I met Marcus about a year ago at a mobile entertainment event in London and although we exchange the odd email, I don’t actually get to see him very often as he’s based in Germany and I haven’t been to Germany since my Sixth Form days when I went on a dismal student exchange (actually, the family treated me very well and I did some interesting things, it was just I had nothing in common with the student I was paired with). So it was a pleasant surprise to bump into Marcus at the Meffy’s on the Tuesday night at the Fairmont Hotel.

Marcus is COO of Peperoni who runs Peperonity, which is a mobile social network that pre-dates myspace and is one of the largest mobile social networks on the planet. And for whom both mobile entertainment and messaging are a crucial part of the service they run for their members. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask Marcus a few questions about what he thought about his trip to Monte Carlo.

Was the trip worth it?
Despite being unsure about the value in the first place and this being the first time we attended the conference (plus: we paid for it :-)) I must say that all in all it was worth it, not just because of the nice, though rainy location. Many of the panels were quite interesting and the meet-and-greet aspect was very important. I also enjoyed the MEFFYS presentation

What were the downsides to the event?
- Why were there no free drinks for attendees? The sun was burning outside and selling water for 3 € gave me the impression that they don’t even try to provide value for money.
- Why was there no cloakroom on the 5th? Many people including myself were running around with their full baggage that day which was a bit annoying inside the conference rooms.
- The whole venue looked a bit scattered due to the several levels in the forum and there being room for 10 times more people all in all, so maybe pick a smaller location next time to support networking.
- I couldn’t find the venue of the MEFFYS in the first place and they sent me the wrong way so what about improving organisation and signposts next time

What was the most interesting thing you saw there and why?
Stupidly enough, we failed to enter the MEFFYS awards but were still sitting at the dinner tables. So I thought to myself, well it’s still a good chance to see who’s number 2 in mobile UGC but from the presentations I saw, I knew only Pitch and Jumbuck’s FastFlirting so it seemed that we were rather looking at who’s number 20 in mobile UGC and not number 2 . Anyway, most of the awards nominees, with the exception of Admob, were unrepresentative of the majority of the current market. So to address that we’re strongly considering entering the awards next year!

Which speaker or session, if any, stood out for you and why?
I think that one of the most interesting presentations from our standpoint was that of the VP Mobile of mySpace (what was his name again? Jean Paul Sanchez - ed). They did seem to get the message of being unable to transfer everything they have to mobile and I am very confident that they provide a very useful mobile side of their web service and thus will help to proliferate the mobile idea even further and exercise even more pressure on the network operators to rectify their access and billing issues very soon so that we can all be part of a great mobile world.

The best panel was definitely the one with the 10 Monaco kids. Even though they were probably not your typical European child, in that they went to an expensive school, lived a relatively sheltered existence in Monaco and money was no worry, they still showed behaviour in common with kids their own age across Europe and the US. It was very clear that even in a world where money doesn’t matter (them being from wealthy families and not worried about the phone bill), content is still being sideloaded and bluetoothed instead of downloaded and MMS’ed because the payment methods are simply not working and the process is not wholly reliable. Lots of lessons for operators in there, wonder if any were present?

So see you there next year Marcus!