We can truly refer to 2014 as a year of success in terms of team, services, and company development: 14% larger and more valuable team, 46% higher turnover, happy customers, successful projects, new expertise for the team, social commitment, international events, team-buildings. It was all there!
Figures say 2014 marks 20 years from the company start up; we say 2014 brought ROPARDO the well-deserved image uplift. We can now praise to have a better shaped culture and more solid processes to fit naturally in our ever-changing world which throws constant challenges at us and at the same time inspires us to innovate.
Company culture means investment in our people as our foremost resource to grow and be a visible presence on the market. We had web technologies trainings (jQuery, Javascript, and Bootstrap), Team Leader certifications, Android Data Security Training. Our mobile development team was present to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Droidcon for enriching international know-how exchange. Besides being certified as tech experts, we are good citizens now upgraded with first aid skills after having attended and the demo lessons organized in our company by the Romanian Red Cross!
Social commitment is not new for ROPARDO and we have stuck to our good habits, being involved as organizers and sponsors in contests (Hardware and Software Engineering, Infoliceanul, ICDD), workshops for final-year students (Career Management). Our giving back to the society we perform our activities in climaxed with the campaign “Adopt a child” where we, the colleagues in ROPARDO, brought a smile to a child in need. Also as recognition of our constant involvement in personal and career development area as well as in research, we were selected by “Lucian Blaga” University, old partners and friends, to host the GEAR-UP Program of Howard University in Washington, US aiming at increasing the number of African-American STEM undergraduates with international research experience.
And since we got down to research we can proudly say the end of 2014 came along with the successful completion of the MYWEAR project where our experts contributed to the development of new integrated sensors and software systems able to monitor interactively health parameters at work and during sports activities. And, as always, we stay true to innovating within other on-going research projects such as PEGASO (Personalised Guidance Services for Optimising lifestyle in teenagers through games on mobile devices) and RoboMate (intelligent exoskeleton based on human-robot interaction for the manipulation of heavy goods with applicability in various industries). Around the PEGASO project ROPARDO even organized its own stuff Cloud&Pizza&Beer – an original and endowing meeting for the team and representatives of the 14 partners involved in the project with the aim of decoding cloud technology used within this project. The invitation we received to take part at the AAL Forum meant for us new opportunities to get involved in research joint projects. Likewise, it was an honour to be invited at Researcher’s Night by “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu as it validated us a researcher among others of the kind in over 300 European cities.
Our hard work deserves some recognition from time to time which is why we participated to international events such as the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, CeBIT in Hannover, Forum IT in Vienna, to name just a few.
To all this we add up the remarkable work and effort of the team to successfully develop and implement custom software solutions for our old and new, but always happy customers. And to make our job even busier we did not forget about fun (team-buildings, Carnival, Game Night, Bowling Cup, Christmas Party).
We say it was quite a year! But with the energy, experience and positive thoughts 2014 rewarded us with, we have stepped into a 2015 that already announces to have an even more crowded roadmap.
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