Our story

Dolphin began life as a start up intellectual property company with software patents in the late1990s.

  • Dolphin developed and registered software patents for electronic survey authoring and automated collation systems, with an International Patent Cooperation date of 1995 in the formative days of the international software patent industry. Just after the world wide web was invented (1990). Well before SurveyMonkey. Patents were registered in the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Singapore. 
  • Dolphin’s principals were a software developer and IT expert, an economist with a bent towards strategic evaluation of organisational performance, and a supplier of corporate professional learning and development tools.
  • The concept originated in our desire to create a tool for gathering baseline data on a group’s collective skills in class rooms, successively benchmarking a group’s skills acquisition, and enabling reporting to corporate clients, such as Microsoft.  
  • As a technology start up, Dolphin grew from idea to patent, from patent to product, with a rocky and unhappy road through the first Australian Government technology incubator program from 2001. We experienced the full range of start-up, market fit, investment and company control challenges along the way.
  • Over the years Dolphin negotiated with the major global corporations in the office business software market and with global players in patent pooling and brokering markets, progressively selling its patents to different buyers while legally retaining a licence to use the patents in its own software.
  • Eventually a broader service maturity business model evolved as firstly as a software vendor, then supplying consultancy services in different industries using our own surveying data acquisition software and associated automated reporting as tools in client projects.
  • Leveraging team knowledge and experience into a wider perspective is leading to Dolphin morphing yet again,  focusing on services to assist ways to innovate and re invent. Creativity, ideas, team work, and  clever technology with robust dialogue, fearless thinking and agility in a global framework leads to success (in often unexpected arenas).

Dolphin is now an experienced specialist business services company with a focus on technology as a transformative enabler. The team has gained sustained insights into

  • strategic thinking and pathways for innovation, management and disruption
  • formalising and leveraging intellectual property for global markets
  • overcoming resistance in organisations to improvement, to transforming productivity and to being human at work
  • how agile and contemporary processes, software systems and tools can best support people in business
  • the importance of perceptions of value and of feedback in customer and market focus, contributing to measurement, and fostering continuous learning and people’s sense of personal value at work
  • journeying with people in teams and in collaboration, transforming business in in the era of the internet of things.

We have a deep understanding of our local community, our environments, and how we live and work in Australian business as part of a global market place.

We run Rust490 – an emerging business  inspired by the opportunity to create a unique Territory place, where ideas meet, transform, morph and spin out to create or rejuvenate a team, a project, an event or a business whether social, public or private enterprise.

And we run The Web Hosting Machine  a website hosting and design business designed to help businesses take advantage of the power of the internet  – with security.

Would you like coffee with that?!  We sell great beans from Bun Coffee Byron Bay in our spare time ….