Byline: DAVID COHEN
OH GOD, we're under attack!" exclaims Benjamin Cohen, still in his pyjamas, as he hunches over his computer outside his bedroom in Hackney.
"Some nutter claiming to be a Mac revenge-God has hacked into our system.
He's trying to shut down our website, to punish me for my fight with Apple."
An hour later, having successfully fought off the amateur hacker, Benjamin Cohen, 22, the internet whiz-kid who became a teenage millionaire sensation when he founded the website SoJewish.com, emerges - now dressed in jeans and socks - to discuss his real war, with computer giant Apple.
This week, Cohen is launching a High Court battle against Apple to try to overturn a ruling that would see him lose ownership of a website address - itunes.co.uk - that he innocently acquired in November 2000. He describes how Apple's Chicago-based lawyers, Baker & McKenzie, put the squeeze on him when they called him out of the blue in November last year, and demanded that he surrender the itunes.co.uk domain name. Apple had launched iTunes in the UK in June.
"Apple offered me a miserly $5,000 [[pounds sterling]2,680] for the address, but negotiations broke down when I argued it was worth between [pounds sterling]50,000 and [pounds sterling]100,000," says Cohen. The dispute was referred to Nominet, the registry for UK internet names, which this month ruled in Apple's favour that Cohen should hand back the disputed name.
But Cohen, showing characteristic grit, is refusing to give in. "I am applying to the High Court for a judicial review of the dispute with Apple. I feel the procedure Nominet uses to settle disputes is biased against small companies. It's not just about the money any more. It's the principle. I'm standing up for the little guy."
Indeed, at just 5ft 5in tall, Cohen is quite literally the little guy.
Hailed as Britain's first self-made teenage millionaire, he was still at school - his teeth in braces - when his innovative-SoJewish website was valued at [pounds sterling]5 million. He would later also launch the more controversial website, Hunt4Porn.com, Europe's first and largest "adult" search engine.
But it was when he was just 16 that Cohen suddenly found himself hailed by the media as "the American Dream slap bang in the middle of Kentish Town" and was whisked off for a private audience with Prince Charles at St James's Palace.
He was still at school when a limousine arrived to take him to dine in the Royal Suite at Heathrow airport with Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who had diverted his flight to London in order to discuss a business deal with Cohen.
"Suddenly I get a call to say that Netanyahu is interested in becoming chairman of my company. I passed on it, thank you very much, but the best bit," he laughs, "was that Netanyahu thought my dad was my driver."
Those were heady days, but the five years since have been a rollercoaster, in which Cohen lost his millions in the internet bust but then gradually rebuilt his fortune, he says, to just over [pounds sterling]1 million today.
It's hard to believe that the fellow is still just 22. What has he learned?
"At heart," Cohen grins boyishly, biting his nails like a nervous teenager, "I'm a clean-living Jewish boy from a typically neurotic Jewish family. My mother phones me at least four times a day to see I'm all right."
Cohen grew up in Elstree, north London, the eldest of three children to middleclass parents, Richard and Rochelle.
His entrepreneurial streak is inherited from both sides of the family, he says.
His maternal grandfather was the MD of Ladbrokes, and his other great influence is his father, a successful solicitor and CEO of a software company.
AGED five, Cohen set up a stall in front of his house where he sold lollipops, bought with his pocket money, turning a 20p profit. At seven, he printed a crude leaflet flogging "cut-price mops" which he stuffed into letters his father sent to clients about their wills.
But it was when he fell ill - with glandular fever - and was confined to bed with ME, the chronic fatigue illness known as "yuppie flu", that paradoxically his life began to take off. He spotted a yawning gap in the market for a Jewish listings website, and the idea of SoJewish was born.
Returning to do his A-levels at the Jews Free School, then based in Camden, Cohen tested his fledgling SoJewish idea on his classmates.
"They thought it was crap," he says, "but that only made me more determined to prove them wrong."
It cost him [pounds sterling]150 to set up SoJewish, which he modelled on a website targeting the Asian community. He offered listings of kosher restaurants and synagogues, a dating service and religious advice penned by a local rabbi.
"It took off immediately through word of mouth. We had two million hits in seven months. One day, my father got a call from The Jewish Chronicle. They wanted to know who was behind this amazing website that was getting more traffic than their own newspaper. When it came out that it was run by a teenager from his north London bedroom, and that a City investment bank was looking to float the company for [pounds sterling]5 million, I was deluged. The next day I had every national newspaper at my doorstep."
Trevor McDonald's ITV Tonight crew arrived to film him at school, while the BBC followed him for eight months for their Trouble at the Top series. "Back then, I was obnoxious and rude, especially to journalists who tried to offer advice. I thought I was really a big deal. And I was - I was Ben Cohen, the dotcom sensation."
At school, his friends began to pester him for loans. But the truth was that SoJewish, a free site, hadn't yet earned Cohen a penny in hard cash.
Before he was out of his teens, his company had merged with the London
Jewish News (a free Jewish newspaper) and was subsequently reversed into Totally plc. For a few days, Cohen was the youngest-ever UK director of a publicly quoted company and his shares were worth [pounds sterling]310,000. But by the time he was allowed to sell them a year later, the internet sector had collapsed and he recouped just [pounds sterling]40,000.
Cohen used it to make a downpayment on his Hackney flat. He also set about rethinking the strategy of his newly formed private company, CyberBritain, focusing on ideas that generated revenue. In the meantime, he built up a small property portfolio worth [pounds sterling]500,000, he says, and completed a BA in philosophy and ethics at Kings College, London.
His newfound interest in ethics caused a dilemma. He had launched Hunt4Porn.
com, Europe's largest "adult" search engine, which attracted 15 million hits a month. "I had a choice - I could have made a packet, but that meant using it to sell porn. I didn't want to be tarred as a porn baron, so I sold the site, undeveloped, for just [pounds sterling]25,000."
Cohen's latest business idea, the online shopping venture Quick-Quid.com, which offers "cash-back" discounts to internet shoppers, was launched five months ago. He hopes it will make him [pounds sterling]2 million a year.
But, for now, he has his spat with Apple to concentrate his mind.
Cohen says that when he registered the domain name, itunes.co.uk (i for internet) to house a music internet business he was developing in November 2000, Apple hadn't invented the iPod. "I wasn't to know it would become the biggest-selling brand of 2005."
Apple, which has declined to comment for this article, boasts sales of more than 100 million songs worldwide through their virtual iTunes Music Store. It is irked that visitors who type in itunes.co.uk - instead of iTunes.com - get forwarded to Cohen's online shopping company, losing Apple business.
"Apple made a bad business mistake - it launched a brand without securing all the internet addresses.
Now it's trying to push me around.
"I've learned that I'm not motivated by money. I love to innovate. And to prove people wrong. I want to show that a multinational can't do whatever it wants."
Those in the know say Cohen is as determined as they come - and definitely one to watch. Or as Apple might ruefully reflect, one to keep an i on.
