It is fascinating the divergent paths we often take - and what they lead to.

Take, for instance, Vincent Ryan. In the late 1970s he was studying genetics at Trinity College Dublin. But he became so fascinated with the computers doing the number-crunching that he eventually diverted his efforts into studying IT.

More than 20 years later, Ryan is a quintessential IT veteran, having worked with some of the State's most well-known IT behemoths such as ICL, Digital and Compaq.

A few years ago, however, he decided to take a different path yet again and get involved in a start-up company. Despite not being a household name even now - like some of his former employers - that company has become an Irish success story on a worldwide scale.

Changingworlds is probably not known by many people outside the IT and telecoms industry. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland use its technology every day as they access their mobile phone or other mobile device to see what is happening in business, politics, sports and so on.

With more people accessing the mobile data internet thanks to 3G, Changingworlds's portal technology helps them get to the content they want without having to wade through a sea of irrelevant data.

Ryan, who joined the company in 2001 and is now a director and its vice-president of sales and marketing, describes Changingworlds's technology as someone handing you the books you want when you walk through the library door.

"Personalisation technology addresses the information gap, particularly on the internet. It can be hard enough to get relevant content on the web using an engine such as Google, so imagine how much harder that is on a small mobile device."

Changingworlds's personalisation technology profiles the interaction between the user, the portal and the internet, and restructures the portal so that when the user visits, information more relevant to that user is readily available.

"Our raison d'etre is to make it easy for people to use the mobile data internet and that helps the operators serve the needs of their customers and improve their profits."

Starting as a campus company in UCD from research carried out at the Smart Media Institute by Prof Barry Smith and Paul Cotter, Changingworlds now employs just over 90 people and can boast 40 clients worldwide, encompassing Europe, the US, Asia, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

Changingworlds's main client in Ireland is Vodafone. The mobile operator has been instrumental in backing the company from the start and introducing it to the overseas market; 12 of the 40 worldwide clients are Vodafone operators.

Indeed, Changingworlds is a leading example of how a SME can mine a niche and grow outside the boundaries of its country of birth.

"Yes, we had to go international," says Ryan. "And we had to decide what was going to be the international currency and language we'd use. And that was data and research. We conducted lots of research and worked closely with Vodafone.

"They allowed us to use proof points to show that the technology was successful. So we were able to say, 'look we have a reference in Ireland with Vodafone and we've increased their revenues by X'. So we were able to go with this valid, workable and scalable solution into other markets. People aren't fascinated by your PowerPoint presentations - they're far more interested if you can prove what you've done in another location."

Ryan believes that the mobile market is still strong at the moment, despite the saturation of product in many European and worldwide countries including our own. He says developments such as 3G will whet the business and consumer appetites in terms of capabilities of mobile devices.

"In the developed markets, the content space will be huge, especially for downloads, 3G and other technologies going on within that," he says.

"Look at the development of TV. For the first few years, it was niche thing - it took 20 years before it really became ubiquitous. I can't predict the killer application that will occur from a data perspective on mobile but you have mobile TV being potentially enormous, mobile advertising is currently enormous and specialised community sites such as MySpace have a huge following. And they're the things, bit by bit, that will drive usage, revenue and also drive additional new ideas in the market."

Looking ahead, it could be a case of "back to the future" for Changingworlds as it plans to revisit digital television (DTV), an area it first looked at when the company was incubating in UCD. "We started off in the DTV space, personalising the electronic programme guides for set-top boxes," says Ryan.

"There's every reason that where we came from is where the mobile industry will want to get to and obviously the TV industry will want to get to as well. And what I'll say is: we are looking at it strongly and there's huge potential in the mobile TV space and the general DTV space for our technology. We showed it four to five years ago and now we believe the time is really ripe."