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Report: SEMN IP Pitching Event – 7th July 2008
Posted: Wednesday 13th Aug 2008
It was bucketing down by the time I got to the SEMN IP Pitching Session, in Portland Street, Central London. As I trudged through the rain from the tube station, I saw a drenched dead squirrel lying prostrate on the road.
It didn’t bode well.
At least the venue looked good though. The Royal Institute of British Architects was suitably grandiose. It was a musty, grand old building of the kind they stopped building in the 1920s. The toilets were impeccable too.
I made it to the floor where the event was taking place. It had only just started, but the pre-event buffet seemed strangely intact. Usually it would have been shredded by this point.
But on now to the speakers. As I sat down and whipped out my notebook, Tris Taylor, of Mogul & the Prawn, began his talk. Tris, being the ‘Prawn’ (the Mogul couldn’t make it) looks a bit like a younger, thinner Reece Shearsmith in glasses. M& P specialises in writing music for other media, a sort of wandering-minstrel-for-hire outfit.
The tone was deliberately ad hoc with plenty of scribbled diagrams scanned and then pasted into the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. It was also somewhat self-mocking and even apologetic. (As you’d expect from someone who’s named after a crustacean.) It was as if the Prawn were saying, ‘look at me! I’m dead ironic!’ Then again, striding in and waving your ego about is no way to win a roomful of Brits anyway, so perhaps he had a point.
This and all the other presentations were, of course, a cross between ‘how we did it’ and ‘please give us your money’. And then some questions. ‘It was a good presentation but I’ve still got no clue what you do!’ a Yorkshireman at the back of the room deadpanned.
He then reminded the Prawn that this was a business pitch and not just a demo of his firm’s music. He may as well have been wagging his finger. But then the Prawn noted that you do at least need to LIKE the person you were working with, especially with music. The nuts and bolts come second in this regard.
And on that bombshell the pitch was ended with a loud PING! on a glass as a sort of makeshift buzzer to tell the Prawn his time was up.
Next up was Frank Puranik from iTrinegy. He was stockier and much more animated and hyperactive than the Prawn. His line in was developing software which could test your online services and products when the web is misbehaving.
Indeed, Frank went as far as to compare using LANs to flying on a sunny day. (Or nose-diving into stormy seas with 200 screaming passengers.) But networks are not always so stable. Some poor souls, after all, are still using dialup modems!
Frank’s approach was setting out a problem and then laying out a proposed solution. Some ISPs prioritise different services at certain times of the day. So for example, if you’ve got a group of World Of Warcraft players (the collective noun is ‘a rabble of’) who all hit the server at a particular time, the network really begins to show the strain. With that in mind, iTrinigy works with games companies and other firms who’ve gone online to see how sturdy their online systems are.
This is in fact an important thing to know. Dalek fans who use the BBC’s iPlayer may be alarmed to know that when it runs out of bandwidth, it will not recover. Of course, iTrinigy claims it can spot problems like this as well as other data packet losses. Funny thing, that.
PING! Went the glass, and we moved on to the next speaker.
This was Yann Motte of business social network WebJam. He sounded French – because he was.
WebJam itself enables the punters to utilise social networks set up by companies or large organisations. It’s already being used by Yamaha and the Centre For Policy Studies, along with the likes of Conde Nast and other big firms. It is, in other words, networking on a branded environment, a Myspace or Facebook for serious organisations, and without the suicidal teenagers from Minnesota.
WebJam is also very helpful. Knowing that many would-be users still haven’t got past the abacus, it has an interface designed for those who can’t use computers or Google maps. All in all, it seems to be a social network that actually. DOES something. It is, as Yann says, ‘Communities With A Purpose’ – be it for business or organisations large and small. And like all the best Web 2.0 outfits, WebJam helps members be transformed into publishers; a cluster of communities with purpose…
Messianic flourishes aside, though, how does it make money? WebJam makes its money via maintenance and hosting, while users coin it in with advertising. Everyone, at least in theory, are fatted like calves. But the truth is in the continuous take-up, so WebJam has some work to do.
PING!
Thereafter, it was Rowland Jobson and Archie Macaulay of iPER. This double act sang the praises of their company, which provides all manner of online services for small to medium businesses, such as context-based speech provision and so on.
Said application, VoxIQ, can convert speech into text and provide real time analytics amongst other things, such as in-context prompts. In practical terms, this allows call centres and clients to share data easily, which will certainly be a change.
Agog at the possibilities, an American at the back asks about potential educational and telemedicine possibilities. Jobson and Macauley looked intrigued.
PING!
In their wake was Rowland Jobson, of Seefood. This makes commercials and branded content, though the presentation couldn’t cover Seefood’s full range as it was somewhat limited in range but owing to circumstances beyond the speaker’s control.
Seefood itself works with Shelter and Notting Hill Group; but also more recognizable brands like Sony Playstation. You’ve probably seen some of its ads already – like the nudists in a Freeserve advert or a cute Brazilian bikini babe playing a tune on Brahma bottles.
It is, of course, an oddly melancholy state of affairs – all that creativity and talent focused solely on flogging things to people. But how else do the creatives work and pay the bills?
Rowland’s forte lays in hiring directors from Eastern Europe – they’re efficient and deliver the goods and don’t mess around. In other words, Seefood is typical of the ‘Workhorse Media’. There are the companies who actually make money, make an impact and will be what defines our times in a century or so. They make our landscape.
PING!
As Rowland goes, Dr. Panos Kudumakis of Queen Mary University’s Centre for Digital Music takes the stage. As you might expect, his interests lie in how technology influences music. In his opinion, the dreaded MP3 format is a ‘disruptive’ technology as is user generated content. What Panos means is that these new media undermine the existing order – in this case, the way through which music is normally distributed and sold, like in overpriced record shops, for example.
So how do you make money from music now? The Centre for Digital Music offers several options, such as online music editing and online systems that track who’s listening to what. The goal being, of course, to find new ways of getting money out of people who just aren’t buying albums.
PING!
Now for some comic relief. Brian Condon from the Community Broadand Network provided the laughs with probably the cheesiest, most absurd ad ever – Ghandi making the 1940s a much better place by spouting syrupy nonsense to the world via the Internet. As Brian snorts, this is utter nonsense and could only come from ‘an industry that believes Ghandi would have done better with a web cam’. Ad men, hang your heads in SHAME.
Instead, Brian observes that it’s not who’s using the Web that counts, but the content they put up which dictates what happens. This is all academic in the UK, as we’re still mostly on slow, plodding copper networks, rather than sleek, zippy fibre-based ones.
Therefore, since it costs too much for business to pay for fibre-optic infrastructure, it means the investment must come somewhere else. Brian argues that bottom-up community co-ordination is the way ahead. That is, if communities band together to set up broadband and then use it to improve their local facilities, then that – not big business – will roll out the fibre-optics that are needed.
Plus, it’s good news for the communities themselves. Most regional programming is never shown, but community sites can provide an outlet for them along with local TV stations, local content and interactivity. Best of all, it’s all owned by the community co-operatives themselves…
PING!
And finally, it’s time for the South East England Development Agency’s Brussels Office to make its case. The presentation was unique in that it was delivered by an all-female team in a mostly blokey room. It was also the only presentation from a state (or in this case, super-state) organisation rather than a business or not-for-profit.
SEEDA wanted to plug networking and funding opportunities with Europe itself, jointly funded by SEEDA and the South East Assembly. The ladies all emphasized the benefits of funding, including networks with academics. (Which is not always as exciting as some might think.) But mainly the free dosh, as you do.
It all sounds very nice and friendly, but also very bureaucratic, full of acronyms, regional areas you’ve never heard and lots of wonk-friendly data and code designations. A real cynic might even go so far as to describe it as the EU gone electronic – Byzantine, defamiliarised and sterile.
It’s also rather suspect. One of the ‘advantages’ of the scheme given here really that only ‘good’ ideas are accepted. But who says what is good? It sounds like a centralised, hulking large organization trying to do the delicate work needed for individual ideas.
The shibboleths are rather self-defeating too, for while “putting innovation into action” is trying to sound feasible, it sounds instead to be quite cold and mechanical, while “YOU in a European project!” sounds rather scary, actually.
It is, in mitigation, potentially generous – but at what cost to independent initiative and those silly ideas that make billions but confuse committees? A certain skeptical tone crept into the questions afterwards, which is a shame as SEEDA do sound like very nice people.
PING!
As I left, once more into the rain, it did feel like I’d learned something. Everyone in there had given it their best shot and there were some interesting ideas. But it was telling that the streets were wet with raindrops in their millions – like them, good ideas are legion, and easily overlooked.
A long, soggy trudge back to the tube station awaited me. That, and the dead squirrel.