How do you do business when your customers want your product for free?
A copy of The Curve is included in registration
Consumers want stuff for free and increasingly they’re getting it: free music, free news and analysis, free movies. But how can any business make money from this trend? Nicholas Lovell’s new book, The Curve, is a fascinating examination of how any business can harness the power of web to make money from free content, expensive content, and everything in between.
To look at the practical implications of these trends we are producing a special edition of CEO Tales on the afternoon of Friday 22nd November. We’ll be asking Nicholas to present the key practical lessons from The Curve and following up with a discussion debate involving businesses that are changing their relationships with their customers based on these ideas.
Join us for light lunch and networking followed by what promises to be a thought provoking talk and debate. We’ll end the afternoon with an opportunity to network and discuss the ideas raised with your peers.
Contributors to the debate include:
Nicholas Lovell
Nicholas Lovell is an author and consultant who helps companies embrace the transformative power of the internet. His blog, GAMESbrief, is read by those seeking to learn how digital is transforming gaming – and how to apply that knowledge to other industries. His clients have included Square Enix (creators of Tomb Raider), Sega, Firefly and Exient, as well as Channel 4 and IPC Media. His articles have appeared in TechCrunch, Wired and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in London.
Nathalie Gaveau, Shopcade
At only 24 years old, Natalie Gaveau earned her MBA from a top University and co-founded French eBay competitor PriceMinister, which sold as one of the largest exits in European consumer web in 2010.
Rather than retire early, she took her years of experience in online shopping and founded a new start-up Shopcade, a fashion and deals hungry community.
Launched in November 2011, Shopcade is a one stop shopping app for all things stylish. The app features more than 150 million products from over 16,000 brands covering fashion, beauty, home and tech gadgets. Graph technologies and natural language processing are at the heart of this online shopping break through. Shopcade has grown exponentially in the UK and US and Nathalie currently leads a team of 20 developers and marketers. Shopcade recently won Best Affiliate site at the 2013 E-commerce Awards.
Nathalie also has a family with two young children and thrives on inspiring women to go after their dreams of being successful business leaders while balancing their family life. Nathalie actively supports (and has been awarded by) many entrepreneurial foundations.
Paul Fisher, Forward Investment Partners
Paul is an active investor in European web, retail and media businesses.
Forward is an investor in uswitch who offer a free service to consumers to save money on energy and broadband. And Factory media, and agency and content company who sell real life magazines to people in exchange for money, and also have a media and agency business who create passionate communities of people around niche sports.
As both an angel or as a VC Paul has invested in transactional businesses where people pay for a specific rpdocut or service: Farfetch, Worldstores, Hubbub, appearHere, unbound and Zopa.
Prior to Forward Paul was at Advent Ventures and First Capital, where he worked in a number of Euroepan TMT companies, including GlassesDirect, Dailymotion, Rawflow, Reevoo.com and OmniPerception.
John Webb, Rackspace
John Webb is Marketing Director for Startups & Developers at Rackspace – The Open Cloud Company, having previously led Marketing at Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto), Yahoo! and Heinz, amongst others. John advises startups & early-stage businesses on Marketing to enable them to craft their stories, build a brand, go-to-market, gain market traction and drive real, sustainable customer and revenue growth. John blogs on Marketing know-how, strategy and tools at get2growth.com and you can follow him on Twitter @WebbJS
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Richard Anson, Reevoo
Richard has a deep understanding of how changing technology has resulted in new ways for consumers to engage with both each other and the brands they purchase from, fundamentally changing the way shoppers buy. He combines this with what he has learnt about the dynamics of building disruptive businesses. He believes many corporates need to re-learn to act like successful start ups.
Richard founded and led Reevoo to become a leading social commerce platform to brands across the retail, travel and auto industries in 90 countries. Prior to founding Reevoo, Richard was a senior strategy consultant at KPMG covering the technology, media and telecoms space; interim Head of Group Planning at Orange, covering 22 countries; and part of the team managing investments of up to £5 million at 3i. He has a PhD from the University of Bristol and MBA from the Cranfield School of Management.
Richard lives in London with his young family. Windsurfing since forever, his kitesurfing is also improving.
Mike Turner, Taylor Wessing
Mike is a partner and UK Head of Taylor Wessing’s TMT group. He has over 25 years experience working in London, New York and LA advising private and publicly held clients on corporate transactions in the technology, telecoms, advertising/marketing services, traditional/digital media, internet and ecommerce sectors. Mike’s TMT sector expertise owes much to his time as a General Partner in a technology venture fund from 2006-2008.
He has led multiple financing and M&A transactions including: the private equity funding by Scottish Equity Partners of Media Ingenuity (www.mediaingenuity.com); the disposal of Geneity (www.geneity.co.uk) to Playtech plc and AM Digital (www.amdigital.co.uk) to Sage Publications; the equity re-financings of Jagex Games Studios (www.jagex.com) and WorldOne (www.worldone.com); venture financing of www.lovehomeswap.com, www.rollupmedia.com and www.made.com; and the joint venture to create Noho Film and Television (www.nohofilmandtv.tv).
This event is supported by Rackspace, Taylor Wessing and Erevena Executive Search.
We look forward to seeing you on the 22nd November.