Early 2006 my colleague Jaap Joziasse showed me his latest brainwave: a timeline viewer. His idea got my attention and I encouraged him to further develop it. Soon we were engaged in long brainstorm sessions about future possibilities of this project. We thought it could be interesting for history class and got Judith Roesink involved. Judith is a teacher at a Rotterdam college and author of history books.
Our initial focus on history led to our first client: Noordhoff publishers. Through another client we were introduced with the Dutch National Archive, a new world to us. Far more dynamic than we could have envisioned. Archives are actively digitizing their content and are open to new ways of visualizing content. At the moment we are engaged in many talks with archives and get positive feedback. Not only on our viewer but on our portal too. Through this portal archives might find a new audience; we may not be the only ones surprised by the attractiveness of archival content…

Early on we got Ralph van Tongeren involved in the design process. His valuable input, combined with Emiel Efdee’s magic, led to what you see today. Hoppinger, our ICT sister company, brought in the necessary technical input. And after consulting the advisory board of Hoppinger, two member of that board decided to join! So now Timerime is a company with Gerard Pastwa and Pico Wilbrenninck as co-shareholders. Gerard went even further than that; he left his job and now is our general director. Pico works diligently on finding new customers for our product.

So we are a company with a two-fold business model; A public portal which generates add revenues. And we sell our timeline software as a service to include in other websites. A lot of work still needs to be done. Our concept is clear in our first version, yet we have so many more ideas. Therefore we stay in touch with professor Maarten de Rijke and his collegue Maarten Marx, at the University of Amsterdam. Hopefully further research can be done on automatic linking of databases.

Our first attention will now go to importing content. What we want to achieve is to have visitors add readymade content to their timelines from our database, combined with their own content. Imagine you want to make a timeline of your own life and you can simply insert a picture of your birthplace, your favorite childhood series and pictures of your round the world trip. That means Timerime must connect with local archives, television archives and Flickr for instance.
Those connections with archives and other portal is what we will make. Should you have suggestions, we love to hear them. And if you can’t wait; that is what we hoped for! Make your own timelines about your passion and add nice content yourself. Content from your own computer or from Youtube for instance.