The man who sent the first tourist into space has chosen Brighton and Hove as the launch pad for his latest business venture.

New Yorker Jeff Manber, former president of MirCorp, has developed a random number generator for the internet called Yuzoz, based on space activity.

Yuzoz uses satellite technology to read astronomical events, such as solar flares or cloud movements on Venus, and turns the data into random numbers.

The numbers can be used to generate mobile phone ring tones, help people choose their lottery numbers or pet names, or just influence daily decisions.

There are numerous random number generators on the internet which have become magnets for advertising but Mr Manber has no doubts Yuzoz will take off.

He said people were still excited by space.

"My career has been about the commercialisation of space, bringing the planets and the stars closer to people and Yuzoz will give people that connection.

"A lot of people feel connected to space and this is a fun way that they can use what's going on up there to influence their everyday decision-making.

"We are looking at teaming up with an online database of millions of children's names so people can push a Yuzoz button which will generate a name.

"It means people will be able to say Our child's name was in the stars'."

Making the connection between random numbers and their everyday lives might be a leap too far for some people - but Mr Manber reckons it will catch on.

He said: "In some ways, we are kind of the opposite of Google.

"You go to Google trying to find a specific answer to a query. But when you want a random answer to a question, or when random data is more useful to a specific purpose, you come to us, click on a link and Yuzoz it."

This week Mr Manber was in Brighton scouting for somewhere to base the business which he hopes to launch - patents pending - in January.

He said: "A lot of the investment for this project has come from Europe so it seemed a good idea to locate the business in the UK.

"I was in Brighton and Hove recently and just fell in love with the place.

There's so much creativity and talent down here and it just struck me as a fun place to be.

"I felt it was an ideal place to base Yuzoz, rather than just getting lost in the middle of London."

Yuzoz has been in development for more than two years.

Mr Manber has recruited 15 experts from space programmes around the world to come up with the software needed to generate the random numbers.

He is hoping Yuzoz - itself a randomly generated name - will be more successful than MirCorp, which unsuccessfully tried to turn the Mir space station into a holiday resort.

In April 2001 Mr Manber signed a $20 million dollar contract to send the first space tourist, American businessman Dennis Tito, on a visit to Mir.