What a week.
I flew off to Barcelona excited to see fellow Podio Partners from around the world again, and to learn more about Podio’s development plans. The European Podio Partner Conference began with a poker night co-hosted by Progress (who own Podio) and thatapp.io at the home of FC Barcelona, Camp Nou. As last year, I volunteered my services as a poker tournament director, including bringing 20kg of poker chips through customs: hauling those across Barcelona in 25 degrees was an interesting choice in hindsight… It was a great evening and got the conference off to a fantastic and fun start. My colleague Jakub and I then headed back to our accommodation to get our beauty sleep: we were presenting at the conference in the morning.
Slightly bleary-eyed, we wrestled the metro network to arrive at the Grand Hyatt Barcelona hotel: our home for the next 2 days. Greeting yet more familiar faces and some new ones, we settled in with some coffee and croissants, ready to get started. The day began with an introduction from Kelley Markoff, Progress’s Partner Account Manager for Podio. Next we moved into sessions from our peers: lots of focus this year was on leveraging AI tools into Podio to optimise and efficiently process information.
It was then our turn to step up to the front and present a project we have been working on for the last few months: the Independent Climbing Wall Collective. We presented how the project came to be – one of our clients (Bouldershack Climbing Gym) came to us with a great idea: what if we could link the operations management systems of independent climbing gyms around the country so that being a member of one gets you a free day’s access into any other gym every month?
We demonstrated the tech stack we had built to enable this to happen, one that caused the least amount of development or effort from both the climbing gyms and the systems they use. In short, we built CSV-first compatibility (so that we were insanely compatible with anything else) then added custom access points for each system that we wanted to integrate with. All the data then ultimately comes into Podio where we finesse and process it into a consistent structure, then automate the reset into member records, member walls, and more.
Over the top of this Podio data, we used Procfu Apps to create custom user portals for the ICWC member walls to access: one for managers, one for the reception team. The reception portal is very focussed about what you can do in it by design: receptionists can look up members from other walls – only seeing carefully selected and protected data – and check them in with a visitor/ICWC pass if they have a credit on the system (or a message explaining why the visitor doesn’t have a credit, i.e. they’ve already used it a different wall this month). The manager portal has a lot of extra features, including user management, API settings, manual data upload, import history and more. They can also view their key statistics like total number of members, churn rate, etc. Critically, as we now have a national picture of those statistics across the ICWC’s members, they can see how they compare to other walls up and down the country. This is an invaluable source of information that helps managers access data that simply wasn’t available to them before the ICWC came to be!
We received very positive feedback from lots of the Podio Partners and the Progress team. We were very proud of the work we have done so far on the ICWC, and are still actively developing it, adding compatibility and integration with more management systems every month. At time of writing, one major management system provider is currently building a simple ICWC front-end integration into their settings page: this shows the level of traction that the ICWC is gaining in the industry, and we’re excited about where it’s heading.
After our session, more followed from the Progress team. We discussed platform stability with the engineering team, future plans and aspirations, new features that are currently in beta testing, and considered the feature roadmap. The message was clear: Podio has got the bit between its teeth, and the team is ambitious and hungry for more. It was great to see and felt reassuring that in an ever-crowded marketplace for work and data management platforms, Podio was still pushing for the top of the pile.
Evening rolled around, and after an entertaining bike ride across the city, we arrived at Batea for an amazing seafood dinner and drinks, sponsored by our good friends at smrtphone (VOIP systems for Podio and other platforms). Spirits – no not those ones – were high from the content of the day – a sense of optimism and opportunity was in the air. With full stomachs and slightly throbbing heads, we headed back home ready for day 2.
The second day began with presentations from Progress’s sales team and the lead for another Progress product, Agentic RAG. Collective mouths were salivating at the potential that a native integration between Podio (as a system of record) and Agentic RAG (as an AI data processor) would bring, and it was firmly added to the list!
Next up, TECHeGO presented their automation engine AVA, including an impressive integration of AI that meant by simply adding a task to an item, you could trigger a load of complex assessment and processing: for example “Check Item Health” would return a detailed assessment of how solid and clean that item was, identify potential duplications, flag potential errors and more; adding “Fix Item” would then tidy everything up and get it back to a clean bill of health – impressive!
As lunchtime approached, people started to say their goodbyes, but conversations were still flying. By early afternoon, we walked back to our accommodation, ready to refresh and do it all again: this time, it was Tape’s turn. We headed over to the coast – once again bicycle-powered (a great way to get around and stop off wherever you like) – and met up with Tape’s founders: Stefan, Leo and Tim. We shared a drink and discussed an interesting project that we hope to bring to the platform next year.
We headed to the restaurant that was to house us that evening, and met other Tape Partners (some of whom are also Podio Partners like us). Before dinner, we headed into a conference room for a detailed presentation from the team about key statistics, feature releases, and the development pipeline. Whilst there are many similarities between Podio and Tape, they are heading in different directions and it’s great to be part of the journey. We fired a load of questions at the team and got nothing but positive responses: all very encouraging indeed. Excited to see what’s next and where Tape will be in the near future…
Time for more delicious food and great company! Feeling incredibly positive about the world, we went in search of an after-venue or two and continued our conversations late into the night.
Sadly, the next day was home time. I really enjoyed my time in Barcelona, and feel 2026 is going to be a very, VERY interesting year as a result of what I learned at these two events.
If you’d like to know more about either Podio or Tape, our work on the ICWC, our skills and experience in systems development and business support, or what my favourite item of tapas was, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: book in for a free chat anytime.
Pete Cuff. CEO