Dear shareholders, business partners, and customers,
As we hold our Annual General Meeting for the fiscal year 2018, we take the opportunity to review the status of our company’s progress.
2018 was a great year for Runbox and we made significant strides on several fronts. We have continued implementing our strategy of expanding service-wide security and privacy features, while building our next-generation webmail app Runbox 7.
The company invests the majority of its profits in development. The operating result continues to be positive, and the company is experiencing solid economic growth and strengthened its market position in 2018.
Our main focus is the Runbox 7 development project and its innovative approach to email. The project receives funding from the Norwegian Research Council and constitutes the largest development project our company has undertaken thus far.
We are excited about the prospects of Runbox 7 forming the foundation for our company’s future success.
Runbox 7: A next-generation webmail app
Runbox 7 entered a limited beta test phase just as 2018 began, and was off to a great start with a large number of enthusiastic beta testers.
With Runbox 7 we have built a desktop, tablet and mobile-ready webmail app that creates an instantaneous email experience using next generation technology such as WebAssembly, HTML 5 Canvas, and Progressive Web App frameworks. Runbox 7 also forms the foundation on which we aim to resolve several of the challenges with today’s email interfaces while looking ahead to the future of email.
The Runbox 7 app is currently in an open beta phase and has been expanded with several features including a Calendar service. Currently we’re developing support for end-to-end encryption which will add another layer of security to our services.
The development of Runbox 7 can be tracked on our Runbox 7 Roadmap, which is published in the increasingly popular Runbox Forum where our Runbox 7 community is growing steadily.
Runbox has long utilized and supported open source software, and after open sourcing the Runbox 7 app last year we have truly joined the open source community also as a contributor. Our app is now available on Github, where everyone can review, comment on, and contribute to our code base.
New domain registration service
In 2018 we also launched our new domain registration and renewal service, making it much easier for customers to register new domains and manage their existing ones.
A modern domain registration service became increasingly important as more people prefer to use their own domain name with their email, while the number of top-level domains (TLDs) has grown rapidly in recent years.
This move solidifies and expands our three main hosting services which are Email Hosting, domain hosting, and web hosting.
GDPR implementation
2018 was a big year for online privacy with the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At Runbox we had carefully planned our implementation years in advance, and our hard work resulted in improvements on every level of our operations.
We have also started a blog post series outlining our road towards GDPR compliance, which we hope may be of use to other companies working to improve privacy protection in their own organizations.
Team and partnership diversity
This is all made possible by our diverse and growing team that is made up of highly skilled and experienced people from all parts of the world: Aside from our headquarters in Norway we have personnel from the UK, Poland, Brazil, and the US – all governed by GDPR compliant agreements.
The cultural and ethnic background, geographical location, and personal diversity in our organization is a great strength. Our team members’ commitment to the ethics and policies of our company forms the core of our organization.
The result of our hard work is a steadily growing customer base, and in order to efficiently scale our operations and hardware architecture we continue to rely on our close partner Copyleft Solutions AS here in Norway.
We also collaborate closely with Norwegian consultant firm Fintech Neo AS and are expanding our relationship with Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation in order to improve our spam filtering systems.
Ethics and the environment
All our operations are anchored in a strong ethical foundation and deep concern for our environment. Being located in Norway we enjoy renewable, hydropowered electricity and we are dedicated to decreasing our ecological footprint.
As 2018 turned into 2019 and news about the environment became increasingly distressing, we were inspired to seek out a non-profit organization working to reverse this potentially catastrophic trend and donated NOK 10 000 to Lista Bird Observatory.
We are excitedly looking forward to the future, and thank all our customers for their continued support as we continue working to make Runbox the best email service in the world.