“We’re a personalised publishing platform that aggregates large quantities of information, with different content for different users.” Andrew Davies is confident that this approach to online publishing is the way forward, and the way things are going, they may be judging the zeitgeist – a push for more personalisation – quite accurately.

Idiomag is an online music magazine that only presents you with articles on musicians and bands that you like to listen to. “We syndicate from 450 content partners, from Rolling Stone and Billboard to niche music mags”, says Davies, who launched the closed-Beta version of the site with Ed Barrow in November 2006. Come April 2007, a full version was launched, in time for the all-important facebook application a month later. “Ed was frustrated going in to WH Smith buying 6 or 7 magazines and then reading 10-15% of each one”, says Davies. The solution? Aggregation and personalisation. “We’re giving a personalised blend so people come back to the site.”

But as aggregators become more prevalent in the world of online publishing, critics argue that the value of the actual content delivered suffers. Davies is sure that the quality of the publications which Idiomag’s RSS feeds emanate from means this tag doesn’t apply to Idiomag: “We’re not a pile-it-high sell-it-cheap company”, he says. “We see high engagement rates with the content we have.” This is key for one of the main revenue sources, advertising. On some ads on the site, he says, there are ten times the industry average for click-through rates, which Davies puts down to trust. While traditional publishing costs (such as writers - “the price of content is being driven down dramatically”, Davies points out) virtually non-existent, and other sources of incomes based on itunes, tickets and merchandising, there are plans for expansion. Davies says there are plans to ‘get into bed’ with some big B2B publishers, as well the creation of a new personalised fashion mag once the musical side of things have been learnt from. “We’ll be adding film, gaming, gossip...from different sites aggregating feeds.” In addition, Idiomag launches the beta version of the mobile phone application.

Revenue generation appears more than likely, while relevant experience is also at hand: Davies co-founded web development company thruSITES, while Barrow’s father had been CEO of a company dealing with content rights management with an eye for social media, and handily for the founders, was willing to invest £150,000 in seed funding.

In 2006, a new kind of business tool was launched, and its popularity has rocketed, with the user base seeing a monthly increase of up to 40% at times. Huddle provides an online space for companies and other groups with office, project and collaboration tools, providing a securely hosted work area with the ability to share ideas and files to other contacts. In some ways this had been done before – but Huddle manages to seamlessly integrate social networking into the mix.

According to founder Alastair Mitchell ‘We‘re bringing together all the different types of business collaboration in one place, but bringing the social network side in. It’s modern, fluid and flexible. The next step of social networking is for business; getting stuff done.’

There is a basic free set-up which people can work on over three workspaces (with one GB storage), or for a little more a company can jump on the ‘mobile’ trend, switching the whole workspace to the company’s servers. In fact, the disparate workforces of huge organisations like UNICEF and Reuters are already using the product. So how did the team come up with the idea? ‘I had the problem, Andy (McLoughlin) had the solution’, says Mitchell. ‘I was managing a large team in a marketing company who were happy using social networking but not stuffy enterprise tools. We thought ‘there has to be a way to bring these things together.’

Huddle started out being funded by the duo’s own savings, secured angel investing for the site build in 2006, and received venture capital funding a year later. All up, a mixture of £2.5m from private and venture has been invested. ‘You always need more money than you think’, says Mitchell. ‘And you always need not to be afraid to seek more financing.’

Growth has been fast – which Mitchell puts down to the social-networking aspect of the business: ‘We can go faster due to the nature of it – people are invited in. It’s viral growth with a business side.’ Although he acknowledges that the initial meteoric rise can’t continue forever, the future still looks very good. ‘It’s been very exciting for us...even people in the internet sector are recognising what we’re doing and integrating huddle into their solutions.'

Huddle recently secured a major deal with leading professional network LinkedIn, joining the likes of Wordpress and Google Presentations by adding appliactions enabling the synicing of users' online profiles.