Due to a dearth of workable Wi-Fi (damn BT Openzone!) TechCrunch UK&I has been unable to do much of a live blog from MediaTech 2.006 but here are some random-ish quotes (treat them as paraphrases/commentary, we aren’t quite up to verbatim typing yet) from the day so far. And if you want to text a question to the panel organisers text “MT” followed by the question to 80003.
Morning session:
Russell Buckley – Managing Director Europe, Admob: AdMob delivered 40% of the traffic to a unammed mobile ad campaign. Why? Because it was easier to click an ad than it was to get consumers to type in a long url on their mobile. More and more brands are waking up to the mobile web in the same way they did ten years ago to the Web. But this time, it’s not a big mind shift for them. The fact that there were 130,000 registrations for .mobi inside 2 weeks means lots of brands are registering defensively. There are more web enambled mobiles than there are PCs. Especilly in BRIC markets. The PC is being leap-frogged, bypassing the PC.
Michael Bayler – Director, The Rights Marketing Company: Are consumers consuming content? Yes. They already have the content. They are finding it already. People buy ringtones not for the music but to define themselves. It’s a digital T-Shirt. We look for return on attention. But the media industry looks for ROI. Media companies capture value by charging a toll – an oversimplication but true. But the media doesn’t exist until people pay atttention. The winners in the space will be those who create a ‘dashboard’ to the ecosystem. [Ed – Sounds a little like Google’s strategy?].
Gurprit Singh – Director, Emerging Technologies, Microsoft EMEA HQ: [Ed – This was the Standard, “Microsoft Live” presentation. Move along people. Talked about convergence. Strange slide with ‘me’ in the middle surrounded by PCs, mobiles and Xbox, but no TV. Dodged a question about why the Media Centre had bombed, saying it was ‘early days’. This feels like a fig leaf to cover the fact that Microsoft doesn’t know what to do.]
More to follow when we get Wi-Fi working again…..