11. February 2008 by Aidan.

I was reminded the other day of a past life. In ‘99 and 2000 myself and a colleague started a business creating online audio for companies. It was back when all of the talk was of exploding bandwidth but in reality everyone was still on dial up (some still are!). My colleague was a musician and composer, I knew how to use Flash and how to sell stuff. As a result we combined these two and created audio and video content for corporate websites that was still in a reasonably small file size. We did a lot of work for telecomms companies and made some good money at it. It was pretty easy at the time. We met with consultants who told us that we were looking at “phone book numbers” for the value of the company, some of our customers talked about investing. Then everything stopped. Audio content became a nice to have and no-one had any budget for it. Myself and my colleague diverted our attention back to our day jobs and got on with it.

It was great fun being part of that boom and it was easy to blame the downturn on our misfortune, however I still think that a major factor in the failure of a lot of companies at that time was that it was all too easy, too fast. You didn’t have to work too hard at it, you didn’t have to think it through too much, people wanted to throw money at you. When that dried up then the cracks started to show and the new easy way was the way out.  

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11. February 2008 by Aidan.

 Welcome to my personal blog.

Topics here can range from anything to do with business, technology, travel or art. Once some form of pattern emerges I will categorise the topics, but let’s see what happens first.

Why am I writing a blog?    I guess it’s a form of therapy, putting down ideas and thoughts. You’re welcome to read, reply or ignore these at your leisure.

Let’s try it out and see what happens.

You may be wondering why the website is called www.1millionusers.com - simple really - I bought the domain some time ago thinking that I could do something with it and I never did. So there was not much point in buying another domain now to host this blog.

Take care, Aidan

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