The Sunday Times, June 3rd 2007

A YEAR AGO: Former schoolfriends Rob Taub and Nick Kenton were starting a free online directory listing all the sports clubs in Britain. They hoped it would make money by attracting advertising. They had obtained an unsecured bank loan of £12,500 from Barclays and had combined savings of £12,500 to get the business going. They planned to employ an agency to sell advertising and last August launched an additional service on the site, Sportsmate, an online interactive community to enable people to find players in their area and for local clubs to announce fixtures. One early casualty, however, was Taub and Kenton’s business partnership. Four months after launching, Kenton withdrew from the firm for personal reasons, leaving Taub to run the venture alone.
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TODAY: The Sportsbase website has had 3m hits since it was launched. But the hoped-for advertising revenue failed to mate-rialise and with the last of the start-up capital spent on launching Sportsmate, Taub had to put in £1,000 of his own money to keep the site ticking over. However, in April Taub struck gold, bringing in two partners, who between them will invest £80,000 over two years in return for a 25% stake each. One investment partner, Global E-Network, will put a voice-over-internet-protocol (Voip) system on the site. This will lead to the launch of Sports Impact, an application that will enable sports clubs to offer their members free calls and texts in return for a monthly subscription. Taub, now 24, said: “Our research shows that club captains spend an average of £80 a month on phone calls to arrange games, so using Sports Impact will greatly cut this figure and will make it much easier for club captains and members to communicate.” The other partner, Mediarun, is an online “It is really exciting,” said Taub. “Hopefully, with these guys on board we can start getting everything moving again. The site has huge potential and I think it is really advertising agency and its role will be to attract advertisers to the site. going to take off.”

Rachel Bridge

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