2014

Adelaide Street Eats

Back in the day, the cultural health of the City of Adelaide was measured using a KPI known as “vibrancy.” The vibrancy algorithm was never published, but vibrancy was consistently high — and the two biggest contributors to the metric were laneways and food trucks.

Adelaide was home to amazing and diverse food trucks, caravans, carts, bikes and other mobile vendors, but they all needed to be licensed and managed, and it was quite a headache for council. Since these vendors were mobile, it was also a challenge for the public to know who was trading and where to find them.

So City of Adelaide approached Freerange to help improve the experience for vendors and customers alike.

As part of their trading permit, mobile vendors had to report certain statistics to the council — particularly where and when they were trading. They’d call or email this info in, and council would collate it all manually. We recognised that with an app for food vendors and the public, the vendors could simply check in at a location when they started trading and check out again when they finished up. That one interaction solved the council’s admin problem and let the public see at a glance who was trading that day and where to find them.

Enriching the app with a page for each vendor — their menu, future trading schedule and social streams — turned it into a platform where people could find and follow their favourite traders. The vendors had a ready-made following, and both council and vendors had a bit less annoying admin to deal with every day.

Winner, winner, street food for dinner.

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Hermie Joins the Team

2014 was also the year Hermie started at Freerange — making him our longest-serving team member by a clear margin. Twelve years and counting.

A legendary WordPress developer with a love for the outdoors and international travel, Hermie’s fingerprints are on more of our work than anyone else’s. As we move through the next twelve years of this story towards today, you’ll see plenty of it, as we move away from our custom CMS to focus on WordPress.

We appreciate you Hermie.

Digital in 2014

Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. Amazon put a speaker in people’s kitchens and called it Alexa.

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