The Glaze story is just beginning, and we are excited to continue to innovate and connect the dots in the future. Please visit our website at www.glaze.is to learn more about our offerings.
In 2022, we released our Records service in beta. Built on the Mobiz platform, it offered a wide range of advanced features such as a robust security system, multi-tenant organization infrastructure, support for ad-hoc data rooms, eIDAS compatible digital signatures, cryptographically verifiable audit trails of all record changes, AI-powered record classification, and digital signature workflows. During the stabilization and pilot user testing phase, we realized the potential of merging the Records system with our GoRetail project. This merger resulted in the creation of Glaze, a secure wallet infrastructure that allows customers to keep track of orders, vouchers, gift cards, receipts, and digital tokens.
We introduced Go-Retail as a pilot initiative to evaluate its potential against LS-Retail/LS-One powered POS systems. Given that LS-Retail is a robust, yet aging platform, we sought to explore the possibility of developing an advanced solution that could facilitate seamless, contactless, and mobile experiences. To this end, we conducted research on WeChat and began prototyping ways to integrate similar functionality into existing retail infrastructure investments. Leveraging our existing technology, we rapidly developed a concept for a “contactless sales and service experience designer.” Upon presenting this concept to industry professionals, the positive feedback received confirmed the potential of this solution. We became confident that we had identified a promising opportunity.
In 2021, we continued our collaboration with the Icelandic Postal office to further enhance our digital capabilities by developing a mobile app that allows customers to register packages and shipments. Our development team at Mobiz played a key role in guiding the Posturinn development group and gradually transferring responsibilities to them. We were proud to have contributed to the modernization of their development environment and workflows, transitioning from in-house servers without proper testing or CI infrastructure to a state-of-the-art development infrastructure running on AWS. This complete development project makeover was powered by Mobiz.
The Iceland Postal Office sought to modernize their customer facing services by fully digitalizing their operations. This presented a significant challenge, as their infrastructure had been built and maintained in SAP over the last 30 years. The goal was to create a new app capable of servicing tens of thousands of users simultaneously, with real-time updates from SAP, while also upgrading the entire operation infrastructure from traditional server hosting to AWS, incorporating automation, optimization, and operational improvements. The main obstacle was not the development of the app itself, but the need to provide scalable, real-time data and a stable bidirectional integration with SAP. Our team successfully overcame this challenge by building the solution on Mobiz. Additionally, we designed and implemented the mobile app, which we believe is actually amazingly cool and we are extremely proud of this project. It was a challenging undertaking, but seeing it function smoothly and serve the entire Icelandic nation made it all worthwhile. We feel privileged to have had the opportunity to contribute to this project.
The challenge was clearly out there: Our business scenarios were increasingly requiring the ability to generate immutable and secure records, and to stamp data with cryptographic keys and sign documents. At the same time, we saw innovative solutions emerging from companies like Google and Amazon, specifically when Amazon launched QLDB, their blockchain-inspired quantum ledger. Recognizing the potential opportunities, we applied for a grant with Rannís, and were fortunate to have it approved. This funding enabled us to embark on a deep-dive R&D project, code-named “Records”, drawing on the expertise of our team members who had previous experience in implementing record management systems, including Jónas, our CTO, who had spent several years as the CTO of a SaaS record management startup, and Arnthor, our CEO, who had served as COO in the same startup.
Wanting to sharpen our product focus we continued actively researching different ecosystems and experimenting with complex integrations. To fund our research and development, we kept on doing on contracting work and allocating any profit margins towards R&D. It is no secret that starting a technology startup can be a challenging endeavor, requiring funding through paying projects. As the famous entrepreneur, Elon Musk, once said, “Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” We understand the sentiment but also recognize the benefits of being grounded in the reality of real projects and customer needs. In our pursuit of innovative product offering, we developed a vision for a new concept, “Heartbeat - The Pulse of Your Business.” We prototyped this concept against Microsoft Dynamics Business Central/NAV and Uniconta and conducted a feasibility test project in collaboration with Islandsbanki, which provided valuable feedback from employees and customers. Through this process, we learned valuable insights, including identifying certain limitations in our basic concept that we were unable to resolve. Time to go back to the drawing board!
Kóði ehf was a founding member of Code North, but due to the company’s rapid success and high internal workload, they left the project in early 2016. In 2018, a group of old friends came together, including some from kindergarten in Þorlákshöfn and others from their university days at Reykjavík University. Three of these friends were running a fintech service operation named “Hlaði” and decided to combine their special friendship and years of collaboration on various projects, startups, and companies. Hlaði’s senior developers, Arnþór Ingi Hinriksson, Ólafur Guðjónsson, and Jóhann Grétarsson, became part of the core ownership team.
In 2018, DK’s development team took over the development of the dk-one project and continued to innovate by developing new mobile apps and adding features to existing ones. In collaboration with DK, we also worked on improving the technology stack in terms of security, performance and scalability.
With the foundation of a solid sandbox for the DK ERP application, we were able to begin our customer-facing innovation phase and develop mobile applications using our technology. One of our early successes was a work-tracking app, which utilized our technology to provide a fast, mobile experience for end-users browsing business data from an Elastic Search cluster. As a result, DK’s business experienced growth with the release of new mobile products. End users loved the speed and capabilities of the mobile experience. Mission accomplished!
We successfully launched an initial version of the cloud platform, running against legacy DK installations across various locations. The service has been running and growing ever since on Dk-One.is, and has grown significantly since then, while maintaining its original objective.
In 2015, Jónas Sigurðsson, a musician and tech enthusiast, founded Code North in partnership with Kóði ehf. with the goal of providing a new way for business owners and entrepreneurs to access their operational data, beyond the constraints of traditional ERP/accounting systems. After establishing a collaboration partnership with DK, Iceland’s leading ERP vendor, a generic technology foundation for integrating legacy software with modern cloud technology was developed, resulting in the creation of a technology platform named the Mobiz Platform.