Many investors will explain how their finest investments have resulted from a referral from a trusted source. So when my phone rang and it was my old friend John Powell, co-founding CEO of Alfresco, former COO of Business Objects, I focused...
Early stage company financing: the issues & their solutions
Our latest blog is a guest post by Ali Ramadan, senior Associate in the Venture Capital Practice at Bird & Bird, where he works with investee companies and investors on equity and growth capital investments.
Ali outlines some common corporate due diligence issues which arise with early stage companies: when issuing shares, seeking angel financing, tax relief or owning intellectual property. Read on for free financial advice!
How and why M&A is driving the much-awaited convergence of off- and online TV (Episode 5/5)
Closing off this series of blog posts is, in my opinion, the solution for TV companies to survive and remain as successful as they have been for the past decades: undergoing a digital transformation through M&A. I'm personally delighted to have initiated investments for MTG into great online content companies such as Houzz , Mobcrush and Vadio; into video ad-tech companies such as Fuisz Media; taken MTG into the MCN world with investments into the largest Nordic MCN Splay.tv and the 5th largest global MCN Zoomin.tv; as well as acquiring a premium online content company to build a completely new e-sports business with the recent acquisition of ESL Gaming.
How YouTube & Facebook (just like TV) have turned into sophisticated platforms creating new star talents and new formats (Episode 4/5)
How technology has changed what a TV company is (Episode 3/5)
How shifting technology sands have started to cause concern for traditional TV (Episode 2/5)
The summer series, continued.
We concluded the last blog with a suggestion of the complacent attitude of many TV companies that believe they’ll always be able to respond to disruption by investing in smaller players. But that didn’t work in other media sectors, and it won’t work in TV, either:
Traditional TV players are facing competition from a small group of hugely motivated and capable technology companies: Google, Amazon, Samsung, Verizon, Apple, Sony, Microsoft and Netflix. Just cash on their books exceeds the entire market capitalisation of the four major US TV networks! More importantly, these companies have already demonstrated their ability to create quality content, aggregate large reach and generate huge advertising dollars or huge subscription dollars in video. Even YouTube is now going to Pay TV.
Why TV still counts, even for digital brands (Episode 1/5)
The summer series begins here. Enjoy.
TV is still a huge player in the creation and shaping of brands. That’s because it still has the power to reach out to each and every one of us, entertaining and informing us with content we love. People love watching TV, and the amount of time we spend watching it still dwarfs the time we spend on the Internet (or gaming), according to Nielsen.
Why Television Must Turn to Technology to Survive - Foreword
Co-founder Anil Hansjee's foreword to a series of blog posts on the future of TV.
"Audiences will evolve faster than they [studios and networks] will, and they will seek out stories and content providers who give them what they demand: complex, smart stories, available whenever they want, on whatever device they want, wherever they want."
Remember that passionate “wake up and smell the coffee“ speech from Kevin Spacey at the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August 2013? Just one month later, I found myself joining the TV industry, becoming chief digital investment officer at Modern Times Group (MTG). It was an interesting time to be joining the industry – and an interesting company: MTG is part of the Kinnevik family of companies, well known for disrupting the media and telecoms industries and for being a major backer of Rocket Internet/Zalando.
Data Centres Set to Overtake The Aviation Industry’s Carbon Footprint
It’s often hard for people outside of the slightly specialised world of distributed computing and data centres to get their heads around quite how critical and complex they have become. So it was a bittersweet moment to find this article in The Economist – Buy our stuff, save the planet.
Tech & the Media in Moscow, Russia
On 30th October 2013, the Tech in Media project, organised by RIA Novosti [a Russian news agency] in Moscow, introduced its participants to the professional approach of the coverage of innovation and venture capital issues in the media. Richard Muirhead from Firestartr was invited to share his knowledge and experience as an entrepreneur and investor with Russian journalists and bloggers. He shared the stage with Mike Butcher, journalist and editor of TechCrunch Europe and a leading figure in the global startup community.
Read more to watch the conference and read Richard’s thoughts.