Moving forward together: from an interesting 2025 to a promising 2026

For Socho, 2025 was an interesting year. In March, Jard took over from Bob and Marco, who led Socho with great dedication for years. Bob and Marco remain involved with the company, but are no longer responsible for day-to-day operations. With this step, we are building on the strong foundation that has been laid and together we are taking the next step in the development of Socho, with the aim of serving even more publishers in the Netherlands and Belgium with even better software in the future.

At the back, everything has remained the same as much as possible, but things have changed at the front: we are moving into a new modern office in Blaricum, because the old office is being converted into homes. In this way, Socho is also contributing to solving the housing shortage. After almost 25 years on the Huizermaatweg, this brings Socho's Houses chapter to an end.

At the back end, we've put a lot of time and energy into product development this year. Although these improvements are not immediately visible to everyone yet, we are focusing on two important pillars:

· Better usability — together with a UI/UX designer and a front-end developer, we're accelerating our transition to a modern web application. We are also working on a makeover of the existing Zeno Sales application.

· New reporting and dashboarding — we've added new dashboards and reporting options to the web application, so that you, as a user, get even more insight and know faster where action is needed.

In addition, this year, we developed an MVP that allows you to ask questions to your data (natural language to query) via AI in natural language. For example, questions such as: “Graph the number of new subscribers per week to the wine magazine” or “List all advertisers in Huizen who have placed an order in the past five years.”

Although the initial results are impressive, we've decided not to roll out this functionality for now. The technology currently appears to be insufficiently reliable: due to so-called hallucinations, the system can sometimes provide answers that sound logical but are substantively incorrect. Our customer Van Dale already saw this coming and therefore chose it hallucinate direct to word of the year to name. A great honor, thank you for that!

In 2026, we want to further accelerate product development and hope to share many great improvements with you again. We are also developing a new website, where the Zeno product and the functionalities will be more central to us. In this way, we hope to better spread our unique story.

In addition, we look forward to a special year, in which Socho celebrates its 25th anniversary, together with Toni's 25th anniversary and Michiel's 15th anniversary.

We wish everyone happy holidays and a happy, healthy and successful 2026!