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June 2006: AOE (Adult Online Europe) show in Berlin - A report.
The first of this year's Adult Online Europe expos was held in Berlin from the 24th to the 26th of April. Featuring alongside the World Telemedia show, it's regarded as the European event for adult coms business. Paul Smith promised not to mention the war so we sent him to see what the fuss was about.
Having never been to an AOE show before, I didn't really know what to expect. Reading the aoexpo.com website at the start of April didn't encourage me much, as clicking 'what's on' links were bringing 'Itinerary to be confirmed' messages up. As it happens I needn't have worried, as full information was available on the site long before I needed to make firm plans. Plus there were paper schedules dotted about at the event, between piles of sponsor's party invites and promotional wads of fake €500 notes, one of which I left under the Gideon's bible in my hotel room to get the next religious guest's hopes up.
The shows' location was the Hotel Maritim, a large complex not far from Potsdamer Platz in what was West Berlin a mere 17 years ago. It faces the Ministry of Defence building where the unsuccessful plot by Von Stauffenberg and others to assassinate Hitler was hatched. When their bomb exploded on July 20th 1944, Adolf was only injured and the conspirators were rounded up and shot in its courtyard. Berlin's got a lot of history; you can still see the bullet holes in buildings left standing at the end of hostilities.
One of the first people I met at the Maritim on Monday morning, propping up the very busy bar, was Patrick Keating of Big Sister(.net), which is basically a Prague brothel bristling with web-cams. The deal is you get your jollies for a reduced rate, but you sign your image rights away. Which means your bum might appear going up and down on a 'Best Of' DVD, your scrotum in a magazine or your rubbered cock on a PC screen anywhere around the world. Boasting seven themed rooms, with several high-resolutions cameras that pan, tilt and zoom, it's said to be the first interactive brothel/club/web site in the world. As well as the live streams, there's a video archive on the site which Maxim and Swingermag.co.uk have both taken a look at. I did say if I was ever in Prague I would Czech it out too. Hehehe. Asked what he hoped to gain from the AOE show (his first) Keating said, "I'm here to develop contacts, to market our range of Big Sister (Endemol have been in touch, but there's nothing they can do) DVDs, VOD, any sort of TV promotion… I've a fist full of business cards already and it's always good to catch up with people I already know in person. As for the size of the exhibition, well, sometimes small is beautiful!"
At three o'clock on the first day I went to see a conference in the room next to the exhibition, where various billing people used it as a platform to promote their services. This was followed by an interesting Q&A session from the floor, with folks on the table replying to specific billing questions. The show was scheduled to start at 4pm on the first day but as it wasn't exactly a hive of activity at that time, I went to look around the larger World Telemedia event at the other end of the hotel's impressive lobby. It was probably three times the size of the AOE show, and featured friendly faces from Activefone, who I'd met at the 3GSM show in February.
By 5pm the AOE room had more of a buzz and I was able to do a quick tour to see who was there. Apart from a rather sorry looking empty stand where AVN were going to be, the room looked well filled with exhibitors, with a meeting area with tables in the middle and a CCBill lounge area with sofas at the far end. However, it was smaller than I'd imagined it would be. Patrick Keating and I weren't alone in expecting something larger as I got the same vibe from some others mooching around. Still, all the faces I saw seemed happy and there was a good 'business' atmosphere in the room, even on day one of three.
The Adult Webmaster Empire stand was fairly quiet so I was able to get a word with Viktor Lant without too much of a struggle. "We're doing live web cams and webmaster affiliate programmes for the two main web cam sites we've got. We have over 300 performers live at any given time and in peak European hours (around midnight) that tops 500, drawn from our pool of 13,000 registered models, world wide. So wherever you are, there will be a girl to your taste online, 24 hours a day. What makes us special is it's free to view. There's no registration, not even an email address. How we make our money is guys want to chat with the girls, have private shows, and that's where they'll reach for their card. So we're at the AOE show looking for new billing methods. Right now we only accept credit card billing and this is a good place for expanding this. Perhaps with premium SMS or calls. We're aware there are people across Europe who will not pay by card, and we regard those as customers we've lost, every day. In Spain people aren't keen on using their Visa online, and in the UK you have a good history of premium rate billing."
The PayNowSMS(.com) stand was manned (and ladied) by Philip Radley-Smith, Group Managing Director, and Kelly Heart. I liked the motto on their business cards; Making Transactions Pay. I asked my usual 'who are you and why are you here?' question, which I'm glad to say wasn't answered from a philosophical viewpoint. "It's early days and as yet the show's a little quiet but it's good to be here", said Philip, a charming man so public school if you pricked him he'd bleed rugger. "We're here offering the first multi-channel payment solution, meaning a merchant can interact with their clients through the web, WAP or SMS and via any of those channels, sell to them. The big USP for us is 1) no one else is doing it and 2) it's really 'messing up' the American market. Because in the US it's illegal to reverse-bill to a mobile phone bill. That's a method that's worked well in Europe, despite moans about low returns and slow payment. We're saying you don't need to do that with our solution, as we tie the whole thing together. You're free to sell across all channels and get people paying with their cards in a very simple way. Whether that's through SMS or WAP or the net, you'll see the same return. The deal in the States is with our method it's legal to initiate a purchase with your handset. They can say 'I want that content now' and because it's not being billed to their phone bill, it's going to their credit card, they can have it now. There's no grey area about this, it's opening up a territory that has always been stunted by their telecoms regulations. It's frustrating for us that this huge potential is stifled. It's a different mindset, a different ball game. I don't know what your experience is but frankly the yanks just don't seem to understand mobile as we do in Europe. But there is a lot of VC (venture capital) money floating about and they are keen to catch up. That's the exciting thing about that market at the moment. It just needs the public there to start to use their phones as entertainment devices as we do in Europe. We're holding our breath for that. Age verification has always been an issue in the States, but as ours is a credit card solution, we can read the VIN range, know where it is and if that issuer lets it be used by under-18s."
Kelly added, "We're here to keep in touch with our clients- there's a few exhibiting here, who signed with us just before the show. Networking, showing our faces. We're also here to listen. To hear what the market's saying and what they want. We were lucky enough to have gone to the AOE show in Amsterdam, which was lots of fun and we're looking forward to Hungary in November. It'll be interesting to see who we meet there too."
Ines Petersen was a lovely lady on the Sex Money(.com - One company name which really encompasses) stand. She's European but has been working from the States for years and I enjoyed listening to her accent yo-yo transatlantically as she spoke. "I've been to all the AOE shows - we're the main sponsor. Sex Money is an international affiliate programme. We provide about 250 different web sites in around 25 different languages, with the right payment method/s for each country, in the right currency. We have 75,000 web masters globally -perhaps not all active but that's our database- and what we do here, for sure, is look for new affiliates to work with us and educating our customers about how to generate more traffic, maybe internationally, so they can really convert, world-wide. So we're talking about geo-targeting, different revenue streams, payment methods, and general advice on does and don'ts for beginners new to the industry."
A poster of 'Maschinen-Fick' drew a question about current trends in porn from me. Ines explained with a laugh, "It's a hardcore niche, but it's really hardcore! It's very well known in the US, with fuckingmachines.com so we got a license to produce our own content with German girls for German users to show the video clips are in German- well, the girls don't actually talk that much! But there's a little interview before and after, you know. We launched that site last year at the AOE in Prague and it's going well for us. We're bringing out new sites every month."
On the PX24(.com) stand I was handed a model HGV and trailer, which seemed odd until Sascha explained that they have two full sized vehicles driving around Germany with, "a video store and cabins inside. It stops everywhere truckers are, as they're the best audience. Actually, in a recent issue of National Geographic there was a picture of our truck at one of these truck stops. Right in the middle of shot. It was great!" When I said such a thing wouldn't be allowed in the UK, there was a quick conference on the stand in German, with the end result being a candid admission that he wasn't 100% sure it was legal in Germany either. You had to be there. Before I forget, their 'thing' is a community of web cam amateurs.
About now I took a break form the hard work of holding a recorder under people's noses and encouraging then to talk about their business. Back in the 'La Bar' it seemed that just as much commerce was being done there and in the lounge area outside as was in the expo room, and a few visitors told me they thought so too. After a very pricey coca cola light, I returned to work with renewed vigour.
My next target was Ben Ingram of TextBill, who I'd seen speak at the conference. "Like a few other people here we're a payment processing company, except we specialise in just the mobile market - driving customer adoption, delivering content and billing. Any way you can pay online, we do on the phone, plus premium SMS - paying on your phone bill basically. That gives customers who don't want to disclose card details, or have a transaction appear on their statement, a way to bypass that barrier. We cover subscription services too. Porn's starting to look pretty good on mobile phones and it's private too. To be frank, you can take a mobile phone into the bathroom with you. There are people at work who can't access adult material who perhaps just need to get something out of their system. Lots of over-18's live with their parents, so 'porn in your pocket' is an alternative to hiding a magazine collection somewhere. With football goals, gambling, music etc, people are more and more accepting of their phone as an entertainment tool. You travel with this product that's getting bigger and better screens, longer-lived batteries, faster download speeds - these things ensure it's way more than a phone, and that attitude's growing ever-more mainstream. For example, we had a new customer a month ago, a complete mobile content virgin, and now they have 60,000 subscribers rebilling at £1.50 a time. From zero to £90k of new revenue in a month. In terms of this show, this is our first AOE event and we chose to be here because it's all about our field, and that it's coupled with the mainstream show, because we also do billing outside of the adult space as MiBill."
I mentioned the speech Ben had given and he was happy to recap it for me: "The digital wallet is a way of describing the convergence of the mobile and the credit or debit card. The SIM that's in your phone is technologically the same as the chip in your chip-and-pin card. If you can use the credit on your phone for more than making calls or sending or receiving data, that's one less thing to carry and one less thing to lose. And if you do 'lose' your phone, that credit can be remotely wiped from it and transferred back to an account, making the phone unusable and thus pointless to steal."
I was forced to stare somewhere inappropriate to read Carolina Lebedies' name badge at OpenErotik, where she's the Chief Marketing Officer. "We're one of the leading mail-order suppliers of adult DVDs in Europe and we're here to meet a lot of web masters and content partners for our shops so we can add more titles. We are selling all over to world, into the UK too. We send by UPS and it works well. We've been to Venus before and AVN in Las Vagas, but this is our first AOE." I thanked Carolina and grabbed a quick shot of the striking Doreen, who was also staffing the stand.
The following day was a longer one, with more conference speeches before the expo, which started at midday and ran on 'til seven again.
Carmunity Mobile Communications' Stefan Kathmeyer said, "We're an aggregator in the premium SMS business in Germany. We were founded in 2000 and we're here showing our new product, M-stream. The plan is to bring the possibility of live Internet webcam girls to every mobile phone, world wide." At this point I produced my ancient Nokia 3310 again, and got the usual laughter. "Ok, no. The phone needs to support Java. Billing's done via a premium SMS, with a credit card or with a drop charge call. It works with 2G, 2.5G and 3G." I asked if users could chat with the girls and Stefan replied enthusiastically, "Yes sure. Definitely! It's a fully interactive product, so you can watch the girl, tell her what you'd like to see. Whatever you like. We have this service around the world, featuring German, English, Spanish and Czech content."
I asked about the event and Stefan explained, "This is my second AOE show, I went to Lisbon before. It's really good. We've made a lot of good contacts and it's definitely been a success for us so far."
On the Bango stand in the World Telemedia show hall I hoped to speak to Anil, the firm's founder. He was giving a talk in the conference room so I spoke to Mark Champion. I knew the Bango name from a chat with Mark Watts of Activefone at the 3GSM show in April, but I wanted to know more about what they do and why they were in Berlin.
"We're here to help content providers sell their content to their customers. The three challenges facing people selling mobile content are A) How do I get people to view my content - How do I promote it. B) How do I actually charge for that content, and lastly C) Who is accessing my content? How do I identify my users? Bango answers those questions. You can't expect a mobile user to type in a long URL. That's awful. It's a really bad call to action. So we help people get their customers to their content. That might be with a short-code text message, in Europe or America, and then there would be a WAP-push message sent to their phone. They simply click on the link and that takes them to browse content so they can find what they want, rather than being locked into anything at that stage. They select the picture, ring-tone or whatever they want, and then pay for it. Depending on where they are and what network they're using. Bango take all that away from the content provider. We let them focus on what they're good at: Producing and marketing their content. It's our job to deal with different operators and payment systems, in different territories… And we can feedback customer information, like which country they're in, which network they're on, etc. On that basis they can offer personalisation, or bonus material for returning customers. The whole tracking thing is really important to customer service. In a nutshell, that's what Bango(.com) do - We hope Bango's the last bit of integration our customers have to do.
John Green who organises the AOE show was taking a well-earned rest when I caught up with him back in the smaller hall. "This is our seventh event. Cannes in 2002, Amsterdam, Prague, Lisbon, Prague, Amsterdam again and this one. The show's very good. All the time it's developing, getting new people along to it. When we first started it was simply an adult offshoot of World Telemedia, and as that's grown to attract more corporate exhibitors and visitors it became clear that the AOE show needed to separate itself from that show a bit. By placing it in a separate area, but in the same venue, it's allowed it to take on its own identity. That said, there's still a great deal of crossover business being done. We've had something over a thousand visitors across both shows, with all the people who should be here, being here. World Telemedia's been running something like fifteen years, so it's obviously very well established. What's special about AOE and WTM, against something like the 3GSM show is that the decision makers are here and visible. It's not all sales staff or booth-babes. Plans for Budapest are exciting. I'm told it's the nicest hotel we've ever done a show in and the city itself is a lovely place, but the layout of the exhibition space will allow us to create everything in one room, with AOE slightly partitioned off. That way there will be much more flow of traffic between the shows, with 'beyond this line you're in the adult zone', Checkpoint Charlie kind of thing. It'll allow more of a mix between the shows, as there are a lot of opportunities on both sides for webmasters and mobile services guys. It should be another exciting show with a good feel to it."
I bumped into Jerry Barnett of Strictly Broadband and GoContent and after the show he had this to say, "I've been attending the World Telemedia and AOE shows on and off for years. The WT side is really for people with an interest in premium telephony: premium rate numbers, SMS and the like. This is of some interest to us now as we've just introduced telephone-based billing to Strictly Broadband, allowing people to buy a ticket with a premium rate phone call as an alternative to credit or debit cards. We've chosen the new TRAM product from Globalcharge, which is working very well for us. The AOE side was a bit small and disappointing, although there were a couple of interesting products on display. The main reason for my attending the show is for networking - even if you don't attend the conference sessions, the hotel bar is a goldmine of useful industry contacts!"
Respond Mobile were a last minute addition to the show, picking up a bargain stand and their Steve Flaherty took time out from the hubbub of the room to chat to me on a lobby sofa. "Respond Mobile's rather unique as we're a full service mobile agency for the adult industry. A mobile expert resource, if you will. We create value within the adult mobile world, with a large technical platform that over ten million pounds worth of content has been pushed through. There's billing systems in 26 countries, we build mobile internet sites for our clients who range from one-man-ban chat operations to pan-European adult iTV providers. We're working with Total Media at the moment. They're the TV-rights owner for Hustler. We also run our own Candy Lounge(.com) brand, where we experiment with technology, services and user-generated content to see what'll work. It has a big client base and if it works there, we talk to our other clients about rolling those ideas out to their sites. One thing that's new is an amateur gay service where all the content's sent in by camera-phone users. It's going to be marketed through Boys Magazine - all good exhibitionist stuff. The main thing we're launching this week is a true client server java application based mobile TV solution for mobile operators. It allows streaming TV on a 3G phone. There's a lot of investment in this at the moment but we're first to market with a really great product. In future you'll see it move across to a genuine broadcast network, like the Digital Video Broadcast system that Nokia are pushing strongly. The problem with other current mobile TV offerings is that there's no age verification built into the application, which means you can't run adult content on it. Ours is a stand-alone app with AV in it, and we've signed up some well-known adult brands -who I can't name just yet- to provide content for it. We're talking to operators across Europe about launching on-portal with them, which is very exciting. Italy and Spain are great markets we do a lot of business in as there's a huge appetite for mobile content, including adult or erotic, of course. In the UK, 6% of men visited an adult Internet site via their phone in December last year. 50% of all men in Korea have visited an adult site from their mobile, at some time. It's stats like that which show just how significant this industry has become."
On the subject of the show, Steve commented, "I had a couple of speaking slots, taking about adult mobile TV and that's generated fantastic interest from some strong content- DVD producers and webmasters looking to moneytise their content asset within the mobile industry. I went to the Amsterdam AOE show last year and we're very pleased how this one's shaped up for us."
It took a while to get hold of Marc Jarrett of password-by-phone.com as his stand always looked busy. Like all the best ideas, their concept was a simple one. Rather than using a premium rate dialer to reach adult sites, they use either a premium rate call of fixed length to get you to a one-shot password, or if there's no domestic PR infrastructure, then an international call to Liechtenstein. Dodgy dialers, fraudulent use of them and modern operating systems which get edgy when presented with a suspicious file to download basically killed an otherwise workable system, so a simple "This message lasts five minutes, and you're being charged £1.50 per minute as you hold for the password, which will be repeated twice at the end" service makes a lot of sense. "The handful of bad eggs whose greed and short-sightedness spoiled the party for dialers has made another premium payment method necessary. Our call to action is a simple message on the screen, outlining the costs, that you must be over 18 and that you need the bill payer's permission. You dial the number and are sent to a service in the right one of 36 languages for you - When selling to the Slovaks, sell in Slovenian. Minutes equal money in this business, and at the end of the wait the surfer fills in the 14-digit pass-code to gain 30-minute access to the content. That's for adult, but it works just as well for anything - membership, magazine subscriptions, whatever. Premium rate used to have a bad image in this country, but with shows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire being paid for by the premium rate element to it, it's gone totally mainstream. 95% of the world's population doesn't have a credit card so it's big business and it's here to stay. I've been in Premium since 1994 and I've been to a lot of shows where it's seen as the bad-boy of telecoms - almost an industry within an industry."
By day three I was detecting a certain weariness in attendees and exhibitors alike, and long before the official 4pm close a few stands were packing up. As the event was winding down, I returned to the Respond Mobile stand to get their final verdict on the show. Jeremy Rainbird's comments were these: "Steve and Seth have travelled the world, going to shows both in Europe and the States as delegates. This is the first time we've actually taken a stand anywhere and the response has been pronominal! We're all completely shocked about how good the three days have been for us."
Even though it was on a smaller scale than I'd anticipated, I enjoyed the AOE event, and couldn't find anyone who felt they'd had a wasted journey. At the time of writing official numbers aren't available, but there were around 1,200 visitors to both shows, with around 350 visiting AOE. Quality rather than quantity was a phrase I heard repeated. Personally I felt I, and everyone else, could have achieved all I/they wanted to with a two day show, but then people were reporting worthwhile deals being struck on the Wednesday, so what do I know?
The next AOE event's a webmaster get-together in London on the 22nd of July, the day before the start of our own ETO show in Birmingham. After that it's another full Expo in Budapest on the 8th to the 10th of November. Visit www.aoexpo.com for more details. Key phrases on the page are 'conference, seminars, workshop, exhibition and parties. Tap into the Online European market, generate new mobile and iTV revenue streams, network with leading players and understand new and successful billing methods'. - It still sounds good to me!
Paul Smith is still free to a good home. Kinky Job offers to info@snapsandbytes.co.uk please.