MediaTech 2008

I attended the Essential MediaTech 2008 conference yesterday, wasn't originally going to go but a Free! ticket from Nic Brisbourne persuaded me . Anyway, thought I may as well blog it as I was there - but rather than just blog it later I decided to "LiveTwitter" it as an experiment. It was quite well structured for that as there were 4 sessions of 5 minute presentations by startups (some were more started than others) interspersed with panel discussions.

The first session was by Neil Hutson of Microsoft, a "Platform Evangelist" (is that a Marketing person in old money?) on Cloud Computing. My PC was firing up on its one wheezy cylinder so I didn't Twitter any of it, but it was fairly standard "head for the Cloud" stuff. I Think he mentioned the word SLA, couldn't be sure.

Next Session was the first set of companies - here were my Twitter 140 character summaries:

Brandwatch - a buzzwatch company, £12k pa B2B subscription model. Has some AI, future is to build more intelligence into it

Polar Rose - Photo image algorithm search engine & dataminer - user gets to search, Polar Rose gets to mine the data. Privacy! .

Shiny Media - Video more important now, SM think Blogs, SocMed sites become marketing channel for high value content. Ad $ fund .

Slingshot - New Movie Co, plan is use digital tech, "non-star" material , use own $$, make yoof experience/long tail films. .

True knowledge - Knowledge based search making it easier for people and machines to find data on the internet.Will it scale? .

By the way, the 5 minutes each startup had on stage was excellent - they only really had enough time to say what they did, why they did it and how much it all cost. Great format, that's all you really need to know.

Next a session on Web Startups in Europe - I noted things I hadn't heard before or thought were significant or different from the mainstream view

Why locate startups in Europe? Answer - Silicon Valley is best but 1st time entrepreneurs tend to start where their roots/contacts are.

Where's the money now? Answer: Transaction, Subscription and Micro-Item business models. Ad funding so not in fashion now .

Eastern Europe is where the internet growth is in Europe going forward (its where the penetration is lowest). Advertising tools as well.

To grow in Europe, have to be in UK, Germany or France. France is different to the other 2, which are structured more similarly .

If an entrepreneur hasn't been able to persuade friends and family to fund a startup, then its (esp now) unlikely 3rd parties will! .

Big issue is the fragmented UK business angel network - its hard to find angel money because its hard to find the angels! (Reply from a twitter commentator - Prayer?).

More companies then, roughly focussed around gaming

Football Superstars - cross of football games and 2nd Life, sells branded doodads as micropays. Entry level hassle unknown. .

Playfish - Facebook platform social game co. Strategy is put up lots of niche games on Facebook - is this sustainable strategy? .

MovieStorm - Aggregate UGV play, via own moviemaking tools etc (sells them to the UG creators), has own community natch. .

Sulake - Micropayment + In World Ads Biz model, Habbo Hotel for Tweenies, moving to teen and mobile gamesocnets next. .

This was followed by a panel discussion on Gaming - interesting comments were:

Women not doing UGV, find it hard/offputting - need help to use it - lesson from casual games, Habbo etc - make it very easy. .

Companies like EA will increasingly be in trouble, market moving from publishers to the distributor platforms (eg Facebook). Hm .

Games traffic on net now greater than porn apparently. Competing for same audience allegedly too. .
Every game has a spike of usage same as all apps, then tails off - key is to have a long tail/aggregation/portfolio of games.

Is power of brand in social nets diminished - no brand in FB top 25 for eg. Are Brands late or do "friends" really trump brand?

If you add Xbox, all Sony PS and Wii, total user base is a fraction of PC & Mobiles and only 1/3rd of consoles are online. . .

Next up - Omar Hamoui, founder of Admob - very good talk, some interesting points on Mobile Web evolution:

Many (most) of the people doing mobile internet development now are not from planet mobile.........those people have been in an abusive relationship for years and have lost confidence. Dangerous to underestimate iPhone! . .

Apple iPhone stack is similar to iPod play, and to DoCoMo - a deeply integrated stack across supply chain that is easy to use . .

iPhone moved from c 8th/9th across their networks to No 1 device in 11 weeks this summer. . .

Where you can provide brands with good performance measurement, they are signing up. Get measurement right and they will come. . .

I asked a question re online mobile video, he was sceptical re broadcast models of Mobile Video, But thought mobile video will come, mainly for quality short form content

Next came the Social Network Startups:

Adconion - Ad audience aggregation network, 4th largest in UK and globally. "Blind" Adnet, now having to monitor where Ads go. . .

Flirtomatic - "When dating goes mobile, what will it look like = Flirting". Premium + Ad serving biz model. WAP, Web, iPhone. . .

Metaboli - Games download platform, 600k paying users, 10m downloads pa. Online games 30% sales next 4 years. Freemium model. . .

WAYN - early days charged users, 2007 went free, growth jumped from c1m to c 7.5m, moved to Ad funding. Mobile/3rd worlld next. . .

Then a panel on "Surviving the Carnage" - this was very entertaining, Charles Cohen of Probability (im)moderating from the start with his panel intros - Wonga = Loan sharks, Nic Brisbourne has been in VC since 2000 so lost more money than anyone else :-), Brian O'Reilly UBS managing rapidly declining wealth, Hugo Burge sells dodgy Art Deco sofas. Comments I noted were:

Hugo Burge (Cheapflights) - His 1st Startup chairman fell asleep in meetings, then sent his flunkeys in to tell them how to run it/close it. Refused. Won.

Nic Brisbourne - case by case basis re cost cutting. VC's should set direction, don't tell them how/where to make changes. . .

Errol Damelin (Wonga) - easy to lay off big numbers, but what happens next day when your capacity to get things done to grow collapses. . .

Nic Brisbourne - some VCs/startups using Crunch as excuse to clear decks. They should have done before, but it must be done anyway . .

Brian O'Reilly (UBS) - Currency fluctuations are changing map of where you need to get your development done (US, Eurozone now more expensive from UK).

Charles then got them to play a game of Long or Short:

Social Media Long or Short? Panel are Long on developing world SocNets, not existing ones.....
Facebook's monthly costs far outstrip its revenues, burning through cash on hand, will it survive 2009 without major cramdown?

VC model Long or Short - depends on when the fund was closed - great time to invest now if you have the money. . .

Startups Long or Short - Big Co's investing less in innovation, and global change so fast - can only innovate via startups. . .

Companies with silly names Long or Short - Short! Company Name must say what it does on the tin, otherwise you have to spend more on branding. . .

There was a "Questions from the Audience" backchannel (hoorah, w00t and so on) but it was only SMS, no Twitter or email (Boo, FAIL!, FTW? etc). Questions in this session included:

Time of Crunch? This is not a recession like any we have seen for years. This is a time to focus, cut costs, assume prudence and be adaptable (18 months of carnage seemed to be consensus). .

Why aren't VC's investing? Reading between lines, VC biz model allows powder dry/options open till things become more certain. . .

What would you bet on now?: (i) Music; (ii) Marketing Tech; (iii) shift from offlline to online media, (iv) where net cust cost . .

What would you bet on now?: (v) China & emerging markets; (vi) mobile internet.

Last lot of companies of the Day - Early Stagers wanting funding:

NXVision - Sez Co is lowest cost way to watch your content - actually a transcode aggregation play afaics - uses DRM tho?. Also said IPTV goes from $1.5bn to $53bn in 5 years, tho' customer base only went up c 3x! $5.3bn more likely

Parkopedia - looks like its an online parking aggregation service. Not clear on biz model. . .

Pingar - tryng to make unstructured data more findable & useful. All good stuff - the "how" is the bit I really wanted to see! . .

Slicethepie - long tail music financing, User choice floats cream to top, users fund band & trade choices, also $ datamining . .

Wayve - networked tablet with write-on screen. £5pm rental, 50% to Wayve. Looks easy to use, but other goodenoughs exist? . .

There was a later panel session on the future of M&A, hosted by the imperturbable Lucy Vernall (given the Doom & Gloom of the Session) of lawyers Kemp & Little, but my computer had run out of battery by then (and so had I really). What did I take away from this - mainly Doug Richard's (of Library House) view that a lot of the money behind the VC's and PE funders is itself in trouble.

Other points made were that there would be:

- A "flight to quality" - aka people making real money
- In other words, no deals will be done unless they are accretive
- As small deals are usually not worth the cost/hassle, they need to be both easy to do and have a "story"
- There will be lost of private to private deals and rollups (Rollups - hmmm...my experience here is that funders often hold on to their asset as long as they can in the hope the others will fall off the lifeboat first)

There is essentially a mismatch at the moment between what company owners still believe their companies are worth, and what Tech public companies - who have seen their own share prices tank - now want to pay. In other words, if you want to sell (or raise money), don't choose 2009.

Re my Free! Ticket, I got it because Nic thought I had asked a good question for his panel, which was:

Given that Online Advertising is no longer the answer, where is the money going to come from?

They didn't get round to it, but after watching c 30 startups, it is clear that Premium service + Micropays of various sorts along with good Old Advertising is the New Model. Just like the Olde Worlde Models then, I hear you say

Re Live Twittering, near the end I asked my long suffering band of followers whether the "thoughtstream" was useful, 7 said it was, 2 wanted more detail (sheesh! ) and 4 had unsubscribed. From my point of view - fine, only hard thing was to scrape the Twts off the stream and invert them to be in reverse chronological order to Twitter (used Excel).