So what is Tubetime? Or perhaps what was it first?

Well, it started out as a free of charge UK mobile surf report & forecast service in 2001 with the precursor of 3G mobile technologies coming to market by some like-minded friends.

The surf club at the University of Glamorgan played a large part in this story as it’s where the likeminded friendship between Marty, Andi and I came together as we hunted for surf in between lectures along the South Wales Coast. Further friends joined us like Nath & my brother Steve in this venture to help us grow this idea.

Like all supposedly good ideas, they are founded in a common passion or goal, and ours was to go surfing as much as possible by having that latest surf information at the tips of our fingers or in this case on our mobile phones.

Surf report & forecasting services had been evolving rapidly in the late 1990’s, in the UK premium rate telephone services from ‘PJ’s Surf Shop’ in South Wales to the National reporter ‘Big G’s’ and gave the listener a brief overview to the surf conditions of the day for the main beaches around the coast.

Whilst the service was regular each day, the updates were not always at the same time in the day and, you’d have to wait for your favourite beach to cycle round in the report, which meant you’d be listening (and paying) for longer. I was particularly guilty of listening to the whole report that in turn led to both numbers being blocked by my parents for racking up large bills.

PJ’s surf report did offer an insider hack of sorts in the first 60 seconds of his report that would offer you some insight into whether it was worth staying on the call or not. He’d say something like ‘Today’s roving reporter’ which meant it was rubbish so no need to stay on the call, to ‘Raving or Off the Lip reporter’ which meant the surf was classic, so stay on the call to get the main course of the surf report.

Dial up internet access typically from a desk top computer or laptop was also starting to become more prevalent in our homes and a variety of regional surf forecasters, surf reporters, community style web sites, forums etc started to publish their content on websites.

Early UK forecasters included SJ’s Southwest Surf Forecast, Soul Surfer (that latterly combined to become A1 Surf), legm98, Surf Station, Surf Hog, Magic Seaweed, surf reports from surf shops like ‘Zuma Jays’ in Bude, ‘Secret Spot’ in Scarborough, Little Pink Shop in Croyde & ‘Gulf Stream’ in Woolacombe & weather models from the BBC & NOAA (the US based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

So, could we get all of that information into the palm of hands wherever we were?

The answer was of course yes.

Well, we were in some luck. I worked for a mobile network operator, Marty was a Software Engineer, and the new technologies of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) & GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) were becoming available on mobile devices and networks.

These two new services did two things that started the next big leap in creating content for people on the move but also the demand for devices with larger screens like the iPhone.

1. GPRS was the foundation of all of the G’s that we now use (3G,4G,5G etc etc) changing the way we access the internet from our mobile phone from dial up (charged by the second & needing a constant connection) to packet data (charged by the volume but could fill in data when a connection was available).
2. WAP enabled the translation of large format HTML coded websites to be converted to a smaller format language WML that could be consumed on the still rather small sized and limited pixel mobile phones that were available.

First up we created a WAP site that could be added to the mobile device browser.

With the WML script created we knew that the next pieces of content that would be useful are surf reports, surf forecasts and weather forecasts. This is where our principle of a free service that could enable the surf community to come together was founded.

We linked up with the main content providers of A1 Surf, Soul Surfer, Zuma Jay’s, Gulf Stream, Secret Spot, Little Pink Shop, Sharkbait and shared how to do the WML coding to the service or did it for them on the basis that their logo’s & links to their websites were advertised and a free of charge mobile accessed service was created.

Now we had to tell people about it to make this worthwhile to all and this is where our friends at the surf Company ‘Headworx’ came in to help us expose and market this service through their advertising in surf magazines.

This was the only real deal we did and even this showed the lack of commercial prowess perhaps we had as the classic surfers we are. All we really wanted was to go surfing, so we opted for a sponsorship style deal of clothing/ marketing in return for adding Headworx’s logo to the service as the main sponsor (just like a sponsored surfer might get).

At the height of the free service we were achieving some 200,000+ per year which was not bad going considering the choice or mobile devices available and we even shared our knowledge with a new entrant into the surf forecasting world called ‘Magic Seaweed’.

Of course nothing stays the same for long especially in the technology world and in 2007 the iphone was launched in the UK along with a standard web browser so that most content providers needed to do little development to enable their content to easily be accessed directly.

Magic Seaweed soon became the dominant UK & European surf forecasting and surf content site and the need for a free of charge mobile translation service we no longer required.

Of course we all know how the success of Magic Seaweed progressed with them creating web cameras, surf reports, forecasts and a very successful online retail operation across Europe and the world before they were ultimately bought by the US Surf forecaster Surfline that we all use today.

I’d like to think that we played a good part influencing the evolution, building confidence using the technology that we enjoy today and am still obsessed with the wave buoy data I can access that helps me plan out where I’m going to surf each week.

‘Alas poor Tubetime we knew you so well’, long live Tubetime in another format 😊