To the uninitiated, the Internet signifies a daunting labyrinth of information, ranging from the fascinating to the downright useless. To establish a reputation as a quality Internet company, skills in door-todoor evangelism rank high on the list. As the big players carry their real world skills and reputation into Cyberspace, the smaller online companies are fading away.

The one Irish Internet services company that refuses to go away, however, is Nua. This week it secured its online future with a £5.3 million investment from Telecom Eireann, in return for a 20 per cent stake in Nua and a 90 per cent holding in Local Ireland a Nua offshoot with big ambitions.

The investment marks Telecom's first serious foray into commercial Internet space. The partner it has chosen has been featuring ever more prominently on the Internet since it established in 1995. Nua has managed to establish an international reputation over a very short period. And yet ask anyone what it does, and you will have difficulty receiving a definitive answer.

In ways, this reflects the persona of Nua's founder and chief executive officer, Gerry McGovern. A self-professed "culchie" from north Longford, with a degree in marketing, a penchant for writing and a reflective passion for the Internet, Mr McGovern is an unlikely guru.

Soft spoken to the point of shyness, he subscribes heavily to the "far from that I was reared" school of thought. His unassuming manner belies a rapid fire intelligence that struggles to make sense of the fast-changing environment in which he operates.

Mr McGovern originally established Nua in September 1995, with the goal of harnessing the communicating powers of the Internet and somehow converting it into a commercially viable business.

"I just knew it was incredible. I'd always wanted to be around an historic event where things would change substantially, and to me that was the Internet. Here was something that made the computer a communicator and brought the human into the equation."

The then freelance rock journalist, poet and writer approached Anton O Lachtnain, a friend he had made through the Internet Eireann news group; and Niall O'Sullivan whom he had worked with for ex-Liverpool player, Craig Johnson, designing the Adidas Predator football boot one of the most successful sports boots ever made.

He put to them the idea of the Internet as a communicative medium with huge potential for information manipulation and extrapolation.

In particular, Mr McGovern saw the Internet as an ideal vehicle for disseminating local area information, which tends to get "trapped" locally and never move outside its immediate geographical area. He believed if this information could be structured, categorised and made readily accessible, it would open up significant revenue generating opportunities. This was the genesis of the idea of a Local Ireland Internet site, offering a gateway to information on all things Irish.

With a personal loan of £5,000, Mr McGovern started Nua from home, but soon had to put the Local Ireland idea on the back burner. In order to survive they did anything they were offered which included building and designing Websites for companies. To develop a loyal following on the Nua site, a free weekly newsletter, New Thinking, was emailed to subscribers. Featuring 500 words on the Internet and where it might be heading, it soon gained a lot of credibility and international attention.

Today, Nua has 130,000 subscribers each week to its free newsletters, Nua Internet Surveys, New Thinking, Making It Work and Blather. Mr McGovern describes them as Nua's marketing budget because they have brought such traffic to the Nua site.

Now, Nua is widely referred to for its surveys on Internet usage, which provide demographics, trends and analysis of where the Internet is going. Though crudely measured, the surveys are a combination of international online surveys and reasonable judgment sense that comes from monitoring the global Internet environment over the last two years.

When Nua won the World Wide Web Business Achievement award from the European Commission in 1996, its founders began to feel the benefits of a wage-free 18 months. Enfor Scientific invested £60,000 in the company, and Nua began to expand. It now employs 34 people and hopes to increase this figure to 100 by 2002.

Nua soon became a consultancy firm for companies eager to get online. At any one time Nua provides consultancy to four or five large companies it is currently working with Metro Toledo, Thomas Publishing, Lucent Technology, and Trintech.

In the last year, Mr McGovern has been able to redirect his attentions to the original brainchild, Local Ireland. Over the last 18 months, Telecom has put about £400,000 into the initiative, and Nua has invested £500,000 worth of software. The latest Telecom investment will provide a further £4 million towards the site.

Loosely modelled on US "gateway" sites, Citysearch and Microsoft's Sidewalk, Local Ireland is probably the first European equivalent working on a national basis. Mr McGovern says: "A central objective of Local Ireland is to become the place on the Internet that people think of first when looking for anything to do with Ireland and Irishness. Local Ireland provides the utilities of cyberspace, and then lets commerce and communities get on with doing what they do best."

Local Ireland plans to release software to allow home users, community and sports groups to transfer material directly on to its Website. Last month, the site registered 500,000 page accesses, and its vocal@local chat area boasts 76 discussion boards.

All the information on the site is filed in 6,000 categories searchable on a national, county and local level. Because the information is categorised before it goes online it is readily retrievable more than any existing search engines can deliver. By making information easier to access and products easier to find, Mr McGovern believes this model is saleable to other countries on a franchise basis.

"I am certain every country needs an information architecture structure. A country's Internet architecture in 10 years will be judged on the same basis as its infrastructure."

Now, Telecom's investment has given Nua the boost it needs to launch its commercial communities on a grand scale, and Telecom has said it will leave the operation of the project entirely up to Nua. Mr McGovern is also attracted to the notion that Local Ireland will open the Internet up to all members of the community.

"I come from a townland where every house will die out. After growing up in a dying rural area, I would be very happy to help in some small way towards regenerating these areas."

As a 40.5 per cent shareholder in Nua, Mr McGovern stands to gain much from further alliances with big companies. Nua is already planning a joint venture with a major US online media company to expand and source its Internet analysis operations. It is currently talking to a systems integration company about making Websites more central to the business process.