What was Freeserves vision?
I think they saw babyworld as a building block in a new on-line media empire they were intent on building. Tim Halfhead, who had joined the company a few months before the sale to Freeserve to exploit the commercial potential of the site, took over as Managing Director of babyworld while I helped them launch their iCircle portal. In fact after 3 months with Dixons / Freeserve I left to pursue a career in venture capital leaving Tim and the babyworld team developing the site under Freeserve’s ownership. Site traffic continued to grow, but in September 2000 Freeserve brought in-house the previously outsourced e-commerce fulfilment, only to close the e-commerce operation in early 2001. All but one of the original team left as the operations are moved from Oxfordshire to Freeserve’s Clerkenwell head office. Freeserve continued to pay the bills, and kept the membership ticking upwards through the bust years that followed the Internet boom. In 2003, Wandadoo (as Freeserve was now branded), w
