Mage UK
Encyclopedia
Mage UK Ltd was a multinational
Multinational corporation
A multi national corporation or enterprise , is a corporation or an enterprise that manages production or delivers services in more than one country. It can also be referred to as an international corporation...

 limited company
Limited company
A limited company is a company in which the liability of the members or subscribers of the company is limited to what they have invested or guaranteed to the company. Limited companies may be limited by shares or by guarantee. And the former of these, a limited company limited by shares, may be...

 based in the United Kingdom, and Spain. Its primary focus was to be a technology group consisting of multiple sub-brands (For example, Mage Web Solutions), and to develop software for both the home and business.

Mage UK is headquartered in Kingston upon Hull
Kingston upon Hull
Kingston upon Hull , usually referred to as Hull, is a city and unitary authority area in the ceremonial county of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It stands on the River Hull at its junction with the Humber estuary, 25 miles inland from the North Sea. Hull has a resident population of...

, England, their most successful products to date are MageIM and MageBB, both being served at a high rate to the public. Both products are available free of charge, and hence do not impact Mage UK's revenue in a positive nor negative way.

Upon offering computer-based educational schemes to employees of partner companies, Mage UK has started awarding Mage CTE (Mage Certified Technlogy Expert) to volunteers that contribute to Mage UK communities with their knowledge of Mage UK Products, and computing technology in general. It has been recently released that Mage UK will soon be offering online courses to the general public too.

Charities are a focus for Mage UK, since working with Dove House Hospice on the Dove House Day website.

2002: Founding

After noticing a gap in the market for educational products, Rudi Visser and Lee Mytton set out to produce software in order to fulfill the needs. Mage Software was thus founded, producing software for the purpose of educating
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

 students in United Kingdom Secondary school
Secondary school
Secondary school is a term used to describe an educational institution where the final stage of schooling, known as secondary education and usually compulsory up to a specified age, takes place...

s (Mainly Science applications). The second product produced was a scientific Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 application, CDMuser (the name of which has no meaning). The product was not released, and was feature incomplete (Voice recognition was planned but never emerged).

2005-2006: Web Software

Mage Software soon realised the potential of the internet, and started producing software for it in a generalised way. Late 2005, two products were released, MageBB and MageIM. MageBB was a commercial bulletin board system released in December 2005. MageIM's Client Application was released for free; with the server application being released under a commercial license only to limited sources that met specific requirements set my Mage Software. Both web applications mentioned are still in development to date.

Early 2007: Turning Point

Mage Software's name was no longer relevant, as the company did not only sell software to end-users. In February 2007, the decision was made by both Rudi Visser and Craig Pearson to change the company's name to Mage UK, which would be a technology group consisting of sub-companies/sub-brands, including Mage Software. The company 'Mage UK Ltd' was registered in England and Wales on 25 February 2007 as a limited company
Limited company
A limited company is a company in which the liability of the members or subscribers of the company is limited to what they have invested or guaranteed to the company. Limited companies may be limited by shares or by guarantee. And the former of these, a limited company limited by shares, may be...

.

At this point, new sub-brands were created under the names Mage Software, Mage Web Solutions and Mage Internet. As notably taken from the names, the 2 internet brands, Mage Web Solutions and Mage Internet, went "head-first" into the internet market, providing Web Design
Web design
Web design is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and interactive elements are used by web designers to produce the page seen on the web browser...

 and Development
Web development
Web development is a broad term for the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet or an intranet . This can include web design, web content development, client liaison, client-side/server-side scripting, web server and network security configuration, and e-commerce development...

 and Internet Connections respectively.

Mid 2007: Low-Level Work

Rudi Visser, after research continuing for months, has announced that Mage UK will soon be entering the operating system market, producing a 'new-age' way of development, and a new way of using your computer system.

Late 2009: Dissolution

In September 2009, Mage UK ceased trading completely and was subsequently dissolved and removed from the Companies House
Companies House
Companies House is the United Kingdom Registrar of Companies and is an Executive Agency of the United Kingdom Government Department for Business, Innovation and Skills . All forms of companies are incorporated and registered with Companies House and file specific details as required by the...

 Registry.

Certain Products and Services were taken over by different companies.

Internet Services

Mage UK's Web Development, Design and Hosting division, Mage Web Solutions, is currently offering services of hosting, design and development to businesses wanting websites. Mage Web Solutions does not currently offer any software products or fixed price packages.
Mage Internet is Mage UK's internet service provider, offering an internet service to users with a BT line in the United Kingdom.

Business Solutions

MageCRM is currently Mage UK's only purely business oriented software product. MageCRM offers the following features:
  • Sales Tracking
  • Workgroup Management
  • Task Management
  • Meeting Manager
  • Accounting/Reports
  • Contact Manager
  • And more...


Mage UK also offers a Bespoke Software Development service to businesses.

Web software

MageBB and MageIM are the only 'Home Worthy' web services that are notable as of now (Excluding Mucca). Both software products are available free of charge and can be downloaded from the Mage UK Website. MageIM was historically written in Visual Basic 6, and released as Open Source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 Software. Early 2007, the software was re-written in the C# language, however was never fully released. The proposed license for the C# version was also open source, however the current released version is closed source (Commercial Licenses may be available).

Developer Tools

Mage Software is planned to release a new wave of development tools in the form of Architect Suite. These tools will provide an Integrated Development Environment
Integrated development environment
An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 for multiple languages, and will have features such as an intellisense
IntelliSense
IntelliSense is Microsoft's implementation of autocompletion, best known for its use in the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment...

-like system, syntax highlighting, and a graphical editor. Architect Suite will be the flagship product of Mage UK's new entry in the Development Tool market, and is going to be entering right alongside Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment from Microsoft. It is used to develop console and graphical user interface applications along with Windows Forms applications, web sites, web applications, and web services in both native code together with managed code for all...

, SharpDevelop
SharpDevelop
SharpDevelop is a free and open source integrated development environment for the Microsoft .NET, Mono, Gtk# and Glade# platforms, and supports development in C#, Visual Basic .NET, Boo, F#, IronPython and IronRuby programming languages.It was designed as a free and lightweight alternative to...

 and Dreamweaver (For its web technology interface).
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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