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- guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 April 2000 08.17 BST
Age: 32.
Who's he? Managing director of Gipsy Media, parent company of Digiguide. Formerly a tax and financial software developer at Digita Open Systems.
What's the clever idea? "Digiguide is an interactive smart searching tool that analyses upcoming TV listings based on a user's preferences and prepares a customised viewing schedule. We have the only product that offers online, offline, Wap and Avantgo [palm pilot] services."
What's the thinking behind it? "My colleague would come in every day and say, 'I watched a really brilliant programme last night,' and I would think, 'Wouldn't it be great if I had a mechanism to tell me about something coming up that I would want to watch?'"
How does it work? We go around different broadcasters and gather their different formats of data. This goes into a database which gets a little bit of manipulation to process updates to the schedules.
"We then categorise it and add keywords to the programmes - this took a while at the beginning, but we now have 25,000 programmes already categorised in our database.
"Thanks to Sky, there are so many repeats: channels like UK Arena and Paramount are a breeze for us to do. Once we're happy with the quality of the data, it gets uploaded to our website.
"The user each week clicks on a link to download updated schedules, and the other media update automatically. You feed it your preferences, tell it what programmes you like, and then it will highlight them for you.
"It will also remind you with a spoken word alert through your PC or a text alert through a Wap phone."
Shortcomings? "It only runs on a PC. If we had it on Linux and on Mac we would clean up, but we don't have the personnel in place yet who have the skills to programme on Macs and Linux. It's not as automatic as we'd like it to be, and there are other features that we would like to add, like a better ability to choose channels, but we have only just upgraded to version 3.1, and the magic bits will go into the version after that."
What's next? "It would be really nice if Sky used our electronic programme guide instead of their system.
"There are other companies such as NTL and Cable & Wireless which have their own systems as well. Or we could hook up with a hardware manufacturer and make our own version and get some of the early adopters buying our product.
"The service is also not in the right place physically for me to get the most out of it. My TV, my computer, they are the wrong place. There's a better place for it to go, and that's where we want it, but I can't tell you yet where that place is."
