Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Last thurday I was at mediatech 2.006 organised by Library House in London. Library House is an english company that helps investors get better information about “hypergrowth” companies in the media space. Young companies can also get better and aggregated information about investors. Starting 2007, they will also cover Europe and not only the UK, as they do now. The event was co-sponsored by Intel Capital and Microsoft and was to give attendees better insight into the world of communication, media and technology. All that was obviously interesting for us at Ormigo, as we are also moving in the media landscape, and I was happy enough to be invited for a steep discount. Thanks goes to Valeria from alarm:clock euro for that one.
The event took place in the IMAX Theatre next to the waterloo station and I have to admit, it is impressive if you see the presentation on a 20×26 meter screen. Ok, on a “small part of the screen” and split in half for video and presentation.

  Library House had invited some interesting speakers. Sadly I didn’t make it to the opening at 9 am, even though I got up at 4 here in Cologne. The way into the city is just too long. I opted to not spend the night(s) to be back in cologne fully working and had to shed a small tear when I paid for the 17 hour parking ticket at the airport. 17 hours … for maybe 7 hours at the conference. Grrr… But back on subject.

I missed Bob Young, Lulu.com Founder and CEO and Co-Founder of Red Hat. I really like the basic idea behind Lulu.com and the transforming power of the books landscape that comes with it. So I would have liked to see him. But when I arrived, things were still going strong. After a presentation of Ian Valentine, (ex-)Director of SKY, about the future of television from somebody who knows what he is talking about, came Russel Buckley, Managing Director ad Admod. Admob is a kind of banner ad network for the mobile space, and they are currently handling 400 million ad impressions per month and rising fast! In a later personal talk, I learned a bit more about their first investment round with Sequoia Capital and I have to admit, if the mobile space is similar to the general fixed line internet, which it is, then they have some good growth ahead of them. Of course the markets will converge eventually, but that will take several years. I am still happy to know that one of our developers, , Timo, has already developed mobile applications. Could become important.
Gupritpal Singh from Microsoft wasn’t really exciting I have to say but it is frightening to see what kind of platform MS is building. They are again showing that they are focussing on developers to build solutions and will work very hard to give them the tools to build cool apps. Think billing, storage, community, social networking, security, computing power, … all via an API. Everything you could think of. Of course you can mix and match from different providers, like maps from Google, storage from Amazon, … but with distribution around all MS devices, one could think of investing in MS again.

Gupritpal then showed a nice slide with how MS products will engage the user from 7 am to 11 pm (mobile phone, office pc, media center, xbox, …). When the next talk about venture capital started, Ajay Chowdhury swiftly said that all entrepreneurs focusing on tools for 11pm to 7am should come talk to him as he sees a real chance to compete against MS in those times.

Otherwise, the Gorilla in the room was clearly Google.

The above picture shows the start of the discussion about investments and it was nice to see that Yahoo! and Google are getting along (the two standing gentlemen on the left). All in all the talk was very good and it came out, again, that reach is key. Once you have it, you CAN monetize it. In that sense we didn’t really fit with Ormigo because we are more on the monetization side than the reach side, even though it’s a bit more complicated than that. We are in line with Google though in that our goal is to democratize the internet and help everyone to play.

Then there were several start-ups present, of course, from seed to growth phase. Some I would like to highlight:

• Aggregator, who build nice TV channels on the basis of aggregation of different sources.
• Mediagraft, who allow you to download free, DRM-free music, financed through ads within the MP3. I am unsure if it will work … but the team rocks, so if somebody can make it then they can.
• Bebo … insane. 18 Months old, 28 Millions Users, 4 Billion Ad Impressions.
• miniweb is the new start-up by Ian Valentine and tries to enable advertisement in an age of time-shifting and VOD.

There were obviously a lot more, and but the ones above were a bit interesting for Ormigo. As such, thank you to Library House for the Invitation and I am looking forward to see you expand to Europe. I am looking forward to the next event.