Cruzio’s Industy — telecommunications — keeps changing and our valiant staff works hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every year, we adopt new technology and even invent new ways of doing business. 2012 was a busy year for us, culminating in a being named Business of the Year from the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce (a huge honor!)Here’s a look back at we’ve done this past year.

We hosted our first annual Open House Extravaganza! It was such a success (and popular with over 1,400 attendees) that we are hosting the Open House Extravaganza 2.0 on Friday February 1st, 2013!

Cruzio hosted the second annual TechRaising after the overwhelming success of the first annual in 2011. TechRaising weekends are short — just 48 hours. But there’s so much to gain: sometimes it’s the experience of working out new ideas with a new team; sometimes it’s learning about the technology; and sometimes it’s a fully featured product that emerges ready to sell. TechRaising creates an event where startup magic happens.

Cruzio hosted the Think Local First mixer in our event space!  TLF mixers are a great place to see what’s going on in our area, from cowboy country in Corralitos to the mighty San Lorenzo Valley. These folks have been supporting the local community and they’re worth patronizing.

Cruzio is 100% local: owned by its Santa Cruz founders and employees, headquartered in downtown Santa Cruz, staffed by local residents. If you call us, your phone call is handled by people in Santa Cruz, not Mumbai or Guam. We eat locally, pay taxes locally, shop locally. We do believe in the benefits and are happy to support TLF whenever we can.

Our goal in coworking was to help out the local economy and create exciting collaboration opportunities for all of us. Santa Cruz County has an abundance of entrepreneurs — they need access to the kind of office space that enables success. Businesses in our coworking space often create new things. For every product, there’s a day when it’s finished. Out into the world it goes. It launches. And that’s time to celebrate. So, every few months, Cruzio devotes one of our weekly get-togethers to an award ceremony we call the Launchies.

This year, the Cold Water Classic was seen around the world in real time. With our newly built high-speed West Side network, Cruzio was able to provide 100 Mbps of fast Internet to the contest managers, who ran with it and broadcast live streaming high-quality video throughout.

Cruzio is serving the newly constructed Santa Cruz Warriors arena with a 100 Mbps connection to stream the games and it looks like Cruzio will be keeping score all season long!

A big thank you goes out to the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce for voting Cruzio the 2012 Santa Cruz Business of the Year. What a way to end 2012!