Sam Talks Technology

Stephen Pankhurst was the co-founder of Friends Reunited along with his wife Julie. In 1999, Stephen’s wife Julie, was pregnant with their first child. She had just used the internet to track down her long lost Grandfather that she had never seen. Realising the power of the internet, and a desire to find out what some of her old school friends were up to, she came up with the idea of FriendsReunited, exploiting a gap in the UK market following the success of US website Classmates.com. Friends Reunited was officially launched in June 2000. The very first version of the site looked pretty horrible. Stephen was not a graphic designer, so he just knocked together anything. However, the functionality worked and very soon they started to get people coming to the site and registering themselves against schools. Nine months later, after a redesign, some hard work, lots of extra features, encouragement from users and the odd mention or two in the press, things started to get interesting. By the end of the