User:Paulmaunders/Fubra
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| Fubra Limited | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Type | Private company limited by shares[1] |
| Genre | Online Media Owner |
| Founded | 2000-04-07 |
| Headquarters | Europe (Operational HQ: Aldershot, Hampshire, United Kingdom) |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | OurProperty.co.uk PetrolPrices.com Airport Hotel Shop Car Hire Centre Airport Parking Shop The Guides Network TalkOn.it Network |
| Employees | 25 |
| Website | www.fubra.com |
Fubra Limited is a private company founded by Brendan McLoughlin, Joe McLoughlin and Paul Maunders in April 2000. Fubra owns and maintains a network of consumer focused websites built with open source technologies.
Contents |
[edit] History
Brendan met Paul whilst they were studying for their A-Levels at Farnborough Sixth Form College, and convinced him to take a year out before University to try starting a web design firm. He also convinced his father, Joe McLoughlin to loan them 10,000 GBP to cover their start up costs. They registered the company at the height of the dotcom boom, and subsequently found that running a company in the post-boom business environment was much tougher than they had expected. To keep costs low, they worked from Brendan's old bedroom, which was the attic at Joe's house[2].
Prior to starting Fubra, Brendan had spotted an opportunity in registering Italian domain names. Unlike their UK equivalent, Italian domains had only just become available to non-Italian citizens, so Brendan had personally registered a few hundred. At the time they cost almost 250 GBP each. Brendan realised that Fubra could undercut the competition by launching their own Italian domain registration site. A few months later they launched Livetodot.com, which was also their first database driven website.
Following one successful month of domain registrations, Fubra set out to expand by recruiting more staff and then securing a one year lease on 1200 sqft of office space at Farnborough Innovation Centre in Cody Technology Park, Farnborough. Fubra's domain sales subsequently declined, and with its added overheads the company entered a difficult loss making period for the next 9 months. Fubra spent the rest of its first year offering mostly web design services and hosting but the company nearly went bankrupt in the winter of 2001, when sales were at their lowest. All staff were asked to take an extended Christmas holiday, unpaid.
Several months earlier Brendan had entered into negotiations with a Taiwanese company, An Chen Computer Company Ltd and Northern-Irish businessman Quinton Mawhinney. The agreement granted Fubra exclusive rights to be the Internet retailer for their CD burning software - CD Mate. On December 12th 2001, CD-Mate.com was launched, and Fubra began to promote the product across the Internet. Sales grew strongly as Fubra secured promotion deals with some of the largest CD websites of the time, including CD Cover search engine, Mega-search.net. This new revenue stream saved Fubra from the brink of closure.
2002 began with yet another office move to save costs the company secured smaller offices in Alexander House, Aldershot. Fubra focused on marketing and promoting CD Mate as well as building and promoting web sites for several clients the largest of which was Balloons over Britain, a UK ballooning network.
Towards the end of 2002 Fubra began to work with E-Soft on the promotion of another software product Alcohol 120%. Fubra had gained experience from retialing CD Mate software online and working with a new partner again as the Internet agent marked the beginning of a transition for Fubra which allowed it to stop working for external clients and instead focus on projects it owned and controlled. Fubra took Alcohol 120% to over a million trial downloads and the software gained huge notariety when it was featured on US TechTV show The Screen Savers as one of Kevin Rose's most popular dark download tips[3].
In 2003 Fubra began building sites in the Travel sector, launching on-line Airport Parking and Car Hire services. Brendan spotted a niche in the market; to build the first vertical search engine for airport parking that would compare prices from a number of car park owners and brokers. In June 2003, they launched the Airport Parking Shop comparison service.
In December 2004, Paul noticed that the Land Registry were making their property sold price data available for bulk licensing, so he phoned Brendan and together they decided to buy the sales data and make it available to the British public for free. After several weeks of intense work they launched OurProperty.co.uk on the 14th of January 2005. The site was popular with the British public who had previously been unable to access house price information for free, and as a result it grew rapidly gaining over 150,000 users in the first two weeks after its launch[4].
OurProperty.co.uk received praise from a number of notable commentators, such as Jonathon Margolis, who, in his article for the Financial Times, described the site as an exemplar of superb web design, aesthetics, literacy and functionality... basically, perfection in every sense [5]
In November 2005, Fubra launched PetrolPrices.com - a site that allowed motorists to find the price of fuel at over 10,000 petrol stations across the UK. Fubra e-mailed existing users of OurProperty.co.uk to inform them of the new site. This e-mail helped propel PetrolPrices.com to become the 7th largest UK automotive site on its launch day[6].
[edit] Fubra Passport
In order to link their growing network of websites together, Fubra launched the Fubra Passport as a centralised login system. This allows any user signed up to one of their sites, to log-in to any other. The passport system utilises MySQL Cluster as its underlying database technology.
[edit] Passport-enabled Sites
| Site | Launch Date |
|---|---|
| OurProperty.co.uk | January 2005 |
| PetrolPrices.com | November 2005 |
| MyJobSearch.com | Expected August 2007 |
[edit] Offices
Fubra has its headquarters at Manor Coach House in Aldershot[7].
[edit] References
- ^ Companies House, Company Number 03967214
- ^ BBC (2001). One Life - Work - Options - Own Business - Case Study. BBC Radio 1. Retrieved on 2007-06-21.
- ^ Kevin Rose (2003-04-29). Dark Deal: Alcohol 120%. The Screen Savers. Retrieved on 2007-06-22.
- ^ Jonathan Duffy (2005-02-09). Virtual Curtain Twitching. BBC Magazine. Retrieved on 2007-06-21.
- ^ Jonathan Margolis (October 2005). Jonathon Margolis finds out what his neighbours' homes are really worth. Financial Times How to Spend It Magazine. Retrieved on 2007-06-21.
- ^ Automotive Category - Metric: By Visits. Hitwise (November 2005). Retrieved on 2007-06-21.
- ^ Address Finder. Royal Mail (June 2007). Retrieved on 2007-06-23.
