Vodafone is a classic British success story. What started off as a small company with fewer than 50 employees working out of a single building in Newbury, has grown into a multi-national giant employing over 71,000 people around the world. When the first UK mobile call was made on 1 January, 1985, it was via Vodafone's network. Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength. Over the years, Vodafone has pioneered many new mobile technologies. In 1991, they launched the first UK GSM network. 17 years later, GSM is the global standard for mobile phones, used by over 3 billion people. In 2003, they launched Vodafone live!, a multimedia portal service. Within six months, over a million Vodafone customers were watching videos, downloading songs and checking the latest sports scores, all via their mobile phones. By 2006, that number had grown to 10 million.