I couldn’t miss the fact that by 1998–9, the use of email was becoming increasingly popular. Most large companies were using it to communicate, but it wasn’t so popular yet with the public – people were frightened off due to technophobia. Bob Watkins and I debated the possibility of creating and selling a special telephone that would enable consumers to send and receive emails. I liked the idea of this phone and believed it would appeal to the man in the street who wanted to venture into the world of email. The other interesting aspect was the business model. Every time an email call was made, we could earn some money by using a special tariff connection. Moreover, as the phone would have a large screen, we could target adverts to consumers at home.

To be honest, during that period, you felt you were being left out or had missed a trick if you didn’t have something to do with the internet. Dot-com companies were springing up all over the place and a new breed of young people were coming up with internet ideas, creating ‘websites’ and promoting various services. Any Hooray Henry with a navy blazer, open-collared white shirt and a pair of jeans – armed with a bottle of Evian and a PowerPoint spreadsheet on an Apple laptop – could walk into a bank and, as long as ‘dot com’ was part of his new company’s name, he could walk out with five million quid's worth of venture funding. It was that crazy.

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It had taken about nine months to get it ready, but the email phone was launched on the 29 March 2000 at quite a big bash organised by Nick Hewer. On the day, the share price rose to 610p, putting a market capitalisation on the company of £500m. There was no rationale behind the share price rise; we were simply caught up in the internet boom, which had just about peaked out by then. The fact that the email phone was perceived to be a joint venture between Amstrad and British Telecom attracted a lot of attention in the City on the day, but the rise in the share price was very short-lived. Soon after the launch, the so-called ‘dot-com boom’ imploded and the Amstrad share price fell rapidly. The penny had dropped: some companies whose values had risen to great heights actually had no substance – people had just been dragged in on a whim or a hope.

The business model of the email phone was all about consumers sending emails and us receiving a share of the call charge. On top of this, we were going to sell advertising to display on the screens of the phones, a kind of electronic billboard in consumers’ homes. The idea was that we would subsidise the cost of the phones so they’d sell at a low retail price.

Sales of the phone went quite well – over 400,000 were sold. However, some people only realised after purchase that sending emails was not free and we experienced lots of disconnections. Also, the advertising model was not attracting the attention of potential advertisers. It seems we had launched at a time when most advertisers were sick and tired of what they called ‘internet advertising’.

The first wave of internet advertising came during the dot-com boom. Everybody thought this was a major breakthrough and advertisers threw a lot of money at advertising on various websites. It turned out to be a disaster and the advertising fraternity pulled away from it very quickly, reverting to conventional media. By the time we launched the email phone, the term ‘internet advertising’ was like the kiss of death in advertising circles.