Snippets: (Live detailed coverage, speaker profiles, links below)
- Just having a website does not mean its a strategy. Have an online strategy and a story line that takes you closer to your customers (Andrew Bradford)
- Traditional media is dead. Find new ways to get online and stay radiant there. Being viral has a cost, but it comes with good content, quality and relevance. (Bob Stumpel and Jimmy Mayman)
- Mobile internet is going to be dominated because of finger / touch (intuitive), location is a killer-app and each application is like the browser on the PC – it takes you to a new world. (Sixto Arias)
- Data porn is all about location, mobility and people. And Dopplr is right at it (Marko Ahtisaari)
- Europeans are not fans of big success or big failure, while the Americans love them both. We need to lose the rust, go out there and sell. And we need to understand more about sales and marketing, and not just focus on innovative ideas (The Europe Panel: Robert Lang, Jeniffer Schenker, Inma Martinez and Marko Ahtisaari)
- Stay radiant, have the self ignition and be positive – Morten Lund
- I have a dream, and that is to make the internet social and distributed – Johan Stael
- Give a fuck about “fuck you” money (Government grants / social welfare money),and use it to build businesses – Martin Varsavsky
- Online Dating is for old loserish men – Tom Varsavsky
Universal Mantra for beating the crisis: Stay positive, be positive and spread the love. That is the essence of entrepreneurship.
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09:34 – people finishing their breakfast and walking into the auditorium. The acoustics are fantastic, there are not too many power / plug points unfortunately, but there is a good wireless connection, and that should keep the souls alive.
The agenda can be found here, the speaker profiles are here
09 40 - So we are live now. Ola is on stage and doing a quick introduction about himself and SIME.
“The future has already happened, its just unequally divided”.
- It takes a lot of time to build good companies. And what we were thinking of in 1995 is slowly taking shape right now. Titanic is an example of a bad boat, but great movie, but it took a lot of time to opportunitize the bad boat.
- “A wealth of information is a poverty of attention” . This is what is happening online.
- There are two types of brands: relationship brands and transaction brands. Transaction brands are going towards free, while relationship brands are going towards premium. There are things that are getting towards the free way, but at the same time the Gucci’s and Prada are spreading more.
- “Knowledge is the key differentiator” online and offline.
- World is socializing. And it is getting niche and vertical focused.
- What we dreamt about the internet is coming true, and its helping set up international business
10:04 – Panel 1: Jimmy Mayman (of goviral fame), Andrew Bradford (platform A) and Bob Stumpel (Result, Dutch Advertising Guru)
What is the most important trend in marketing and advertisement?
Bob: Marketing is getting more technological. And its getting more relevant and personal
Andrew: Technology is revolutionizing the market, and its a renaissance of a kind. Apply the learnings of traditional media into new media. The key factor between good and bad campaigns is to have an integrated online marketing strategy. Listen to the people who are talking about your brand online; social marketing is about spreading through your most important channels wide and deep; and finally a website that all blends into your strategy.
Jimmy: Banner ad’s is broken. People are tired and bored of the banner ads. They do not log on online to your brand / campaign site. They do things that are interesting, social and entertaining. So the winning formula is good content that is entertaining and relevant, and is at the right distribution channel.
Bob thinks that traditional advertisements are dead, and companies should stop pushing people into the trap and fooling the system if they do not listen to what the people really need. There is going to be a future for advertisements sooner that we expect, but later than we hope which filters the noise in the communication sphere. More people are developing an immunity towards advertisements, and it makes it tougher for companies to find the market segment.
Viral campaigns can cost anything from 50000 Euros to a million, and its not about just uploading a video to youtube.
The panel was good, but it could have been slightly more focused on the right mix to get a very good viral and marketing campaign out. Probably, there is no exact secret formula, and people are still trying to find the ingredients that make the recipe up. But clearly, content and the relevance hold sway in helping companies find the goldmine online.
Bottomline: Marketing and advertisements are getting technological. We need to find models that makes it more relevant and personal without pissing the users away, and we need to find it fast since people are getting immune to the ads and are looking past them.
1026: Christopher Pommerening, Mr. Venturepreneur is going to talk about the market.
“Venture Capitalist + Entrepreneur = Venturepreneur” . More and more entrepreneurs who became successful once, starting investing the money back in younger companies. Venturepreneur is such a person and we try to connect all the Venturepreneurs of this world through Active Venture Partners. Christopher and friends actually started a restaurant called “founders lounge” made for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs to meet, brainstorm and create new companies.
Ideas are a liability if you do not put the right soil and ecosystem around it. And venturepreneurs help put the right soil and help you find the ecosystem around it. Its a community for specific kind of entrepreneurs – ones who have built and sold companies, but are still entrepreneurs and are also already holding portfolio’s or ready to invest some seed fund into interesting companies. And having a common fund, common knowledge base would just make it easier for companies to find the right mentors and guides who can help the entrepreneurs build good companies.
Bottomline: Entrepreneurs out there, speak to Christopher if you need to meet the venturepreneurs and / or need money and to find your mentor for the company. It promises to be a great network with some great names, connecting the Morten Lund’s, Johan Stal, Ola’s, Stefan Glanzer of the world.
1042: Marko Ahtisaari, founder of Dopplr
Act 1: Serendipity : whatever be the state of the world, people want to travel smarter and efficiently. And there will always be people who will travel despite the economic crisis, H1N1 etc. The result of connecting people who are traveling is the DNA of Dopplr.
Act 2: The Social Atlas: Adding the community touch and location to the services, helping find things around you.
Bottomline: Location, relevance and people – 3 keywords about developing travel communities online.
1055 – How European is the European technology scene – Marko Ahitsaari, Jeniffer Schenker, Robert Lang, Inma Martinez
Europeans are good at building products but bad at marketing and servicing the idea. Americans score there. Europe can be divided into 3 regions – wine drinking countries, beer drinking and vodka drinking. And countries want to go international within their own “type” of countries.
Inma thinks that we need to have more tech crunch types of blogs focused on Europe. TC Europe is still not picking up, and there is a desperate need for information sources to find the European hot beds to inspire people and help them find the right nodes to connect to.
Jeniffer thinks that 2 words are not accepted in Europe – success and failure. Failure is still a social stigma in most of Europe, but in the US, the person is treated as a rock star. People are shy and have a big fear of failure. We need to be bold and go around and steal the customers from the US and everywhere else.
Bottomline: Europe, be bold. Lose the rust. Learn about selling and marketing. It is not just about having innovative and creative ideas, but its about taking it to the customers. And go around the world to find your gold, and not just look within your own market .
How European is the European Tech Scene
11:20 : Mobile Marketing, Sixto Arias
SIME caught up with Sixto before the event and had a quick chat. The text of the chat can be found here
- Mobile is the remote control of the media and soon the internet.
- Its the finger and your pinkie that will control your internet experience.
- Real Address vs IP Address – location and real time address vs your IP virtual address that has no meaning and value.
- Apps vs Browser – apps will be your gateway to connect to people and the world, just like the browser on the PC.
Sixto on stage @ SIME Barcelona
11:35 – time to pause. Networking networking networking
12:14 – we are back, and its Martin’s show. I love his clarity of thought and expression, and thumbs up for him making it to Barcelona. Type of environment that benefits entrepreneurship, and the role of Barcelona as Spain’s entrepreneurship hub.
1223 – Morten Lund is bankrupt and he is happy with life. Ability to self ignite, they will do no matter what. Entrepreneurship is like a war story, there will be blood, and there might be victory. Are you able to understand 360 of the technology, marketing to build the company?
1230 – Stefan Glaenzer : differentiating between vision and hallucination. Go by your gut than analysis when you make investments. Stefan is currently involved with RJDJ , a company which is about personalized playlists and customizing it based on the environment.
1240 - Manfred Bodner talks about his experience in running a gambling company, getting arrested in the French land but still growing the company into one of the stalwarts of the internet.
1250 – Johan Stael Von Holstein – the crazy entrepreneur second only to Morten Lund talks about love and entrepreneurship, how love is a basic strand in the DNA of entrepreneurship, and how he envisions the future of the internet to be a connected node of personalized social networks. Its already there with aggregation and services like friendfeed and ping.fm, but he is talking about integration across the media platforms.
1300 – “Inside the brain of a serial entrepreneur” with Johan Stael, Martin Varsavsky, Morten Lund, Stefan Glaenzer, Manfred Bodner
I had to go up on stage and do an impromptu, but the focus was on the attitude of an entrepreneur, the next big thing, where the money will be, and the differences between Asian entrepreneurs / entrepreneurship and the Western world. And strangely enough if they had 1M $ with them right now, no one knew where they would invest. Clearly all of us are finding our feet.
1330 – The state of the Spanish digital arena with Martin Varsavsky
Martin was joined by a couple of entrepreneurs from the audience, and the point of discussion was the language mindset amongst the Spaniards. Why people are not open to even minor variants of Spanish when they meet the Latin Americans. Clearly there is room for innovation and that can be a global phenomenon only if people think global, and welcome global ideas with open hands.
1349 – The state of the digital natives with Tom Varsavsky
Tom, the bubbly son of Martin Varsavsky was a radiant youngster 2 years back when SIME met him at Copenhagen, and now he seems to have a world of confidence in him that seems to carry him off a 15 year old youngster who is going to carry the international flag quite high. And being the charming guy that he is, he was quite at ease ducking questions like “Is it ok for your dad to peek at your facebook activity?”, “Do you date online” (for which he said – only old losers date online) and being the son of Martin, he seems to have his entrepreneurship roots well grounded. And we here at SIME hope to see more of him in the years to come as a speaker and a favorite SIMEite.
1400 – You cannot shrink to greatness – Ola
It is clear from the day that you cannot shrink to greatness – you need to be out there in the war field (as Morten calls it), get your hands dirty with blood and keep innovating to find the goldmine. And having a good online story can help you in a long way to find what your customers need. One common pitfall is people often do not realize that their customers are intelligent and that is something that is getting more true when you are trying to communicate online.
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