This weekend I was at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The venue was host to the biggest motorsport property in the UK, the British Superbikes (BSB). The event was different, because as well as being supported by other motorbike classes, BSB hosted the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB, a new one-make car series. It could have all [...]
Upon arrival in London, I met up with Simon Darling, an ex-Unilever guy who was putting together ideas for a start-up. London was buzzing with web entrepreneurs, the bubble was rapidly expanding and events like First Tuesday were drawing crowds of 500 to monthly events. My first start-up was not run by Simon, but a group of Dutch investors who were creating a consumer comparison site called consumerdesk.
The company that Simon finally started in early 2000 was called Fonepark, and the aim was to create compelling SMS text message applications including an updating address book and location based chat services. My role was part product architect, part business development, but with only 4 full time employees, my role was pretty varied. It was the absolute cutting edge of mobile interaction with no premium rate billing and no apparent billing model. Nevertheless, the social networking functionality of the service that we created was ahead of its time.
Fonepark briefly merged with an infant SMS delivery platform called Applied Mobile Media, later to be renamed as Mblox. Later in 2000, Fonepark received an offer from an early social network, Bolt.com for the mobile applications to be integrated into their service. The sale of Fonepark to Bolt was concluded on January 26th, 2001 and I flew to New York for a 3 month stint of integration work.
Now working for Bolt.com, I was product architect for wireless. Not only developing new products for the phone, but transferring some of Bolt’s more popular services into SMS and WAP formats.
As the dot-com bubble started to burst, Bolt.com started to pull out of its commitments outside of the US and consequently the UK office and mobile team were closed down. The events in New York on 9/11 and the coming of winter in London led me to a decision to leave London and return to Australia.
On the way home from London, only 6 weeks after the collapse of the Twin Towers, I returned to Thailand and also visited Cambodia. I have written several articles about Cambodia including: Angkor Artichokes and Angkor Afloat.
