Milestones

Members of the core team discover the fascinating depth of the Internet while studying at the HSG (University of St. Gallen) and subsequently develop the first public services for the still young online community based on the legendary VAX/VMS platform. These include information services such as a free telephone directory, free fax, the first instant messaging services and other smaller useful offerings. The World Wide Web (www), which is mainly used today, had not even been invented at that time.

The first insights into the infinite possibilities of the Internet mature and the will to break up old structures in society and business emerges. Up to this point, it was difficult for the masses to quickly access public information. Telephone information services cost a fortune, you had to be able to afford to read a newspaper, and there was already a disturbingly large concentration of media at this time.

1995 the foundation of VADIAN.NET takes place. First as a general partnership and finally in 1996 as VADIAN.NET AG. After five intensive years since 1990, members of the founding team were convinced that the time was now right for content services and the commercial Internet.

Due to the lack of Internet users in Switzerland, VADIAN.NET develops many services for customers from the USA in the first years. These include, for example, news publications and information services for organizations and companies associated with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Projects such as The Middle East Businessreport, Privatization.net, The Caspian Report, Arab World Online and the first search engines are created.

First commercial works for customers from Switzerland are created to bridge the time until something can be earned with own content offers for broader user groups. The first customers of VADIAN.NET at that time included clients such as the then still small private bank Wegelin, the Kantonsspital St. Gallen (KSSG), Kachelmann’s Meteomedia, OBT, Swisscom, Sunrise, …

Development and launch of our own advertising technology vBanner in order to professionally display advertising material on our own platforms.

Launch of the world’s first free SMS messenger community with login and phonebook functions. VADIAN.NET invents the ViewCode to prevent fraudsters from exploiting the sms service with the help of automated bots. The logic, later known as Captcha, is patented a year later by Altavista in the USA. The ad-financed sms messenger service grows to over 300,000 active members by the year 2000. VADIAN.NET subsequently builds similar applications for mobile operators such as Swisscom and Sunrise.

Consultancy mandate on the subject of digitalization at a leading global investment company in Hong Kong. The handover of Hong Kong to China is witnessed at first hand at the beginning of July 1997.

Opening of Medialounge and Mediastore at the market place in St. Gallen

The Medialounge serves as a consulting center for Internet services and the provision of surfing stations so that the population can get to know the Internet first hand. In the Mediastore, customers can buy Japanese imports of popular games and movies.

Pure cult … Childhood / youth memories are awakened! The official website of Bud Spencer, budspencer.com moves to our legendary www1 VNET webserver in St. Gallen *-)

Further development of the publication software (CMS) Realtime Publisher Suite for customers from the Harvard University environment and for Swiss publishers.

Launch of auskunft.ch and 111.ch, the combined search engine for the web and telephone numbers.

After three long and hard years of negotiations with the SDA (Schweizerische Depeschenagentur, which is owned by the big established media houses), VADIAN.NET launches the first publisher-independent news platform with a full news offering. Up to this point, Swiss people still had to resort to foreign offerings, as the local media houses only published individual articles from their print offerings on the Internet each day. Within a short time, news.ch had hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. Thanks to additional content deliveries and editorial services of VADIAN.NET for almost all major Internet providers and operators (Cablecom, Sunrise, Orange, Swissonline, Tiscali, T-Online, MSN, Bluewin, Datacomm, …) VADIAN.NET becomes the most important Swiss online news provider and supplies almost all Swiss daily with news in four languages: German, French, Italian and English.

The fast integration solution for Free SMS portals is developed and generates thousands of new registrations and paying customers from all over the world as the first such offering. In the same year, work begins on the mobile messaging API platform aspsms.com …

Expansion of the VADIAN.NET competence market to multilingualism for the planned B2B portal plenaxx.com.

On board are the partners Swisscom, the Swiss Trade Association, the Valora Group, Mobiliar and UBS. The ambitious project with a budget of 50 million Swiss francs is stopped after a short time in the middle of the big dotcom crisis. VADIAN.NET buys the domain planaxx.com in 2019 out of sheer nostalgia.

The professional SMS messaging solution with various interface offers (APIs) for software providers & portals goes online.

After only a few months, aspsms.com has tens of thousands of registered customers worldwide.

SMS Blaster Windows Edition for mass sending of SMS is launched.

Personalized advertising messages to hundreds of thousands of recipients become possible even for laymen. From the beginning the source code is open for the community to build further creative solutions on it.

enter-adsl.ch, Swisscom’s information and lead portal for people interested in broadband goes online.

VADIAN.NET delivers community features, messaging APIs, lead tools, as well as APIs for verifying bandwidths and availabilities of home connections throughout Switzerland.

The ad-free news platform in the style of a newspaper 100 years ago, goes online in a burst of creativity and defiance. At its best, the publication has 120,000 readers per month.

The Swiss weather platform with x-thousands of localities goes online.

Constantly updated weather data, road reports, webcams, bio-weather and more.

The soccer platform goes online with daily news and free e-mail addresses. After just a few months, the service already counts thousands of loyal webmail users. Subsequently, our fussball.ch editorial team also supplies third-party portals such as the official Axpo Super League website, sportal.ch and sport.ch with the latest sports news.

Streaming content on news.ch. Long before HTML5 made it easy, VADIAN.NET produced TV short news about current events in Switzerland with its own VJ editorial team and launched studio formats such as eGadgetsTV and FacesTV. Streaming was done via Windows Media Player. Amazingly, depending on the bandwidth of the viewers, the video streams were delivered to them in high-definition even back then… and… even Youtube didn’t exist back then. In HD? Not anyway.

VADIAN.NET produces interactive TV shows together with StarTV & TeleOstschweiz (TVO) for several years.

VADIAN.NET launches crossmedia game and news concepts: Mobile, TV & Internet.

In the most intensive phase up to 30% of the daily program of national TV stations are covered live by different VADIAN.NET formats.

Launch in cooperation with hotel.de. More than 135,000 hotels around the world can be conveniently booked via hotel.ch.

The first complete information portal for gastronomy businesses with more than 30,000 restaurants goes online. The directory logic is based on the company’s own competence market technology.

VADIAN.NET establishes a joint venture in Mexico with local partners to launch Interactive TV Services in Latin America. After a turbulent and very instructive year, it withdraws again from the monopolistic market (under the aegis of Carlos Slim and his telecom and TV groups).

Nothing much really happened, mainly licking wounds …

Launch of the web-based SMS sending solution smsblaster.com for the then more than 100,000 customers of aspsms.com.

The cooperation project with Mediabox, Adspot and LikeMedia in Zurich is launched.

Co-founding of the joint venture Mediabox Digital AG. After VADIAN.NET has already gone through all models of marketing its own websites in the past, such as self-marketing and third-party marketing by several marketers, VADIAN.NET is now founding its own marketing company in Zurich, at the pulse of the advertising scene.

news.ch Roadshow with the Colani Space Truck in cooperation with the marketing fair expo, werbung.ch, Medialounge, travel.ch, myClimate etc.. A one-week tour through the major Swiss cities with wonderful reactions from the media agencies and partners visited. Hundreds of thousands of photos are taken on the streets, traffic jams caused by photographing car drivers and daring overtaking maneuvers to be able to take better photos are the order of the day these days. The Zurich cantonal police put an end to the colorful hustle and bustle in the Limmat city and a personal police escort accompanied the giant space truck to the official residence. With the result that at the police station, the police corps members themselves are delighted to pull out their cameras and enthusiastically pose and take pictures.

AdSpot GmbH is founded as a spin-off of VADIAN.NET in Zurich.

From now on, the professional TV spot streaming offers are not only open to the news.ch network, but media agencies, media houses and direct customers can now also license the technology for professional TV spot streaming. As a result, the word AdSpot is becoming a generic term thanks to the high level of market penetration.

Relaunch with plug-in concept, about a dozen portals now use the same framework and are closely networked with each other. Content becomes unique. A business report is played out on wirtschaft.ch, soccer on fussball.ch, general news on news.ch and greeninvestment news precisely on greeninvestment.ch.

Launch of seminar.ch in cooperation with the education pool. Several thousand seminars per month are presented.

In autumn, the VADIAN.NET trademark directory goes online with 300,000 trademarks on wirtschaft.ch/markenregister and markenregister.com.

The independent insurance comparison and broker platform goes online.

Co-founder of the marketing company Likemedia GmbH in Zurich.

As an additional plugin for auctions in the news network of VADIAN.NET auktionen.ch is launched.

A special solution for secure 2FA authentication on the web and other software products is launched.

Relaunch of the now 13-year-old competence market with 36,000 company portraits at this point: new look, social media feeds, new advertising models …

Co-founding of Montemedia AG in Zurich. Due to retargeting, residual space marketing, and thus falling advertising prices, many Swiss online media houses are caught between the chair and the bench. VADIAN.NET seizes the opportunity and founds its own company for «Human Focused Advertising» with a young team in Zurich.

Re-launched as a news and business portal.

Co-launched and provided technical support for the tabloid and satirical magazine.

Increase of the investment in Swissguide AG. VADIAN.NET has been a minority shareholder in a large group of shareholders since 2003; Endoxon/Google were also among them most recently. After an extensive reorganization and a new shareholder base, VADIAN.NET is now also getting involved in operational processes.

The SDA (Swiss News Agency), which is mainly owned by the major Swiss publishers, is fined. After years of discrimination against news.ch and other independent online media, justice is done. SDA has to pay CHF 1.88 million into the state treasury. But the damage has already been done. Through unprecedented salami and attrition tactics, the subscription conditions and development opportunities of independent and pure online media have been worsened from year to year and too many privileges have been created for the long-established publishers. Winning back the readers lost as a result will be a Herculean task.

New as a plugin in the VADIAN.NET news network.

With more than 100,000 Swiss jobs per month.

Thousands of webcams, swimming weather information, bio weather and social feeds of localities.

Foundation of public.ch GmbH, which specializes in regionalized advertising, as a joint venture in Winterthur.

After an intense 16 years, VADIAN.NET decides to dissolve the news editorial team, take a break and go into retreat.

The general conditions have worsened from year to year. Monopoly situations in the areas of «news agency» and «online marketing» make it difficult not only for news.ch. Anyone who doesn’t play along with the social media long-tail cat video circus has a particularly hard time achieving large enough coverage at this time. We are happy about the time we gained and the new freedom. But … we will be back … sometime.

As one of the first domain registrars in Switzerland, VADIAN.NET launches, more than 22 years after the first registrations, the new innovative portal domains.ch.

On domains.ch domains on several hundred endings can be queried extremely fast, analyses of domains can be made, and with the help of tags, attractive domains can be marked. Thanks to automatic matching with court decisions, WIPO UDRP cases and trademark conflicts of domains are also automatically displayed. The ideal platform for trademark consultants, trademark attorneys, advertising agencies and domain brokers is born.

Final launch of domains.ch with a new layout and many new useful functions. The lightning-fast domain search over several hundred domain endings has intelligent additional functions, such as checking whether occupied domains are still advertised for sale on broker platforms.

Launch with several hundred fiduciaries and accountants, jobs and seminars in cooperation with seminar.ch. News reports on the subject of accounting round off the offer.

 Launch of screenshots.ch, the Swiss platform for online screenshots. In addition to a current screenshot, historical screenshots are also shown if data already exists from the past.

Co-founding of the theINDUSTRY AG joint venture in Zurich. AdSpot GmbH, Mediabox Digital AG and eyeonX AG bundle their competencies and customers in a new powerful unit.

A whole series of online tools around domains and hosting go online as sister projects of domains.ch. These include projects such as: reverseip.ch, reversedns.ch, reversewhois.ch, portscanner.ch, hitanalyzer.ch, domainvalue.ch, reversens.ch, reversemx.ch and the particularly popular platform iphistory.ch.

As an industry platform for the ICT economy. Job offers, seminars & courses, news and directory offers complete the offer.

Launch of werbeagenturen.ch as an information platform for potential clients of advertising services. Job offers, courses, news and directory information on the advertising industry.

Launch of firmen.ch, the comprehensive Swiss company directory with extensive company portraits for all industries. Tens of thousands of job advertisements, educational offers and news further round out the offering.

Launch of the new Swiss platform for follow-up planning. Every year, around 15,000 companies are looking for a succession solution. Developed together with consulting partners, nachfolge.ch goes online in January, shortly before the start of the pandemic.

Launch quickreg.ch, a guest data QR code solution for the hospitality and retail industry. The professional tool in the corona crisis.

hotel.ch relaunch with guest data QR code solution.

Relaunch restaurant.ch with guest data QR code solution. Directory with 30’000 restaurants, news, job offers and seminars.

Launch of QUICK-ID. A fast authentication solution based on VADIAN.ID for regular customers of clubs and restaurant visitors who often change locations.

Launch Backorder- and Premium-Domain-Services on domains.ch

After 25 years: spontaneous relaunch of the VADIAN.NET website on the occasion of our participation at the 50th St. Gallen Symposium.

As an industry and advice platform for the *real estate industry* and everything about *home decor*. Seminars & courses, news and directory offers complete the offer.

fotografie.ch is relaunched. Launched more than 20 years ago as an e-commerce platform, then used as a sales platform for photo agencies and now relaunched as an industry portal with a wide range of services. Search for photographers, news, jobs and seminars round off the offer.

One of Switzerland’s most important resources is education. With schulen.ch we launch the new comprehensive Swiss portal on education with thousands of education offers, school portraits, news, jobs and seminars.

Launch of galerien.ch as an information platform for artists, clients and galleries. Courses, news and directory information on the art industry.

Launch of boutiquen.ch, the Swiss company directory for fashion stores and boutiques of all kinds with extensive company portraits. News further rounds off the offering.

Launch of export.ch, the Swiss company directory for the export industry and logistics companies of all kinds with extensive company portraits. News, job offers and seminars round off the offer.

Launch of beauty.ch, the Swiss company directory for the beauty industry with extensive company portraits. News, job offers and seminars on beauty topics further round off the offer.

Launch of fitness.ch, the Swiss company directory for the fitness industry with extensive company portraits. News, job offers and fitness seminars further round off the offer.

Launch of wellness.ch, the Swiss company directory for the booming wellness industry with extensive portraits of wellness businesses. News, job offers and seminars round off the offer.

Launch of apotheken.ch, the Swiss company directory for the entire sector with extensive portraits of companies. News, job offers and seminars round off the offering.

Launch of drogerien.ch, the Swiss company directory for drugstores of all kinds with extensive company portraits. News, job offers and seminars round off the offering.

Launch of optiker.ch, the Swiss company directory for the optician industry with extensive company portraits. News and job offers round off the offering.

Launch of fahrrad.ch, the Swiss company directory for the bicycle industry with extensive company portraits. News from the world of bicycles rounds off the offer.

VADIAN.NET AG is certified according to ISO 27001. This internationally recognized standard confirms the implementation of a comprehensive information security management system. It guarantees systematic processes for the continuous identification, assessment and treatment of security risks in order to ensure the best possible protection of sensitive data and information. ISO 27001 is the most important cybersecurity certification.