UKNM: Conference Report: Red Herring on Hollywood

[azeem azhar in la]

	Dear all,


I'm currently at the Herring on Hollywood and I thought a brief report on

the conference might be interesting.


We're sited in the Century Plaza hotel, stuck just outside of Beverley

Hills, it was used by Ronald Reagan as his Western Whitehouse during the "I

don't recall" days. The doorman was complaining of the 250th day of

sunshine in a row. It's a tough life.


The key theme of the conference is content. LA is the world's capital of

entertainment content. (Useful content comes from New York and London). So

expect a great deal in the way of interactive tv plays, content-commerce

splashes and getting rich media down thin pipes with a splash of magic dust.


Overall headline from day one: a great deal of clever stuff is happening.

But single-source rich content is just that: single-source content. It's

expensive to produce and, frankly, as a business is no more challenging

than making mini-series or turning out TV shows. It just isn't as exciting

as a hot technology play, clever aggregation businesses or those

gotta-love-'em natural monopolies of marketspaces (like Chemdex,

www.chemdex.com; and eBay, www.ebay.com).


Message two: investors seem to get this. Valuations are less explosive than

Silicon Valley businesses. There are no $100m raises here (yet), and very

little that looks like it'll go stellar when the time comes. More some tidy

businesses and trade sales.


With bikini girls and banana-hammocked boys gyrating, rotavating and

culminating in full view on an 8th floor balcony, Load Media

(www.loadmedia.com) made a splash at the launch party at the Sky Bar Monday

night. They exploded a banner from one of the suites, and then flew an

illuminated Load-emblazoned helicopter over the Mondrian. The after-party

they held at Chateau Marmot spun through the night. Load's presentation was

less impressive: the company delivers pre-cached video to a users desktop.

To be honest, I still don't know what it does


The companies

eStyle.com is create a range of women's shopping services. Backed to the

tune of $13m they've launched their first product, BabyStyle

(www.babystyle.com). This is the first play to get to American women, who

control 80% of household spending in the US. (That's a lot). The next

series of services will be to grow the knowledge and learning into a range

of related sites (so something aimed at women with children older than

toddlers). The model is intended, from the start, to be extensible to other

parts of women's purchasing.


B3TV (www.b3tv.com) provides service and infrastructure to enable

interactive television. I know you're all thinking "That sucks dude", in

fact the opportunity is fairly clever. B3TV relies entirely on set-top

boxes that comply with the ATVEF standard and needs no modifications to

cable operators networks. ATVEF is support by Microsoft/WebTV, Liberate

(NCI), Sony, DirecTV, NBC, Disney,Hitachi, Cable and Wireless, Panasonic

and Playboy so looks like it will be a standard within American homes soon.

Essentially, by partnering with a network B3TV can enable click-to-buy (or

click-for-more-information) on programmes and advertisements. With stateful

sessions, it could remember the last pizza you ordered, for example. This

is essentially the kind of functionality that BIB/Open will provide only it

is not a proprietary system and requires much less development--and is

cheaper--than the BIB/Open closed platform. (B3TV is funded to $6m with 13

employees: BIB is more than an order of magnitude greater, and enabling a

smaller market.) Looks like a candidate for a trade sale rather than an IPO.


Replay Networks (www.replaytv.com) is a fairly well-known property so I

won't go into their business. (Tomorrow's World has even done a show on

them!)


The star for me thus far has been Magnifi (www.magnifi.com). Backed by

Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Magnifi is developing a business-to-buiness hosted

application service for the marketing community. The size of this market is

around $750bn in the US annually. The service is a platform that allows

collobarative working across the whole of the marketing value chain

(conception, creative, media buying, execution, performance measurement),

and solves a problem currently addressed by a mish-mash of e-mails and

faxes. It's also good to see the service bureau model (per seat annual

charges) being adopted by big players like Omnicon, Disney and Young and

Rubicam.


The market

The venture market in SoCal is a lot less active than in the Valley or New

York. Their are fewer VCs and a lot more people pushing entertainment

content around. I can't help feeling this is less mind blowing than

watching a Zefer come attacking the global strategy consulting space, or a

Moai delivering auction (and other dynamic pricing models) software to

dozens of web sites. No good marketspaces here, either.


It's a glamorous, fun and, frankly, hedonistic environment full of B-list

Hollywood stars. They future of a lot of rich media is here, because the

stars and talent are getting into it. They will create some compelling

content and addictive applications for the DSL-enabled world. But I'm sure

they are only going to be bit players in a world dominated by stellar

networked-economy businesses like eBay, BigStep and others waiting in the

wings.

ciao

a


p.s. you may have read that Chuck D opened up with a presentation. He did.

I was having breakfast at the time, so I've no idea what he said.



azeem azhar 			| www http://azeem.azhar.co.uk/ (*)

tel 07958 544 593 		| icq 315460

fax 0207 691 0464		| pgp http://azeem.azhar.co.uk/pgp/


* downdated


********************

UKNM is sponsored by Excite UK, visit us at http://www.excite.co.uk.

Email Khalil Ibrahimi

khalilexcitecorp [dot] com (mailto:khalilexcitecorp [dot] com)

 to advertise on Excite.

********************

Change your UKNM subscription use http://www.chinwag.com/uknm.html