Digital Media Conclave - 2010 came to an end with a resounding succes

Digital Media Conclave came to an end with a resounding success. CellStrat was overwhelmed by inquiries from all over India. On 20th. May, just a day before, we received close to 80 calls from across India mainly from Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai if registrations were still open. At the end, we received more than 120 audience, quite a good figure considering this was the first Digital Media Conclave organized by CellStrat.

21st. May came and passed so fast that we could not believe it. Whole day passed by at a hectic pace with presentations from top Industry Professionals providing their insights, answering un-ending queries from the audience and networking.

Here is a brief on the event:

I opened the event and briefly described what audience can expect to hear in this event.

Keynote was delivered by the popular Mr. Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, the only lead based digital media agency in India. His presentation was amazing, full of insights and best of all he started the presentation talking about his own 12 yr. old son and how he observes him playing with his geeky gadgets and learns from his son how he is growing up surrounded by all sorts of digital media, tools and platforms like Google, yahoo, msn, facebook, orkut etc....Mahesh says he learnt an important lesson from his son that we all in some or the other way are surrounded by gadgets and platforms all around us and thus we should try to be in sync with some if not all else we will be left out and all others following them will leave us behind...most audience liked his presentation. In fact they liked him so much that they were not ready to stop questioning him. Finally his session exceeded 10 mins while our pannellists in Digital Media Panel were already waiting and eager to start the next panel.

The next panel on the theme of Digital Media and Content finally started at 10:40, a 10 mins delay. Panellists included who's who of the industry. We had Sanjay Trehan (Head of Content) of Microsoft, Gaurav Luthra (Content Head) of Dentsu - India, Rama Sadasivan (Director Digital Business Development) of Wall Street India, Satya Yeramsetty of 160by2 and moderated by none other than Ibrahim Ahmad, Group Editor of Cyber Media Ltd. Lot of queries were being asked by all audience and were not letting the panelists proceed in spite of Mr. Ibrahim's repeated requests. Lot of discussion took place on what kind of revenues can be expected, the current state and some points also touched upon the advertising affects on digital media. Finally, I was asked by Ibrahim and Sanjay Trehan that we should create a digital platform for taking this discussion digital else all queries would never be answered in any session and could go for hours and hours without stopping...

Then we had a small tea break where all of these speakers were again seen to being bombarded with questions from eager and high energy audience. Everybody was enthusiastic to meet these speakers and exchange cards with. Everybody was praising the quality of speakers. Audience too (for the first time in our 3 conference till date) comprised of all professionals and no students. All speakers and audience liked this fact a lot. We amazingly received audience from all parts of India including Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Kolkata besides Delhi in India. Apart from India, we also received audience from Singapore, China and USA.

Post Digital Panel session and tea, I presented some findings from our currently running Enterprise Digital Media Survey. Lot of slides had to be skipped and I was also forced to ask the ever eager audience to take their questions offline else I could not have completed my presentation. Post this, we had a small presentation by Arvind Mohan, the Group Chief Strategy Officer of RediffusionYR, which was again appreciated by one and sundry audience. He spoke mostly on branding in social media.

Now we were running exactly 20 mins late before we broke for lunch...to my amazement, unlike other conferences, everybody was back in hall at exact 2pm for joining the much awaited discussion on the social media panel. The Conference Hall was full and packed by audience and speakers in this session. This session comprised of Thomas Clayton (Founder & CEO) from Bubble Motion (the voice based twitter like service launched recently in India), USA; Rahul Razdan (Product VP) from iBibo Web (the online social network); Mohit Gundecha (Director, Business Development) from Mig33 (World's oldest and largest Mobile based social network); Arvind Mohan (Group Chief Strategy Officer) of RediffusionYR, Rajiv Dingra (Founder & CEO) of Wat Media, myself Vishal Singhal (VP, Marketing) from CellStrat and moderated by Prashant Singh (the Web and Mobile Development Evangelist and founder of Momo-Delhi). After brief intros by all, Thomas gave presentation on what Bubble Motion is all about and how they are able to provide the services to Indian Bollywood stars and general audience. He said their first star from Bollywood was none other than Amitabh Bachchan who uses their services quiet frequently and slowly they have been able to rope in other stars too as their subscribers. He says they are earning good revenues from the service as although first extraction of voice message is free but every next extraction costs a person some amount and he says they are able to receive about 50% revenues from second extractions of voice messages. He was asked a critical question which he replied to, in a very amenable fashion which was, "How can people search for previous or any messages as there is no voice based search engine as of today?" to this Thomas replied that they have a dedicated site for this from which this kind of searches can be done in other countries but in India they are yet to start and they are planning on starting a voice activated phone search and retrieval service soon." Mohit too gave interesting insights on how they started and were able to garner 40 million subscribers worldwide. He said they have been able to create tie-ups with IPL teams and others who regularly interact with their fans and bollywood stars through this channel. He says, they are trying to be QQ (of China) for world outside China and working towards it. Rajiv Dingra mostly talked about how business is done through social communities etc. I spoke from research perspective, about why Indian web is not taking hockey curve like traction and growth etc.

After this session which ran over the tea break time too, the speakers were not ready to get off the dais and continuous queries were coming from the audience, we had to skip the tea session to go straight to the VC panel on funding opportunities in the digital media domain. This had accomplished speakers like Harish Gandhi from Canaan Partners, Rahul Chandra from Helion Partners and Sameer Guglani from Morpheus Ventures moderated by Pranav Bhuta of Guggenheim Capital Partners. The hall now had a lot of start-ups who were looking for answers from VC panellists on growth stage funding related questions...Tea was served post the last session.

Overall, the event went very well and lot of people rated it as 5 on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being lowest and 5 being the best. In addition, content quality was rated as a 4 and quality of speakers came in at 4. The backdrop banner was designed by our colleague Sakib and was much appreciated by all.

Lastly, I would personally and on behalf of CellStrat, would like to thank all our supporters like CMAI and sponsors like AgileCo, our memento sponsor Penguins Books India and mobile partner 160by2. I would also like to thank our media partners WYROL, Smart Techie magazine, TelecomEra magazine, Media Redefined, Mashable, WatMedia and YourStory.in.