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This was now our second real stand (the first being last year’s 4m2 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona) and our first time in the context of online. The next one will be in Adtech, NY, November 3-6th 2008.

OMD was A LOT bigger, than I was expecting. It’s funny when suddenly all these digital companies meet, and everything which before seemed so virtual felt so real. There might to be a market around online marketing, after all. LOL

So, the stand…
This time, we (Richard Sirén from Pen&Hammer and myself) designed the stand using some interesting material: foam. Two types of Polyether foam actually, the white ones were made of mattress foam and the red ones of sponge foam.

We sketched and designed  four little people: man and woman hands down, and man and woman waving. These little foam people were ordered from a company who makes mattresses and sponges. “400 of these, please!”
Turned out quite voluminous! I was then supposed to take these with me from Helsinki to Düsseldorf. Now, that’s about 4 of the largest trash bags. I asked DHL and UPS for an offer and they gave me an estimate which was over 1000 euros! For 5kg!? They call it dimensional weight. Luckily, airberlin didn’t have anything like this. “It’s all about the kilos”, their customer service told me, “it can be 10 bags, as far as the total weight is below 20kg”.

In Düsseldorf, people seemed really friendly! At least, everybody was smiling at me as I was walking around with my luggage, weekend bag, 4 transparent plastic bags filled with little people and a backpack.

The stand was designed with the thought that it would be an eye catcher. I never thought that would still work with the stand packed in plastic bags!

Anyways, 1pm on Tuesday, the black foil was in place on the walls, so I could finally start gluing these little people with 3M’s flexible spray glue to the walls. Took around 10h.

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I am quite please with the result. We got excellent feedback and large interest at OMD and it even ended up being great material for us when presenting the company and what we do.

Yesterday, the second floor of Molly Malones offered a nice and friendly environment for mobile people from all industries to connect with each others in the event organized by Mobile Monday (MoMo). The topic of the evening was Earning models in Mobile Entertainment, which is also an important question to many of our customers.

Our board member Alan Moore gave interesting insights into the big opportunity in utilizing the players with different roles in social networks. This topic is closely related to what we do here at Xtract for mobile operators and other customers.

Other speakers gave also fascinating presentations. Dr. Josef Noll from Norway spoke about privacy issues in entertainment business. He forecasted that privacy matters will be huge business in the future. Dr. Madanmohan Rao pointed out that in India, where Bollywood and cricket are the most popular forms of entertainment, the ones who will understand how to make money from mobile entertainment will earn a lot of money.

The place of yesterday’s event, Molly Malones in Helsinki, was also the place where the idea of MobileMonday was invented. The original founders of MoMo were present at the event and told about how no-one could believe at the beginning (Sep 2000) that eight years later MobileMonday events would be organized in tens of cities all over the world. It is exciting how a good concept, such as that of MobileMonday, has the power to spread all over the world, thanks to world-of-mouth and people networking with each other.