Poacher turns gamekeeper to tap into niche

At 16, John Beckett developed Ryanair's website. Now 25, the entrepreneur has built up a small empire. Caroline Madden reports.

John Beckett's big break came in the late 90s when Ryanair picked his web design company, Adrenalin Systems, to develop the Ryanair.com website. Together with his business partner, Beckett not only created the website in three weeks but also created a stir in the media. Why? He was a 16-year-old schoolboy at the time.

Before signing up Adrenalin Systems, Ryanair had been getting "ridiculous" quotes of £3.5 million from other website designers, says Beckett, who charged just £20,000. Was this a fair deal, or did the no-frills airline take advantage?

"Twenty grand is twenty grand when you're in school," Beckett says. "Don't get me wrong, Ryanair got a bargain . . . We got so much publicity after it as well. I mean you couldn't pay for the publicity that we got."

After such an auspicious start, it's not surprising that at the tender age of 25, Beckett has built up a mini-empire, with almost half a dozen ventures on the go.

His main business is ByamSys, a spin-off from Adrenalin. The biometrics solutions start-up is already showing so much promise that it earned him the title of Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Shell LiveWire awards last month.

"A few years ago myself and Edwin [his chief engineer] sat down and said, everyone is doing websites, and software outsourcing, what can we do to move into a new niche?" Beckett recalls.

"We decided biometrics was an area that was very much up and coming."

ByamSys develops fingerprint scanning devices which can be used to identify individuals uniquely. The company's main product is TruancyGuard which, as the name suggests, monitors the attendance of students. It offers additional functions such as sending texts to parents if their child hasn't turned up on time for school. The device is now being used in eight educational institutions in Ireland, including exclusive private schools such as Mount Anville in Dublin. It has also enjoyed worldwide exposure, featuring on the Discovery Channel's Beyond Tomorrow programme.

The company has just signed a deal with Shaw Scientific, which supplies resources and equipment to schools, to distribute its system. "Shaw Scientific are committed to making a certain number of sales," a significant milestone for Beckett, given Shaw's existing client base.

"We envisage quite rapid expansion," he says. "We want to concentrate on getting our name associated with our niche first of all and then from there move outward." The system has hundreds of potential applications, he says, and is particularly suited to monitoring attendance in workplaces that traditionally relied on swipe card systems.

Beckett also has his eye on the Middle East, where he has built up a lot of contacts through consultancy work. "They're very security conscious and not particularly price sensitive so once we get our ship in order here we're going to move into the UK very aggressively but also into the Middle East - Jordan in particular," he says.

"We've already made certain inroads in the UK - we've met with the Department of Education in the UK who've endorsed our system."

Beckett's software developers are based in Malaysia, which keeps costs low. He expects that by the end of this year the headcount there could exceed 30.

The company received a boost last year when it was accepted on to Malaysia's prestigious Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) programme.

Getting onto the MSC programme was difficult, he says, but was worth the effort, as membership carries huge benefits such as a 10-year corporation tax-free period.

So the truancy prevention system is showing great potential, and the days of answering "anseo" to tedious roll calls may well be numbered. But how does Beckett reconcile himself with TruancyGuard's Orwellian undertones? "You might say it's somewhat Big Brother, but the Education (Welfare) Act means that schools are obliged to know where students are at any time. It's not being Big Brother, it's allowing schools to fulfil their obligations under that Act."

However, the irony of developing a system that he himself would have hated using when in school has not escaped him. "Did I ever skip school? I skipped an enormous amount of school. The hunted has become the hunter!"

He may have missed a lot of school, but Beckett's youth was anything but misspent. "I wasn't sitting on a beach drinking cider, I was working," he points out. "I always had a couple of hare-brained schemes on the go."

And although he's a self-taught software developer, website designer and all-round IT whizz kid, he couldn't be further from the stereotype of a geeky programmer. Personable, articulate and refreshingly enthusiastic, he is extremely focused yet is still managing to have a ball. "I'll only take things on if I think they're going to make money and they're going to be a bit of a laugh."

As well as immersing himself in the world of technology, he is also dabbling in the property sector. He has set up a property development business in Hungary with some friends, and they have also bought seven properties around Mountjoy Square ripe for redevelopment.

Yet another of Beckett's "hare-brained schemes" that's going from strength to strength is buyireland.com, which sells 1sq ft plots of land in Roscommon as novelty gifts to Irish Americans. The company scored a recent coup when a distiller bought up 2,000 plots to use for a St Patrick's Day promotion.

When he's not running his many business interests, he can be found flying a two-seater plane or indulging in his other passion - sailing.

He matter-of-factly remarks that he aims to buy a yacht before he turns 30, which would sound a tad unrealistic coming from the average 25-year-old. But then Beckett's career so far has been anything but average. Watch this space.