OPEN shirt, light tan and pinstripe suit: Patrick Rainsford has all the mannerisms of the typical, restless serial entrepreneur, mouth in free flow, hardwired to brain. But there is also a selfdeprecating sense of humour and a refreshing air of mischief about him. When he talks about `disruptive technology`, it sounds like fun rather than sinister manoeuvring. His company, emuse technologies, is Rainsford's latest disruptive `child`, one of the hot Irish software stories of the year and a stock market candidate. He and Peter Conlon have already sold one of their businesses for $100m (€78m). Rainsford has invested in mobile technology and content firms Sirens Worldwide and i-Rights, and in Tune Tribes, a company that offers downloads of unsigned rock bands. The serial entrepreneur thing, Rainsford says, `is a congenital disease`. `I love playing at the edge of different problems and doing things that are disruptive, taking something and doing it in a different way.` emuse is special. Five years ago, Rainsford saw that digital television was going forth and multiplying, with hundreds of channels emerging across digital platforms, cable, terrestrial, satellite and broadband. As television fragmented, so a threat rose in the form of the internet, robbing and pillaging the riches of television advertising.

VITAL STATISTICS Age: 49 Home: Dublin 4 Family: Married with two daughters Hobbies: Working out, jazz, wine fanatic Favourite film: Chinatown Favourite book: Money by Martin Amis WORKING DAY I SUPPOSE I average 10 hours a day. Generally I wouldn't get home until late at night because we are working across different time zones. What do I do with time off? Sleep mostly. I'd use a BlackBerry, but I'm not a `crackberry` addict. I love gadgets but get bored with them easily. I probably see them for what they are. I do all my work on all my ideas with pen and paper.

For the Dublin entrepreneur, television's redemption lies in `interactive` advertising. emuse technologies has just landed a five-year deal with ITV to offer a one-stop shop for interactive advertisers, the first of a plethora of deals ready to roll in Britain and in a range of other countries, from New Zealand to Spain.

Already viewers are pressing red buttons on digital remote controls to use emuse's technology to win free trips to the World Cup with Budweiser, or to reserve test drives with local Honda dealers.

`What we are doing is giving traditional media the teeth to compete with emerging media,` says Rainsford. `We are helping television fight back.`

Rainsford is half of one of the most formidable partnerships in Irish enterprise. While a senior lecturer at Dublin Institute of Technology in 1986, he set up Lightband Communications with the help of Conlon, a Leitrim accountant and executive at the Industrial Development Authority of Ireland.

The company sold video systems to share-dealing rooms, but it hit tough times with the stock market crash of 1987. When it was wound down, Rainsford dusted himself off and with Conlon set up MV Technology, which was sold to the American company Agilent for $100m in 2001.

A year before that sale, Conlan set up Xsil, a highly profitable equipment manufacturer, and Rainsford established emuse. Conlon is an investor in emuse, Rainsford is an investor in Xsil, and the two men coinvest in a string of other companies through an investment vehicle, Morgan Ventures.

The men `split up, on a dayto-day basis, so we could cover more ground`, says Rainsford, but after 20 years they are still very much working partners. `We know how each other thinks,` says Rainsford.

emuse was a labour of love. Rainsford's first job after leaving UCD was as an engineer with the BBC, and the industry has a huge attraction for him. At the dawn of the millennium, he saw two problems emerging. Companies had no way of gauging a response to expensive brand awareness campaigns on television, whereas they could with internet advertising. The other was the array of technology used to send television signals into people's homes.

`There were software firms that made software to allow interactive advertisements to work on satellite, but not on cable or terrestrial; software that worked in America, but not Britain or Europe,` he says.

For global advertisers especially, the cost and complexity was killing interactive television advertising at birth. Rainsford's vision was to `unify all the technology` into one system that could be sold to broadcasters globally as a service, rather than a software product.

Reality, in the form of the September 11 attacks in 2001 and then the worst advertising slump in 35 years, interrupted Rainsford's vision. Chaos in the industry, typified by the collapse of ITV's ONdigital, contributed further to instability.

Rainsford and Conlan's pockets were deep enough to weather the storm and, of the €16m that has been invested in the company, the two men have contributed €9m. They have put €25m into Xsil. The funding allowed emuse to keep testing its service through the world.

emuse also won the contract to run its technology for the red-button voting on I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! and The Great British Quiz, for which it was nominated for a technology Bafta.

Rainsford now believes he has `the right model at the right time in the right industry`.

`We are the same as an eBay or Google or Yahoo,` he explains. `Nobody buys Google version 4.0. We provide a service that is hidden to our users, and that's the way it should be.`

emuse will plan, design and deploy interactive campaigns. All responses to advertisements are collated by emuse and passed back to the broadcaster and then the advertiser. The operation carries just 70 staff and most of them are engineers. The technology does the work.

The deal with ITV was hugely significant. Over the past two years, ITV has run more than 500 interactive campaigns, and interactive campaigns are up 80% this year.

`There is no going back. Interactivity is what the internet can deliver, and it is what advertisers want.`

Rainsford plans a frenzy of deals with broadcasters and advertisers. `We are now entering a high-growth phase. An IPO [initial public offering] is something that we are going to consider. We are going to grow as fast as we can and take stock at the end of the year.`

A media conglomerate is the most likely trade buyer. `We are an advertising company first, not a technology company,` says Rainsford, before adding that any purchaser `would have to have a pretty big cheque book`.

Besides, Rainsford looks to be having too much fun to sell out. He believes that the emuse interactive technology is something global that will `live on after I'm gone`. That appeals to him. And he is already thinking of his next business venture `before I get too senile`.

© The Sunday Times, London,14 May 200. This article may not be copied or reproduced without the prior permission of the copyright holders.