It has been a while since my last post on Essential Mediatech but the guys of IntrudersTV were cool enough to record the entire keynote by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and I guess it took them a while to process. They finally released the video and I thought you might all find it interesting enough to watch.

I talked about OpenAd.net yesterday but it might be a better idea to have Katarina Skoberne of OpenAd.net do the talking for her company and let her explain the idea. Video created by Intruders.tv.

It is time for the last showcase at Essential Mediatech today. The last few panels were boring, and I am starving (didn’t have breakfast this morning) so I am actually planning to leave after this showcase. If this review sounds a bit grumpy, then go ahead and blame my growling stomach. The presenting companies were:

K2 Network - service provider and online community for massively-multiplayer games
Telcogames - global publisher, developer and distributor of mobile games
Weblin (Zweitgeist GmbH) - developer of avatar software for internet browsing
WooMe - online speed dating platform

Honestly, I have no idea what the first company did. I must have watched it but it simply slipped my mind. The second company was a big platform provider for a telco to host, distribute and promote mobile games. I never play mobile games except for the little tennis application that game on my Sony Ericsson K610, but if I really wanted to play something I’d grab my Mac, a PSP, or Melinda’s Nintendo DS. In other words: glad they all make money but seriously not the interesting things to blog about.

The last two companies were about stupid animated browser puppets and online dating. I am not the one to install an app to have a whole bunch of Weblin animated puppets walking around in my browser, showing me what other people are visiting the site that I am visiting. Besides it being intrusive and annoying and a possible security leak, it doesn’t even work on a Mac!

WooMe is a kind of online speed dating, which a) doesn’t interest me as I already have a girlfriend and b) I am a GEEK so inherintly not that interested nor motivated to put myself in the line of fire like that.

All and all it was fun today but a bit weak in companies presenting. I actually miss the “expo” part of a conference like this, but I will do a bot of a better write-up later on.

So, we just had the 3rd showcase of companies here at Essential Mediatech and honestly most of them were (again) boring. The only one of the list below I really, really enjoyed was OpenAd, and weird enough this was the only company up until now that I really enjoyed listening to.

IGA Worldwide - in-game advertising company with proprietary ad-serving network
OpenAd - online marketplace for buying and selling advertising, marketing and design ideas
Trutap - developer of a social media application for mobile phones
Xtract - social network analytics and mobile marketing

OpenAd is a seriously good idea (unlike Trutap which is like an unfocused big mashup of online mobile services pushed into one chaotic looking java app) even though it is about advertising. Their idea is to crowdsource the advertisement industry, making it possible for any company to use their thousands of creatives to create a new advertisement campaign. The cool thing is that you actually don’t pay for the process (which is the old model) but just for the end product you agree to license. In other words: you only pay for things you will like to use and are happy with. Their previous customers include quite a few big companies so I am looking forward to the future of this business model and the effect it will have on the quality of advertisements.

So, the afternoon here at Essential Mediatech has started, and we started with an interesting talk by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn on a wide range of marketing strategies, comparing approaches of old to new and small to big companies. Reid used to work for PayPal before he went to LinkedIn and clearly has a lot of experience in business and understanding marketing strategies and revenue models.

In short Reid talked about the difference between how people think one should start a business and plan the monetization, versus how he thinks it is best approached. He stated that the old model is to have revenue as soon as you start, be self sufficient and grow on the existing revenue streams once you have established them. On the opposite he claims the new model should be to setup placeholder revenue models as soon a possible, but to plan to change these models as the business grows. For example, if you plan to have a complex advertisement model that is very targeted, don’t start building that at first, but in contrary start with placing Google Ads until the time comes to change the advertisement to a more complex revenue model.

In his new model he claims that monetization is at first irrelevant. If you plan to take a couple of risks in a business, which would you think is more valuable: establishing the monetization or establishing a community? If you build a large community soon any change in the monetization strategies will have a far larger effect on you revenue model than when you start building the revenue models before the community is established. Obviously it is good to build some kind of monetization when you start, because being established and self funding is interesting and motivating, but clearly expect to change the model whenever you reach a higher level of company operation.

I thought this was a very interesting talk, and I have 2 more pages of notes left that I didn’t use in this post, so I will see if Reid has written about this somewhere else or maybe placed this presentation on SlideShare.

So, we just had the second company showcase here at Essential Mediatech, this time focussing on content providers. The presenting companies were:

7digital - service for secure distribution of digital media
Mind Candy - developer of puzzles, cross media entertainment and alternate reality gaming
Netlog - online social portal specifically targeted at the European youth
Shiny Media - operator of a number of news-oriented websites

Ashley Norris from Shiny Media

I was particularly interested to see Shiny Media, as I am a reader of one of their blogs ShinyShiny.tv and didn’t know they were this big (nor actually that they were located in the UK). The other companies were a bit less interesting, especially Mind Candy which were basically promoting their new online pet-keeping game. Tamakochi all over again and certainly not my beef.

So, we just enjoyed a few companies giving small showcases of their products. I’m not explaining all of them in detail so here is the short list.

Rawflow - live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming technology
Simply Media - creator, aggregator and distributor of digital video content
t5m - video-based, socially conscious entertainment and lifestyle network
Zattoo - peer-to-peer internet television provider

All of these companies were in one way or another trying to add some more value (and therefore revenue) to the online video model. I specifically enjoyed Zattoo, as they offer Satellite TV over IP to a little program that seems to also run on Mac. Unfortunately you need an “invite” so I will have to tackle the founder in a moment to get acces to their service.

So, I am at the Essential Mediatech conference here in London at the BFI IMAX theatre. I arrived a bit late but managed to be in time for the first keynote of Antti Ohrling from Blyk.

Blyk is a very interesting mobile phone service provider that is free, for 16 to 24 year olds, and sponsored by targeted advertisements. The talk was interesting, especially the fact that they get about 100x the response rate one would get from traditional advertisements like e-mail and banners. The service is currently available in the UK and free to any 16 to 24 year old who can get enough value from 43 minutes and 217 texts a month.

I promised to make some video-interviews with the startups at Essential Web 2007, but at the last second I couldn’t get the camera that I was promised. Lucky for me there is a new video-blogging  website  called IntrudersTV that attends many of the tech events here in London and around the world.

They were also at  Essential Web and they were cool enough to make videos with almost all presenting startups. Have a look at their site and the interviews with the people behind Jaiku, ParkAtMyHouse, Blognation, etc.  Seriously top-quality site, and I hope they will enable you to host their interviews on your own site in the future.

After my reviews of the first 2 sessions at the Essential Web 2007 you would probably have expected another grumpy review of session 3. I have to disappoint you a bit as I am actually excited about some of the next companies. If you follow Four Starters regularly then you will know that we already reviewed some of these companies before.

The third session of the Essential Web conference was the last one of the morning, and the panel was formed by Chris Seth (UK Managing Director, Piczo Inc), Judy Gibbons (Venture Development, Accel Partners) and the ever merry Paul Walsh (Segala).

Jaiku was obviously one of the most interesting companies present at Essential Web. Jyri held a very calm talk, explaining what Jaiku is and where they would be going. The talk was much different than the Geek Dinner talk of a couple of weeks ago, but it was still very interesting to hear Jyri talk about things like cooperation with mobile telcos, and what their monetization strategy would be. Basically they are thinking about adverts and premium packages for the future.

Besides this being the first time that I heard Jyri talk about the monetization of Jaiku, I was amazed how he was able to convince the entire audience that Jaiku and Twitter are not mutually exclusive and therefore not competitors. Hell, he even envisioned them being compatible in the future, as he thinks we have enough silos of instant messaging already. It is just amazing how this guy totally understands his users and business audience at the same time. I am so glad I am part of the Jaiku experience!

A while back we had our first look at LouderVoice. The concept behind LouderVoice is first of all to make it possible to easily search for reviews that are now spread across blogs, and secondly to take those other reviews out of their silos like Amazon. The idea is actually pretty good, as they have a Wordpress plugin and use Microformats, but still it isn’t perfect.

When I had lunch the first a couple of weeks ago with Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice and Paul Walsh of Segala I was pretty new to the LouderVoice product, but in time I began to understand what it takes to make a really good web2.0 tool. At the moment LouderVoice has a couple of issues involving community, usability and understandability which they have to really solve before they can appeal to a big crowd. As someone I spoke during the conference said: “I signed up and the first thing I noticed is that I didn’t understand what to do next.” Luckily for us and LouderVoice they seem to understand these issues and they are working on a new release.

Anthony Eskinazi from ParkAtMyHouse is a regular at the London Open Coffee Meetup, so I talked with him a couple of times before. I was amazed by his speech, as I had some small comments about his product before. The idea behind ParkAtMyHouse is simple: if you live in a place where there is a clear lack of parking spaces (read every metropolitan area), but you don’t use your own parking space: rent it out!

The problem with ParkAtMyHouse is that it’s success tends to be very local, and reaching a success in every other big city therefore takes a critical mass over and over again. Luckily for Anthony he seems to have found a couple of deals with companies like Zipcar. I hope to see his dreams come true, as he already has plans for SleepAtMyHouse.com and LiveAtMyHouse.com

WAYN is short for for Where Are You Now? The idea is that you tell them where you are (sounds like Plazes?) and it is clearly aimed at the MySpace generation (read: it is an ugly and confusing page). Furthermore the page annoyed me a lot as it kept giving me messages in JavaScript Alerts whenever I did something irreversible like emptying my messages recycle bin.

Although this is probably a fun product for some people, I think it is just a bit too confusing for me. The product on one hand sounds a lot like Plazes, but on the other it also allows you to build a profile much like MySpace, sharing photos, news, videos, interests, stories, trips, etc. With 8 million users they seem to have done quite well until now, but I rather have quality over quantity and somehow this overload just doesn’t do it for me.

The stupidest idea of this session was definitely Zubka. The idea behind Zubka is that you should profit (money-wise) from bringing together people who need a job and people who need an employee. The reasoning by the founder was that it already happens a lot when people bring their friends together to solve job issues like these, but that they rarely get any compensation or it.

I was sitting next to two people during this session who both kind of immediately went: “yes, you do get compensation for it!” The compensation that you get is the trust you build and the relationship you establish with these people. The clearest advantage here is that when you eventually need a job or employee, you will be more likely to get the favor returned to you than when you asked money for it. Not to mention the obvious point of being biased if you ask money for every deal you make in this system. I think there is a lot of research to be done (or already done) that will prove that this is simply a stupid idea.