Many years ago, in sunny Sydney, Alicia found herself organising yet another group holiday for friends. This as usual involved weeks of researching on the internet, discussions with friends, loads of emails back and forth, before a decision could be made and the holiday organised.

She found that holiday accommodation was not the only type of decision that involved in depth internet research: buying a TV or car, finding a place to live with roommates, choosing the venue for a party' these all resulted in frustrating efforts to manage the options she found, get feedback from friends or family, and then communicate the results to everyone else.

So, in mid-2006, Alicia decided to do something about it, and created Skimbit. She envisaged a simple elegant tool that could help anything with their online research and decision-making tasks. A tool that didn't force you to be overly social or to buy anything. A tool that was a pleasure to use, and could be used for almost anything. Alicia's goal was to create a service that made busy people's lives a little simpler.

Then, in mid-2007, Alicia moved Skimbit to not-so-sunny London, expanded the business and launched Skim-in-a-box, a powerful platform that can create customised and integrated instances of Skimbit for other websites. For example, its perfect for wedding, travel, home improvement, baby or fashion websites that want to offer a skimming tool for their own users. We also have some exciting new developments we are about to launch, so watch this space!

We are a young company, but an ambitious one. We have loads of ideas on how to improve our site, and are looking to grow quickly in the next year, so please feel free to be part of our community and part of our journey. We would love to have you with us!

The first time Joe met Alicia she was standing on a ping pong table. That was 12 years ago. Since then they have been firm friends, and when Skimbit moved to London, Joe came on as business partner and Marketing Director.

With years of internet marketing, project management, product management, and record industry (very vital) experience, Joe was perfect for Skimbit, plus his habit of wearing flip-flops to the office and his eclectic music collection made him a welcome addition to the office.

Matthieu and Alicia met in Sydney, in a job interview. Alicia was going on a 6 week holiday and had a week to train someone to take over her job of running the entire ad management platform for one of Australia's largest online publishers. Matthieu stepped up to the plate, and not only learnt everything in a week, but by the time Alicia came back from holidays, found herself wonderfully redundant.

So when Alicia heard that Matthieu was leaving Sydney to return to Europe, she snapped him up. He now runs Skimbit, keeps everyone in line, invents new solutions, and religiously has a Diet Coke at 4pm every day.

Ciarán stood out from the crowd by calling Alicia up and expressing how much he would like to work for Skimbit. He then turned out to be perfectly suited for the job. How could Alicia ever have said no?

Since joining, Ciaran has brought order, process, and quality into Skimbit, and regularly has disputes with Alicia over whether words that are not proper nouns should be spelt with a capital letter (obviously they shouldn't).

The newest member of the Skimbit family, but already making a fabulous splash. He is known for having the coolest shoes in the office (he buys ultra-cool ones from eBay) and for being the only person in the universe to use the Opera browser (or so it seems).