The British entrepreneur who sold a soccer Web site at the age of 17 for $40 million has switched his attention to help launch a social networking site on Sunday designed to fight malaria.

Tom Hadfield set up Soccer.net in his bedroom before selling it to U.S. sports network ESPN, but now hopes the power of sites such as Facebook can curb a disease that kills an estimated one million people a year, many of them in Africa.

"I believe in the power of friends telling friends telling friends," self-styled part-time student and full-time entrepreneur Hadfield told Reuters in an interview.