FishMS

Ventures, they say, are only 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration so naturally I, like everyone else, wants to be doing the 5% rather than the 95%. About a year ago, I was sitting in a fish shop in Rosebank mall on my own (because Caron was overseas) ordering supper and I had never heard of the line fish. Being quite keen not to deplete fish stocks to the level of extinction and having read an article by SASSI I was quite keen on following their list but I simply can't remember 10 things by rote let alone 20 or 30. Sitting there cursing my memory, or lack thereof, it occurred to me that it would be really cool if I could just SMS the name of the fish to a number and it would send me the information. Hence was born FishMS of which I can claim only two things, the original idea and the name - everything else which as I have mentioned is the 95%, belongs to Tony and Barry as well as SASSI. Tony for the actual development work which wasn't trivial as well as operational responsiblity and Barry for financing, philosophical backing and encouragement and finally SASSI who have done and continue to do an excellent job of the publicity.

Tony came through the other day with an arbitrary magazine with some recipes in the back. One of the recipes was for fish and next to the recipe were suggested altenatives to the one in the actual recipe since it happened to be an orange category fish. In addition, the FishMS number was shown with a brief description of what to do to check whether the fish you are buying is endangered or not. Seeing this, and I don't think SASSI had anything to do with it, was really one of those warm fuzzy moments when one briefly feels that the little people in the world really can make a difference.

FishMS has now had numerous articles in quite a diverse number of publications and there is even a movie about it which actually won an award of some sort. You can check it out on youtube at FishMS