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AO’s “Big Media” panel line-up does more to explain the Valley’s definition of what qualifies, so here it is:

* Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark Capital
* Albert Cheng, EVP Digital Media, Disney-ABC Television Group
* John Edwards, CEO, Move Networks
* Thomas Lesinski, President, Paramount Digital Entertainment
* Michael Montgomery, President, Montgomery & Co
* Todd Teresi, SVP, Publisher Channel, Yahoo!

In such close proximity to Hollywood, “big” + media = video, and it quickly became apparent that the star of the hour for this crowd was Albert Cheng, EVP of Digital Media at Disney’s ABC Television Group, who, it could be argued, just managed to convince his network to be just a bit more accommodating to its audience’s actual viewing habits.

More…Perhaps it had something to do with how intelligently Cheng addressed what his audience actually wants.
“Put what we’ve done in context of three years ago. [then CEO Michael] Eisner made a lot of bold moves,” encouraging what Cheng called “simmering entrepreneurialism. He gave us the license to be bold; think about the consumer.” He did. He said, “I thought a lot about what was happening to the music industry. I wanted to be proactive and think about what consumers are doing” with their viewing time.

That contemplation led to the first network deal with iTunes, a deal that took 48 hours to complete from crafting the deal to allowing episodes to be downloaded. “It put us on the map,” Cheng said, and in the context of being recognized for our “aggressive, pro-consumer stance” on distributing content.

ABC’s enabler is Move Networks, which John Edwards said has served 400 million episodes to date, along with one billion ads. Fielding criticism about why a new player was necessary to do so, Edwards points to the quality of the experience, which he says (and audience bloggers agreed) blows away the competition. Watching an episode on a laptop can finally approximate watching it on TV, even in HD on existing bandwidth, but that’s only the beginning.

ABC will soon allow clip-sharing and posting, which could be the last barrier to video’s Web conversion.
But despite all the talk of transition, Edwards and others reinforced the notion that there are still “two worlds” competiting for video viewers online. Said Edwards, “One is the Internet video world, which has a very Web-oriented display, and the other combines Internet and Television as a business.” The latter, business-oriented model relies on the high quality of the user experience, combined with high-quality content, to support the “right” ad models.

“The gold mine” is at the high end of the spectrum here, he asserted. Of the 12 billion videos that have been viewed, most averaged 2.7 minutes, but long form video, constituting 2.2 percent of the total, has generated 47 percent of the revenue, he said. “Our goal is to deliver 10 million concurrent viewers in a single sitting.”

That could require adapting the platform to settop boxes, mobile viewers – wherever the viewer wants to be. But that will also require much more work on how to measure the audience and how to drive the highest profits per revenue hour, all while protecting content copyrights.

Teresi doesn’t worry about that when Yahoo! is distributing video for walmart.com, but he’s got to do better than that to recoup the search engine’s $150 million investment in Maven Networks. Lesinski from Paramount Digital does. Managing content through the many “sequential distribution” channels at his command is the way studios have milked value from content in the past, but he’s intentionally trying to disrupt that process to figure out how digital channels can reap even more profit from wider distribution without violating current deals or further handicapping theatrical release.

Or, as Cheng described the challenge, “as we evolve over time, how we serve a generation that is moving and maintain the infrastructure for both the old model and the new one over time, while serving both as the dynamics change and figure out where the money goes” – that’s hard.

Lesinski predicted a world in the not too distant future when content would exist in a kind of “cloud locker” with unlimited shelf space, where viewers can watch movies they’d never see otherwise – “any movie on any device at any time.” He looks for innovation in recommendations – technology that can pre-qualify movies and other video experiences for you that you wouldn’t otherwise discover.

Cheng chimed in with his version of Nirvana which would reflect “True convergence, a seemless transaction of content and people on any device, so seemless that you can deliver video and engage with the consumer regardless of what they’re doing, even if they’re on a social network.” He added, “We want to work with people, not against them.”

In other words, for “big media” to survive, there may be room for only one class of Internet video – the kind that puts the user first.

Palo Alto, CA – Tony Perkins has probably earned the right to crow. He famously predicted the “dot-bomb” right before it went off, for instance, and through the darkest aftermath, companies he and his AlwaysOn advisors picked as leading potential entrepreneurial investments have managed to stay ahead of the curve for profitable exits. In venture capital or VC-speak, an “exit” is that point at which early investors see a return on their investment, either through the company going public – as likely this year as a woman in the White House – or in today’s more common “merger.”

Being a member of past AO 100 companies gave you about a third of a chance to exit at three times the industry average, Perkins claims. A study from the 451 Group found that, among the previous AO 100 companies 23 companies have been acquired in just the last 12 months for a total of $5.5 billion. Microsoft
Deals are clearly down from a 2005-2006 high of 27, and – depending on who you ask – all were bought out by another company rather than through public offering. Microsoft is the largest “serial acquirer” of AO firms, having now bought six of them.

That said, the yearly listing is somewhat misleading – companies that have appeared on past lists may recur – among this year’s top 250 are many repeats such as Aggregate Knowledge, Digg, Facebook, Gaia – last year’s winner – Topix, Tremor, Trulia, Yelp and Zillow, being among those already familiar to newspaper companies in one way or another.

There’s a long list of “green tech” start-ups, which, while probably worth watching, don’t have a lot to do with publishing; and infrastructure plays – other than making the point repeatedly that selling software as a service is here to stay – don’t generally become competitive game-changers.

Four categories do: Mobile, Consumer & Community, Online Advertising Service Providers and Enablers, and we’ll cherry-pick each of these a bit to raise a flag or mark trend lines.

But we don’t want to miss the forest for the trees. A few key trends are worth highlighting without being tied to any single company.
More…1. Angels are becoming the new early-stage investors and VCs of Silicon Valley, but entrepreneurs in large measure are shouldering more of the burden to become profitable fast. In this economy, start-ups generally are being asked to make it farther on their own steam using their own seed capital, and to demonstrate larger growth rates and revenues before measuring up to even angel investment. As Ron Conway, founder of SV Angels, put it, “It takes more money to fund a mediocre business than a great one.”

Investments of $500,000 at a time – what a panel of angel investors referred to as sufficient to establish “microcaps” – may in large part be viewed as sufficient start-up cash because it just takes less money to start a tech company these days. There’s so much disruption in the ecosystem of the Web that companies like StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, and Spiceworks all were built on rapid internal growth, until they got to the point where they sometimes need to jump a chasm to bigger growth and “build the plumbing” required of a larger company, as one investor described it.

Sarbanes-Oxley compliance certainly puts a crimp on growth, and may create the kind of leverage that causes smaller companies to sell out earlier than they might otherwise, just to acquire the kind of infrastructure needed to support the reporting requirements, investors complained. But companies aiming to grow from the start have to invest in SOX plumbing from the get-go, because just like a house built without it, it’s much more costly to add later.

2. While green investments are widely expected to grow by 10 percent or more in the coming year, summit attendees surveyed say that the digital entertainment sector expected to receive the most funding this year is mobile (43 percent of voters thought so, as compared with 25 percent of respondents who thought social media would lead, 20 percent who voted for content and 11 percent who picked tech enablers.) Mobile also was voted as the sector most likely to see more M&A activity, and within the category, the the biggest opportunities were seen for mobile content. As for total investments, mobile was ranked a close third after “greentech” and digital entertainment in total anticipated investment dollars this year.

Those most in the know about mobile – panelists from Nokia, Google, and Qualcomm – all predicted that carriers will likely have to find a way to share the individual handset location coordinates that are so instrumental to applications that can be personalized to a given cell-phone user. There’s just too much upside opportunity there to be ignored, they agreed. Multiple Google panelists affirmed that the new Android operating system, on track to be available in commercial phones by Q3, will be flexible enough to accommodate many applications never envisioned by the search behemoth. It will, as one asserted, be “nothing like Microsoft.”

3. Several entrepreneurs, and their investors, managed to comment in completely different contexts that no-one has managed yet to crack the code on “local” services online. Among those on the AO 250 who are trying: OpenTable, NearbyNow and Outside.In (which didn’t make the list, but did present in the break-out sessions). Outside.In pointed out that its local BuzzMap of most blogged about places in D.C. Maryland and Virginia, is now live on on the site of its partner WashingtonPost.com. And BookingAngel.com, an Australian company poised to give OpenTable a run for its money, said unequivocally that Internet Yellow Pages are “dying.” A most concerted effort among all local leaders appears to be a focus on some version of a “pay for results” or pay-per-booking business model. But, at least in the case of BookingAngel, the reservation works automatically, generating a qualified lead sales opportunity until the prospective business client is virtually forced to reject business or pay between $3.50 and $8 per reservation. If the local search marketplace in increasingly populated, it certainly appears that the survivors will have at least proven their right to survive.

4. The more mature the Internet supposedly becomes as an industry, the more likely companies sound like they were named by a 4-year-old.

The ‘Short List’
Not even three days of CEO pitch sessions were sufficient to make it through AO’s entire Global 250 list. As noted in our lede piece, Twitter took top honors this year as AO’s “hottest, most innovative, and potentially disruptive tech startup on the planet.” But we’d be remiss in not relating AO’s category winners in sectors most likely to affect you, and saw several others that may warrant more attention.

In “Consumer & Community,” KPMG and company selected hi5. The social network, launched in 2003, has become one of the world’s largest social networks and is a top 20 Web site globally with 80 million plus million registered members in more than 200 countries. That said, the individual appeal seems not much changed from GeoCities of a decade ago where the appeal is to “find friends in your hometown,” show off your photos, listen to music you like, reconnect with classmates and “build your own page and express what’s important to you.” On some level, it’s so much work to engage in yet another social network that until someone important to me joins, I’ll probably have to take their word for it.

For my own taste, I was singularly impressed with IBeatYou. One of an increasing flow of companies out of Los Angeles, IBeatYou dares users to “challenge the world” in “a place where you compete with anyone in anything, anytime.” Participants can compete – challenging anyone to any contest by submitting a video photo or text; judge competitions or get friends to rate your entry; and finally brag, “win with a beatdown, talk smack, and rack up stats.”

Everything about the site plays to a user’s will to win. Register and you find you’ve won 100 points just for logging on. Fill out your profile for more points (yes, all you marketers can already see where this is going), and participation counts in the never-ending quest for a higher score. With competitions like “your most useless talent,” “best 60-second rant,” or “best pic of you drinking,” on many levels it smacks of YouTube, but with scorekeeping, and better ways of making challenges personal and timely.

Celebs like Golden State Warrior Baron Davis and Will Ferrell provide personality if not all that much presence – Ferrell’s last logon was two weeks ago – but they do warn you that IBeatYou is as much about settling a claim in your own circle than being a “stan” (stalker-fan. New vocabulary word from the rapper session.) Best online newspaper Web ap, anyone? Booyah…
Into the “Cloud”
We won’t dwell on infrastructure companies except to note, on some level it seems singularly odd that online newspaper companies persist in investing millions in their own, highly specialized CMS’s when so many other companies are running headlong into “cloud” computing. AO’s top infrastructure company, OpSource, provides a complete Web operations infrastructure and service solution for software as a service and Web businesses, and it’s committed to always providing the most current technology and applications solutions while still allowing customers to pay “on demand.”

Taking a closer look at SaaS services rather than “building your own” in hopes that audiences will materialize seems the only sane response to today’s tight capital markets. Rather than “build it and they will come,” OpSource offers, “plant it and see if it grows. “

Among “Enablers,” AO’s category winner was Youku, headquartered in Beijing. Since it’s all in Chinese, I can only guess at its claims, but the site is such a blatant rip-off of YouTube’s design, that we can only assume that’s where this is headed. MySpace must have thought so too when it decided to partner with the company.

Video To Rock Your World (or at least your Wiki)
A more compelling presentation, and collection of big media partners, was evidenced by Move Networks, whose infrastructure underlies ABC, Fox and the CW’s efforts to make their recently aired video available for download. While reliant upon its own separate media player, there’s no denying the success of the platform in its space, and the networks hungry for more interactivity and loyalty from fans seem willing to even enable users to remix and reload videos.

Relative newcomer ManiaTV, not featured in AO’s top 250, presented a clean contrast to Move’s strategy in targeting established media brands. It would rather create it’s own. Launched in 2004 as the “world’s first Internet television network,” the company produces, sells and distributes “made for Internet” programming targeting 18-34s. A key revenue stream is creating innovative, branded entertainment opportunities to leading brands and advertisers. And, it’s got 8 million viewers a month. The formula has attracted more than half of AdAge’s tops 100 advertisers.

Curiously, both Move Networks and ManiaTV like to call themselves “Television 2.0.”

But it’s not alone; Notably, OrDie Networks (ShredorDie.com, FunnyorDie.com, PWNorDie.com etc.) takes a page out of the cable playbook, building its brand with sold-out campus tours nationwide and video’s ideal “reverse publishing” model: it has produced 10.5 hurs of programming from FunnyorDie that will air on HBO in 2009.

As imitable as we may think all these models may be, for most online newspaper publishers the video entrepreneur that will rock their world is Kaltura. Kaltura calls itself the “first open-source video management platform” available on the Web. Using words like lowest price, source control, flexibility and extendibility, Kaltura’s differentiating feature nonetheless seems to be its advanced participatory or collaborative controls. Say someone were to post a wedding video online, and the original videographer missed the reception. A user who shot the reception could go online to the same platform and just “cut in” the closer – he or she could even insert multiple scenes from a different angle in the earlier video file without doing away with the original; each version of the mash-up would be preserved and be accessible from an idex.

If this sounds like a video Wiki, you’re absolutely right. It’s therefore no surprise that Kaltura has just done a deal with Wikipedia, the 9th largest site on the Web with 207 million unique users. Look for video Wikis soon, but don’t just look.

Kaltura is distributing around a “freemium” model, meaning that a free video management platform is already available. SDK or CMS (content management) extensions with browser-based applications, custom work and support or premium functionality are extra and constitute Kaltura’s profit motive. Note that among the CMS extensions already ready for primetime is Drupal.

The prospects for third party syndication, streaming and revenue sharing are mind-boggling, as are the truly editorially thrilling Web collaborations. Imagine a “Katrina” wiki where users can download the application in a minute that allows them to publish and remix their own video online. Users can pull in a Flikr video, mash-up video from other news sites, all in an open-source, drag-and-drop environment for any wiki platform or PHP site. Match that with Adap.tv (discussed below) and you’re off to the bank.

As was clear in the “Big Media” panel, top video content owners are willing to “play” in the Internet space to find the right business model for new audience realities, but by the time they get there, they’ll find the online-only competition has had the time to acquire substantial polish – er, FountainheadNetworks.tv’s “Bitchslaped.tv” notwithstanding.

Tony Perkins, organizer of AlwaysOn, likes to point to the fact that 30 percent of America’s leisure is spent online, while only 6 percent of the ad dollars have found their way there. “That’s poised to change,” he said.

The final “Enabler” company offered the stage this year that deserves a hard look is Neighborhood America. NA has developed a richly layered community platform (a.k.a. “enterprise social network solution”) with where users can interact around virtually any brand. The structure of the community itself is designed to let members know instantly what resources are available within it, and what they can do to make use of the applications provided.

Called Elavate, this platform has been used by customers as diverse as Kodak and Scripps Networks to promote products and gain consumer intelligence, and there’s an API that allows continued innovation. Key goals: ad revenues, retail sales, and referrals through peer-to-peer marketing. A second product, MovoMobile, allows marketers to develop a mobile marketing campaign and connect it to any Web-based community.

And, like OpSource, Neighborhood America’s platforms are built on the software as a service model.

Video and Semantics Lead Ad Trends
We have no idea why AO lists adap.tv in consumer applications, as it’s clearly targeted towards helping publishers make the most of their online video advertising. The company’s “OneSource” video ad platform is billed as the first open and universal platform of its kind. With a single point of control, the company allows publishers to match their online video inventory with video ads from ad networks, who typically have the largest potential pool of such ads, but which come in a large number of different formats.

Here’s the problem. Online newspapers have a growing repository of video content available to viewers who, by their past behavior, have demonstrated that they’re willing to suffer one form or another of video advertising. But this advertising comes in a smattering of formats – overlays, pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, Flash, streaming – you name it.

Combine this with the fact that the ad serving technology companies don’t interact, and you’ve potentially dissociated the most interesting local video out there from being matched to good, contextual video ads.

When it fully appreciated the amount of revenue that it could unlock for publishers everywhere from multiple ad sources, Adap.tv changed its initial model as an ad overlay company and created a tool that can integrate all forms of video ads with video content. Oh, and the CEO knows a little about advertising. Before forming Adap.tv, Amir Ashkinazi founded shopping.com, which was sold to eBay.

While we’re on the subject of behavioral targeting, it’s worth noting that a different word has crept into the online advertising lexicon: semantic advertising. Peer39 enters the space with technology developed in Israel and based on research at the Technion Institute of Technology and Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Entrepreneur Amiad Solomon now has $12 million in financing from Canaan Partners, JP Morgan and Dawntreader Ventures, and secret weapon SVP of Ad Sales Hugh McGoran, recently of Platform A, which acquired Tacoda.

But McGoran is just the most visible Tacoda overlap. Among Peer39’s advisors are Daniel Jay, former Tacoda President, and former co-founder and CTO of Permissus and Engage; Eytan Elbaz, co-founder of Applied Semantics and inventor of AdSense; and Larry Allen, chief architect for Tacoda’s market strategy and largely responsible for the growtn of Tacoda Audience Networks. (Also noteworthy, James Oppenheim, CMO, joins the company from The Jerusalem Post where he was director of New Media.)

Knowing behaviors has always been only part of the equation to targeting advertising, and proponents of BT know this only too well. The problem becomes how to target down to the page level the sense of a particular type of advertising to the sentiment and understanding of a particular type of content – combined with the need to multiply that experience to achieve mass scale. It’s when things go to scale that the sensibilities are sometimes strained, but Peer39 has applied its algorithms to social networks, where there’s seemingly an endless supply of content at least.
Natural language processing and machine learning are part of the picture, but so is “appeal,” and this has been hard to differentiate as social networks proliferate.

Peer39 promises brands they won’t be embarrassed by the context of their advertising, and if those promises hold true, it could start a stampede.

And yet, perhaps whatever publishers do to “optimize” their ad yields, there will always be “remnant space.” For this real world, there’s Rubicon. (Go ahead, click on the Web site. It’s a hoot just to watch the “ads served” ticker climb past the 32 BILLION mark.)

Rubicon’s play is to make hay in the inefficient space that exists between unsold ad space on publisher Web sites and the myriad of ad networks that purport to monetize that. There are easily 300 such networks, and Rubicon works with 229 of them. Workind with Rubicon, publishers insert just ONE ad tag, and Rubon uses its technology to find the best yield rate, while still respecting channel conflict. The system, in short, “lets publishers focus on their core… we figure out what works best and send you one simple check,” said CEO Frand Addante.

AO’s pick for the category: Conductor. We’ll have to take their word for it. The site is clearly “under construction.”

AlwaysOn, Palo Alto, CA – It took back-from-bankruptcy rap star MC Hammer (http://www.myspace.com/mchammer) to clue me in to Twitter.

Twitter, you see, topped this year’s list of the AlwaysOn Stanford Innovation Summit “pick” companies of those most likely to succeed financially. Past “best of show” picks – singled out for their innovation, market potential, commercialization capability, stakeholder value creation and media attention or “buzz” – have included Linden Labs, Quigo, Gaia, YouTube, Skype and Bebo. Yet, while even the teen-targeted virtual world Gaia looked like a winner to me when it topped Tony Perkins’ list of most likely to score a big one for venture capitalists last year, with Twitter it seemed like AO had reached the outward edge of e-indulgence.More…

Apparently, I wasn’t alone. Even a prominent Bridge Bank contributor to this year’s AO Global 250 (who preferred to remain anonymous for obvious reasons), told me, “When they asked me to say why I picked Twitter, I said, I didn’t. Even in a world where the Internet has become ‘all about me,’ this one seems over the top.”

CEO Jack Dorsey, who runs the company, made light of the fact that Twitter’s micro-blogging capabilities, sent in 140-character, text-based posts called “tweets” to whoever signs up to “follow” them, can be used to tell friends what you’re having for dinner. (Please consider this an invitation for my new Twitter friends to refrain from such breaking news!)

Yet, it has also been a useful alert tool for California residents in keeping abreast of live, mobile alerts from their neighbors during the recent wildfires, and friends of a UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Buck helped get him out of jail when he simply texted the word: “arrested” to his Twitter account after being picked up at a protest in Egypt.

Clearly, with apologies to anyone reading this article, I have less interesting friends. But imagine, what would happen if the expansion of mobile bandwidth ultimately permitted video Twitter? Would you really want people following you into the shower? For many, this is a prospect too horrible to contemplate. (And yet, this too exists. Caught you looking.)

Hip Hop to the Rescue
Then Chamillionaire, Grammy Award winning, platinum recording artist and one of two leading Bay-area rappers to join hype-master MC Hammer on the final summit panel, said what I’d been thinking. Prefacing his comment with an acknowledgment that “sometimes you have to listen to people smarter than you are,” he added, “Like, I don’t understand the fascination with Twitter…. I think everyone’s just trying to work out what’s the latest hot thing and make some money off of it because otherwise everything is free.”

Hammer then set him straight. Having himself brought his “DanceJam” site to Silicon Valley for advice and financing before launching it, he said, “Twitter is a very important tool for not just us, but it allows us to control our fan base so that when you do have an album about to come out and you have 20,000-30.000 followers on Twitter,” you can tell them when the album is coming out and “cut your marketing costs essentially down to zero.”

That’s when it hit me. For much of the previous two days, I’d been listening to entrepreneurs make often tortured presentations asserting how they had managed to shape technology to do something that would somehow be so useful, entertaining or enlightening that surely an audience would follow. Perhaps the biggest stretch was BoomJ, a too-cool-sounding effort to serve the “boomer generation” as a social network. (Who wants to hang around geezers our own age, really?)

Conversely, before us sat some of the cream of Hip Hop saying that they can live with the Internet, even if it blows apart the old business models that have heretofore held the recording industry together, because they have faith in their own creativity. It’s the music that’s the real driver – the Internet is just a communications tool, a way to stay in touch with a fan base that can recognize what’s real. In short, you use anything and everything at your fingertips to make what works, work for you, as Chamillionaire put it.
‘Trained to get things digitally’

Of course, Chamillionaire has every reason to think digital. The number two hit on his second album, Ridin’ (or Ridin’ Dirty ) sold 3.5 million ringtones, becoming the biggest selling ringtone record of all time and making the artist more money than his entire “record” deal. “My fans were trained to get things digitally,” he said simply.

If only the same were true of publishers.

One wonders how the conversation in today’s newspaper board rooms would be different if they turned on what to do to better monetize our swelling youth audience, rather than what content could possibly be employed to conjure their appearance.

Here again, Hammer had some humbling words for the news biz. Asked what he’d like to see develop from the Internet that had yet to see, he said, “Citizen journalism. …There are 9 million stories out there that aren’t being told,” he explained, and as soon as someone develops the business model to allow those stories a voice, everyone will be able to “talk back” to the major news networks and stop letting them “talk down to us.”

He’s got his own ideas about a business model that will transform the music industry, and has been working with Ron Conway, founder of SV Angels, and SoftBank Capital on a model that will be revealed by the end of September – online, if our instincts prove correct.

It sounds very much like Hammer is about to launch his own sort of “record label” where everything including the arcane manner to which we refer to such things is about to be redesigned. With music at the center of everything he does, our guess is that he’s set to launch three largely unknown artists online whose music will be available to fuel music videos on YouTube, digital commercials and remixes of all kinds.
Think of it as “bizjam,” and watch what happens.

Just don’t watch too long; cable competitors are fishing for talent, some in your backyard. Seth Shapiro, fished for prospects with this AO blog post: “We have a new music chnnel with Comcast dedicated to working with artists on these new models. We are in 17,000,000 homes today and are looking to build thease new models side by side with great artists. If you’re interested … check us out at www.archannel.tv and the Comcast On Deamnd section.”

Attendance: Rappers 3, Newspapers 1
But cable had the room to itself among more traditional media players. As in years past, there were more Hip Hop rappers on stage than there were newspaper companies listed on the attendance roster – and two of the latter were probably there to cover the rappers.

Internet business isn’t built without the collaboration of Internet businesses. Digital DNA is as important to newspapers’ survival as “reach.” If the amazing reach and traffic of some of the very nascent businesses we touch on isn’t evidence enough of that fact, save yourself the read and go back to consolidating your niche pubs.

Note: As with all the AlwaysOn “main stage” sessions, you can watch archived video of the entire conversation referenced. The session featuring Chamillionaire, articulate and insightful Bay-area artist Mistah FAB and MC Hammer, as well as session moderator Quincy Jones III, is here.

Since the Australians live their whole lives a day ahead of us in the U.S., I suppose it stands to reason that a group of Australian entrepreneurial interactive companies would provide an informal tee-off to the AlwaysOn Stanford Innovation Summit. This was my third year at the show, and my fourth AlwaysOn conference, and I readily admit I can’t live without it.

There’s something about the honesty born of greed (er, I mean being in fundraising mode), that fosters true collaborative innovating. But now that I’ve said the word Foster’s I guess I have to return to the Aussies.More…

The most interesting entrepreneurial observation made by one of the half dozen pitchmen, probably isn’t unique but it struck me as quite interesting in context. SmackBiz.biz Director Damian Hickey said, “The YouTube generation has grown accustomed to using video in their daily lives; it stands to reason they would make it an integral part of their businesses” going forward. SmackBiz purports to have developed a standard document format for business video that is 10 times more efficient than YouTube for just such business uses.

Besides compressing/encoding this video at the client end (on the shooter’s desktop) to make it more efficient, the system also imparts meta-tagging and archiving in a way that makes business video more accessible and useful “behind the firewall.” Hickey says the system can be implemented in an hour, and can manage up to 1 million videos without the use of database software, making it substantially more economical to use than many video management platforms on the marketplace today.
That said, SmackBiz’s first major Australian client is a media company (the name of which Hickey said he must keep secret under NDA), that is using the software to enable user generated local sports videos for 200 Web sites across the country.

He’s not pursuing that strategy stateside because “there are probably 100 solutions” for managing video in a content management system. “Our business is about business generated content, not user generated video,” he insisted. Things like secure storage, library quality cataloguing, seamless integration into a Web site, extensible metadata (autoformatted archiving) and out-of-the-box “open source” streaming capabilities all make me hope he’s open to reconsider.

Booking Angel Gives OpenTable a Run for the Money
Does the world need another “Open Table”? Booking Angel thinks so, and claims to have already signed up five times the number of restaurants in California alone as Open Table has nationwide. The principle is the same – a consumer goes online to book a restaurant and gets a confirmation of that reservation.

But with BookingAngel.com, the service is both white labeled entirely to local search Web sites, as in the case of BooRah.com in sunny CA with 30,000 eateries and counting, and it doesn’t require the restaurant to invest in an expensive on-site terminal. Reservations are confirmed via phone with touch-tone options for the restaurant to approve a requested time or suggest an alternate booking.

When a slot is agreed, the diner receives an SMS, as well as a follow-up reminder. Restaurants only pay when the diner shows, which does AdWords one better, says CEO and Founder Dean McEvoy. In McEvoy’s opinion, the business of charging companies for local listings (known in our parlance as Internet Yellow Pages or IYP), “is dying.” He predicts the wholesale migration of local sites to a pay-per-lead model instead, and is looking for local partners to give it a go.

McEvoy says the typical spend per booking is $3.50-$8.00, which businesses find vastly preferable to per-month spends for consumers who may never even see their local listing. One additional viral aspect of BookingAngel is that consumers who use the service are reminded to return to the partner site and write a review of their experience, which could help local sites validate their reviews. The reviews make for more bookings, and so the cycle, er, feeds on itself, if you’ll pardon the pun.

McEvoy says the model will scale to any appropriate local business (“What would a lawyer pay for an appointment?” he asks rhetorically), but only because businesses only pay when they see results. The company is working with the Australian University Research Center on ways to make available the inventory of many kinds of businesses. McEvoy promises partners, “Revenue, more bookings, and insights about your customers” unavailable from the competition.

RedBubble.com Empowers Artists
Martin Hosking, remembered by some U.S. publishers as the founder of LookSmart, re-engages the Internet publishing world as executive chairman of RedBubble.com, a site where artists can upload images and receive commissions for their designs being turned into t-shirts, greeting cards or other products.

It may not sound exciting, but appears successful, and could catch on.
With the success of such regional meetings, more could follow, but the Global 250 is aptly named; more than 65 companies are based outside the U.S., and AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins said, “We’re just scratching the surface.”

Okay, maybe behavioral targeting isn’t completely dead, but with Tacoda’s disappearance into the catch-all that is Platform A at AOL (along with search, video, and a cast of thousands), I’ve been wondering if the buzz is officially gone. At AlwaysOn’s Stanford Innovation Summit, I’d no more listened to Peer39 CEO Amiad Solomon’s preso than I heard that Hugh McGoran, former RealCities, former Tacoda ad sales VP had joined the company as SVP. He even offered this link http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25586553/ to check it out. That’s how fast something can go from sounding impressive to being important.

It turns out that AlwaysOn’s “top 100″ picks, historically, on average exit at 3 times the market cap of their industry peers. According to investors surveyed by KPMG, the top three sectors they expect to fund in the near future are, in order: green technology, digital entertainment, and MOBILE! See the story/slides here http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/28228. Presenter says it was difficult to pare this year’s list to 250 this year from more than 900 nominations. Here’s the full list http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/27959. Criteria for picking these folks: innovation (how unique is the business plan), how unique is the market, how much traction have they achieved, are they increasing enterprise value, and finally how much media buzz are they getting. So, my mediopoly friends, YOU have a role in selecting the next round.

I’m told the Facebook application conference (f808) is also in SF this week… maybe it’s possible to sneak down. (No! Egads registration has closed… even after an additional 100 tickets were released!) But the Facebook “ap” is always open; witnesss the Facebook developer Wiki. In short, having a Facebook ap is to the Web what having a screenplay is to living in LA. With all this creative activity, one wonders when it will occur to FB that scads of creative entrepreneurs have learned how to virally enable sharing of their own sites, and their accompanying advertising messages, while FB itself is still fumbling on the ad front. Just think about it, compadres — does it really matter whether you “publish” your own social networking site, when FB or MySpace can do it for you? It’s like bandwidth from YouTube — it’s all you can eat, just make sure you eat what you take.

Come again — did you say PRINT media have a leg up in the coming world of mobile marketing?

I did. SMS — short messenging service codes — are made for American Idol. (I’d say “broadcast” but that would include radio and you can’t even touch your mobile while driving in most states of the union.) But 2D codes – campaign-specific bar codes that look like a checkerboard of squares within a square — these make the most sense in a printed medium, from which they can be used as a springboard to impulse action. Want to know the first time I actually saw a 2D code? On the back of a Google business card.

Now that I’ve got your FULL attention…More…

Much has been made of a recent Google-led experiment with a QR code campaign for Blue Nile , the virtual jewelry store. Others (ClickZ, Gunar, Gawker) have covered this more completely than I can. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that Google gets the credit for working with a “REVOLUTIONARY” new technology, when it’s the smaller entrepreneurs that are really making the headway? Here’s another fact: the first large-scale, monitored test of the use of 2D codes in the U.S. took place at Case Western Reserve this spring and it was conducted by Mobile Discovery of Reston, Va. (Disclosure, I’m privileged to be consulting with MD at the moment, but what I say here is entirely my own fault.

Mobile Discovery tested a revolutionary new platform that allows users to scan a simple printed “code” (known as a 2D code) and click on it to deliver instant access to scores of new products and information services. (One point of clarification — the “QR code,” as these codes are commonly referred to — is a standard in use extensively in Europe and Asia. “2D code” is more accurate as the “term of art.” Mobile Discovery doesn’t itself make the scanning software — several companies do that. Mobile Discovery focuses on a service for advertisers that makes use of the codes to create great user experiences. )

Working with students at Case in Cleveland, Ohio, USAToday.com, the world’s largest magazine company, Reuters, QVC, and all major U.S. wireless carriers, Mobile Discovery used its 2D marketing platform to allow students to
o sign up for free magazine subscriptions,
o view and possibly win a product a day from QVC,
o subscribe to mobile headlines from USAToday.com,
o get instant, real-time information on campus transportation systems,
o download and listen to full interviews summarized in the school paper,
o downoad and use coupons for special offers at the campus bookstore,
o create and share mobile marketing campaigns, and
o raise money for charity.
It was the first large-scale test of its kind in the U.S. of 2D codes, widely in use in both Europe and Japan, and it yielded lots of positive results.

In Germany, the national paper has been using QR codes for some time to draw mobile readers into multimedia experiences associated with printed stories. At Case, The Observer school newspaper used similar technology to springboard readers into the full audio of an interview. The magnetic appeal of such experiences should be obvious to any editor… or marketer.

C’mon people — think about the opportunities. See a display ad for Versace’s new Fall line at Sak’s — click on the QR code to watch the fashion show. I admit I tend to think in “retail” because it’s both been so long a staple of the newspaper business, and because it has been so under assault lately from the Web. Now, along comes a useful technology for which print is actually a key link in the value chain. It would make no sense to link to a 2D code FROM the Target.com Web site — the multimedia experience in that context is already just a click away. But someone browsing the display ad for leisure and curious to see what’s new now has the means literally within their grasp.

And yet U.S. newspapers are largely ignorant of the phenomenon. But fear not — phone companies are going so far as to do the marketing for you to push the scanning technology of their new devices. See this 2D blog from the UK. (I don’t know which is more validating — that the giant Australian telecom / which has always aspired to be a media company, btw / is launching a massive “Aren’t you QRious?” campaign, or that there’s now a blog fully dedicated to the subject of QR codes.) Or, check out the Vespa campaign in Canada .

Just don’t miss this wave when it finally carries all the way to shore — we have too much history invested here. Mobile has now evolved to the point where printed newspapers can now leverage it to add value to their own content, and create multimedia experiences for their advertisers. What are you going to do about it?

Short answer: it’s becoming irrelevant. For the longer, two-part answer, stay with me.

It’s been awhile since I covered this topic, so here are some “touchpoints.” On 9/11, I was in San Diego, scheduled to speak at the 9/11 CTIA conference about our findings in the NAA Wireless Pilot program. That research ultimately resulted in a 143-page white paper with focus-group video called “Info to Go.” But the experience was a bit more gripping. Tuesday, the scheduled day of my talk, my phone woke me up at 6:18 a.m. with an alert that two planes had smashed into New York’s World Trade Center.

The rest was a bit reminiscent of the AP wire from the JFK assassination that still hangs starkly on the wall in New York:

7:26a Wall Street evacuates after plane crash

7:26a Pentagon evacuated, fire reported

7:51a One of the World Trade Center’s twin towers collapses

8:49a Mayor urges New Yorker to evacuate lower Manhattan

9:26a Train travel suspended between Washington, Boston

1:18p No airline flights in US until noon Wednesday

But let’s not forget that it’s a PHONE, shall we. The message, “Please call 703…” on Sept. 15 was my travel agent asking me if I’d be open to a flight from San Diego to Philly through LA. Answer: you betcha.

The better part of a decade has passed and I’ve yet to receive anything so timely or relevant on my mobile. MicroStrategy’s own history is a matter not worth going into here, but I have to offer special kudos to Belo Interactive whose management at the time were enterprising enough to experiment and try to move the needle. Have publishers been waiting so long that they just don’t believe the dream anymore? If so, it’s a real shame.

Such is the conundrum facing all pioneers — out too early and you end up forging prejudices that color your optimism later on. So, here are some facts:

CTIA, the international association for the wireless industry, says 84% of the U.S. population – 255.4 million people – is mobile. Of those, the vast majority (85%, or 217M people), have phones capable of reaching the Internet. Yet only around 34 million people actually accessed news and information with their mobile browsers last year (~14%). A much higher number, 19%, received SMS or Short message service ads, and 22% sent or received video and movies.

There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be a billion-dollar market by now. Or is there? For my part, it seems like the medium suffers from:
1. Lack of compelling applications
2. Mobile campaigns are too hard to create and track, and
3. A lack of user education (phones are still too hard to navigate.)

All that is about to change, and quickly. AND, in a way that’s intrinsically “print friendly.” Are you QRious? Then read on…

9/11 Mobile Alert

So, now there’s a sort of Wiki about online video for the newspaper industry. The descriptives most commonly used to explain what we do as the news and information industry have now finally and completely dissolved. See here http://www.naa.org/Resources/Articles/Digital-Media-Online-Video-Home/Digital-Media-Online-Video-Home.aspx. And here http://wiki.naa.org:8080/dashboard.action. Now, if there were only a way for us to create our own topics and propagate them… Still, progress.