The early years: tourism and culture.
TIN began in 2004. Early work with Tourism Toronto and a consortium of Canadian tourism agencies involved bringing destinations, audiences and large collections of content together in a shared portal. It was an exercise in organizing information as much as building software.
That chapter also included advisory work on a proposed European cultural and tourism portal. The portal did not launch, but the work brought a different kind of experience: thinking through how a common information system could serve organizations with different needs and ways of working.
Enterprise work brought another kind of complexity.
Through the following years, TIN built and maintained web platforms for enterprise clients. Work on Progress Sitefinity included Environics Analytics, where the corporate website had to communicate a specialist, data-heavy business and remain practical to maintain.
Alongside that work came larger custom platforms. Lifescape explored personal stories and memories. rOOmzz focused on online meetings. A substantial listing platform connected people with structured information. Different products, each requiring decisions about how the software would work beyond its public pages.
A chapter in websites. A continuing software practice.
For several years, websites became a larger part of the business. WordPress was followed by Webflow, and the work spanned hospitality, professional services, technical businesses and community organizations. Design and content became increasingly close to the development process.
The team grew and contracted as the work changed. Custom platform projects continued alongside the website practice. That history matters to the company we are now: we have worked on the visible experience, the underlying application and the practical job of keeping both useful.
AI changed what we could take on next.
AI prompted a deliberate change in focus. Today, the centre of the practice is building and deploying complex platforms for clients, with AI used both in the development process and inside the software where it serves a useful purpose.
We also build software for ourselves. Living with an application after the first release exposes the small decisions that are easy to miss in a project plan. CCP and the TIN Command Centre give us that experience inside our own business, while projects such as the Lifescape rebuild open another chapter.
