e Business OBSERVER
12
| August 27, 2015
CASE STUDY
Being in the right place November 3 will be a big day for Chris Bartolo. It will be one of those moments that could so easily turn into a life-defining moment – and yet, the ways things have gone in the past four years, it seems certain that there will be many other such turning points. He will be representing his company, Dazzle Panel, as a beta start-up at the Web Summit in Dublin – representing their designated top 15 per cent of start-ups from around the world.
Mr Bartolo has already paid back all the private investors that helped him turn his student dream into a reality. He has had a number of offers to sell the company and is already working on the next phase of products and projects. Not bad for someone who is only 22. It all started with an assignment at the University of Malta, where he was reading for a BSc in IT and Artificial Intelligence. It was all about intelligent bus systems and he got to thinking.
Unlike so many of his peers, however, he did not stop there. He started working on software for tracking devices and by October 2011, while he was still at university, he already had several clients who had a small fleet of vehicles – and a few months later, their numbers had grown exponentially. “At the time I was doing freelance work on content management systems (CMS) for local and international clients. What I
DAZZLE PANEL’S EVER-INCREASING CLIENT RANGE INCLUDES TAXIS, DELIVERY VANS, COACHES AND SCHOOL TRANSPORT. PHOTO: MATTHEW MIRABELLI
“Some clients only need basic information – where the vehicles are and if they are on time. Others might want to make sure that the driver is not sleeping in the vehicle with the air conditioning on”