One of the most interesting panels at DLD 08 (don’t worry - my last post on the subject) was “Smart Boys on New Markets”. The original title had referred to “old boys” apparently, but someone had objected, although “wise old boys” would probably be the one I’d have gone for.
The panelists included:
- Dr Hubert Burda, who heads Burda, one of Germany’s largest media companies and whose idea the whole DLD thing has been
- Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO and Founder of WPP, second largest largest marketing services company in the world
- Joe Schoendorf, of Accel (one of the VCs investing in AdMob, by way of disclosure)
- Joseph “Yossi” Vardi, arguably the most connected technology businessman and investor in Israel, which punches well above its weight in the tech world
- Richard Wurman, a veritable polymath (and scarf wearer), who has done everything from found the TED conference to become a Guggenheim Fellow, and still find time to write 81 books on a diverse range of subjects.
- Banquo’s Ghost, or DLD’s faintly embarrassed conscience, was that there were no women at this top table.
The best joke was made by Yossi - I’m in awe of a person who can make jokes in another language. In his introduction, David Kirkpatrick, said that Martin Sorrell started off by buying a company that made supermarket wire shopping baskets in 1971 (WPP stands for Wire and Plastic Products) “which means that he invented the ‘wired’ movement” according to Yossi. Well, maybe you had to have been there.
There was a lot they talked about and I could write all day, but I’ll just share a few key thoughts.
Schoendorf: “If you’re lucky enough to live long enough to see your grandkids grow up, there’s nothing about their lives that you’ll recognise from your own childhood”.
This may well hold true for today’s grandparents. But with change accelerating all the time, just think what that means in the context of your grandchildren.
Schoendorf (again): Assuming that the new President serves two terms, by the next serious election (2016), there will be one surviving European member of the the G7 - the UK. Today, there are 5.
China’s economy has just overtaken Germany’s, by the way.
Burda: Media is the “economy of attention”. I have heard this before (and maybe he invented the phrase) but anyone in media or marketing should take time to meditate on it.
Sorrell: There are three major macro-trends that concern us all.
1. Geographic power shift
Obviously, China and India - China alone has 600 million mobiles now, with a million handsets sold every day. But let’s not forget Goldman Sachs’s N11, that I’ve written about previously.
Western Europe is in slow, inevitable decline. Yikes.
Someone else said (in a different panel - Andreas Weigend, I think) that if we think we can keep China in line via trade pressure - think again! Today, US exports account for just 1% of China’s GDP, so that’s deadend thinking. We must find other ways to influence them, if we are to influence them at all, which remains questionable.
2. Technology
Well, MobHappy readers probably realise that technology is causing fundamental changes throughout business and society, so let’s not dwell on that.
3. Recession
Sir Martin remains relaxed about 2008 and the economy, relying on the US elections and the Olympics (and European Championships, to an extent) to pull us through.
2009 is a different case though, so be prepared. We have been warned.
So that’s my round-up of DLD 08 for this year. I appreciate that I haven’t done justice to the scope, subjects, wisdom, stimulation and excellent roster of speakers. If you can get a ticket next year - or better yet, become a speaker - you should definitely do so, as it’s one of the best agendas in the world.
Paulo Coelho (seminal author of books like, “The Alchemist” and “Veronika Decides to Die”) gave a great, compelling keynote at DLD, which for me, was one of the highlights. The man simply oozes charisma and wisdom.
Unlike Martha, he’d thought about his audience and gave a speech that we would find both relevant and interesting.
His main theme was that copyright is a lost battle and that we should accept that and live with the consequences in the new world. Moreover, this isn’t something we should grieve over and regret, but that all content creators could use this to our advantage.
He doesn’t just pay lip service to this sentiment, but has used the philosophy very astutely to create considerable commercial advantage for himself (and his publishers).
His learning went like this. First, he published a free downloadable book in 2001; “Stories for parents, children and grandchildren” showing quite an early awareness of the web and its possibilities for a non-geek. He describes it as his least read book, despite getting millions of downloads. People download, but don’t read he thinks and no one has ever talked to him about the book!
Next, he found a pirate version of The Alchemist in Russia, where we was selling only 1,000 copies of the book each year. With nothing to lose, he used the pirate version himself to create a free download. The next year, he sold 10,000 and the next 100,000 copies of the book itself. Nothing else had changed, so he sees the free download as a sampling exercise. People download, read a bit and if they like it, they go buy a book.
These days, he’s more structured in his approach. He finds pirated versions of his work in different languages and tells people about them via his alternative blog “Pirate Coelho”, which he promotes via his official blog. He also allegedly leaks drafts of official translations onto Pirate Coelho too.
He claims this has dramatically increased worldwide sales and as a best-selling author with 100 million books to his name, it’s hard to see how his blase attitude to ownership of his intellectual property has done him any harm. Besides which, the goal of most writers is actually to be read first and foremost. Any money you make (or “lose” through piracy) is mostly secondary.
He also told an amusing story of a blog post he wrote, inviting the first 10 readers who emailed him to a party he holds every year on March 19th. The party was held in an obscure corner of Spain, so he was surprised to get replies from places like Japan, Qatar and Iraq.
He wrote to the ten people clarifying that it was just a 2 hour party and that he wasn’t paying for flights or accommodation or expenses in any way. But they all came anyway - the Japanese lady had never even left Japan before!
As I wrote last week, I was one of the privileged few to be invited to DLD 08 (thanks Katja and Simon!), which was a tremendous success, as last year. Many congratulations to Dr Hubert Burda, who had the vision to start it 4 years ago and turned it into certainly Germany’s leading conference, probably Europe’s and which has to be among the top 10 in the world.
There were loads of speakers, mainly in panel format and unusually, much mingling of speakers with the hoi poloi. Such is the quality of the invited audience, that it’s an event where big name speakers not only stick around after their slot, but they’re accessible to the audience too.
Unfortunately, many of the panels take place in two streams, so you’re forced to choose between very interesting topics, or even whether your time is better spent meeting and networking in separate hall. I found a good approach was to focus on panels which weren’t so familiar, as the chances of real learning were much higher. Sadly though, I didn’t get to see nearly as much as I wanted.
I’ll be posting more about it in clearer headlined topics. But I’ll make a couple of comments here about three subjects that don’t really fit in anywhere else.
The first is scarves. No, not a mobile tech buzz word, but those long (or short) flappy things that go round your neck. About 1 in 10 men were wearing them, which I found most odd.
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing like a nice cozy scarf on a cold day, but why wear one inside in a venue that was packed to the point of unpleasantly warm at times. Sure, I get it’s a fashion/sartorial statement thing, but at the expense of making you uncomfortably hot? I’ll spare the blushes of the fashion victims (by no means all German), but this was strange.
Secondly, we had a presentation by David Silverman (no scarf for him), the animator best known for directing numerous episodes of The Simpsons. The poor man managed the worst technology mishap since George Bush fell off a Segway - he managed to not only make a Mac crash, but in front of one of the most influential audiences gathered in Germany the whole year. David made a fantastically smooth job of continuing his presentation while frantically re-booting and without skipping a beat. The man had real aplomb.
But it wasn’t Apple’s finest hour and any Microsoft executives in the audience must have been rubbing their hands gleefully, while wishing that they had filmed the incident for later release on YouTube.
Finally, Martha Stewart - yes that Martha - was due to receive the Anna Burda award, presented to women of achievement. Last year it was won by Flickr’s Catrina Fake and she presented it to Martha. The idea then was that she’d head over to where Tyler Brule, founder of both Wallpaper and Monocle (and one of the scarf wearers!) was waiting to interview her. So no speech planned or requested, just the one-on-one.
But this is a determined lady. She wanted her time in the limelight and launched into the first half of what she’d planned. Firstly, she treated us to a ceremonial unpacking of her travelling suitcase containing all her gadgets. Bizarrely, she’d packed every item, ranging from camera, various chargers, Sony Vaio, more chargers and phone, into some kind of clear plastic bag. No - I have no idea.
Then she launched into a prepared speech for about 20 minutes or so - all the while leaving Tyler sitting on the stage sweating under hot lights and almost certainly deeply regretting wearing that scarf, by the way.
The content of her speech would probably been really fascinating for her lifestyle homies and readers, but was a little beneath the audience of tech-savvy geekerati. Apparently, she blogs and takes lots of photos - this is no technophobic lady we were meant to understand. Again and again. See for yourself and bear in mind this is the edited highlights.
Finally, she graciously allowed herself to walk over to Tyler and be interviewed, by this time having thrown the timing of the packed agenda completely and all really as she wanted to tell us she took lots of photos. Tyler walked her through some questions and this could have been really entertaining if they’d had the time to do it justice.
A strange affair all round, but this is a woman who knows what she wants and does it. Or maybe it was all in protest at scarf wearing.
Anyway, I’ll be writing up some more notes in the next few days, which are more “on topic” for MobHappy. But thought you’d be interested in this “out-take” version.
Back in November, I posted about seeing a couple of small restaurants touting their SMS shortcode offers, and wondered if the trend was really taking hold here in the US. I’ve now noticed that the paper here in town, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has launched its own text alert service.
Again, not a major milestone in worldwide mobile services, but it seems like further evidence that this stuff is really starting to take off in the US. Despite the glitz and its population (somewhere over 2 million people in the metro area), Vegas is a fairly provincial place. And if you check out the RJ’s web site, you won’t get the impression that they’re really on top of this whole internet and technology thing. (As an aside, it’s sort of amusing that the other paper in town, the Sun, has a really great new site… but terrible content, whereas the RJ’s content is — slightly — better, but their site makes it damn near impossible to read.)
Now, the service itself: I like the shortcode, 702411 (702 being the Las Vegas area code). The content isn’t very compelling yet, and hopefully that will change — if people sign up to these sorts of services for the first time, and find them useless, it will create a strong, and damning, first impression.
I posted yesterday on the new that AT&T was selling SIM-only service, but apparently still required customers to sign a two-year contract. AT&T says now that the language on its online store talking about the two-year contract was a mistake, and that customers don’t generally need to sign a contract for SIM-only service. GigaOM says AT&T told them these were the real stipulations:
* A customer can bring their own compatible device to us, and we will sell them a SIM for $25 or sometimes less.
* The customer can purchase prepaid service, which requires no term commitment and no ETF.
* In most cases, the customer can also purchase postpaid service with no term commitment and no ETF.
* The exception is that we may require a commitment with a promotional rate plan.
* In any case, the bottom line is that we give customers the option to bring their own device to us and purchase service on a month-to-month basis.
That’s a lot better — though the “promotional rate plan” leaves some wiggle room.
Perhaps this will be the last mention of Stefan Eriksson: the former Gizmondo exec and Ferrari-crasher is out of jail (via Engadget), and is in a detention center as he awaits expulsion from the US. Apparently he was released from jail in December, but he’s been sitting in a detention center waiting for the Swedish consulate to scare him up a new passport.
It’s not clear what country should be locking up their Enzos, either: it’s speculated Eriksson could end up in Sweden, or Germany, where his wife and daughter live.
Japan is to start licensing cellphone “sommeliers” to guide consumers through complicated functions as mobile telephones become ever more advanced, an official said Monday.
The communications ministry said it was planning to support a private-sector plan to launch an exam to license specialists who sell cellphones. “We hope they would be able to explain complicated functions and charge systems to consumers, much like wine sommeliers guiding you,” a ministry official said.
You can look at this a couple of ways. You can think, “oh, those quirky Japanese and their phones.”
Or, you can see it as a sad indictment of how complicated, confusing and non-user-friendly mobile devices, services and tariffs are when you need a certified “expert” to explain them to normal people. Is the solution to train more experts, or to make things easier to understand and use?
Back in November, I 
Perhaps this will be the last mention of Stefan Eriksson: the former Gizmondo exec and Ferrari-crasher is 
