Ubbin Labs is the engineering team behind GFoundry. We have been building things since 1999, which is long enough to have strong opinions, a few scars, and one or two stories we are still not entirely sure how to tell.
We built Palco Principal from scratch – the largest Portuguese-language music social network, running across Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, and Cape Verde. With 70,000 tracks and no Spotify anywhere in sight, we designed our own recommendation engine before the tooling existed. It worked. Then the 2008 financial crisis wiped out the online advertising market, and we learned something important about what happens when the engineering holds but the business model doesn’t.
When the App Store was still a novelty and most developers were still figuring out how to ship one native mobile app, we took on Heathrow Airport. Three platforms – iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia QT – built from scratch, for one of the busiest airports in the world. There were nights that did not end. The apps shipped in January 2012. Heathrow used them.
We then ran a formal R&D programme with Fraunhofer Portugal, building stream mining infrastructure with real behavioural data, which became the technical foundation of GFoundry. Ten years later, that platform runs in 26 languages and is used by enterprise clients across multiple countries.
There were other projects. Many of them. We will spare you the full inventory — partly because this page would never end, and partly because the stories worth telling are already in the writing section. The rest we keep for the second drink.