Media Round-Up from DLD 11

Staci. D. Kramer from ContentNext Media, Robin Wateurs from Tech Crunch have done some very good coverage from the panels and thoughts of the luminaries at DLD, one of Europe’s premier tech conferences. DLD, a 3 day event held in Munich, brings together the 170 thought leaders from around the world, over 1000 participants, bringing together a mix of digital, media and art. SIME along with DLD, Le Web are part of the European Alliances of Conferences, sharing ideas and thoughts amongst each other.

Here is the summary from some of the panels at DLD:

• Arthur Sulzburger Jr. New York TImes about why print will be around for longer than you think it will and why the app world will be easier to monetize
  
• Groupon CEO on the lingering IPO question for the company, and his honest truth
  
• Interview with James Murdoch summarized on the pay wall, The Daily  and the landscape of the media industry
• James Murdoch on charging 99 cents / week for The Daily

• And James Murdoch on The SUN, one of their most successful companies having a strong paid component
  
• Google’s Marissa Meyer on Eric Schmidt stepping down as CEO of Google
  
• Cracking the social commerce nut with Groupon and Foursquare CEO

And here is the link to the livestream

The Return of IPO in 2011!

[From Strategyeye Digital Media's Predictions]

Facebook won’t yet, Demand Media definitely will, Skype wants to, LinkedIn might, as may Zynga, Groupon or even Twitter. Tech IPOs look set to come back with a vengeance in 2011. Or will they?

For all the speculation stoked during 2010, concrete commitments for going public this year are harder to identify. And companies are now looking at other ways to raise money.Hulu is a good example of a candidate supposedly poised for an IPO that now looks less certain. Enter Facebook and the USD1.5bn “special purpose vehicle” it created with Goldman Sachs. Via this, the social network will increase its shareholders to more than 500 and will have to disclose its financial results, but it doesn’t necessarily need to go public. Will other companies follow this strategy? Facebook may eventually IPO regardless, but if it does it will be in 2012, not 2011. The only certainty is that there will be more IPO activity this year than last, with Russian search engine Yandex, some more Chinese internet firms, Betfair, Pandora and Glam Media also ones to watch.

All in all a great time to pick tech stocks especially through concepts like Sharespost.

Infographic on who owns Facebook

Facebook, the social networking giant has snowballed into the social glue of the internet today. And as Christian Hernandez mentioned during his keynote at SIME Stockholm, Facebook is all about making the web social, enabling discovery of interesting networks and content. With a rumored IPO coming in April 2012, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Zynga have all got the attention of wall street investors who want a piece of the action. The recent valuation of 50B $ testifies to how far the idea has come along. Here is the infographic of Facebook’s ownership structure.

Interesting Events, Summits and Conferences for 2011

Here are some interesting sources to find events, summits, meetup’s, conferences, hell even dream days (11.11.11) to go to during the next coming months.

1. Social Media Biz coverage
2. Robert Scoble’s Plancast
3. Conference Alerts

At SIME, we are almost ready to launch the days for this year’s, so stay tuned as always!

Here’s to a great year of business, meet ups and inspiration!