Silicon Valley comes to Belfast (or Hollywood comes to Holywood)
It was great on Saturday to meet some of the guys from the Silicon Valley based Irish Technology Leadership Group who were over in Belfast for the MTV European Music Awards over the last few days – I mean – ahem - that were in town to talk to some of Northern Ireland’s emerging digital and creative businesses and technology entrepreneurs.
Robert Nashak (Executive VP of Digital Entertainment for BBC Worldwide Americas) shared with us his Top 5 most interesting and in his view exciting observations about the way digital is moving right now. They were:
1. Multi platform IP development – storytelling on multiple platforms simultaneously. This is about the way that games and apps are increasingly released at the same time as new films instead of at a later date. (JonMichael Bukosky (see my second photo) made a great point later on that digital allows a story to live on in between traditional tv seasons and it also provides a way for alternative story lines to develop through accompanying apps and games);
2. Brand integration in a way that benefits both brands – the example Robert gave was Lady Gaga & Zynga;
3. New ways to measure audience interaction and gauge audience feedback – e.g. by monitoring & measuring Twitter volume and sentiment whilst an episode of Dr Who is on air;
4. Cross platform and cross merchandising in terms of digital marketing – advertising products on Amazon but also iTunes, etc;
5. The new challenges faced by media companies as SAAS (software as a service) and freemium models become more prevalent, especially in the gaming space.
Some of the above doesn’t seem that new but I guess this is a good summary of what the BBC sees as current and investment-worthy.
He also gave us an interesting metric – 30% of iPhone users download apps every month but only 30% of apps downloaded are used for more than a day. How terrifying is that for the millions of app developers out there, especially those hoping to make money from in-game micro transactions?
The most enjoyable part of the evening’s event for me was the panel discussion chaired by Sean O’Donoghue of Dreamworks and some of the advice given by panel members to Northern Ireland based digital companies. Eric Sargeson of AT&T advised us to make the most of organisations that have already invested in Northern Ireland & are seeing sustained success – for example NYSE (they recruited an incredible 50 people in a single week in Belfast) and HBO with the filming of their Game of Thrones series in Belfast. John Hartnett advised us to position ourselves as the creativity capital of Europe. We like that John but we were wondering - “Why stop at Europe?”
Any comments or questions, please ask below & I will do my best to answer.
