Continuing the trend of something different for sessions, yesterday’s DCM Europe saw a Dragons’ Den-style series of presentations, where three ‘entrepreneurs’ argued the case for why they should be given an investment of €250,000. This time there was no dead heat to be decided by judges, but the presentations were as captivating as Wednesday’s Showcase Startup.
David Naylor of Field Fisher Waterhouse was the moderator, and first up was Clive Dickens, COO of Absolute Radio. His pitch was for RADIOsync - “A new product proposition to make the discovery of online radio easier through metadata.”
Dickens quoted some figures: 91% of people in the UK listen to 21 hours of radio per week (“radio is very much in rude health”). However, though 80% of the people in the UK own internet enabled devices, and there are around 40k radio stations online, only 10% of people have listened to the radio online. This, he said, was largely down to discovery, or lack of: data, he declared, is the new oil of our economy.
RADIOsync would help people discover radio via their own choice of music (with permission), and via friends' recommendations, as with Facebook. “This is becoming a vital part of the online world with 20% of online time in the US now on Facebook.”
Paul Westhorpe, formerly of PRISA, also went down a content discovery route with his pitch of ‘The Good Life’ - an online service to help people find ”cool, new, local and global authentic experiences".
Content is critical to this, he said: both internal content with images, and video, all going into what he called a “content federation system”, along with external content from business partners and user input. The experiences could be shown based on user preferences, and Westhorpe used the example of visiting Madid, where the user could view maps based around a certain experience, such as a tapas crawl, with recipes for patatas bravas, or a cultural experience, where they could also watch a video on how to flamenco dance
Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of book reader service Anobii, got up to discuss what he called the development of ‘moral DRM’ and caught the audience’s attention with a Victorian advertisement for ‘asthma cigarettes’. “Piracy is a very large problem for music and music and books (though it is still early for that market,” he declared. “Dr Batty’s asthma cigarettes clearly didn't work, and so DRM may not cure piracy.”
The relatively new e-book sector has been learning from music, he said - EMI dropped DRM in 2007 and in January 2008 Sony became the last to drop it.
“An interesting side effect of DRM,” he said, quoting Time magazine, was that it “helped Apple achieve a quasi-monopoly” and the only real effect of DRM is that it “harms the good guys”. DRM removal didn’t hurt the music publishers, he said, though it did squeeze the retailers.
You can’t prevent sharing, he stressed, so DRM should be Digital Rights Morality, he went on to say. Publishers could provide DRM-free books that were watermarked with the buyer’s personal information (name and address for instance) on each page. That would install an ‘honour’ system of not misusing the publication.
“Interoperability of books would open the market,” he stressed. “Other publishers could sell into Kindle and vice versa.” Education is key to preventing piracy of content, including books.
Second place was a virtual tie between Dickens and Westhorpe, but Matteo Berlucchi the clear winner.
