I don’t know, being scooped on my own story by a printed publication. The shame! If you don’t know, I will be leaving GCap in April to go it alone with a few of my own ventures. I handed in my notice just after Christmas after having a long think about what I wanted to do.

GCap’s been a great employer for the last six years and I’ve been able to work on some excellent projects and interfere at the highest level! Being able to play with someone else’s train set has been lots of fun, especially when those train sets include Classic FM and XFM.

When people ask me what I do at GCap, my recent answer is to say “I help people in the company do things they wouldn’t normally do”. This might be something like renewing Classic FM’s licence, launching a podcast system, creating a children’s radio station or just building the world’s largest local multiplex network. Did you see what I did there?

Anyway, the ‘helping’ bit has always been the most fun. Giving some knowledge to help some really talented people do interesting things has been the most rewarding part of my time here. So I felt why not do something similar but on a wider scale? I’m going to be doing a couple of things, but the one I’m excited about is called Authentic Buzz and it will help companies develop platforms and presence in the new media world. At the simple end, if someone knows that MySpace is important or that they should really YouTube but aren’t sure how to pitch it right or integrate it into their operations then they can give us a buzz and we’ll give them a hand. As part of this there’s a new website authenticbuzz.com which will track some of the interesting developments in new media, so keep an eye on that and subscribe to the RSS Feed. Oh, and if you don’t know what an RSS feed is, then give us a call and we’ll definitely be able to help you out…

Leaving GCap was tough as I’m a massive believer in what we do here and especially because there’s going to be some interesting developments that would be fun to be a part of. When I handed in my notice they did say some very nice things to me and offered me some fantastic opportunities however I just felt it was time to have a go at doing something else.

But more importantly this does mean that it will be harder for me to get you all free tickets for XFM gigs and shockingly I’ll have to pay my own phone bill from now on.