The story of batamO

The Story


batamO™ was founded in early 2007 by three friends in Melbourne, Australia: Adrian Monico, Kevin Barnes, and Peter Tari.

Each business savvy, all three friends combined this characteristic with a tonne of enthusiasm, coupled with their individual area of expertise: Adrian’s background in Information Technology, Kevin’s business and sales acumen, and Peter’s management skills (as well as a stint as an NZ rugby player!).

batamO™ originated from a brain-storming session after Kevin found the process of trying to manage his ‘Internet Explorer favourites’ a frustrating daily task. He initially contacted Adrian, an expert in the field of IT, about developing a better internet solution to his problem.

Between not being able to recall when or why he’d decided to save such a long list of bookmarks, coupled with his irritation at not being able to readily find the site he wanted, the three friends commenced discussions about Kevin’s issue, creating a website that allowed users to display favourites in a very easy, accessible and fun way.

Many hours, months, discussions and think tanks later, the three came up with a solution to Kevin’s problem with a social bookmarking site that enables users to save favourites as thumbnails of the actual website – both live and non-live. One amazing step further, users would also be able to work within live thumbnails, even with more than one bookmark at once, with all the other advantages a social bookmarking sites offers such as sharing links with friends, categorising links, easily accessing favourites, and so on.

Hence, the idea was coming into being, and all they needed was a catchy name. Not quite months, discussions and think tanks later but instead, after many hours of Peter playing around with their names, the first two letters of each surname were thus used to christen their first invention: BA_, TA_ and MO_.

batamO™ was born.

batamO™ completed testing in December 2007, and launched Version 1 in January 2008. The site was initially developed to work on MS Internet Explorer and later updated to work with Firefox and Safari.

Adrian, Kevin and Peter, in developing the website, were also able to achieve a deeper and more personal individual objective through batamO™ : to make a difference, in particular, to the plight of ill and disadvantaged children and abandoned animals. Via donations made to the free website by users, 50% of which will be donated via the charity arm of the company, batamO projectTM, two charities are now the current focus: the Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI), and Pet Project.

Currently, Adrian, Kevin and Peter are busy launching the first version of their exciting new social bookmarking website, while also working on its further development, including the development of a function that will allow parents to control their children’s use of the world wide web by allowing access only to batamOTM to ensure their child’s internet safety – what is sure to be an excellent solution for a world-wide internet safety issue.


For more information, please contact:
info@batamo.com
www.batamo.com

About the Author

Adrian is one of the partners that came up with batamO™, an Australian free innovation