I own or have a stake in the following businesses:

SMS Text News
I started SMS Text News originally to demonstrate the power of blogging. A few weeks into it, I got an email from a chap who I’d written about — he thanked me for writing about him as I’d sent him a few clients, one of which ‘made’ his business. At that point I thought I should try SMS properly. So I got stuck in and woosh, 2 years later we had a team of 10 and 250,000 readers a month. We cover what’s moving in mobile each day — providing both news and opinion to an audience comprising industry executives, investors, mainstream media and mobile fans.

Tollejo
Formed with my good friend Dan Ilett, Tollejo is a blog serbice agency. We provide a wide range of brilliantly useful blog related services, from training to event blogging to managed blogging on behalf of other companies and individuals. I particularly enjoy giving blog awareness courses and consultancy to many of the large FSTE and Fortune 500 companies we work with.

Eventscope Online Networking
Think of it like a mini-Facebook for your conferences and events. It fixes the problem that I used to come across every time I went to an event and left with 4 business cards, all from people trying to sell me stuff. I wanted to be able to browse the guest list and send networking messages to prospects easily, simply and without the event organiser getting shirty about using their proprietary information. And without spamming folk. We provide the service to hundreds of events — including many for Informa, the world’s largest conference company.

Live Event Chat
One of my proudest achievements was to figure out a way to deliver a live internet guest chat services and make it scale for hundreds of thousands of visitors. The biggest issue is when a traffic spike from a television promotion hits the servers. Worse than any digg moment, that’s when the system needs to perform. Proudest moment? Watching the servers barely break a sweat under the hundreds of thousands of Harry Potter fans tuning in to talk with J.K. Rowling to launch her final HP book in late 2007.

Neo One Impulse
Spun out from Neo One, Impulse is an SMS text-to-screen service aimed at nightclubs and entertainment venues. We provided the service principally to Luminar Leisure in the United Kingdom (the largest nightclub chain with 300+ venues) and had a superb time implementing one of the UK’s biggest mobile services of it’s time. On peak nights — Fridays and Saturdays — we used to account for a whopping percentage of UK network traffic (something like 0.5%). We withdrew the service from Luminar when it was no longer economically viable. We still provide Impulse, on a bespoke basis, to many events and venues.

Neo One
At one point, the UK’s largest provider of moderation and content control services. We provided business critical monitoring services for many of the UK’s biggest media companies including BSkyB, Teletext and Flextech TV. High points included advising the Home Office on child protection and managing Sky News daily live chats featuring the great and the good. Increasing competition in the marketplace forced moderation rates down so we decided to pull out of day to day services in search of a better return. We still provide bespoke moderation and related services for some key clients.

Liv4now.com
The antidote to boredom — that was the tag line! Liv4now is no more. A phenomenal proof of concept for our community and moderation skills at Neo One, we launched site back in 1999 and in it’s hay day, Liv4now was one of the UK’s largest independent entertainment sites.