Interlinked started out from an idea I had in my final year, back in November 2001, to order a taxi by text message. You know what it's like, your rushing to get ready, eat and go out, the last thing you really need is to find a taxi number and get placed on hold for ages... well I thought, wouldn’t it be simpler if I could just text a time to get picked up.

Giving the idea a bit further thought and after some encouragement from friends, I enrolled on a start your own business scheme, backed by my university, Northumbria. This 6 month course lasted till the end of my studies and the day after I finished, I launched Text-A... This name could be applied to nearly everything, from Text-A taxi, Text-A Pizza to a few indecent suggestions!

The scheme I enrolled on linked students with mentors, which lead to our 1st office/desk in Queen Street, Newcastle. The 1st six months of trading was spent mainly on researching the ideas, which was aided by a £5,000 grant from the local Innovation & Action fund (via Business link). Part of this money got spent on a national research panel, asking 2,000 people what services they would like to do the most by the still emerging text messaging technology.

The results were certainly interesting... people would like to order taxis by text, however a close 2nd, 3rd and 4th was finding bus times, train times (when on the move) and cinema times. After this, it was pretty clear people did not want to order pizzas, flowers and any of the other things by text.

Next was the hard part... costings. The taxi idea was expensive to link into the control room software, bus & train times both needed GPS equipment to give real time info (at £1,000 a bus or train!), so that left cinema times. Potentially this was the easiest, as the data feed could be licensed, but that license was £17,500 a year... Sadly, I didn’t have this money!

This outcome pretty much killed off the early Text-A promises, but this was not to be a major problem, as Text-A became TextYou (I quickly went off explaining the –A all the time) and the business evolved... more on this soon!