SOURCE: TheRegister
Interview A week is a long time in internets. Last Friday we all felt like we were shouting at the bins about Phorm and its deals with BT, Virgin Media, and Carphone Warehouse.
Now, you can't move for stories about data pimping and the massive change in people's relationship with their ISP Phorm represents, not to mention the new legal turf we're being dragged on to.

The advertising targeting firm has now launched an impressive rearguard action aimed at soothing the controversy, with CEO and former MIG joyride salesman Kent Ertegrul pimping himself out across any media outlet that takes any notice of what the online public cares about (see Bootnote). We met up with him and Phorm's top boffin Marc Burgess on Wednesday afternoon at Phorm HQ (just around the corner from El Reg's new digs).
We're told Ertegrul did his own video webcast last night (here), but it doesn't seem to have been archived, so in what follows you'll have to imagine his Bond villain mid-Atlantic accent for yourself. There's four pages to slog through, but we hope you'll agree it's worth it.
Trading Places

El Reg: Can you explain the history of Phorm and how you were linked to what security experts describe as spyware?
Kent Ertegrul: We started off creating a toolbar. The toolbar was kind of a social browsing concept. Wherever you browsed it would show you people who browsed to the same website. And then what you would do is click and chat with those people, so it was like social networking based on where you were browsing.
Kent 'I am not the Prince of Darkness' Ertegrul,
with friend (artist's impression)

We concluded that the best way to monetise that was advertising. And because we were aware through the toolbar where people were browsing we started building an ad server that allowed you to show ads based on that.
That grew very well and then we saw an opportunity to take the ad technology that we built and bundle it with freeware applications. So that's how we got into the adware business - as opposed to the spyware business.
Things grew more and we went public, in fact we were the only public adware business, with shareholders like Fidelity and Morgan Stanley. Our [non-executive] chairman is the former chairman of Microsoft UK [David Dornan]. There's nothing shady.
But what happened was it became very clear to us that there was no distinction in people's minds between adware - which is legitimate - and spyware. So we did something unprecedented which was we turned around to our shareholders and we shut down all our revenues. We weren't sued, we weren't pressed by anyone, we just said "this is not consistent with the company's core objectives".
So PeopleOnPage was the original toolbar. When we took that public we were 121Media. When we decided to shut that down we became Phorm.