Latest Technology history Podcast Episodes

Sally Robinson: The dot com success story from a remote farm in Yorkshire

Tech Business History - May 29, 2019 15:00 - 23 minutes
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 ou...

Tan Rasab: How WCities nearly conquered the world

Tech Business History - May 22, 2019 12:00 - 44 minutes
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 othe...

Toby Rowland: Journalists needed crazy dot coms like us to write about

Tech Business History - May 15, 2019 08:00 - 36 minutes
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 promo...

Eva Pascoe: Making the Internet cool in London

Tech Business History - May 08, 2019 12:00 - 49 minutes
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, un...

Rory Cellan-Jones: The rise and fall of dot com Britain

Tech Business History - May 01, 2019 12:00 - 25 minutes
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 s...

Darryl Mattocks: Selling books online before Amazon

Tech Business History - April 14, 2019 18:00 - 46 minutes
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 ...