Over Christmas, two young whippersnappers got in touch to tell me all about their ventures that they claim will make them millionaires before they are 14. And to think that I didn't manage to make my first million until I was 16.
Both teenagers are attempting to milk the success of the MillionDollar-Homepage that has been in the news a lot of late. The site was started by a student, Alex Tew, who wanted to raise a million dollars to pay his way through an undergraduate degree at Sheffield University.
His concept was simple: buy a pixel on his website for a dollar and it will stay up for five years. The catch being that you need to buy at least 100 for him to take your order. Thanks to the newspapers and television news, Alex managed to get his website in front of millions, and, as a result, he sold out and is on course to bank some £500,000. No student debt there then.
But back to our youngsters.
Adam Beasant, from Swindon in Wiltshire, claims to be a regular reader of my column (just don't tell our advertisers because, at 13, he doesn't exactly fit the key demographics for Britain's most popular business website).
Adam's parents are friends with the parents of Alex Tew. After a dinner party, Nigel Beasant asked his son, "Why don't you do a website like Alex did and make some money?" Adam's response to MillionDollarHomepage is TheWorldsLongestList.com.
The site is essentially a list of names, where you can add your name, location and a link to a website for a fee of $1 (including a 20 per cent donation to charity). It is little more than vanity publishing for the digital age.
Perhaps more interesting than the list is the rather sweet blog where Adam writes about his website, raising money for charity, his sporting prowess and of course talking to Britain's first teenage dot.com wizz (for example: "December 13: Surprise to us all as we received word from my mums friend who just happens to be Alex Tew’s mum, that the whole family are putting their names on the list including Alex Tew himself!!").
When you look at the site, you can tell that it has been designed by a 13-year-old. It is all coded in Microsoft Publisher and it doesn't all work, but that is part of its appeal. It reminds me of the rather clumsy homepage I designed when I was 15, before I taught myself how to code.
Adam couldn't quite explain why someone would want to pay their $1, but then I suppose for such a small amount of money, it doesn't need a hard sell. You know you're giving some cash to a kid to buy some trainers and that he's giving some of it to charity. But I can't imagine that he's going to make a million, but then a couple of hundred pounds (or even dollars) isn't bad for a 13-year-old.
While Adam's website made me say "aah", I'm afraid I didn't feel the same about TreeofNames.com, created by another 13-year-old, Nicky John, from Cwmbran, South Wales.
His site is more of a direct copy of the MillionDollarHomepage model. It's actually powered by commercially available program that allows any Tom, Dick or Harry set-up a "clone" of Alex Tew's website. What particularly disturbed me about this was not Nicky, who was a pleasant young man to talk to, but the press release that was sent to Times Online.
