Could you tell us a little about your own professional background?
I’m a serial entrepreneur who’s always been slightly ahead of the market. Besides some opportunistic projects, such as a guerrilla marketing effort selling T-Shirts at major events, I went straight out of University into making high-end gourmet coffee. This was at a time when espresso coffee was just gaining popularity. One of my best mates and I started a mobile coffee cart company and grew it into the second largest coffee cart company in Australia.
I sold that and went to the UK and got involved in a tech company, building computer peripherals and spy gadgets in China and selling them into European retailers like Dixons and Maplins. In 2004 after a good 4-year stint, I invested my coffee business money into a new start-up called MoMedia. This was initially producing and distributing mobile content clips on 2G phones. It turned into a digital media production company syndicating channels of UGC, mixed with professional content to Telco’s, internet and IPTV companies including MSN, Yahoo, AOL and a bunch of other massive companies which don’t exist anymore. I part sold that to Endemol, the Dutch/British TV production and distribution company.
What inspired the launch of Looper Insights and what were the initial goals when you started?
Having worked in the Video on Demand (VoD) industry for 15 years, it was apparent that content and app distributors had very little visibility into the placement and positioning of their movies and VoD apps across the specific devices used by consumers such as smart TV’s, streaming devices, set top boxes and gaming consoles. With more digital entertainment available than ever before, how do you know if your content or apps are being found and consumed by users? I wanted to create a solution that allowed these companies to not only manage their content more efficiently, but also to understand which placements and promotions could produce the best ROI for them.