10 Year Anniversary

It is now 10 years since we released the first version of RW Net.

We would like to celebrate this by offering you a 20% discount on all our stock products.
The offer runs until end of October 2010, but first you have to send us an e-mail stating
that you would like to use the offer before 22nd of July, i.e. within a week.

Our history

The full story started a few years earlier in 1996 when I worked as a traffic planner
in COWI, where we did a project about how pupils would choose a route for going to school.
This led to implementing a very simple routing algorithm, which worked directly
on top of DBF files. Thanks to a small network (<2000 links) performance wasn't an
issue, but in 1998 I got my hand on the first national Danish road database (DAV)
and soon realized that it was very slow with real size street networks.

One of the slowest parts was building the topology. I used a mapbasic application at that
time and remember how it took >10 hours, when my computer would usually freeze by
the end. Very frustrating and I finally had to replace the motherboard - it couldn't
handle the stress test (!). This same process today takes less than a minute.

Another problem was the main routing algorithm (Dijkstra), where I found that I had
implemented some of the details in a less than optimal way. After correcting the issue, it
all become at least 10 times faster.

In 1998 an application called "Afstand DK" was developed. It was a desktop application,
which could be used to calculate the distance between 2 addresses in Denmark. It was very
similar to other desktop applications that were around at the time (Route66 planner etc).
Routing on websites was still not very common.

In 1999 I left COWI for another job and at the same time bought the copyright to the
source code, so that I could keep developing it in my spare time. This soon led to version
2 of "Afstand DK", but it didn't generate many sales. This was also the time when
our website domain (www.routeware.dk) was registered. As I didn't have much international
focus at the time and .com domains were expensive, I never registered www.routeware.com.

In early 2000 discussions on various newsgroup lists (MI-L, sci.op-research) gave me
the impression that there was a big need for a routing package, so I started extracting the
algorithms from the "Afstand DK" application, so that they could be reused in many different
applications and of course sold as a seperate product. Beta tests ran through the summer
of 2000 and on 6th of August RW Net 1.00 gets released. The first customer was Martin Hodder
from ORC Data Services, a company which had been very active in the testing phase.

I had to wait until March 2001 before the next customer showed up, so it wasn't a major
business success right away.

The rest is history as they say. Much has been improved upon and added since then. Today's
RW Net 2 is still based upon some of the building blocks from 1998, but with RW Net 4 we
are ready to take the next step and cover even more platforms and complex routing needs.

Thanks for supporting us through all the years.

Regards

Uffe Kousgaard
Founder & owner