PROVEN STRATEGIC NAVIGATION

CASE STUDY:  

Rantmedia Ltd

www.rantmedia.com

22 Cathedral Road, Cardiff CF11 9LJ

                  “I started working with David at the start of 2012 and his impact on my business has been transformational.

David has enabled me to think strategically, and his insights have helped grow my business to be the premier mobile app and games agency in Wales.

I have found his experience in all areas of business to be invaluable, and look forward to continuing to work together in the future.”

Who are Rantmedia?

Rantmedia help brands engage with their customers through innovative, engaging and intuitive mobile apps. They build mobile apps that are useful, interesting and entertaining.

Their customers include Admiral Insurance (Confused.com, Diamond), Jaguar Land Rover, S4C (TV), BNI, Mentor Graphics and REPs (Registered Exercise Professionals).

Initially founded as a web-development agency in 2003, they changed focus to mobile in 2008. Rantmedia is now recognized as the premier mobile app agency in Wales.

What did they want from a mentor?

Anton approached the Wales angel network, Xenos, for some potential mentors and then asked them to pitch. Intrigued by this process (turning the tables on angels!), I agreed to discuss this with him. I proposed how we could work together. Once a week for 3 months we met to discuss professional goals and detailed business issues.

Rant wasn’t looking for finance. Anton needed advice on how whilst growing Rantmedia fast, they could maintain their philosophy of delivering first-class products and shift their focus towards the things they really enjoyed, games.

What did I do for Rant?

Working with Anton Faulconbridge, initially as his Mentor, we identified that to expand the mobile App agency, Rantmedia needed to commodify their work by forming intellectual property blocks and appreciate that IP was at the heart of everything they do. These IP blocks would be code functions that could be re-used in other products.

This meant Rant could build product faster, taking on larger projects without having to scale their team at the same rate. Rant is now an IP focused business.

In 2012/3 we achieved the following:

• Identified that Rant had been producing intellectual property for many years. Redundant projects from their web development agency days were left under-exploited. These had produced finished products that could all be sold off as white-label businesses. This process was begun.

• Developed processes to identify IP building blocks or cores in each application being built to enable their reuse.

• Found a new office location that better reflects Rant’s image.

• From discussions with Anton his love of retro-games and a real desire to bring these to mobile devices emerged. Rantmedia Games was created.

• Negotiated the acquisition of the worldwide exclusive license for Vectrex and financed the development of the iOS App, Vectrex Regeneration.

• Developed the marketing, pricing and PR strategy for the launch of Vectrex Regeneration.

• The app was featured by Apple and received critical acclaim around the world, including a BAFTA Games nomination (awarded commendation for Technical Achievement).

• The owners of another famous games brand approached Rantmedia Games to develop their IP for mobile.

• Negotiated licence of this soon to be announced brand for mobile games.

• Demonstrated Rant could do what they enjoyed and still grow (sales doubled in a year).

• Rantmedia is now recognized as the premier apps development studio in Wales and a globally recognized independent games studio.

• Watch Rantmedia discuss valuing their IP on Inngot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0IE_XBlGHs&feature=youtu.be&a

What are IP building blocks?

In 2000, QED Intellectual Property developed the concept of ‘silicon intellectual property’. I was the founder and CEO of QED until 2003. We worked with Texas Instruments and Lucent, amongst others, to collate and manage into a single portfolio a range of audio software to be made available to users of their digital signal processors (DSP’s).

The concept of Silicon IP developed as a business model within the semiconductor industry. The company licenses it’s technology to a customer as intellectual property. This type of ‘fabless’ semiconductor company doesn't provide physical chips to its customers but merely facilitates the customer's development of chips by offering certain functional blocks.

Typically, the customers are semiconductor companies or module developers with in-house semiconductor development. A company wishing to fabricate a complex device may purchase the rights to use another company's well-tested functional blocks such as a microprocessor, instead of developing their own design which would take additional time and cost.

Silicon IP is now an established industry practice. The most successful Silicon IP companies include ARC International, ARM Holdings, Rambus and MIPS Technologies.

The concept of IP building blocks can be extended to any reusable IP cores (e.g. software code, designs).

 August 2013