"That took a little bit of effort to build and we still have four full-time programmers working on it for version updates," Ahchow said. "Having CRM available on a 3G mobile phone is promising, but we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves."

Service Central is now starting to work on new functionality so people can identify friends and contacts and a system to refer preferred suppliers to others.

Ahchow said the marketplace can also be applied to mortgage brokers and financial planners, but business services like cleaning and security are quite popular.

The developers are now adding more AJAX-style features to the Web interface and implementing high-availability on the backend servers.