From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 10:17 PM
To: *ALL MetaTV
Subject: Capt. Midnight: More P & A – Day Two
Day Two – NYC and New Jersey – more press and analysts
This is a test of the emergency traffic control system …
On this crisp spring morning we set out at 7:30am in our car to head over to New Jersey (pronounced New Joisy. I can say that, I used to live out here) for our next analyst meeting with Probe Research. The sun was shining, a perfect morning to ….
…. sit in traffic crawling to get into the Lincoln Tunnel to go from NYC to NJ … Oh the traffic! It took literally an hour to get over to the other side. Andrew remarked that he was able to count all the tiles in the Tunnel as we inched our way through. I’d forgotten how long it can take to get in and out of New York.
Finally after a 2 hour car ride (mapquest had indicated 33 minutes – although the fine print I think said that this presumed that you owned a helicopter), we arrived at the offices of Probe Research. Probe provides reports and analysis for a variety of industries with a particular focus on Telcos.
Yesterday we were at the lavish offices of Delphi group with flat screen panels and gold trimming with mahogany elevators. All courtesy of their extensive Fortune 500 client base. Today we were in New Jersey at the Probe offices circa 1975 with particle board furniture and peeling paint. Well, as they say, when you are reading the reports in your office, you don’t notice the color of the wallpaper (or lack of wallpaper) in the research offices 5000 miles away.
We met with a couple of nice folks who again were just starting to take an interest in the iTV space. We were able to introduce them to MetaTV and also give them some background about what is happening in the industry. Definitely a great warm up for our “big bout” in the afternoon with no other than “Jupiter/Media Metrix”.
Once again the DVD demo went down as smooth as a baby’s bottom and provided a great exclamation point on the presentation.
We got back into the car to head back into NYC, accelerating down the NJ turnpike, until …..
…. another traffic jam. This time accident related. Oh well, plenty of time to read all of the Jupiter reports on iTV. Jupiter has recently written quite a few reports that could almost be business plans for MetaTV. One such report (available in *marketing/analysts/Jupiter in public folders) called “Waiting for critical Mass” spoke to the middleware and set-top box fragmentation, perfect for MetaTV. Thanks to our PR firm MSRdotcomm we had an appointment with the author of the report, Lydia Loizedes.
Jupiter is at Astor place in a trendy part of town with hip cool offices. As Mary put it, lots of kids running around and she wasn’t joking. Depressingly young twenty some things (I guess we have quite a few of those at MetaTV too :-), I’m definitely getting old) dressed in pre-dotcom boom suspenders and jeans, writing and commenting on the World at large.
Lydia was very knowledgeable and immediately had great feedback for us. In fact, she told us that she always asks people who come in, who has the best middleware. She said that one set-top manufacturer (Scientific Atlanta) said that Liberate was the best and had their act together. One Netop (who she wouldn’t name) said Microsoft (yes Microsoft). And she said that no one mentioned OpenTV as a leading player. Not surprising given their level of US penetration.
Once again during our presentation, she totally “got” our value prop and how we in fact were the poster children for solving the issues raised in her report. She was very interested in our technology (she’s a former software development product manager) and threw us some of the hardest technical questions we had had to date.
Thank goodness Andrew and I practiced how to spell XML before we flew out.
The questions and discussions got so involved that before you knew it our hour was up. She extended the meeting to an additional half hour allowing us to run the DVD demo and also to arrange a further meeting by phone the following week (an extremely good sign).
This was definitely a great meeting. Jupiter are quite prolific in the iTV analysis space with over 7 dedicated kids (err I mean analysts) focused on the space.
Together with Forrester, they provide probably the best coverage, which is why they are one of the 3 we are currently subscribed (READ bribe) to (the others being Forrester and Gartner).
With the nearly 2 hour meeting complete, we headed back to the hotel and prepared for a meeting with Gary Arlen of Arlen Communications, another research/press analyst. Andrew flew solo on this one and Mary reports that Gary was won over giving us a perfect 8 for 8 so far on this trip!
Tomorrow, we have 3 more meetings before flying back home.
Thanks for tuning in …. we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming ….
Capt. NY/NJ, toll? what toll?