{mosimage}Tony Perkins opened the 2008 Summit at Stanford 6pm 7/22/08 with remarks about the economy, politics, and entrepreneurial environment. KPMG presented their analysis of the AlwaysOn top 250 Companies, including information on tech M&A over the past few years.
Jack Dorsey from Twitter showed up to accept the award as selection as the #1 startup out of the AO 250. He shared some more details about the Berkeley Journalism student who was freed from a jail in Egypt by the Twitter community. There was a lot of twittering going on throughout the conference, as attendees posted to Twitter; and exchanged notes while watching the conference live webcast feed.
Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital is conducting a panel on “Big Media’s Comeback” featuring Albert Cheng EVP Digital Networks at ABC-Disney, John Edwards CEO of Move Networks, Thomas Lesinksi President of Paramount Digital Entertainment, Michael Montgomery President of Montgomery & Co, and Todd Teresi SVP Yahoo!. Tom Lesinksi is explaining how Hollywood’s 50-year old business model, being very lucrative, are difficult to disrupt.
{mosimage} ABC is getting a lot of kudos for their high-quality internet video, recently introduced for some popular ABC TV shows. Yahoo! not there yet. A lot of caution lights flashing for the tech M&A market over the next six months. Premium content the favored buzzword re: monetization (‘YouTube vs Hollywood’). Cheng (ABC) keen on consumers willing to watch ads while engaging in free quality online video; ABC making great $ with this, terrific CPM’s up to $80.
New ad delivery technologies being brought to bear for internet users: overlays, trailers, slideups, pick-an-ad, pop-unders, sliders, etc. Hollywood looking for economic parity regardless of where their content is being viewed. Online helping video content providers and advertisers to target demographics very precisely. Movie side (Paramount) not focusing on ad-supported models; movie and television fundamentally different in terms of monetization.
A slew of leading tech startups will be presenting at this conference over the next 72 hours; we’ll report on some of them. {mosimage}