Wifi, or the ability to connect your mobile computing device to the Internet without a cable was quite a new phenomena in 2003. The Compaq laptop that I bought in January 2002 did not have wireless built in, instead it required a separate PCMA card to talk to wireless routers. That didn’t matter too much, because there weren’t very many wireless routers to talk to and in public, even fewer.
Apart from the occasional ‘hotspot’ left open and stumbled upon either by accident or via the practice of warchalking, only Starbucks really offered access to the internet in this manner and they charged £15 per day for the privilage.
Hotspotted then had 2 parts. One was the design and development of wireless hotspots that would be free to the end-user, subsidised by in frame advertising. The Hotspotted directory was a list, published on the internet, not only of the Hotspotted access points, but any other free sites that the community knew about and those that had to be paid for.
My idea for a bespoke router was developed by an ex-NASA scientist to allow for complete remote maintenance and upgrade and because we knew which router a user was using, we could deliver specific location based advertising. However, usage of wifi in public was still low.
The Hotspotted.com directory went on to be one of the most referenced sites for the purpose of finding hotspots and was regularly updated and added to by the community.
While looking for venues that such technology would suit, I came across an Australian with the ambitious idea of opening a private members bar in Soho. The concept, like all good ideas, was simple. 250 people would invest in the bar, effectively becoming shareholders or owners. The more loyal they were to the establishment, the more reward they would receive in the form of a dividend.
With the liquour licensing laws due to change and several legal hurdles to jump, not least of which being the creation of an Information Memorandum, Shareholder Agreement and sophisticated investor legislation, the project to get M1NT, the World’s First Shareholder’s Bar open was not an easy one.
The story of the early days of Dividends Limited will one day take up a lot more space than this page, save to say that by the end of 2004, the company had been created with me as a Director, the business plan was done and people were starting to invest.
Along the way I met some very interesting people, including a marketer by the name of Denis Baddeley. Den and I originally bumped into each other at a rather dour and dreary networking event. As the only two people in the room not wearing a tie, Den and I hit it off immediately. At the time, I was representing Dividends and Den thought the project was a meaty one from a branding point of view.
While working on marketing and branding ideas for Dividends, Den and I realised that we had a set of complimentary skills that once combined would create a powerful creative, digitally innovative company. Lateral Syncing was born.
