In their case the something was the ability to watch the Republic of Ireland squad take on Holland in 1990 World Cup play in London.

So they hired out a dusty room and offered punters the chance to checkl out the match for £10. Sixteen years later, they took on Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB for packages of rights to screen English Premiership football matches. . . and won, to much shock and awe in the City of London and even here at home.

But there's no question that the two lads are now players in a global game, distributing their content across cable, satellite, free-to-air brodcast with TV3 and several different brands of internet from IPTV to streaming downloads on broadband via BT and Eircom. They're worldbeaters and they're our winners for 2006.

BEST PODCAST The Persuaders Alex Gibson is more a master of the quick-change role-swap than Superman. He's a lecturer at DIT.

No, he's the host of a weekly radio show on Anna Livia. No, he's the presenter of The Media Show on the City Channel.

No, he's taking his radio show and turning it into what is to our mind the most successful podcast to come out of Ireland, offering access to the best marketing brains on the island of Ireland -- The Persuaders, sponsored by AFA O'Meara.

See it all at www. persuadersonline. com.

BEST BUSINESS IDEA The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson The editor of Wired magazine probably didn't know that he would wind up writing the economics text that suddenly made internet economics make sense.

In one line, the Long Tail argues that the internet has reduced the cost of "shelf space" to near zero, which means that for the first time, more niche content than ever before can find a market.