Andy Moore

Bookbinder : Broadcaster : Voiceover

[email protected]
44 (0) 7921 870 990

Archived Projects

Some of the things I've created over the years

I'm in a state of shock just prepping the content for this page, why? I've done so much, so many amazing things, created wonderful software projects and built websites that have generated literally tens of billions of page impressions and made millions in revenue. Then I went bust, binned the lot, and walked away from everything, and all the people in my life to go chill closer to the equator for a bit whilst I got my energy back.

Here's just some of my projects and ideas over the years which I've made manifest by 1) thinking them up and 2) working my arse off to make them a reality in this rather backwards world of ours.

I've not just been through a number of different projects, I've also been through a number of personal rebrands, this one is my favorite!

I once sent a demo tape to a radio station inside a tin branded like Heinz beans

DMWP - Digital Mayhem Web Projects

DMWP was my first digital project. I was trying to make a living selling domain names, website hosting, text messaging, dialup internet access and even got in on the telecoms provider game at one point when I started giving away 0870 phone numbers as well as providing an email to fax, and fax to email service.

Did it make any money? Did it bollocks, it cost me every month, I only picked up a handful of clients for domains and hosting, the SMS customers I managed to onboard were at very little margins and the telecoms backbone provider I used skanked me on the revenue share from several thousand 0870 lines.

That was the first time I'd get skanked in telecoms, and sadly wouldn't be the last.

dmwp.co.uk - my first go at an online business

DMWP sucked, big time as a commercial entity, it did however make the phone go and bring in contacts, one of them asked if I could do premium rate text messaging, my answer was no but I explained it was next on my working list and I was keen to get into the "reverse billing" side of the industry as at the time it was largely unregulated and was a cow that when milked created cash.

That phone call led to me and my new friend at the time getting into business together, we did not have even the proverbial pot to piss in but at the time I was also running a free SMS website called WEB2TXT, so we simply hijacked that domain and used it for our venture.

Services Provided:

Way Back Machine Archival link for dmwp.co.uk

WEB2TXT - an ugly site that made money!

It didn't at first, hell no, it was costing me an arm and a leg in text messging fees, I was giving messages away but to send a text you would have seen about ten adverts, those ad impressions more than paid out my costs, the hurdle was the volume in which it sent messages, and the absolutely crazy growth such a viral tool created.

One user could message five people, each message carried web2txt branding and it spread faster than a new Chinese virus from a lab, one user would advertise to five users, four of those would sign up, then virally spread to another five users. It went kinda crazy, kinda fast but my text messaging provider was pre-pay, and the advertising revenue was always paid out after 90 days. It could not support the rapid growth so when I could swap out a loss making site, for one that had some serious potential for coin, I binned the messaging and it became a ringtone website.

An early version of the web2txt.co.uk homepage - my first serious commercial venture

Premium SMS Payment Systems / Reverse Bill Text Payments in several countries

We didn't have any ringtones when we decided to start selling them, a bit of a problem until we realised that the common method of entering a ringtone was through RTTTL, Ringtone Text Transfer Language, the content looked this alien cypher below and was a pain in the arse to enter into your phone:

Auld L S:d=4,o=6,b=101:g5,c,8c,c,e,d,8c,d,8e,8d,c,8c,e,g,2a,a,g,8e,e,c,d,8c,d,8e,8d,c,8a5,a5,g5,2c

I figured out how to a) send those to a phone so the user didn't have to enter anything, b) how to bill them for that at a profit and c) made it so we could just cut and paste any RTTTL ringtone we found online, for free, into our database and make it available for sale, yeah, we started that business with stolen ringtone contents, grew, got busted by PRS and music licensing goons so went fully legit, we got licensing deals with ringtone producers, paid our royalties and dues, then after many years of working towards it, ended up being one of the largest music download libraries on the web: we peaked at about 6,5000,000 licensed music tracks which were available to stream and download, but the "Crazy Frog" had happened and it killed us. A slow death we dragged out for years, growing in an ever declining market with reduced consumer trust is hard! 

This little fuck murdered the entire ringtone industry thanks to Jamster / Jambo having operated on a subscription model which billed users each week, at the time we were number one, two and three on Google for "crazy frog ringtone" and as an affiliate we made a killing, very fast, but once people got billed again, and again, and again, they soon lost trust in our primary billing mechanism of reverse billing, and without trust in our payment methods, folks just stopped ordering ringtones.

Thanks Jamster. You complete bastards. That cost me an unaccountable amount of money, sent my mind up my arse and really kicked me in the teeth. Something I've kinda struggled to pull my head out of my arse over ever since. 

The Crazy Frog killed an entire industry and murdered trust in text based payments

Here's what the site was looking like nearer the end:



web2txt.co.uk as she was closer to the bursting of the bubble

RIP WEB2TXT, I miss your wonderful international, multi-channel income streams. We had premium SMS in 24 countries, through dozens of providers and a mix of keywords and dedicated shortcodes, we had premium rate phone lines in the UK and Ireland, we were the first merchant, and I was the first customer ever to put a transaction through PayPal on the mobile web, for which PayPal Mobile thanked me by inviting me to speak at one of their conferences in London, we broke ground with a mobile web billing system that was a hybrid of web based interactions that triggered reverse billed messages which I'd cobbled together in house, and we also provided mobile content to the BBC, mobile networks and others in the mobile content game, sometimes powering national campaigns in the red top rags. 

I'd say it was fun while it lasted but I'd be lying to you, I hated that work, it was a ball ache, I only loved the money!

Democracy sucks, it cost me a million quid

We were once offered three million pounds for the business, there were three of us, two voted "no", I voted "yes", therefore I concluded that democracy sucks, it cost me my million quid and I swear I will never vote on anything ever again, nor will I ever find myself in a situation where my share capital does not carry more weight than all other shareholders combined.

I ended up in business with the guy who made the offer, we were selling around $100,000 worth of ringtones a month in the US, and got shafted on the deal by our payment processor to the tune of about $300,000 - I had a breakdown and left my then girlfriend, my business partner at the time had a breakdown and was subsequently the target of an international manhunt after his then girlfriend was found battered to death in a Parisian hotel room.

It's a tragic story, I swear, what I know of the man, I know he'd be more likely to ham himself than another. Ian, if you ever read this: I hope you, Trace and the family are happy! I always believed in you. 

Offical Mp3s: 6,500,000 songs to download and stream

Legal mp3 music site, millions of songs to download and stream.

Huge site. Big flop. Cost me a fortune to setup.

Artist Network: 4,000 sites and millions of visitors

A collection of fan sites that were designed to work on mobile phones, I'd registered several hundred .mobi domain names, all the names of recording artists, then used the Last.FM API to scrape biographies, imagines and merged this with the music from the Official Mps website, ringtones and lyrics.

Loads of sites, loads of visitors, shame they didn't have the intent to buy music. That, along with the mp3 site above, was a salient lesson in how people spend their time online, verses their money.

MySQL Lyric Database: 1.5 million lyrics

I wrote a spider to crawl one of the biggest lyrics sites, then wrote five more to scape even more sites, by the time I was done running my robots I had a MySQL database with over 1.5 million lyrics.

It was only by having so many lyrics, and publishing them to the web, that I learned the intent of people searching out lyrics on the web is to either learn English, or sing along with them, which is very different from the intent of buying music, those pages got ad impressions but they had no value, I soon concluded the only way to make money from lyrics was to bundle the database up and sell it to those who didn't know lyrics had no real value. Bless em, I love it when I can have an idea, zip it up behind a pay wall and charge people to access it.

I made more money from selling lyrics than I ever made publishing them online. 

Detect Mobile Browsers: over 100,000 users

Built from the data I collected over millions of page views on the ringtone website, this handy snippet of code was featured in more books that I'm aware of, seeing as not all authers have the decency to contact the authors of the work they write about, it was my first big personal success story outside the music and ringtone business.

A really early version of detectmobilebrowsers.mobi with fewer than 25,000 downloads

A later look once many more had downloaded it and it'd fully proven itself

Used in some pretty prolific places by some legendary names, NASA, Nintendo, Stanford, Shrek, don't mean to brag but I can so deal with it. It's all past now, assigned to history but is still a pretty cool client list to have had under my belt. 

I was, and still am, absolutely blown away by the brands that used my work

It\s beyond surrel to hold a book in your hand and read about your work

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140920214038/http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/

Users archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140920214038/http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/users/

The site is owned today by someone else: https://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/ 

WordPress Mobile Plugin: 200,000+ users

I swear this changed the world, and I apologise, I don't think, in hindsight, that it was for the better.

Before this pluigin publishing on the mobile web was a ballache, your regular website could be accessed on a mobile browser but it would suck, everything about it would suck, it'd take ages to load, things wouldn't render right, some stuff just wouldn't load and it was a lousy experience till this plugin came and made it easy.

All you had to do was install it and it would automatically detect when a user was visiting your site on a mobile phone, then show them a mobile friendly version of the page. It turned entire sites mobile friendly in a couple of clicks, went worldwide fast and racked up hundreds of thousands of users. 

I wasn't just a way to make your site work on mobile phones, it also enabled mobile advertising and opened up web publishers to a brand new income stream. AdMob loved what I'd done to integrate their ad serving into my code and helped the plugin go crazy by putting out a press release that got the word out to more users than I could ever have gained on my own.

See archived press release: AdMob 'Plugs in' to Mobilize the WordPress Community  Innovative Mobile Plug-In to Drive Revenue for Bloggers

The plugin was free, it served ads and carried links to my ringtone and music websites, by the time I shut this all down I had around 167,000,000 links back to my website, was number one on Google for thousands of search terms and had basically pulled such a stunt with backlinks that I'm one of the reasons why Google changed their algos to no longer give as much value to links. Sorry about that. My egoistic delusion would like to think I changed the world as we knew it, more than once. 

If a user wanted to remove ads and links they could upgrade, otherwise my ad account served ads by default, and when they updated it to their ad account credentials I'd still take a slice of their ad impressions: the plugin peaked when it was generating over a billion page impressions a month, as for the ad revenue, wow, I've never know a money flood like it, how I miss those days! 

I used to get about ten cents a click, and was taking a slice off a billion impressions a month. 

It was HARD WORK to get that plugin working, the end result was some of the easiest money I've ever known, but you know what they say, easy come, easy go...  It was a tsunami of cash and for some strange reason memories of that time are somewhat hazy to say the least, I was basically living in Amsterdam, earning more than the average Brit in the UK and more than the average American in the US, and had even more coming in from different channels all over, it was all on autopilot, I was an idiot and it was a perfect recipe for the disaster of going totally off the rails. 

I swear this plugin changed the world, it made it easy to publish to mobile browsers

See the original AdMob Press Release on the Way Back Machine here.

NoSting Hosting / Brigfhtside Hosting

I setup another web hosting business, this time as a Nominet Tagholder so I could register .uk domains and an eNom Silver account holder for other domains. 

Accounts and provisioning were all automated and in real-time, it was using WHMCS on the back end along with Arctic Issue Tracker which I had stupidly installed on the same database as WHMCS which contained the keys to our PayPal account, all it took was one exploit in Artic to get totally screwed over by some Chinese hacker who cleaned out the linked PayPal and bank accounts

I sank thousands into eNom, a designer skinned our front end at a cost of a couple of grand, we had money in PayPal and the Bank, the whole lot went and rather than fight it, I took it on the chin, my lapse in database security cost me well over ten grand and upon getting hacked I just binned the lot, then spent my eNom balance on the .mobi addresses for the Artist Network. 

Location Detection

I wanted to know the location of a mobile browser on my webiste, managed to figure out how to get so close it made people paranoid, then packaged that up and gave the code away for free.

Record a Call

I was bored of having arguments with utility companies where they recorded the calls but I didn't, so knocked up a simple IVR system where I could call a number, the IVR system would ask me what number I wanted to dial, would connect me, record the call and send me a text message with a link to the recording after the call had completed.

Made in a night. Tweaked over a weekend. Came in handy as a service! 

Users called a non-premium rate number that I got a little kickback on.

Reminder Call

I had a meeting one morning, but I am terrible at getting up early, I can sleep through alarms so I hacked a system to call me at a set time.

Another concept thrown together over a night, then finetuned over a few days, another non-premium rate number generated a little kickback for me per call.

Users could call up, it'd ask them for the time they want calling, give them the option to record a custom message, then the machine would call them at that time.

Click to Call Plugin

This WordPress plugin helped add a phone icon to the bottom of the screen, when clicked it would connect that user's browser to the website's phone line.

You know that green WhatsApp icon you see on sites today? Yeah, it was like that, but years ahead. 

It turned WordPress into a telephone that could convert clicks into conversations.

SMS Keywords: Free SMS to Email for Radio Stations

A bit of a throwback to my DMWP days with SMS to Email as a service, this site was originally a directory of SMS Text Message Providers in the UK, listing aggregators, shortcode suppliers and bulk messaging gateways, but an old mate from radio rang me one day asking if I could set him with with an SMS service that would email the studio, so used the SMS Keywords domain to throw a basic service together.

This kind of thing comes naturally to me, and I can cobble something like a two way SMS gateway with unlimited keywords in a matter of minutes. As for what those keywords then do, that's where code magic and creativity comes in, but thanks to web services it's pretty much a matter of whatever you can think up, can be hackup into reality. 

I've created domain registration systems, and website ordering systems that work by SMS text messages, a simple SMS to email gateway is nothing in comparison to what can be done! 

smskeywords.co.uk - free SMS to email to Radio Stations

Radio Zone

A music management platform that can automate output, daypart, play hourly news broadcasts, support live broadcasts and a near infinite number of concurrent listeners.

Made with:

Can your stream handle a million listeners?

Most Minty Tooth Oil

Most Minty Website

mostminty.com = 100% natural, fluoride free toothpaste alternative

 BANNED THROUGHOUT EUROPE for being "TOO NATURAL"

Voiceovers Direct

A website builder for voice actors and voice artists, it hosts demo tapes / showreels, contact forms and supports the voice actor selling direct to their customers with online ordering.

This website is made with it. Yes, I built a website builder so I could build this website... 

As a concept it works, talent have earned money with it.

voiceovers.direct - a platform for voice talent to build sites, showcase demos and book work

This website is powered by voiceovers.direct