Although retired now Chris Dahlberg and Denise Collins have a long association with Douglas Shire tourism.

Both are tourism pioneers, Denise opened the first Bed & Breakfast in the Douglas Shire in 1993. Poor old council hadn't come across an application like this before, so we all held hands and started a new type of tourism accommodation. This was 20 years before Air B&B which has revolutionised tourism worldwide. Chris became a professional birdwatcher and started the dawn river tours which were very good for visiting birdwatchers. This too was soon copied and not only in Daintree but other parts of the world.

Both these concepts were helped by the newly discovered world wide web. If it wasn't for those early blogs and web sites these two fledgling businesses may not have made it.

Starting with two standard websites Chris, who was no stranger to computers, worked out how make his own websites and not only that made them for other tourism businesses.
After every river trip Chris put up one of the world's first blogs listing the wildlife that was seen on his river tours. It caught on like wildfire and the reputation for seeing wildlife in the Daintree spread.

Chris was invited to Barcelona in 1999 as a keynote speaker on tourism. It was during a visit to Edinburgh Castle that he saw interpretive mobile devices that people could use at numbered positions around the castle to find out what happened there. At the time he thought them brilliant but too expensive for small businesses. Then along came the smart phone which could connect to the internet and Chris made one of the world's first web applications for the Daintree Village. He put little signs up around the village with numbers at special places. He then designed a web app for smart phones that had a map and the explanation for those numbered places. It was just like the Edinburgh Castle experience only a lot cheaper.
One of the locals remarked, "Oh yeah but whose got a smart phone?" to which he replied, "just wait and see".