One UK firm's modest approach to 'web 2.0' [BT broadband office]

One UK firm's modest approach to 'web 2.0'

Posted 22 May 2007 at 8:43AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online

Reading some of the 'hot startup' websites out there, like the highly-regarded TechCrunch blog, you'd be forgiven for thinking that unless you're young, good-looking and living in California, you're nowhere in the world of 'Web 2.0'. But that isn't the case: UK-based blog Vecosys tracks the cool stuff coming from Europe, and there's plenty of it.

Take, for example, WhosOff.com. It's a free web-based service to help companies manage their staff holiday: approving holiday requests, tracking how much leave each employee has taken, ensuring Person X is never off at the same time as Person Y, and so on. Not bad at all for a sideline project by a small Canterbury-based database consultancy.

Phil Cross from X:Drive, the company behind the service, got in touch with me after a recent posting here which mentioned AOL's similarly-named Xdrive service. (Clearly a man who's tracking his online reputation - good for you, Phil!) He described how the site was actually a spin-off from a project they did on behalf of a 'large PLC company'; after six months of development, the site was launched in July last year, with a business model based on advertising revenue.

Traffic is already respectable, and growing. 'A real shocker for us has been the big name company departments who have signed up, and are the most active users,' Phil told me: 'the biggest names you can think of in computing, the media, government departments - even other large web developers.' Promoting the site has been an 'adventure', he says - 'no matter what your budget is Google sees that it gets spent.' And as the site grows in popularity, Phil admitted to me that it might become too big to exist as a sideline.

WhosOff is a really encouraging story of modest entrepreneurship, and proof that you don't need plush Soho offices and millions in venture capital to get something off the ground. Good luck to them.

Tags: holiday, leave, saas, techcrunch, vecosys, web 2.0, whosoff, xdrive

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Comments

1. At May 29, 2007 9:30 AM, Marcus wrote:

This is a very odd story... No company with ':' in their name will ever be successful - if only because Word won't save it - and it's the one big stupid No,No any PR agency will tell you to avoid! Secondly, xdrive.co.uk - doesn't work!

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