Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you go first when you were trying to penetrate the market?

Mark Hyland: It was the carriers first. That was partly because of the DNA of our CEO. He had worked in the carrier space, in the billing space. He had this idea that the wireless carriers would need with help managing their video infrastructures. He’d come from an outsourced billing world where he’d seen carriers say, “We will never outsource. The two things that are most core to us are our network and our billing, and we’ll never outsource those.” And he lived through their outsourcing both. So, he knew that if the value proposition was right, they would outsource something like video infrastructure or video service platform. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 3)

Mark Hyland: So, that’s how we got going. Essentially, the first mobile video, as you remember, was very rough. There were a Nokia device and Sony Ericsson device that could play downloadable video clips. So, QuickPlay did some deals with content providers to get some music videos, to get news clips and so on, and started looking around at what else was out there to license. We had early deals with two of the wireless carriers in Canada, Telus and Rogers, which are still customers and partners. We had the beginnings of a business. Early on, there were just a few thousand downloads a month. People would spend a couple of bucks to look at a video clip, and they would have it on their devices and could watch it again and again and again. But it was very early days. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That’s how things happen.

Makr Hyland: So, Shift was a great entrepreneurial experience. We had to raise money. We had to explain ourselves, explain our vision. We were all in our early 20s at the time, so I think we had the naiveté of youth on our side. Starting a magazine at that time – there was a bit of a recession going on in the early 1990s. It wasn’t the best time. The other lucky thing was that in 1993, 1994, we started to have the Internet coming and Mozilla and so on. We actually jumped right on the Web, built a Web page for the magazine. I probably sold the first banner ad in Canada, which is maybe not a great claim to fame for those who hate banner ads, but it was pretty early on. That was all a great education. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 1)

People have grown so accustomed to online media, particularly newspapers and magazines, that they hardly give them a second thought. Pioneers like Mark Hyland and QuickPlay Media co-founders explored the world of online media before computers and the Internet were as commonplace as radio and television, which have also moved online.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Mark. Let’s start with a bit of your beginning, and since you were an early founder/investor/CEO, I want you to bridge the story of the two founders as well. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 5)

Sramana: So, it’s the usual adoption cycle. I think we’re still at that early adopter phase of these technologies.

Markos: Yes, definitely. People get concerned. They say, “Wait a minute. We don’t want the business being disturbed by all these things.” So, they don’t have to be disturbed, but it’s a case of you need to think about how you implement it. You need to think about under what circumstances do crowd sourced communities work? For what types of requests, what types of support? It’s not for everything, but it’s for some things. People need to take a step back and think about how it would work in their environments. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 4)

Sramana: OK. Fair enough. Crowd sourced customer support, technical support, this is something that we are seeing elsewhere as well. You know, in the program that I run, One Million by One Million, which is a virtual incubator, we have an Italian company called Crowd Engineering that is selling, both in Europe and the U.S., to enterprise customers and providing what they call a level 0 customer support. Before level 1 or level 2 customer support touches a consumer query, the issue could potentially be solved by crowd sourcing customer support through expert customers. That’s the platform that they’re providing. It’s something that is becoming more prevalent, yes? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me synthesize, and then we’ll look at specific points that you’ve made. I’ve got an IT portal as a window into IT. I’ve got crowd sourced support, peer-to-peer support on the support side. I’ve got collaboration sessions to break down silos within IT, including storing and saving for reference. I’ve got mobility. Did I miss anything?

Markos Symeonides: I think you got most of it. The other element is something that we call the info zone, which is … I liken it to if you’re on Facebook, and you see the top right hand column. You’ll see that whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re looking at, they try to put relevant information, related information there on the same page. We’ve implemented this motion within the product as well. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is there much of a tradition of software entrepreneurship in Edinburgh?

Markos Symeonides: There is some. You’re probably aware that Edinburgh University has a five-star rating, along with the famous Cambridge, MIT and others. There are a lot of skills that come out of Edinburgh, but really, there are not very many global software firms based here. We do get a pick of all the talent, which is very good, so we can’t complain. We have our engineering base here in the U.K. We don’t outsource any of it. But the majority of our sales now are not in the U.K. More than half of our new sales come from North America, for example. >>>