Why I Started Cbox
Cbox started as an online PDA built with PHP and Flash before I turned 18. The name was originally Combo-Box but that sounded wrong, so Cbox was born. Twenty years later, the name stuck but everything else changed.
Cbox exists because I was a teenager who wanted to build things on the internet.
Before it was a company, before it had a CVR number, Cbox was a product I built with my good friend Joaquim. He did the frontend in Flash and Photoshop. I built the backend in PHP with iframes. The "product" was an online PDA: address book, email, SMS (you could actually send free SMS via email gateways back then), games, and a login system. All in a browser, years before anyone had heard of web apps.
The name was originally Combo-Box. It sounded wrong. Cbox was shorter, cleaner, and didn't make people think of HTML form elements. That was around 2000. A couple of years later when I turned 18, I registered the company, got the cbox.dk domain, and the name has stuck ever since.
What Cbox became
Over the next twenty years, Cbox evolved through every phase of my career. It was always there on the side, even when I had full-time jobs elsewhere.
In the early days it was hosting. Hotserv ran 100,000 websites on a single Linux server. I hosted Unity's first public release when they were still a small team in Copenhagen. UMCM was a SIP callback engine used by DSV and Ferrero. Heste-Nettet was one of Denmark's biggest online portals.
Then telephony. GoIP at Debitel with 100,000+ customers. Talk IP and Flexfone with Thomas Fest. Danske Bank broker telephony in New York, London, and Stockholm.
Then drones. EasyInspect and Inspection Cloud for infrastructure inspection. MyDroneAcademy, Denmark's first approved drone school.
Then broadcast. TV2 Regionerne: two CMS platforms, a million video migrations, 90,000 requests per second on election night.
Through all of it, the same pattern: I end up responsible for the infrastructure, and the tools available are never quite right.
What Cbox is now
Cbox today is focused on building the infrastructure tools I wished I had in every previous chapter. Better PHP container tooling, hosting, consulting, and eventually open source packages that solve the problems I keep hitting across projects.
Each chapter taught me different things. Scale from hosting, real-time from telephony, computer vision from drones. Broadcast taught me caching, Kubernetes, and what happens when your infrastructure can't go down.
Joaquim went on to do other things. I kept the name. Twenty years later, Cbox is still mine, and I'm still building.