After trying his luck in various pursuits, including BuyMyFace and mobile games, Ed Moyse, a Cambridge graduate, decided to do something big. He was interested in bitcoin, a digital currency used for making payments online, as reported by The Guardian.
Moyse and Harry Huang, a Cambridge friend working for Goldman Sachs as a software developer, got together and developed Wyre. The app enabled merchants to accept bitcoin payments from customers and their business would appear on a virtual map showing prospective customers, businesses that accepted the digital currency.
The pair participated and won Varsity Pitch award, a competition conducted by the National Association of College & University Entrepreneurs (Nacue) that invites students and recent graduates to submit a video pitch for their business. The publicity and the £10,000 prize money helped to further develop the business.
Although Wyre was flourishing, Moyse and Huang have put it aside and while trying to find technology journalists interested in writing about the business, they came up with another idea.
They developed a software tool, called Hey Press, to search the TechCrunch news website to identify those journalists who wrote about bitcoin, and then added another 20 publications. The software, that could help small businesses or PR firms who want to identify journalists interested in particular areas, has been put on Product Hunt, a site for showcasing and sharing new products.
The next in line was JournoRequests. The pair created a software script that delivers Twitter requests (for experts or case studies) using the #journorequest hashtag to the PR professional's inbox, filtering out requests of little interest.
Wyre, for now, has taken the backseat because of concerns regarding potential security issues relating to storing large sums in bitcoin, though Moyse thinks it's possible they'll revisit the idea in future.
For the moment, they are thrilled with the way their business is working out: "For the time being our focus has to be on Hey Press and JournoRequests. It's working, it's growing, loads of people are using it and we're really happy with it."
