Company Profile

YooMedia plc is one of the fastest growing interactive entertainment companies in the UK.
Since 1997 we have been developing and launching leading B2C consumer brands in the gaming and community sectors. We also work in a B2B capacity with leading brand owners, agencies, content developers and broadcasters to design and develop their interactive content strategies.

Led by Executive Chairman Dr. Michael Sinclair and Group Managing Director Neil MacDonald, YooMedia has assembled a highly experienced management team that possesses a unique blend of skills and experience in the areas of Digital TV, Internet and mobile phone services and technology.

With main office locations in London, Exeter and Maidstone, YooMedia manages core assets including:

Over 30 office locations throughout the UK alone

State-of-the-art studio, production and post-production facilities at our Wapping location.

UK broadcast return path & bandwidth owner

Fully fledged UK Bookmaker License

Database with over 350K UK singles

SMS Engine access with international reach

Fully staffed 50 seat Customer Contact Centre in Maidstone, Kent

YooMedia Dating & Chat - Our dating subsidiary company manages the oldest and largest UK-owned dating brands including Dateline, Club Sirius and Avenues. YooMedia Dating has over 20 office locations throughout the UK and also manages YooChat, our world-leading interactive chat service found on UK digital cable on the Telewest platform (platform extensions planned for 2005).

YooMedia Gambling & Games - Combining the brands of Avago and Channel 425 (in partnership with William Hill) YooMedia is on the leading-edge of interactive fixed odds, casino and poker gambling services for digital TV, the web and 3G mobile phones. Our gaming business also manages YooPlay, the only interactive just for fun games channel found on all four Digital TV platforms in the United Kingdom.

YooMedia Enhanced Solutions (YES) - YES works with brand owners, agencies, content owners and broadcasters to clarify the options, define the strategies and deliver the interactive content that enhances consumer and audience experiences. YES customers include the BBC, Nestle, Celador, William Hill, Channel 4, ZipTV, The Cartoon Network and HR Owen.

10m a month profit....you mean t/o of 10m a month surely?

right. now i am confused. what am i missing here. 2 humungous sell trades and virtually nothing else and the sp ticks up!! Whats happening??

they were buys...delayed notification made them look like sells

Mobile UK operator Orange will next week launch nine channels on its 3G mobile television service. The channelsincluding news from ITN and CNN, the Cartoon Network, extreme sport and other entertainment serviceswill only be available to subscribers within Orange's 3G network using a Nokia 6680 handset.

The mobile video streaming application will be downloaded free of charge while the service will then cost 10 per month after a free three-month trial. Viewing is capped at 1Gb of data which equates to around 20 hours.

Rival UK operator O2 considers 3G better suited for on-demand programming. It is trialling a 16-channel service in Oxford in conjunction with ntl Broadcast using the DVB-H transmission standard and Nokia 7710 handsets, and earlier this month announced its programming partners.

DVB-H broadcasts programming from television transmitters rather than the mobile phone networks. France Telecom-owned Orange plans its own DVB-H trial in France later this year.

Alexis Dormandy, Orange chief marketing officer, said other channels would soon be available.

"Our customers will be the first in the UK to watch TV on their mobiles, be that CNN or 24-hour coverage of the Big Brother house."

He added: "This signals the start of a huge new opportunity for our customers, broadcasters, handset manufacturers and production companies."

Lovelacemedia | 20.05.2005
Search news:

Business profile: The last dotcom evangelist
By Martin Baker (Filed: 22/05/2005)


Who is David Docherty ? He has been called the new media's leading visionary, the great white hope of UK television, a charmer and a networker who makes Peter Mandelson look like a monk - and, according to some, a hard-hearted, arrogant, callous so-and-so.

It's easy to see where the difference of opinion arises. Driven, garrulous, funny and occasionally dangerous in conversation, Docherty is the chief executive of YooMedia, one of Britain's -fastest-growing media companies. He is media through and through, from youthful academic to BBC apparatchik, to the private sector businessman whose company provides the texting service on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

What Docherty does is easier to nail down than who he is. The YooMedia web-site offers a list of apparently incongruous activ-ities, all based round interactive technology - "dating, gaming, games, chat, mobile, government".

Government? Yoomedia has an interactive application that helps consumers use the NHS. Cynics might say the public service function is just greed with a guilt complex. But Docherty bridles at the characterisation of him as just someone bringing video dating and gambling to our mobile phones. "I genuinely believe interactive media must be about more than pornography and e-mail. It can be a real force to do good," he says.

He is watchful and slightly tense, not because of the interview but because he wants to be taken seriously about his good intentions. Or perhaps there is a roomful of lawyers and bankers next door finishing up a deal. YooMedia, which reported an annual loss of 24m last month on turnover of 21.3m, is voraciously acquisitive, and recently bought up ViaVision, the operator of Pokerzone TV.

A published thriller writer, Docherty nevertheless cannot avoid using the lingua franca of his world when describing YooMedia's activities. "We are an interactive entertainment and solutions provider," he says. "We bought Dateline and five or six companies in gambling games, dating and chat, which is what makes money on the internet. We're now Britain's biggest dating company." Not bad for a boy born into hideous poverty. "I grew up in the Gorbals. My earliest memories are of my father chasing rats round the living room with a poker."

Docherty is bright and went to Strathclyde University. He retains a rich Glaswegian accent and a hint of Caledonian chippiness. "I always felt an outsider in England, in London. I never felt I could settle in the place."

Docherty had come to London to do a doctorate and was writing a book on Channel 4 when he came into life-changing contact with John Birt, an ex-London Weekend Televison man who was to become the director general of the BBC. Birt told him to call if he ever wanted a job.

"One day I woke up and I thought, I hate being at home on my own. I had ended up watching both episodes of Neighbours in the day," he laughs. So he switched roles from loner academic outsider to Birtian BBC insider. "I went from managing myself to managing hundreds of people in a matter of months. I'd lie if I said it was terrifying. I relished every single second of it."



But the restructurings and the redundancies and being a widely loathed Birt henchman took a brutal toll on him.

"I looked at myself in the mirror and said: 'How the hell did you become you?' I looked 20 years older than I was. I looked bashed up, stressed. It wasn't worth it. It was too much of a sacrifice of who you are. I'm not that person. I'm focused and strong-willed and strategic, but I'm not the person I became at the BBC."

His big disappointment is not rising to controller level at the Beeb. He left for Telewest before the dotcom bubble burst. When it did, the axeman was axed.

Now Docherty is building YooMedia at a breath-taking rate. He is still rawly ambitious for the "new" media he champions. He is going to bring you interactive television services, games on mobile phones and dating opportunities, whether you want it or not.

LYNNE FRANKS, Working Woman
The setting is perfect, a welcoming west London flat, fragrant with lilies, a candle burning on the kitchen table to symbolise the energy of the working day, beside a vase of her trademark gerbera daisies. The PR legend Lynne Franks is dressed in a gorgeous flowing turquoise outfit, flown in from her favourite LA designer, Dosa.

The look appears carefully constructed, but Franks is not here to show off her lovely home, Hello!-style. 'The number of times I have read a young woman journalist's opinions of my household furnishings, as if I care. Does it happen to a man? A man would never do an interview in the house. You would never generally describe the way a man is dressed, or that he has put on weight.' What she does want to talk about is her journey from public- relations legend to passionate advocate of the professional and personal development of women.

Good PR, Franks has come to understand, is about much more than cheap stunts. 'It's absolutely crucial for the PR industry to be creating value. The PR industry has got to be an example of what authentic communication is about. It's not about spending your clients' money in as many varied and gimmicky ways as you can, but trying to do something to improve peoples' lives. I'm not in favour of painting planes blue to promote a new blue- coloured soft drink, which a certain agency did years ago and spent millions. It's what I teach my women: if you are opening a cake shop, bake an enormous cake full of healthy ingredients, and take it to the children's hospital.'

She is convinced she has not lost her ability to tune into the spirit of the times " the instinct for trendspotting that made her a household name in the 1980s as the PR guru who invented London Fashion Week and introduced the nation to Swatch watches and designer jeans. 'I've always let my intuition, combined with my creativity, run wild. I know that I intuitively plug in at some zeitgeist level to what's going to happen next. It's what I did in PR, and that's how I was able to know what the market wanted, or how they wanted to be communicated with, and then I would promote my clients' products using that psychological direction,' she explains.

'For a long time I've known that there was going to be a shift in the needs of women in society. There was going to be a time coming when women wanted to do things in a different way, both personally and professionally.'

After an interlude in California, enjoying a lifestyle of rising early to watch dolphins playing near the beach, she has been back in the UK for three years, and is busier than ever. She is about to apply her philosophy of female empowerment to a new digital television channel, which she is setting up in conjunction with the multi-media publisher Big Picture and David Docherty's YooMedia, in the format of an aspirational women's magazine. Franks, who will be a non-executive director of the channel, will host her own daily chat show, offering words of wisdom " of which she is in no short supply " and interviewing experts in the fields of health, nutrition and relationships. It is her first television show, but Franks will be able to draw on her experience of having been a guest on television programmes around the world, as well as having worked on pilots of several new formats and honed her interview techniques in thousands of live sessions.

Her television idol is Oprah Winfrey. 'I've wanted to have an Oprah-style show over here forever. That will not be what I'm doing, but I don't think we do it over here at all. I don't think Trisha even comes near it. Trisha is really Jerry Springer in black women's garb. It's ridiculous to say she's anything like Oprah, she's not issue-led in the slightest. It's not intelligent programming. I'll be really interested to see what Nigella Lawson's new ITV chat show is like, but she's married to Charles Saatchi, so one can assume they're not going to be too radical. Oprah will take on the entire Texas meat industry.' If her show were to have a signature tune it would be The Eurythmics' 'Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves'.

The new channel will use red-button technology to interact with viewers, throwing out questions about their lives and incorporating their responses back into its programmes. 'It will be aimed at women " how to live and work to your full potential. It seems to me that red-button technology is perfect for it, learning in an entertaining way, using fun stuff that makes it really yummable.' Is that a word?

The daughter of a north London Jewish butcher, Franks left school at 16 and began her professional life as a typist. After a stint at Petticoat, the first weekly girls' magazine, she founded Lynne Franks PR from her kitchen table in 1970 when she was 21, with Katherine Hamnett as her first client. The company grew to become the UK's highest profile PR agency. The mother of two young children, Franks's life had become in her own words 'a roller coaster of launches, hype and hysteria'.

Then in one week in 1992, she quit her job, her marriage " her husband Paul Howie went off with a family friend " and her Buddhist faith. In her autobiography, she writes: 'I knew it was a matter of life and death for me to get out before I burnt on some kind of PR funeral pyre.'

The next decade was spent moving to California and embarking on a journey of spiritual and sexual awakening. In 1995, the idea for Seed, Franks's manifesto for the feminine way to do business, was planted when she staged an event called What Women Want on London's South Bank, starring Sinad O'Connor, Chrissie Hynde and Germaine Greer, to raise awareness of a UN international women's conference in Beijing. Seed is now her main concern, run out of her flat with a tiny team of three full-time and three part- time employees.

When she published The Seed Handbook in 2000, the New York department store Bloomingdale's dressed windows across Manhattan with over-sized gardening tools and blown-up quotes on sustainable commerce. It was the sort of publicity few in the PR industry could dream of, showing that nearly a decade after quitting her eponymous public-relations agency, Franks was a still a force to be reckoned with.

In 2002, Franks returned to Europe and now divides her time between her homes in London (just down the road from her son, a stand-up comedian), rural Oxfordshire and Deia, Majorca, where her daughter and baby granddaughter live. Her home on the island is on the site of the garden of an old monastery, and is bursting with orange, lemon and eucalyptus trees and cacti brought back from America by early explorers. As she lives in Majorca for two weeks out of every month, the television shows will have to be pre- recorded in blocks, but to include a live element Franks is considering having a camcorder on her when she is at her Spanish home.

In the 20 years that she ran her PR agency, Franks confesses she didn't even know how to switch a computer on, let alone how to use one, but she has now embraced new-media technology wholeheartedly. 'As a communications person, my skill is understanding how to put a message out to somebody. I believe that it is possible to use my communications skills integrated with learning programmes that will have more effect than classic learning.'

Together with a company called Cambridge Training and Development, part of the public sector supplier Tribal, she is developing M-learning " educating women and young people via mobile- telephone text messages using a similar technique to the quizzes in women's magazines. 'We combine our thinking using graphics that are more MTV than traditional, and language and imagery that relates to what's going on in women's and young people's minds.' Instead of 'How compatible are you and your partner?' the M-learning questionnaires will ask, 'Are you ready to start your own business?'

'They will be asked different questions, and then they put their answers through their mobile phones and they will get a response saying, 'Well, right now you probably need about six months' practical experience,' or 'Are you sure you're concentrating enough on your personal life?' 'Seed is also developing E-learning programmes for women and school children aged 14-19, incorporating more traditional skills such as how to use a spreadsheet for adults, and literacy and numeracy for young people, so that they count towards recognised qualifications.

Next month, Seed is launching a brand new initiative in conjunction with Starbucks. The 'Plant Your Seeds' project will be piloted in 28 branches of the coffee chain across the UK. The aim is to bring together small groups of local women who will embark on a six-week personal development programme, at the end of which they will be encouraged to create something for their community. 'If you look at where the community centres are for women these days, they generally are the coffee shops,' says Franks. 'It could be they feel there isn't sufficient childcare in the region and want to open up a crche, it may be they want to create a book library for their local hospital, or stop some big development being built on their local children's playground.'

Franks has applied the Seed philosophy around the world, working with Bangladeshi weavers, women in South African townships and middle-class housewives in Guildford. Seed, which has just started paying for itself, has already run successful schemes with small business services in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and London, and is about to set up a centre for female entrepreneurship at Luton University, where Franks is entrepreneur-in-residence.

It is a tribute to Frank's unique talents that The Seed Handbook has evolved into an accredited learning programme backed by the DTI. Before the election, Seed enjoyed 'fantastic support' from Patricia Hewitt and former women and equality minister Jacqui Smith. Franks is 'absolutely appalled and horrified' that the new women's minister Meg Munn will not be paid for her role, but remains confident of Gordon Brown's determination to make the UK an enterprise culture.

She laments the fact that although a lot of warm words are being spoken, there is 'no budget' for women's enterprise " an area which she believes has been neglected, but is crucial in giving women the tools to start their own businesses. 'Women need to be talked to in a different way. When women went to the traditional business services to get help, the language was so male they felt they didn't relate to it.'

Franks is germinating ideas at a heady pace about how to boost female entrepreneurship and, at a wider level, how to improve women's self-esteem. What is still driving her at 57? She sees herself as a tribal elder, putting down foundations for future generations. 'Improving the quality of peoples' lives, that's what I'm passionate about, and if I feel I can't do that, then I'll toddle back to Majorca and retire into my old age. I question what drives me, and what it comes back to is that I'm passionate about helping people and teaching from my own mistakes. I'm in a fantastic position, as are my peers Anita Roddick and Katherine Hamnett. There are those of us who have learnt so much and clearly see our role as giving back now. We are in our wise-women stage.'

In her youth, Franks was political, describing herself as an 'ardent socialist' who regularly went on solidarity marches, but she admits that, cushioned by the female-dominated PR industry, she was a relative latecomer to feminism. 'In the PR industry, particularly fashion PR, there are probably more women than men and the men are mostly gay, so it's a fairly feminine energy.' She is critical of the way in which the early feminist movement encouraged women to compete with men on their own territory. 'Whereas women speak to each other to connect, men speak to assert their space " it's a psychological fact. Traditionally, since the Sixties and Seventies, women have gone into that male space " what we call the Mrs Thatcher paradigm. That's what's got women to the point where they are getting infertile, they're drinking too much, they're having heart attacks at a younger age, breast cancer is increasing " we just stress ourselves out.'

Seed is all about teaching women that they can run businesses on their own terms. The majority of the women who take part are setting up in 'soft industries' such as IT, fashion, textiles, jewellery, coaching and the healing arts. 'Most women in this country want to do something that fits in with their life. They can have their kids and work from home if they want to,' says Franks.

Living according to her own creed, Franks achieves balance in her busy life by meditating with the Brahma Kumaris, an all-female order in Willesden, and attending regular five-rhythms dance classes in Tufnell Park. 'Women over 50 have such huge self-esteem problems, because it's an ageist society. I'm still looking to see what I'm going to do when I grow up, I have reinvented myself at least three times now and will continue to do so until they take me away. I've never been healthier, never had more energy.'

This summer, she is spending five days at a dance camp in Wales, travelling with a small group to the rain forest in Ecuador and teaching a workshop on the feminine way to do business at the Findhorn spiritual community in Scotland. Later in the year, she is planning a series of Seed retreats at her home in Majorca, where groups of 10 to 12 women will take part in workshops on personal development and leadership growth, incorporated with yoga, dance, creative writing, art, mountain walks and hot tubs.

I have avoided bringing it up until now, but, like Basil Fawlty who couldn't resist mentioning the war, I must ask whether her lifestyle isn't still a teeny weeny bit Absolutely Fabulous? Jennifer Saunders has always denied that her comic creation Edina Monsoon was based on Franks, and while Franks recognises some of the traits as her own, and even called her autobiography Absolutely Now!, she believes the character was a composite of different people. 'It was a metaphor for the time, a parody of the Eighties and very funny. There are aspects of me in there and aspects of other people. Some of it was hysterical " the whole Buddhist thing she got from me because I was a practising Buddhist then.'

But although she admits it has opened doors for her, she is tired of the Ab Fab tag now. 'I've done a lot more in my life than that image of me suggests. So I don't want it on my gravestone.'

THE MENTORS WHO MADE LYNNE

JANET STREET-PORTER

'I worked on Petticoat with Janet, who has been a great role model. I love her writing, I think she's such an inspiration. I was shocked when she went on I'm A Celebrity... but I thought she did it really well'

DIANNE THOMPSON

'I think she runs Camelot in a very feminine way, and she's a very feminine woman. In my personal opinion " as her friend " she works too hard, but she's very committed to what she does'

OPRAH WINFREY

'My hero of all heroes is Oprah, because she takes on issues and she does it stylishly. She has shown how a black woman can take her power and show her wounds publicly and still be incredibly successful'

DADI JANKI

'Outside India, the Brahma Kumaris, the only female-led spiritual organisation in the world, is run by this 90-year-old woman. She is the most extraordinarily intelligent woman I have ever met. She never watches television, but she knows about everything'

MARJORIE SCARDINO

'I don't know her, but I do know how she operates her business. She runs that enormous conglomerate [Pearson] in a very feminine way. She empowers people. Decency is one of the company's principles. She encourages her staff to do a decent act every day'

ANGELA FRANKS 'My mum lives in north London and we're very close. She's a grandma, a real matriarch of the family, bless her. She's 81 and she's still a huge influence on me. I speak to her every day and she's full of very pragmatic advice. I certainly rely on all my elders for that'



Source: Independent, The; London (UK)

steady on McT!

thanks for the latest news...be good to see some share action soon!...still hanging on.

What's happening with this share price today? Buys outweigh sells but a 10% drop. I just topped up at 11.75p (though am slightly nervous in case something unpleasant is in the pipeline to explain all this).

it seems to be all the way down with this one
McTavish posts a lot of info, EWR's gone quiet and I'm beginning or maybe continuing to think that theres better fish to fry...

buying opportunity IMO
Alan

anything to substantiate that alan?
was thinking same myself and there certainly is an increase in activity...

Nothing concrete I'm afraid. At the risk of being called a ramper (see SEO thread) I just have one of those gut feelings that this company is a right product, right place, right time type. That and having read interviews with the boss, he seems a focused type that will make it big.
Given the area of operations I feel that this stock will either grow as its turnover (not necessarily profits) rise, acquire voraciously or be gobbled up by another media mogul. Whichever way is a win for holders at this price!!
All instinct gobbldygook I'm afraid but I find it works for me as well as hours pouring over accounts and RNS.
Alan

I agree with you Hewitt...I think Yoo will make it big time but it is a question of when and waiting it out.

works for me hewiit/dyna I'll book another 20k
(having one of my better days today, GRI)

In similar vein to a message I left on the SEO thread, we should decide if we are traders or investors. I am the latter and I invest for long term growth, not short term gain. If you are the kind of investor who hits the buy or sell button every time the price fluctuates then you are really a trader or an investor who should be looking at mid to large caps and not these penny shares. I think YOO will be mid cap eventually, by one of the routes mentioned above but if drops like this panic you, get out and come back in when the company is more mature. The rewards will not be as great but the risks won't either. Isn't that the deal and the first lesson we all learned?
Alan

fair point...trader or very green trader anyway....
I've got to try and build some capital before I can leave it lying around (invested)

absolutely right--and I feel the rewards will be well worth waiting for!!

I have little enough capital too, but I take the opposite view. It takes either a large amount of capital or a large swing to make the dealing costs and taxes negligable on your profit, so I choose companies I expect to give a good return in the medium term and leave the money there. A good company doesn't become a bad one in an afternoon, and I'm too damn tight to pay brokers all the time for dipping in and out!! I can hear you now. Typical bloody Yorkshireman (LOL).
Hope you did get in at the low cos I think this share seems to dip late morning and early afternoon every day, before rebounding prior to the close. We'll see if I'm right (there's a first time for everything!!)
Alan

Big delayed sell just went thru', should be reason for drop.

Just checked the historical charts for YOO and, interestingly enough, they seem to drop off dramtically through spring/early summer and rise vertically in the run up to the interims in September for the last 2 years. Maybe there is something in that. Most small companies share price is news driven and YOO lack the news flow required to keep it stable? May be other reasons and I might be talking crap, but I still think it has a long way to run.
Alan