The Hubdub Story

Original Idea

Hubdub was the brainchild of husband and wife team Nigel and Lesley Eccles. Both keen news followers, they'd found that since starting a family it had become harder to follow and keep track of news stories they were interested in. A math graduate and veteran of online betting and publishing industries, Nigel came up with the idea behind Hubdub in August 2007. Much to his shock, Lesley, who has a background in technology sales & marketing, agreed that it was a good idea and they decided to set up business together.

After a month of late nights crouched over the kitchen table reviewing paper-based designs, they realised they needed someone technical to join them. After a couple of false starts, fate walked in and Nigel met Tom, Rob and Chris one night in September 07 in the local pub. They had already set up an internet business which was on the cusp of being successful, but success was by no means assured. After many more beers, and a couple of curries, thus was formed the start of a beautiful friendship and they decided to pool resources for the greater, Hubdub, good.

At this point of course, we weren't called Hubdub, and it took many many more beers and brainstorming before the name was finally decided - in the end, it was Nigel and Lesley's 3 year old son who named the site. "Hubdub is when you run out of numbers, mummy!".

Before long, the team had to recruit editors to help create, moderate and settle markets. But there was no money to pay any staff... The first batch of Category Editors were all students at Edinburgh university from around the globe, all of whom were news junkies and keen to learn about an internet start-up.

Launching Hubdub

After a hugely successful launch on January 28th 2008 (at Demo 08), Hubdub was born! And Hubdub addiction started to take hold. By April, Hubdub had a large and dedicated core following, and so Super Users were introduced - users who were really super and helped to police the site, giving vital support to the overstretched students. Soon, some of these super users were promoted to full time category editors... and the students all went travelling!

Our category editors and super users are truly phenomenal people and are doing an outstanding job of keeping Hubdub a fun and exciting place to play. If you fancy chatting to any of them, just drop them an email - they'd love to hear from you.

Growing and Changing

Over recent months, we've developed partnerships with online media sites such as The Huffington Post, Reuters and The Independent who are providing Hubdub with even more topical and exciting questions on today's news stories. We sincerely hope you are enjoying Hubdubbing and we always welcome feedback, so if you have anything to say, then do Contact Us.

Happy Hubdubbing!

The Hubdub Team