thePlatform in London
Last week, thePlatform sponsored and attended the Online Publishers Association conference in London. Held at the Landmark hotel in Marylebone, it was a small but impressive group of attendees and we were excited to be exhibiting our media publishing system and showing off our latest features, like the new Community Toolkit and release of version 16.2.
I have to admit, a lot of these shows can be a bit long and boring. Panel discussions have a tendency to become just another platform for execs to pitch their company and software to everyone in attendance and provide little benefit to the attendees. So, I was happy to see several speeches given that actually provided some value and insight into how others see the industry and are adopting their business to recognize the value of new media and how they might put their company in a position to benefit financially. One such speaker was Dr. Stephen Roppel, CEO of Holtzbrinck eLAB.
I have to say I wasn't terribly familiar with Holtzbrinck before Dr. Roppel spent about 30 minutes over lunch discussing who they were (a family-owned publishing company headquartered in Germany, active in over 80 countries with over $2 billion in revenue) and about how they were expanding into digital media through eLAB. He explained how they were creating, incubating, as well as buying small companies in Europe and the U.S. and testing out their ideas, using the Holtzbrinck foundation to provide support but giving these new businesses room to breathe and grow on their own. According to their website, this five person team has about 18 companies in their portfolio, including two sites that handle over 6 billion impressions a month.
While I was listening to Dr. Roppel, I couldn't help but be reminded of my own employer and how we were in a very similar situation. I've been with thePlatform just short of eight years now and have seen how we've grown from 20 people to 140, how we've kept focus on our core business of providing a hosted digital media publishing system intact and how even after our purchase by Comcast, this has not changed.
Along with our parent, our developments outside of our immediate space, but in conjunction with it, will help us provide truly unique products in the future for our customers. Being a part of the Comcast family (and Comcast is still a family run company, just like Holtzbrinck) has provided a number of benefits that have helped us to keep the talent we started with and allowed us the support we need to operate a successful and unmatched B2B service.