Morphing UpMyStreet into one mother of a local message board was Stef's idea, not mine. I think.

Back then we never sussed how to stop nutters using it to track down people's homes or deal with the knotty issue of how you reached critical mass... ideas are easy; making them work is the hard bit.

The very original idea for UpMyStreet (why not link house prices to postcodes?) was James Bilefield's. I think James is now deeply senior at Yahoo! UK.

Stef and I took that idea then scoured the web for all manner of other geo-referenced data. My proudest moment was deploying some, erm, Russion tools to decompile a 10Mb Windows Help File (!!!??!) containing all the UK schools performance data. Stef learned sed and spidered his way across large chunks of the .gov.uk and parliament.uk Then he pissed off to Burning Man 10 days before launch, the tart.

Alaric (then a first year uni student) wrote most of the code. Alaric is utterly adorable, and humoured our rampant feature creep with barely a complaint.

Ian Jordan (now at Ebay UK) did the original graphic design and HTML.

We really did build it on a budget of 8k. Could do it again for not much more.