News & Events

From The Times Union
Thursday, April 19, 2018

Schenectady
Transfinder awarded the Schenectady City School District its Ambassador of the Year award at its annual client summit in downtown Albany Wednesday.

Laurence Spring, the district's superintendent, accepted the award during an afternoon ceremony at the Albany Capital Center where Transfinder was holding its summit. 

Transfinder makes bus routing software used by school districts, and the Schenectady school system was Transfinder's first client when the company started 30 years ago. 

"Schenectady City Schools is what officially made Transfinder a company, because it was our first client," Transfinder CEO Antonio Civitella said. "I always talk about the importance of that first client, when you go from zero to one. Schenectady is that client. And they stuck with us through it all, including the times we had to work the kinks out." 

The Transfinder client summit brings in 200 transportation officials from school districts across North America that use Transfinder software systems to operate their bus schedules. 

"Transfinder is really the bedrock of our transportation department," Spring said. "As different folks transition in and out of the department, it's Transfinder that provides the infrastructure to how we do things, how we get routing done, how it is that we make sure that, despite at transient population, kids still get picked up." 

The award was given out just after former Army linguist and intelligence officer Eric Maddox gave a keynote talk about how he helped track down former Iraq President Saddam Hussein after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Maddox interrogated prisoners trying to get information on Hussein's whereabouts and finally was able to get to Hussein's bodyguard, who gave up the dictator and led a Delta Force team to the farm in Tikrit where he was hiding in a hole.