Sentient - Bluehoo

Bluehoo has been created by Sentient and is one of a suite of applications that have been incubated over the past five years. Sentient is a strategic IT consultancy and ideas incubator operated by Jonathan Greensted (CEO) and Dr. Nick Francis (CTO).

Bluehoo was originally conceived in April 2004 and was one of the first third party applications available for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile phone platform. At that time is was called Bluetooth Buddies as it quickly became apparent that world was not ready for it so after entering (and losing) a Microsoft competition of the most innovative mobile phone application we mothballed it.

In the spring of 2008 we decided the time was right to bring Bluetooth Buddies back to life, so we dragged it out of the mothballs, gave it a spunky new name and Bluehoo was born. It was immediately apparent that if Bluehoo went viral we would need to scale our infrastructure very, very fast so we started the hunt for a cloud platform to host us.

Being a long standing Microsoft partner (since 1993) using Windows Azure was a natural choice and the familiar development environment saves us time and money whilst also shortening our time to market.

After six months of development Bluehoo was launched as part of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles on Monday 27th October 2008.