SilverDisc Celebrates 15th Birthday
SilverDisc is 15 years old today!
SilverDisc was established on March 10, 1993 by three people (Alan Perkins, Allan Todd and Eric Barfield) who had met while working on interactive CD applications at Philips in Surrey. That is why the company is called SilverDisc – because its first products and services were delivered on CD, a “silver disc”.
Alan, Allan and Eric were three guys who enjoyed making a living while having fun doing techie things. Well, they considered it fun anyway! In 1993 they were using very low speed dial-up modems and Compuserve to communicate with each other and a small world of CD developers. In 1994 they got their first Web server and started hosting Web sites for clients. In 1995 they developed a fully functional shop with online credit card capabilities for one client, and started hosting the Web site for HarperCollins, a major publisher – not bad going for three guys working from home and having fun.
Early Years of Search Marketing
In late 1995, on the day AltaVista launched, SilverDisc realised the potential that search engines held for marketing purposes. They started marketing themselves and their clients through search engine optimization, although that phrase was not in use at the time.
During the mid-to-late nineties SilverDisc continued to deliver CD and DVD products and services as well as Internet services and Internet marketing. It remained three guys having fun. Then, a few things happened in quick succession:
- Allan moved back to Scotland and got a real job working for somebody else – he wanted his young family to get a “proper Scottish education”
- Alan moved back to Northamptonshire, mainly to tap into a support network for his young family, but remained with SilverDisc
- Alan and Eric teamed up with a distant relative of Eric’s and formed a new company, e-Brand Management, to take advantage of the “dot com boom”
1998 to 2000 was spent developing patents, products and services based around some ideas that Alan had in the years since 1995. In parallel, SilverDisc continued to service its existing client base.
The patents were filed in 1999 and have since been granted. They cover some very fundamental search engine ground. One patent is in crawling and indexing, and the other is in personalisation – both are hot topics today, nine years later. The first product, Search Mechanics, was launched at the very first Search Engine Strategies to be held in the UK and e-Brand Management was one of only five exhibitors there.
That covers “SilverDisc - the early years”. In a future post, I’ll look at what has happened since 2000. 