Nov
11
The Magic of Marco
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing | Leave a Comment
Success brings its own problems. I am reasonably sure that whatever Marco Rodzynek thought he was doing in 2009, when this blog amongst others reported on NOAH ’09, a conference of less than 300 free-loading delegates in the Park Lane Hilton talking for a day about internet services companies in Europe, it was not about running conferences. NOAH, founded with two other ex-Lehman managers in the wake of that outfit’s collapse, was pitching for advisory business, and now has a good deal of it if the founder is to be taken at face value – and he certainly is, with deals like Bigpoint to show for it. If you check this blog you will see that I attended NOAH ’10 last year, in an enlarged audience of 650, still free.
This year’s invite required a fee, so I anticipated less people, and thought the move to the Old Billingsgate conference venue probably meant that less sponsorship than in the first two years had diminished the budget. How wrong could one be? Marco produced a two day show, in a larger venue, with 1180 attendees paying over £300 each, and greater sponsorship. Some 97 people and companies spoke and sat on panels. Sessions ran right through breaks and meals when necessary, and outside of the auditorium there was as much chatter around the six or so booths of an incipient exhibition as there was in the conference hall. So the whole British investment community was represented? Well, broadly, but alongside their European peers. For a meeting held in London, this was as European as they come. One subject of debate centred on the idea that Europe now has an equivalence in start-up and development terms to Silicon Valley – but then we all disagreed on whether that was best represented by London’s 800 companies in the Silicon Roundabout at Old Street, or by the powerhouse of software development that is moving things in Berlin, or by the design talent and entrepreneurial drive of Barcelona. I took a straw poll in one group and Berlin won, but, then, there were a huge number of German players on display.
Those of us who filled the hot and airless evening sessions of the late nineties would have recognized the flavour in the room: this was First Monday or Last Friday or whatever they were called playing out on a large scale. It was important to be there and to be seen, and just as important as doing deals was promoting the investor’s image as the right player for an outstanding opportunity, while desperate developers asserted that they did not really need the money – unless of course someone wanted to help them go faster, further and right past their competition. Outside the doors last week, equity markets were lurching like a trawler in a gale, and two governments in Europe fell while we enthused about opportunity. And that is the essence of Marco’s magic: he has persuaded us to suspend judgement for a moment and observe how, even in difficult times, a group of mostly consumer-facing network service are achieving really interesting growth rates, how audience transfer to these services remains rapid, how the smartphone challenge is now at last being met with some worthy service responses. And while he does this it is noticeable that very few services from the traditional vendor community are making much headway (interesting to see both Axel Springer and Schibsted looking so mundane in this company) and that there are relatively less pan-European services than I would have expected from the first two events.
If there was an exception to that rule it was perhaps HomeAway, which predates its US owners in the UK and is the secret giant of holiday bookings (larger than TripAdvisor at 4.5 million bookings per month), or Softonics, or eHarmony (re-inventing relationship management). Or even ZooPlus, selling unconscionable amounts of dogfood despite depression. But in some ways the most impressive players were the niche operators. It is a moot question whether indeed these service companies scale globally. Groupon was on the platform talking about rediscovering local internet, and this is surely true if we are to get beyond the whole business of classifieds – looking at this meeting like a very flat place to be – and re-ignite geographical community with service offers and hyper-local interest. The man from FourSquare clearly had aspirations to do this, but they always seem to get overtaken by what I suspect are the less lasting joys of finding out that your friends are all drinking in the pub you are just passing. But then the focus shifted again: here is good Sverre Munck of Schibsted, who I thought once would create the first real digital newspapers, rightly saying we should watch the Indonesians, and see how a society behaves when its primary link to the Internet is Smartphone, without any precursor experience of other technologies. And did I hear someone say that online recruitment is now a 27 billion dollar business globally? There were some good niche examples on display here. And there was also a splendid man from Lehavi who used his brain, working through his computer, to move his toy remote car around. And Tony Castells of Barcelona produced great incidental music of his own composition to fill the breaks that Marco was so anxious to deny us.
In short this was a very diverting conference. But less is more, and greater variety of investment fields (where was music, or personal finance, or sport, let alone business!) will be welcome as it develops further. It could be that the advertising model is not the entire answer, though you would have thought it was the ultimate in business model development here. More on hybrid models, and less on old-fashioned classifieds. And a final recognition that old media are not going to cut it here. But keep tapping the vein of frenzy that makes this such a fascinating area for so many investors – and keep giving them a place to meet and talk and, as in that first rush of internet blood to the head in the late 90s, to stimulate and force each other to compete.
Nov
4
Rush to Judgement
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Everyone has a sticking point when it comes to the impact of technology. My hard-headed friend who cannot imagine that virtual exhibitions will ever get off the ground positively salivates when we talk about personalized learning in a mobile context. And he was close to my thoughts last week when I attended the Dublin Web Summit. In fact, it might have been his bulky frame that kept on standing up and cutting off my field of vision from the fixed camera position. Because, you see, I wasn’t actually there. Twelve international airports in the previous 28 days had quite cured me of the urge to travel. But I did not miss anything that I had wanted to see in Dublin, and much that I was able to hear was excellent. Other parts less so: web summits are rather macho for my taste, and entrepreneurial boasts about their social outreach and their unique viewer growth have more resonance in body building than in business. But the Summit itself, in conjunction with Livestream, performed its function, and started me thinking again about the role of virtual events.
And from a couple of answers to my enquiries there does seem to be a change from when I last looked at this a year ago. One obvious point of enquiry was Comdex, famously bought by UBM for a dollar, and revived as a virtual event. The news is that in its second year this show increased its exhibitors significantly, and now seems to be attracting well over 5000 paying customers, making it an exhibition worth attending. Elsewhere, it would be my surmise that Globalspec, having launched a great number of events last year, are now doing a sort of culling operation, retaining and building what works and scrapping the rest.
If virtual eventing is to emerge as an art form, then it is important that shows should be cheap to initiate and that there should be a sort of rough hewn hierarchy of development values in play. This seems to be happening, as shows get upgraded from virtual conferencing to “catalogue exhibitions” and then on to virtual reality full-on, with a genuine effort being made to replicate the communications of the exhibition hall. Conferences superficially seem easier, but simply watching a live videocast and tweeting may not be the most interesting interaction we have ever had. Few have moved to live broadcast full interactivity, yet it is surely only a turn of the network wheel away. Wait for colleagues to say “I was in a really interesting conference in Tokyo on the train coming into Waterloo this morning..”
So lets look around and see the variety of models now at work. All of these happen to be in UBM (a lesson in the results of listening closely to David Levin!) but they are not untypical of the range of activities happening elsewhere. Of course, you would expect the technology events to be on the move here, but they are certainly not the vanguard. Black Hat is interesting: this security technology meeting has opted for variable packages for online users depending on whether they attend on the day, or look at it retrospectively. So if you go to Uplink, in this case, for live streaming video, you get 2 tracks of 20 supplier briefings, two keynotes and the interactive service which allows you to ask questions and enter into dialogue. If you use the on demand service you get two keynotes and the best two presentations from each track. And if you visit Interop online, you simply get a video library to search and download.
But I found two areas where different models and pace of development were in play. Airline maintenance costs and technology is clearly one. I surmize that you may have to sleep a long time between sessions, so visiting this in bed may be essential. However, I was really taken with www.retailinvestorsconference.com. This is a neat partnership between Betterinvesting (National Association of Investors Corp, www.betterinvesting.org) with MUNCmedia and UBM’s PR Newswire. The target is private investors, and particularly those who do not use advisors or stockbrokers. They do a one day virtual meeting a month. On 3 November you could have heard a presentation by the Nasdaq – quoted China Precision Steel Corp. As part of the deal, the video and presentation collateral get distributed by PR Newswire. However, attendees on the day (I wonder if they give their avatars blue rinses!) have a terrific range of interactive choices. They can go to the auditorium and hear the session (EST timings get Florida as well as the North East). Or they can go to the Exhibit Hall and visit the presenter’s booth, make contact with staff and ask further questions. Finally, there is the Lounge, with the opportunity to talk to other investors and see what experiences they have had. The organizers appear to be doing one day a month, and up to 8 sessions per day. This is like having a trade show with 96 exhibitors and speakers – and a huge growth opportunity within the other 353 days of the year.
So a wide range of business and presentation models, but now I feel that this movement is rumbling towards real marketplaces. The App and tablet combination will be important in making theses shows work, and making their interfaces seamless. Ambitious management in tough times are trying to make a little technology go a long way, and charge for the virtual as if it were real, Some of the pricing packages will slow market development, and some of the attempted bundles are too ambitious as well. My feeling is that this opportunity is larger – and cheaper – than many believe.
And, finally, there is one opportunity here which is being seriously neglected. Virtual events throw off data like dandruff. Skilled developers will know everything about user profiles – who is interested in what, what key questions were asked, what ongoing interest survived the meeting etc. This can be anonymized and re-used, subjected to analysis on behalf of individual clients, and served up to help newcomers to profile themselves when they first use the service. It adds value and serves to offset the effect on pricing of relatively lower cost bases. But above all, it brings the events companies to the important threshold of becoming B2B data companies, and if they fail that challenge then they will fail the full opportunity that becomes available when these new businesses mature. Lets postpone the rush to judgement. The jury is still out and the odds must be stacked in favour of a huge advancement in the age-old business of introducing buyers to sellers happening here.
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