as Andrew can remember, but all that changed when smartphones became popular.  

Andrew remembers Virgin briefly running a project called ‘Third Screen’ and Virgin Mobile releasing a handset that doubled as a mini TV. The idea being that in the “modern age” everyone would have three screens: a home TV, a personal computer and a mobile phone. We can’t see Andrew, one of our keen gamers, being satisfied with that set-up for long.

Do you have a memory to share?

We hope you’ve enjoyed our trip down memory lane. If you’d like to share any memories of Astun over the years with the team, please contact us. We’ll be back next month with more memories from the team!