After two-and-a-half years developing and designing the Scoot website in Oxford, I was getting itchy feet. Scoot had proved an enormous success - born out of the ashes of Freepages, it was a MILIA d'Or-winning British online business information service with a clever search system and a tight, fashionable brand. But I didn't much fancy playing internet buzzword bingo in tedious meetings for the rest of my life. And I wasn't the first - most of my friends from the early days, when Freepages was a small, exciting place to be, had already moved on.

I had developed a great working relationship with Scoot's producer, Jon Ewing. We always had umpteen ideas for new products and web sites and that alone seemed like a good basis for an internet business. Then a spark of inspiration came from an American site called Showbizwire, which trawls the web for news headlines about movies, TV and music, then dumps them into a list. It's simple, but it's a good way to get a nutshelled run-down of what' s happening in Hollywood. And something told me there was the germ of a much, much better idea in there somewhere.

We were lucky enough to get the support of local businessman Mark Churchward, whose management consultancy company The Briefs Network was short-handed in the web department. After a few meetings and some tough talking over the nitty-gritty, Mark, a former client from my days as a freelance web developer, offered us a couple of spare desks in his office and a regular 30 hours of contract work between us each week. It provided us with a meagre but steady income while we developed our product.

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