Tech Business History

Sally Robinson and her husband ran their farm in Yorkshire, along with a small bed and breakfast business that Sally looked after. When Sally heard about the Internet in 1999, she realised it could provide an opportunity to further diversify the farming business. She converted a couple of the outhouses into offices and Amplebosom.com was born - providing lingerie for "the larger lady", as Sally puts it. Twenty years on, Amplebosom is still going strong, whilst conforming to none of the dot com stereotypes. It's been profitable from the start, has never borrowed large amounts of money - and Sally has not made millions from the business either. Presenter Charles Miller featured Sally in a documentary for the BBC twenty years ago. In this podcast he catches up with Sally and the Amplebosom story. 

WCities was a London startup that provided local reviews written by a global team of freelancers - a kind of precursor to TripAdvisor. Its young founder, Tan Rasab, jumped on the dot com bandwagon early, hoping that his website could make money with banner advertising. When, along with many other startups, he found that wasn't going to work, he switched to the new idea that was exciting investors: sending information to mobile phones. At the time, that meant text information in black and white. Tan did some big deals to licence his content to telecoms companies. An IPO was in the offing which would have made Tan and his wife fabulously rich. Then 9/11 happened and the bottom fell out of the market, especially for any business connected with travel. Tan Rasab tells the story of the rise and fall of WCities - a classic tale of the dot com era. 

Toby Rowland was the co-founder of one of Britain's best-known dot com startups - a health site called Clickmango. He and his partner had no trouble raising £3 million, or spending it as fast as they could, at the urging of their investors, in a year and a half. They hired Joanna Lumley to promote their site but Toby realised, too late, that the idea of selling vitamins online wasn't going to work and that he should have tried one of the many other startup ideas he'd rejected. But Clickmango was followed in Toby's career by other innovative businesses, including a dating site and the company behind Candy Crush. In this podcast, Toby relives the dramatic rise and fall of Clickmango.  

Eva Pascoe came to London from her native Poland to study human-computer interaction and psychology. In 1994, she founded Cyberia, possibly the world's first Internet cafe, which was described by Wired magazine as “the most fashionable cafe in '90s London”. Backed by Mick Jagger, and visited, unexpectedly, by Bill Gates, Cyberia became a hub for first-time users of the Internet, especially women, and a growing arts tech scene. In this podcast, Eva remembers those heady days, how Cyberia expanded to a dozen international branches before she sold the business, and how it was almost as hard to find a decent cup of coffee in London back then as it was to get Internet access.  

As a BBC journalist, Rory-Cellan Jones witnessed the brief dot com boom in the UK, followed by the bust. Among the big stories, he covered the birth of Freeserve, Lastminute, Firebox and Clickmango - many of them headed by relatively privileged young people who'd come from Oxbridge or business school. But it was a time, he says, which has shaped Britain's attitude to entrepreneurship ever since - popularising the idea that anyone can start a business and make themselves online millionaires if their idea is good enough.  

This week's guest started an online bookshop that was probably the first in the world. He’s not Jeff Bezos but he is, arguably, Britain’s answer to the founder of Amazon. He’s Darryl Mattocks and he was selling books online in 1994 - a year ahead of Amazon. In fact Mr Bezos later came to the UK to check out The Internet Bookshop, as it was called. You’ll find out whether the Internet Bookshop had a happy ending in this podcast. And how Darryl's tech business success story began with making money from his computer when he was still a boy.