When you've been an online version of Cilla Black for the past seven years, you might think it hard to leave matchmaking behind. Simon Prockter, the founder and CEO of Adventura.com probably won't thank us for the comparison, but his reputation in the world of dating precedes him.

Through his first business, SpeedDater, which he founded with a former publishing colleague was a hugely successful singles database with just under half a million customers. When the company branched out into travel as a value-add with Speed Breaks Ltd, he and co-founder Ben Tisdall (now departed), brought new impetus to holiday romances and a more sophisticated take on Club 18-30s holidays.

But with the active holidays now taking precedence, it called for a change in name and image. Share the adventure, he promises. And while romance will inevitably happen between groups of young single people, it's no longer the be-all-and-end-all foisted on those more interested in great skiing, diving, sailing or other sporty breaks. Hence the new name: Adventura.com

And the re-brand has been surprisingly smooth. Prockter was already the owner of the domain, but some internal resistance and a heritage of sorts had meant the business could never quite take the leap. The problem was that when the company exhibited at travel shows, the word 'speed' in the name had all the usual connotations.

He's clearly still getting used to the change, slipping the word 'singles' into conversation before adding that the term is "so against brand guidelines now". Badges, scorecards and dating paraphenalia are banished. Itineraries are less rigid. "People didn't want it to be forced," he says. Prockter acknowledges though that some will still stump up the cash in pursuit of meeting someone or sex, but for many it's just about fun.

The switch took a while to happen. "We flogged all the dating assets and now run with travel." The dating business was sold to EasyDate Ltd in a cash deal, plus earn-out, in March 2008 following an approach by Max Polyakov two years earlier. The exit price is undisclosed - indeed only three people on Prockter's side of the deal know it. Early rival Udate.com sold for £93m in 2002 and had a smaller database, but it's fair to say valuations had fallen significantly by 2008.

Nevertheless, Prockter appears to be doing well. He's also got serial entrepreneur Paul Birch, one of the originators of Bebo.com alongside brother Michael and his wife Xochi, on board. Birch bought out Tisdall in October 2005. And Adventura has a sister site, Pureescapes.com which focuses on group retreats to lavish properties in Europe. It's a site he founded with tech start-up specialist Rob Loch last year and is growing steadily, with friends in his entrepreneurial network using the service to forge closer relationships and share expertise from respective areas.

Adventura turned over £2.2m to September 2008 and Prockter expects to see an improvement this year, with gross profitability already looking to be higher. He's also set to launch a third site, Tripflip, a strategy game where participants compete for a holiday. The site will combine elements of social networking and be delivered as a Facebook application. "The travel industry isn't innovative enough," he rails. "Some of the big five travel players have only launched booking engines in the last few years. Anyone not writing something for Facebook is missing a trick."

When undergraduates arrive at their fabled institutions the reality is that their cash will only go so far after fees. Nevertheless, they represent a very attractive market for many of the biggest brands.

The problem then has been that while companies know this, they – bar the likes of Pot Noodle maker Unilever – have often struggled to communicate with their target audience. Brothers Michael and James Eder sought to remedy that with the creation of studentbeans.com a bulging online directory of student discount offers on food, drink, clothes, TVs, laptops, mobiles, travel and magazines.

Everybody wins. That’s why after setting up the business in Birmingham initially with the help of a £2,000 Prince’s Trust loan plus £7,000 of their own savings, the site had half the student population registered within six months. Like every start-up story though, it wasn’t without a bit of pain and the odd cock-up, as James recalls. Their ‘bean character’ – a Teletubby-like furry bean – suffered the indignity of being heavily rugby tackled at a Freshers’ Fair. Unfortunately for James he was inside the suit.

There was also the email newsletter sent out in haste – and in Latin. The site took off though, with the Eders hiring student campus brand managers to promote it within as many universities providing a fantastic opportunity for students to learn while studying. The opportunity was endorsed by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Studentbeans partnered with Proctor & Gamble on the initiative to provide an introduction to one of the world’s largest marketing-led companies, as well as speeches, tutorials and workshops.

Eder also negotiated a partnership with Jelly Belly to hand out packets of Jelly Beans in exchange for branding, and managed to convince the Accor Group to provide a hotel room for him in key cities when on the road.

Such a creative approach to bootstrapping a business has paid off with the company now profitable and boasting Daniel Nabarro, the founder of online lingerie retailer Figleaves, on board as a non-exec. The site has more than 200,000 registered users with around 500 joining each day looking to take advantage of the offers that promise combined savings of approaching £6,000. With the recession now strangling everybody else’s wallets, you suspect the rest of us would like something similar.

Online identity company Garlik is a mere baby in the world of business, but promises to be a behemoth. “Garlik is helping consumers look after their personal information in the digital world,” says founder and former Egg chief information officer Tom Ilube.

It was this concept that secured the services of his former boss Mike Harris (the creator of two billion pound businesses First Direct and Egg) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) on the basis that his business would be another disruptive market changer.

Berners-Lee and Harris bought into the concept, as did a small coterie of venture capital investors. No wonder. If identity fraud can cost UK victims at least £1.7bn per year, then the player that emerges to salve or solve this problem will be in hot demand.

That’s where Garlik expects to be – and all arrows point to it achieving its aims. Ilube raised £9m from the likes of Doughty Hanson & Co and 3i - £3m in Series A in early 2006 and a second tranche of £6m in April 2007.

Its flagship product, DataPatrol, which uses semantic web technology to enable users to track their personal identity on the web, is hitting the right notes. To explain what the semantic web is it’s best to imagine the internet we use now as a series of documents. The semantic web is a web of data, which has disastrous implications for many. That’s why major distribution partners have been quick to show an interest. Deals to offer the product to Jobsite.co.uk users and Card Payment Protection, which itself has 10 million customers, have helped to seal Garlik’s reputation as a major one to watch.

So how did Ilube get here? Based on a hunch that he could do something special in the space he carried out the kind of market research that every start-up entrepreneur could learn from. He spoke to consumers to see where the concerns lay and to technologists at Southampton University (where Berners-Lee operates from) and other universities.

But perhaps most importantly, he commissioned criminologists to speak to online fraudsters, asking what they do with personal information, where they get it and how they steal people’s identities. He even got a price out of them, determining how much an individual’s online identity is worth to them. The answer? £85,000 – using store cards, mobile contracts, personal loans, credit cards, passport applications and marriage and immigration options. Scary stuff!

The upshot is that while we may all sit cowering by our PCs afraid to input any more data, Garlik could be that knight in shining armour. “Garlik is setting out to be a billion pound company,” confirms Ilube. Much will depend on Garlik seizing the opportunity that the semantic web presents and he says it’s a bone of contention as the UK leads the way, but isn’t moving as fast as it should to create the web’s next big things. “We’re doing stuff here, not just us but other companies as well, that nobody else is doing. We could seize that. We could build companies based on the next generation of the web that would be unrivalled.

“In five years’ time Garlik will be a company spread across the semantic web. The issue of people’s personal identity will be significantly up the agenda and Garlik will be the company people will turn to to help them look after their personal information in every corner of the web in every corner of the world.” Watch this space.

23/4/09 UPDATE: Garlik has secured a further £1.6m in a Series C fundraising backed by venture capital investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and 3i, as well as management and existing angel backers. Since 2006 revenue has grown by 300% per annum.

It’s affordable, ethically-sourced, nutritious, and by all accounts tasty fast food. No wonder that Pod is expanding its number of stores. Started back in 2005, a new site was launched in the spring, another will arrive in November, and over a dozen more are planned in the long term. Last year’s turnover hit £1.5m, while this year’s prediction is £2m.

Yet Pod nearly never was. Founder Tim Hall explains the idea came to him following a realisation he had after a health scare. ‘It started partly after a personal health scare I had 3 years ago. The consultant had advised me to eat healthily, which is pretty hard to do in The City.’ Each dish is clearly marked on the menu - low-fat, vegetarian, vegan, wheat-free, dairy-free or gluten-free, while Hall has ensured that wasted food and packaging is (mostly) composted down, the wood used in building the restaurants is coppiced, the plastic furniture is recycled, and electricity is supplied by Ecotricity. The fact that people enjoy the dining experience is thanks to a late-arriving US-trend. ‘The idea is that it’s healthy food combined in the “fast casual dining” sector. I was in the US and it was blowing up five years ago. I believed it would happen here, and it did’, says Hall.

Before the launch of the first restaurant, Hall set up a retail business called Thin Red Line, and also spent some time as CEO at automotive consulting business Burbank. Yet he says personal reasons again took him away from the environmentally damaging practice of importing cars to the UK - something that Hall wanted to leave behind. ‘I always wanted to combine retail with the ethical stance, so it was partly personal and partly ethical.’

Getting together on launch with Kate Skerritt, former partner at Prêt a Manger, and a strong team of non executive directors, Pod received £500,000 pre equity and £150,000 from the government’s small firms loan guarantee scheme. A later round of £1.5m from existing shareholders and customers (it doesn’t hurt being in The City, he admits), should help Pod through a storm damaging the sails of many of its immediate City neighbours.

As the summer heats up in the UK, the need to cool down means it’s easy to take the importance of water for granted. Yet clean water is a gift - according to the makers of Frank water, there are more people in the world’s hospitals suffering from water-borne diseases than from any other ailment.

Founder Katie Alcott explains what led her to start the Frank venture in 2005: ‘I was teaching in a community school in Kashmir, and I found it strange that after every couple of months a new child would come in. I asked the headmistress and she said that they weren’t new – they’d just been off school due to diarrhoea or another water-related illness. It made it very hard to teach!’

The project is simple. Water is extracted from artesian wells in North Devon and sold as Frank bottled water in the UK. 20 pence profit is made with each litre sold, before being handed over to state-of-the-art projects in India, currently focused on Andhra Pradesh. The result is 200 litres of clean water for each litre sold in the UK. According to Alcott; ‘The work meets World Health Organisation guidelines on technology-focused projects. It’s about recycling water that is already in use there.' Instead of boring wells, Frank funds a five-stage filtering process that ensures the cleanliness of the water.

Perhaps most impressive are the sustainability credentials of the projects. Frank funds the initial implementation and works with an NGO on the ground to ensure the smooth running of the scheme. While residents of the village are charged a nominal – and affordable – fee, the profits they take then go back into the community, with many villages choosing to put funds into education. There are more projects planned on top of the current eight, with expansion outside of Andhra Pradesh into other states of India, as well as a move into Africa, via Ghana, well underway.