iPlot

SOCAP09 (Social Capital Markets) Conference Brings Together Social Innovators from Government and Business

The Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) Conference, a landmark gathering of top business and government leaders creating market-based solutions for social impact, is taking place September 1-3, at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.

SOCAP brings together a unique mix of the world’s leading social innovators – traditional investors, impact investors, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, new media, NGO’s and non-profits, wealth managers, development agencies, venture capitalists, MBA students and other groups interested in the growing opportunities of social capital — who are catalysts of change across the globe.

Last year’s conference gathered more than 650 leading global investors and entrepreneurs from 26 countries. This year’s conference from September 1-3 in San Francisco is sold out again and features speakers from the Skoll Foundation, Participant Productions, Food Inc, GRITtv, LINKtv, Invisible Children, Global Giving, the World Economic Forum, Virgance, Kiva, Change.org, Ushahidi, McKinsey, The Economist, and many others. The opening keynote will be given by Sonal Shah, Director of the White House Office for Social Innovation.

“SOCAP09 is the premier event that puts the flow of capital to social good into a context,” says Founder Kevin Jones. “In these turbulent times, social innovators in the public and private sectors, from foundations to social venture funds to development agencies to grassroots Web 2.0 activists, are working together to build a new economic foundation for the world. With our expert speakers, high-impact sessions and exciting networking events, SOCAP09 is an essential gathering for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of social capital.”

I will be there, too, and report. You can also follow the conference online via:

SOCAP09 Blog

Twitter: @socap09,#socap09

On the Eve of OnMedia NYC: Media and Advertising Industries Still Optimistic About 2008

I'm off to New York for the OnMedia conference from January 28-30. The two-and-a-half day event features technology CEOs from Silicon Valley leading presentations and debates with their counterparts in global advertising and media. It will be a dynamic crowd that's coming together to discuss emerging user trends and new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries.

The list of speakers includes web 2.0 entrepreneurs such as Steve Rosenbaum (CEO, Magnify.net), Ami Kassar (Chief Innovation Officer, ideablob), and Matt Colebourne, (CEO, coComment); established content players such as Jim Spanfeller (President, Forbes.com) and Adam Berrey (SVP Marketing and Strategy, Brightcove); and investors such as Joshua Tanzer (Managing Director, Revolution Partners), and Andrew Cleland (Executive Director, Investments, Time Warner). The concluding panel on Wednesday, "Big Media Online. Now Comes the Hard Part: Sustaining Growth," promises to be particularly interesting as it brings together such different figures as A-list blogger Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine) and Gordon McLeod, President of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

The media industry has always been a fertile ground for innovation, but with a growing number of technology plays and social media sites entering the space, the past couple of years have been especially lively. And this year, pundits say, we're likely to see more disruptive business models and subsequent M&As -- despite the looming recession.

The annual AdMedia survey of ad and marketing executives and private-equity investors claims that "respondents are surprisingly optimistic about the environment for M&A deals and M&A valuations in 2008." Eighty percent of the executives surveyed expect their organizations will be involved in media mergers and acquisitions in 2008 despite widespread concerns about the prospects for the U.S. economy. According to the survey, M&A activity is likely to focus on sectors such as search marketing, mobile marketing, and viral marketing.

This view is supported by an article in The Economist, which offers a differentiated but not overly gloomy perspective on the prospects of the advertising industry this year. According to the magazine, a possible recession will hit TV and print advertising sectors much harder than online advertising:

"In rich countries the internet is claiming a growing share of advertising -- at the expense of traditional media, such as TV and print. There is still a gap between the time people spend online as a fraction of their media consumption (about a fifth) and the fraction of marketing budgets spent on the internet (about 7.5%). Many companies are trying to narrow the gap, which will sustain internet advertising during a downturn. Search advertising, the most effective kind of all, should be safest."

Another Bubble?

Techcrunch vs. Podtech: Don’t Shoot the Messenger

Blurry, blurry, the boundaries have become in these days of social media. A recent example is the brouhaha around Michael Arrington’s (Techcrunch) post on Podtech’s future.

Arrington critically reviewed the negative publicity Podtech has been receiving in the blogosphere lately. Podtech was criticized for its unclear distinction between editorial content and advertisements and was also questioned about the fidelity of its content creation business model, given the growing competition in the semi-amateur video space. Arrington said Podtech had decided to move to a third-party content aggregation model, but video blogger Robert Scoble, who runs the popular "Scoble Show" on Podtech, responded – via Twitter – that this was incorrect.

While the tone is getting a little bit heated and more personal in this debate (Arrington: “I personally find 90% of Podtech content just slightly more entertaining than watching paint dry.”), there are two things that are remarkable: First, any rebuttal to an opponent’s message can be instant in the days of Twitter and thus has to be. Quod erat demonstrandum, by the twitter-happy Scoble. Second, the friend/foe line may need to be redefined for social media. Every PR expert will tell you that “reporters are not your friends” but, hey, it’s good to be reminded that bloggers aren’t either. When bloggers reach out to other bloggers for PR, things become naturally even more complicated so that Arrington even sees himself obligated to clarify: “Dear Podtech. I’m not your VP of Marketing.” “Never confuse TechCrunch with your PR or marketing team. And if your messaging isn’t clear, don’t shoot the messenger. Clean up your own mess first. Furthermore: “This is a post that Podtech pleaded with me to write, to counter the massive negative publicity they’ve been getting around the blogosphere.” That’s the beauty and the risk of the conversation economy – the meta-conversations become a part of the public conversation, too.

Top Marketing Podcasts

Marketing Voices, a weekly podcast that discusses how social media is affecting marketing strategy and practices, has compiled a great list of marketing podcasts.

1. Seth Godin, marketing expert, author, guru.
2. Robert Scoble, the "king of blogging" and vice president of media development for PodTech, evangelizes business blogging.
3. Peter Rojas, co-founder and editor of Engadget.
4. Phillip Bodzenta, director of global communications for Coke, describes how Coke used bloggers to build audience during the World Cup.
5. Sharon Wienbar, managing director, Scale Venture Partners (formerly BA Venture Partners) on what is hot/ not in social media venture investing.
6. Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, talks about how to measure social media.
7. Steve Rubel, senior vice president of Edelman Public Relations, speaks to how social media is impacting the practice of public relations.
8. Dick Costello, chief executive officer of Feedburner, speaks about how to get blogging and podcasting content is found and distributed.
9. Bill Kircos, head of consumer and enterprise media for Intel, describes how Intel implements social media programs, most specifically, podcasting.
10. Kelly Wagman, head of customer relationship marketing for Juniper Networks, talks about how Juniper used social media to build a community.
11. Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, an enterprise wiki company, describes wikis and how they are best used in marketing.

DLD Conference in Munich

I look forward to attending the DLD (digital, lifestyle, design) conference in Munich from January 21-23, 2007, two days before the World Economic Forum in Davos, and attracting a similarly impressive group of speakers and attendees. DLD is covering digital innovation in business, science, arts and design, and is bringing together 500 thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators from Europe, Israel, America and Asia.

Luc Besson, the influential French filmmmaker, who recently declared his withdrawal from the movie business, is one of the many eccentric geniuses who are expected to "spread light on new paradigms in markets, society, and lifestyles for the next decade." Others include Chris Bangle, Beth Comstock, Lord Norman Foster, Marissa Mayer, Walt Mossberg, Nicholas Negroponte, Craig Newmark, and Nicholas Zennstroem.

Notes from the Techcrunch 7 Party

It has become commonplace in Silicon Valley to discuss whether the web 2.0 phenomenon bears any resemblance to the halcyon dot com days. If you don’t take business models and VC term sheets into account and only look at the parties, then the answer must be yes. The hype is back, and with it, the hedonism and glam. The Techcrunch party on Friday at the offices of August Venture Capital in Menlo Park was a must-go event for the Valley’s Who’s Who (if you want to raise money or have money to give, start with this guestlist), and it saw a lively crowd boasting about A- and B-rounds with wine and mini-burgers on the sunny patio.

A sure sign of the Valley’s renaissance is that it attracts many Europeans who were thus ever-present at the event (or maybe it’s because of my European bias). Guillaume Cohen, co-founder and CEO of the enterprise video broadcasting service Veodia, was queried about an alleged conspiracy against Tour De France winner Floyd Landis, a VC from SVB congratulated me (and Germany) on “a flawless World Cup,” and a half-naked young man in a Speedo made an abrupt special appearance - see video above (I heard it was a reference to an inside joke from last year that had to with Robert Scoble).

I spoke with a number of European entrepreneurs who all confirmed that Europe has become a driving force of web 2.0: Felix Petersen, co-founder of the Berlin-Zurich based Plazes, visited the Valley to meet with a number of VCs for a first round funding. Plazes is a social location directory with 100,000 users that can tag locations to find other users or related places nearby. The service has recently garnered a lot of media attention after it had long been the darling of super-geeks but Felix told me that most of the press coverage focused on the evidently Orwellian aspect of the service and hasn’t led to any conversion and hence “We don’t actively do any PR.” Plazes doesn’t make any money yet but hopes to offer attractive contextual advertising opportunities, based on its location-based user profiles. Tim Bonnemann, who wasn’t able to attend, was present as subject of conversations as he is the initiator of the Web Mondays that have become indispensable forums for web 2.0 entrepreneurs in Germany. Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, CEO of Paris-based vpod.tv, a video publishing on demand service, was in the Bay Area to attend the Digital Hollywood conference and present at the 3rd French-American Tech Connection in San Francisco.

On the way out, I met David Thompson of Genius who impressed me with a detailed recollection of all the times we had crossed paths before. Boy, if all sales guys were like him you wouldn’t need a CRM system!

By the way, even Silicon Valley's power has limits: the police showed up at midnight to shut the party down...

Web Monday on Monday

Web Monday is an informal gathering (in Germany) aimed at bringing together users, developers, entrepreneurs, researchers, web pioneers, bloggers, podcasters, designers, venture capitalists and other folks interested in web 2.0 (in the broadest sense). The goal is to better connect the larger web 2.0 scene in Germany as well as enable and improve transatlantic idea exchange between Germany and the US.

Since its inception in November, Web Monday has spread fast: meetings are now being held in a number of German cities (among them 6 of the nation’s top 10 biggest) on a regular basis and have attracted several hundred participants so far.

Now, the first Web Monday Silicon Valley will take place in Mountain View on Monday and anyone involved in web 2.0 or neighboring fields who is interested in German-US business (or any kind of “bridging” between the two, for that matter) is most welcome to join.

Mobile Content: Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup

Mobile is the buzzword today, and whoever manages to best satisfy the needs of consumers on the go, effectively catering to the ”third screen,” will be the marketing king of tomorrow. There are three types of mobile services that are reaching for their tipping points: location-based services, integrated presence services (WAP/Internet, IM, SMS, MMS, e-mail, phone), and mobile delivery of rich-media content (video, TV, user-generated content, audio, games, etc.) -- with the combination of all being the true killer app.

The “Mobile Services - Content is King” panel discussion, hosted by the German American Business Association (GABA) this week in Palo Alto, focused chiefly on the latter. This made sense in light of the fact that mobile TV is the fastest-growing new data service on handhelds (according to a Telephia study). While the panelists, including industry experts from Telephia, Yahoo, MobiTV, and Infospace, largely agreed that the combination of rich content with mobile broadband will propel incumbent carriers as well as new specialized service providers, they conceded that the industry still faces major obstacles in driving widespread adoption for a number of reasons:

1. Fragmentation of offerings: While there is a vast array of services and applications from numerous providers, it is this sheer number of custom offerings that seems to confuse consumers. Knowledge of mobile services is still limited to late adopters while the early followers depend on the packaged information they are fed from their gate-keeping mobile carriers. Often, average consumers do not even know what is possible with handheld devices. In particular, the awareness of mobile TV is very low compared to downloads, games, and mobile Internet. Of all the players, MobiTV seems best-positioned to tackle this and lead the market in part because it has developed a compelling brand and secured partnerships with AT&T, Cingular Wireless, and Sprint Nextel.

2. Fragmentation of devices: On the hardware side, players are fragmented into PDAs, iPods, PSPs, cell phones, etc., while research data shows that consumers would actually prefer to carry just one single device with them (preferably the cell phone) that integrates all of the above applications. Marketers consider the cell phone to be superior to other devices since it is the most familiar and also the most personal handheld device. Not to mention that advertisers appreciate its call-functionality (yes, you can still use a cell phone to make a phone call…) as it allows -- literally -- a “call for action.” Because of that, many believe that the cell phone will eventually also absorb many former iPod users in spite of the next generation of iPods being spiced up -- according to rumors -- with Wi-Fi and gaming features.

3. Fragmentation of technology standards: There are a number of technology standards being used to deliver mobile content. Right now, the field is divided between telcos that provide broadband connections, handheld devices manufacturers, and mobile services such as MobiTV, Qualcomm's MediaFlo subsidiary, or Modeo, that specialize in delivering professional content onto mobile players. The problem is that, for example, MediaFlo networks are based on Qualcomm technology, while Modeo plans to use the DVB-H standard backed by companies like Philips, Texas Instruments, Nokia and Motorola to build its networks. Hope is on the way, however, as Qualcomm unveiled a new chip Friday that supports three major wireless television standards. The so-called Universal Broadcast Modem (UBM) will allow handset manufacturers to use a common chip for production of devices geared to different standards. The standards supported by UBM are FLO, Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld, and Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial, enabling mobile handsets to receive real-time content regardless of the broadcast technology selected by operators.

4. Pricing: Mobile services are still prohibitively expensive for average consumers. If you subscribe to MobiTV, for example, you pay $12 per month for 15 channels (not 15 channels you want, the 15 channels MobiTV decides to feed you).

5. Usability: Mobile devices require content that is specifically tailored to smaller screens. Soccer games are a good example: The wide angle images usually shown on TV do not translate to smaller screens since viewers simply cannot see the ball. Service providers therefore typically use close-up shots of the players instead. It is also interesting to note that three of the five most popular channels on MobiTV's service were created especially for a mobile environment. People might want a familiar television experience on their mobile devices, but they obviously watch much different types of content on them -- short videos, also called "snackable" content.

After the panel discussion, I spoke briefly with Jonathan Atkin (Managing Director with RBC Capital Markets), the panel’s moderator, and asked him about the potential of mobile applications for the enterprise. Jonathan opined that the time wasn’t quite right for an enterprise play, arguing that technologies, applications, and business models first needed a proof of concept by consumers before they would be picked up by business users (as was the case with blogs and Wikis and will soon be with online social networks, see LinkedIn or now the expansion of Facebook into the corporate world). Yet the potential is enormous; Jonathan referred to real-estate agents being able to access location-based information from their cell phones during open houses. According to the Telephia Customer Value Metrics, the real-estate industry is most dependent on their cell phones.

For the time being, it seems that the mobile services market is plagued by the same problem that beset digital music before Apple created the iPod: while there is a plethora of fancy devices and powerful applications, the one mainstream application for the consumer is lacking. It might be a matter of design or maybe it’s a question of brand power, but mobile services will not be fully embraced by the mainstream consumer unless there is one single player that will lead the market with a groundbreaking (and that almost inevitably means simplistic) product.

Web 2.0 Shake-Up Inevitable?

MIT’s Technology Review has the latest take on the Web 2.0 fever. It offers a sober and rather skeptical evaluation of the start-ups' business models, which – if you believe the publication – aren’t all that great. As most Web 2.0 sites rely on nickel-and dime revenue from contextual advertising, some industry pundits contend that a shakeout is likely within the next 12 to 24 months: “The winnowing of Web 2.0 won't be as bloody as the dot-com crash of 2000-2001, though, simply because these companies never accepted much venture funding and have far fewer employees. What's more, the underlying technologies won't disappear -- more likely, failing companies will be bought up by slightly larger competitors in a wave of consolidation.”