I was fortunate to visit Costa Rica recently. I was there for a couple of weeks, touring around the country, recharging the batteries. I was in a group of 10 and we travelled from the Caribbean coast to the Pacific, discovering Costa Rica’s lush green rainforests, white sand beaches and amazing abundance of wildlife along the way. They say that Costa Rica represents 0.1% of the world's land mass (it's the same size as Belgium) and 5% of the world's biodiversity. As you can imagine, there were many tales and photos to share. One friend, Ant, was updating his Facebook profile every other day - you'd be surprised, but wherever we went there was a decent internet connection. He took a notebook with him - they are really quite cool and good value at £325. Give me one of these over the iPad any day.

Several of the group wrote postcards and we were all amazed that place after place, we couldn't find a postbox. Of course, by this stage, I had already written and sent personalised postcards using Carderoo. Several of the group also used the site to send a few tio their loved onmes - thankfully, they all liked the idea and execution.Eventually, at La Fortuna, we found a post office, but this was closed for 2 days, and we had to wait for the 9th day to find a postbox, at Monteverde. In summary, it was 10 times easier to find a decent internet connection than a postbox.

You can imagine my delight when I received a phone call from Richard Tyler, Enterprise Editor, at the Telegraph, asking me to feature in an article about new start-ups thinking global. I was delighted to be asked, and here's the story:

I feel bad. One of my best friends has just had a baby. I bought a congratulations card and wrote a lovely note. Then the card sat on the mantlepiece for two weeks. First it was the address: the pain of digging the latest one out of the handful of different address books I own. That done, it’s the lack of stamp. Pathetic really. The wildcat Royal Mail strikes didn’t even come into my thinking. Yesterday, I handed the card to my friend as we met to mark his eldest’s third birthday. It was OK, but I still felt bad. I’m not very good at sending cards, even though I instinctively want to.

Holiday postcards are even worse. I buy one for my Gran but only send it on the last dayl. I am, I discover Carderoo.com's target market.

Serial entrepreneur Rob Eberstein, 36, is launching his latest venture on Monday. While existing sites like Moonpig.com could solve my greeting card problems – it lets you design bespoke cards and send them for £2.99 – Caderoo is the easy way to send postcards to friends and family from overseas.

Eberstein explains: “The vision behind Carderoo is the frustration of sending postcards. You have to find them, find the stamp, then a post box. It’s invariably at the end of the holiday and they invariably turn up after you’ve got back.”

This isn’t a problem for people who delight in writing postcards. But for those that find it difficult to turn their good intentions into action, they can now log on, upload one of their own photographs or access a library of images from Flickr or Wikimedia, chose their typing font, write their message and the address and then press send.

A hard copy postcard is then sent from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world – initially printing will be done in London but the plan is to hire local printers in other English speaking countries. The price, if you buy 10 postcards, is 99p. If a virtual card will suffice, it can be sent for free to Twitter followers via the Twitpic application, or via email.

“The real confidence I get is if you look at the greeting market in total it’s £1.3bn a year in the UK. The percentage that’s print on demand, like Moonpig, is 1pc of the market. That’s forecast to grow to 10pc over the next few years,” says Eberstein. “We think there’s a really nice market there.”

The ‘we’ includes Julian Guppy, the chief technology officer and former colleague at Zebtab.com – an application that delivers news and video to computer desktops – that was heralded as a bright prospect but has been knocked sideways by the collapse in advertising. It is now in administration.

Eberstein was co-founder of Zebtab and says he has learnt a lot from the experience. “We were getting millions of ad impressions a month [on Zebtab] but in terms of revenue it was nothing. We put in three years of our lives into that. The big lesson is the revenue model.

“Carderoo has a very simple revenue model. We have a really good team; the market looks like being a really great market; it’s fun, which is great; social media is taking off; and it’s got the potential to grow quickly.”

Refreshingly, he’s open about the post-mortem on Zebtab: “Was it really service a consumer need? If a product is withdrawn and dies, do people miss it? If I am honest I do not think we were meeting a need. Twitter came along and did a lot of what we were doing and that was it.”

“Technology moves very, very quickly. You go through business school and you are told these things. For whatever reason you have this dream and vision and everybody gets really excited and says what a great idea. You can’t give up. You have to keep going until it collapses.

He adds: “But now people are being much more realistic. You have to meet a need and have to make it pay.”

Carderoo is supporting Englishman Oli Broom, who's going to be cycling 25,000km to the first Ashes test match in Brisbane, on a bike with a cricket bat, all for charity.

I first heard about Oli's trip through The Corridor, a cricket blog written by Will Luke. Will connected me to Oli and I immediately thought that Carderoo should help out by providing Oli with a load of real postcards and a way to send postcards by email and to his Twitter account. We met in a pub in Marylebone a few weeks ago after he had just left his job and he's a great guy, full of energy, fearless adventurer and above all else, a slightly barking mad Englishman. I have always wanted to travel London to Cape Town and was fascinated by his routes through Sudan, before heading off by ferry to Mumbai. 

In short, Oli's expedition has 3 aims:

1. To cycle from Lord’s to The Gabba in time to see England play Australia in the first Ashes Test Match of the 2010/11 series. I’m hoping to have friends / colleagues join me for certain legs of the journey – quite a few have expressed an interest.

2. To raise £10 for every kilometre that I cycle (so about £250,000). Funds raised are to be divided between two charities – The Lord’s Taverners, whose mission sits very well next to the aims of the expedition – and the British Neurological Research Trust at UCL (a close friend I used to play cricket with broke his neck and is now paralysed and needs 24 hour care – the BNRT undertake ground breaking research into such injuries).

3. To play cricket in as many countries as I can on my way across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Sub-Continent, South-East Asia and Australia. These games wont all be scheduled matches, although I’m hoping to get a few proper ones through contacts at the ICC, MCC and Lords Taverners.

If you'd like to donate, please view: http://www.cyclingtotheashes.co.uk/how-to-donate.php

I wish Oli the best of British as he starts his trip next week and can't wait to view the postcards as they start to come through (assuming that the images are for Public viewings!!). As a few of you may know, I myself am a massive cricket fan. I have the best Twitter name in the world at @EnglandCricket and tweet as often as I can, have been on several England oversea's tours (Sri Lanka 01, New Zealand 02, Aus 03) and still play cricket reguilarly in London for Clapham In and The Whalers. I'd love to say that I'll be joining Oli watch England destroy our archrivals next year.