Today is the day!!!!

well today is the day and it has finally arrived. After a process that with the VC fund we are going to sign has taken over 9 months (our baby!!) tomorrow we will be signing the entry of the VC on our shareholding structure and a round of financing of significant size divided in 3 stages with milestones
The last 2 months have been specially difficult, seeing that we were almost there but not managing to close it. It has helped the management team to stick even more together and also to get to know our new partners even better which will help on our future relationship. It has also taken a toll on our personal lifes both in terms of dedication (we have been working sometimes 20 hours days between office and working from home) and also the stress level we have been under. In fact I think I should write a bit about work life balance in the coming blogs
well wait here for more details in 24-48 hours but we start an even more exciting time on our companies
thank you all for being there!!!

Day at work and Mobile advertising today in Madrid forum

After an interesting day at work with 3 different business development calls/meetings (meet ZED business development manager, Yell.com and 11888 team and have a conf call with Turkey where Martin Jaros a former colleague at Vodafone CZ is starting at youth segment marketing director http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=5044638&fromSearch=0&sik=1200632845597&split_page=1&rd=in&authToken=3ckS_XVnyM7-mNVzyJw1T5i4digkljnQldgkV5e3sUhjoRgj0Oe3kUcPoQd30R&authType=NAME_SEARCH&goback=%2Esrp_1_1200632845597_in) I went together with one of my team guys (Daniel Torres, business and product development, daniel.torres@mmchannel.com, http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=5029496&fromSearch=0&sik=1200632845754&split_page=1&rd=in&authToken=2gS9jFwMkNKrKJXi9nIbOHi4digkljnQldgkUOgPsRd3gNc3AQhj8SejgVcz0R&authType=NAME_SEARCH&goback=%2Esrp_1_1200632845754_in)
to Mobile Monday Madrid, which was focusing on Mobile Advertising, probably the biggest hot thing at least in terms of hype.

Previous events in Madrid or Barcelona of Mobile Monday have not been very good but I really enjoyed this one.

http://www.mobilemondaymadrid.com/

I think there was a good combination of speakers, from operators Iñaki Cabrera, Director of the Mobile Marketing Business Unit of Vodafone Spain to international and spanish startups: Philip Gontier, Sales Director EMEA, JumpTap Europe, Jefferson Wright Chandler, European Business Development Director at ShoZu Ltd and Juan Antonio Muñoz, Founder of Unkasoft
Some interesting remarks were:
- traditional advertising is about demographics while mobile advertising is about behaviour (adapting adds based on
- companies on this space will survive in 08-09 but no real money will appear until 2010 (at least)
- Lack of standards and trust is a big show-stopper for both players and consumers
- M-Advertising is about 5-12x more effective so far than internet advertising. There is a combination of novelty plus more effectiveness on the media
- So far games and video have been the more combined advertising/content combinations

By the way we should be speaking at Mobile Monday at some point this first half of the year

You may be wondering what about your financing round? Stay tunned more on that next week

And keep the January 13th morning open if you are around Barcelona 3GSM world congress

Business Development during the past week in Dubai and Paris

Just come back from a 4-day trip to Dubai and an 1-day trip to Paris doing some business development where we have submitted and presented two large proposals for different players in the MENA region. Good presentations and good feedback from our prospects. Now starts the most difficult time for us (and probably for all business development professionals) which is to wait for an answer. Hopefully in both of these opportunities we will have feedback quite quickly

In the meantime our Regional partner in the GCC region, Luis Sisamon has just started his blog (http://sisamon.blogspot.com) and although I am still unclear of what he will talk about on the future, his first entry does give some interesting hints about available software for regular MAC users (aka me). Will keep you posted how he evolves on his blog

After business 2.0 has dissapeared...

In the last years every time I had the chance to buy either in London or in the US the magazine Business 2.0 I have always done it. I always found interesting articles, some decent analysis and entertaining reading.
I was already worry that the magazine may disappear since this past summer when I was reading an article online (sorry I don´t remember the source) about a website that did bets on which was going to be the next publication to go under and business 2.0 was first in line
I got lucky that still this Christmas there was available what they called "The collector's item: our final issue" which I got. But another magazine caught my eye "Inc." which did have an article in the cover about "Inside the mind of a serial CEO" (start up guy).


http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080101/the-secret-life-of-a-serial-ceo.html

I found the article was very interesting and the magazine was in general very good
I guess I have found a magazine to look for when in the UK or the US

mmC objectives for 2008: my view

I was the other day chatting with a friend of mine (Marie Paro who is the head of alumni for Diamond Consulting) and she asked me what were our objectives for 2008. Interesting enough although we have a very solid and continuously updated business plan for both companies and we have also lots of chats with our upcoming new investor, I don´t think we have put this on paper. So I did think about it for some minutes and I did come back to her on these terms.

For mmCHANNEL:
- to hit our first 1 Mio Eur in revenues
- to have at least one client in each of the continents (at least seeing this as Europe, MENA, Australasia, NA and Latam)
- to recruit a strong second management line behind the CxO team

For mmCONSULTING:
There could lots of ideas here around number of customers, some diversification, etc… but at the end I believe the objectives are much more simple

- Hire talent
- Keep talent
- Nurture talent

In the meantime to make sure we keep growing as we have done in the past 24 months

Cheers
CAM