Steven Bermeister

The Digital pop Machine

Anyone born during the sixties remembers the decade digital music swallowed pop. The transition from weary rock to synth pop was as fast as the technology that fed it would allow. In 1980, Devo, Blondie and Joy Division topped the charts with their digital pop synth sound and video clips that boasted special effects made possible only by digital video technology. Drum kits were reduced to a single lone stand with a thin boy in a striped shirt playing in time to a pre-recorded overproduced sound of a Roland drum machine. The theatrical piano replaced by a sorry single digital keyboard. Even the guitar was reduced to a mere accompaniment to the digital pre-recorded sequences of a machine that could reproduce the sounds of a thousand instruments.

In 1981, Roland released their first synthesiser supporting the MIDI format. MIDI (Musical Instrumental Digital Interface) is an industry standard protocol that allows musical equipment and computers to communicate with each other. In the early eighties, MIDI, developed sequences which allowed one to record, edit and play back. Soon after interfaces were released for the Apple Macintosh, Commodore 64, PC-Dos and the Atari ST. In 1991 the MIDI was tweaked to allow all types of media control devices to communicate with each other. A number of music file formats based on the MIDI-byte stream are used today to store music in the very compact form used for ringtones and video games.

Today the music industry has come full circle with the decline of record and CD sales and the marked growth of digital music sales in the form of mobile phone ringtones. Full circle in that Joy Divisions “Love will tear us Apart’ has made a digital comeback, and can be heard from many a teenagers mobile phone, betraying the anonymity of the caller, and full circle in that once again, music has been reduced to its lowest common denominator. Simple notes on a simple scale encoded and decoded in the simplest possible way.

Yet, there’s nothing simple about the digital music business. In July 2008 New Motion Inc (now Atrinsic)a leader in the internet advertising, mobile technology and entertainment industry announced that for a mere $6 million plus, it had acquired the asset of Ringtone.com, a valuable internet domain that receives over 1,000 sign ups per day for the downloading of mobile content.

Burton Katz, the Company’s CEO, commented saying “Ringtones are the historic growth driver behind worldwide mobile content sales. Over the past year and a half, there have been fundamental shifts in the subscription based business model supporting these services creating unique opportunities in a business continuing to see strong consumer demand.”

At the same time, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), an organization that collects royalties for song writers and publishers, is forecasting that overall ringtone sales in the US will fall 7 percent in 2008 to approximately $510 million. That drop indicating an 8 percent drop in 2007 to $550 million. BMI claimed that the market hit its peak in the US in 2006 with sales of $600 million.

CEO of Advertising web Service Steven Bermeister remembers recording music on his Roland Jupiter-8 keyboard. His family established one of the first retail computer shops in Sydney where the now retro Atari ST, with MIDI interface was sold. Even then his love of technology merged comfortably with his love of music. These days he’s on the other side of the music business selling digital music and all its applications online through peer to peer networking.

Realizing that the ringtone business in the US was about two years behind Europe in terms of off-deck mobile content plays, in 2003 he established The Ringtone Channel. He wanted to get in early to be well positioned to “ride the wave of success that was seen in Europe and Australia when the US market caught up.”

Bermeister says “The heat is coming out of the Ringtone market which means that the flood of players who came into the market late and have been losing money are getting out.” He believes that will stabilize the business and bring down the cost of acquiring customers. The players that remain (those who got in early) will divide the market between them.

Madonna’s Hung Up was almost certainly written to be downloaded onto a mobile phone and Britney knows it’s her Prerogative to join the ringtone game too. The pop industry has fully ingested the digital music platform and is now spitting it out in ever devolving incremental bursts of half digested compositions, catchy enough to dance to and just short enough to forget.

The Bermeister Family is a name synonymous with technology. In 1981, Allan Bermeister established one of the first computer retail outlets in Australia called The Computer Spot in Sydney’s Martin Place. In 1982 together with his two sons Kevin and Steven Bermeister and Mark Dyne in the United States, he established Ozi-Soft an interactive multimedia and games distribution company. By 1990 Ozisoft was Australia’s largest international software distributor.

In 1992, Ozi-Soft engineered a management buyout, together with Sega Enterprises, to form a new company called Sega Ozisoft Pty Limited. Sega Ozisoft with exclusive representation of Virgin Interactive, Sierra Entertainment, Viacom, Ocean, Accolade, Time Warner, Acclaim, Microprose and Starwave. In 1992 Kevin joined the Board of Directors of Packard Bell Australia, which became Australia’s largest manufacturer and distributor of personal computers to the home marketplace. In 1999 this interest was sold to NEC.

Kevin Bermeister established a $70 million interactive theme park in Darling Harbor in Sydney, Australia. This park utilized the latest in multimedia, entertainment and destination attraction events. The theme park operated through a joint venture company, the shareholders of which included Sega Enterprises Japan, Mitsubishi Corp. and Mitsui Corp. The major shareholders sold their interest in 1998 to an Australian property group.

In 1994 Steven Bermeister launched one of Australia’s first modem products called Zentech and joined Brilliant Digital Entertainment.  In 1996, Brilliant Digital Entertainment was launched into the US public capital markets. Kevin bermeister became a member  of the board of Tag-It Pacific, Inc., a specialty trim, printing and packaging company for the garment, accessories and related market industries in the United States.

In 1998 Steven joined the Auction Channel, a division of Brilliant Digital Entertainment a publicly listed company on the American Stock Exchange to head up its Australian and New Zealand operations. From the expertise gained from the large scale marketing of the mobile entertainment industry In 2004, he established The Ringtone Channel PTY LTD - a web based Mobile Content Business and was a founder and driving force behind Californian based publicly listed New Motion Inc (NWMO) a leading Internet Advertising and Mobile technology business.

During 1998, Dyne and Bermeister repurchased a majority interest in Sega Ozi-Soft and thereafter sold the company to Infogrames. Kevin Bermeister continues to focus his effort on Brilliant Digital Entertainment and recently established Altnet Inc. a division of the company that is focused on Peer to Peer network solutions for content providers, consumers and providing technology and enterprise solutions.

 In 2003 Steven established AirArena, a Digital Media Company that focused on mobile entertainment via online distribution channels.  In 2005 Steven established Get Me On Media and Advertising Web Service specializing in online marketing and advertising management systems for large and small businesses. Since its inception Get Me On Media has signed up over 10,000 customers from the US, Australia and Europe.

You Might as Well Play Lotto
Of the 20 Million Websites listed
less than 10,000 generate traffic !

It is estimated that an average of 2.7 Billion dollars was spent on internet advertising in the first quarter of 2007 by TNS Media Intelligence, a US provider of Advertising information and statistics. According to TNS CEO Steven Fredericks, there has been a dramatic shift away from traditional print and television advertising and towards online advertising, with television showing a decline of 2.7 %. Small businesses are following this trend, but without fully understanding the search engine process their online campaigns are nothing more than glorified yellow pages ads in a directory of millions of listings.

To illustrate the point, online advertising specialists Advertising Web Service conducted an internet search for the words ‘Carpet Cleaning’ and ‘Plumber’ on Yahoo, Google and MSN , each yielding an average of 16 million websites per listing, which leaves small business operators out in the cold when it comes to internet marketing and advertising.

Search Engine Optimization is one way for small businesses to try navigate their way through the ocean of online completion, as is online networking, but most small operators do not have the internal IT infrastructure or budget to include either of these tools in their daily routine, and staying on top of the online marketing game demands daily attention.

Google’s ‘Adwords’ work much like the stock exchange with daily flux in the demand and supply of the ‘word’ market. What this means is that advertisers bid on the words they want Google to list them under and set a budget for the right to be listed under these words. If a competitor places a higher bid on the same word their ad will automatically default to the higher ranking. Other factors such as relevance to market and costing structure also determine ranking on Google.

Advertising Web Service CEO Steven Bermeister says: “In trying to keep up with the online competition, small businesses make the mistake of investing thousands of dollars on professional looking websites which in all probability will never be seen. Small businesses need to differentiate between marketing their services and marketing their websites”. Of course the website should be well designed promoting the unique aspect of the product or service using benchmark marketing strategies, and the operation should be smooth, but that’s the easy part of the formula. Connecting to ones specific target market is the real challenge. A low budget ad that reaches its market would generate more profit than the most expensive ad that floats around cyberspace forever unseen.

In fact by using a search engines unique ability to filter out extraneous traffic, small businesses can better match their product or service with their customers search. If a searcher is looking for a camera in Mullumbimby, a well targeted internet ad will show up under the relevant words, ‘camera’ and Mullumbimby’. This is the outcome that small businesses are looking for in online advertising - a specific, local relevant match. In this way small businesses can turn the internet around to work for them instead of feeling
overwhelmed by it.

TNS Media Intelligence is the leading provider of strategic advertising intelligence to advertisers, advertising agencies and media properties. The company’s tracking technologies collect advertising expenditures and occurrence data, as well as select creative executions across 20 media in the U.S.

Steven Bermeister

The Keepers of the Name

My mother is a keen genealogist who has collected and collated family members we never knew existed. There remain a few, hanging on by a mere mark on the page,  void of name and history, and many who’s colourful stories have etched themselves in the family psyche as heroes, villains, rebels and madwomen. In her enthusiastic and persistent search to dig up the bones of the dead she has made contact with cousins who previously existed only on paper and connected with nephews with whom she previously shared little but a common marriage. Suddenly old remains of black and white photographs that were practically put to rest in dusty shoeboxes handed from one generation to the next have been retrieved with enthusiasm and excitement. Their faded sepia restored, their image sharpened by a few clicks on the Photoshop toolbar, and voila, a great grandmother is brought back to life.

Now previously estranged family members collaborate sending lists, photographs and stories across cyber-boarders. Google has played a significant part. My mother was able to find a wedding photograph of her great grandmother on a site that recorded the history of a small town in South Africa. There she found that her great grandmother was on record as having been the first to marry in the newly found synagogue in the town where she also headed the first Women’s Auxiliary. The photograph shows a previously unknown small pretty dark woman, standing next to her husband - who looks remarkably like my brother.

Names remain a challenge, as a previous generation dies out leaving the next  to dig up from the pits of there fading memories any remaining knowledge, scraps of information, pieces of a story, a name a town, a place. “What was the name of…? “begins many a sentence of the searching genealogist.

The year I turned twenty eight, I changed my name from Carol to Rebecca. It was a strange thing to do but I wanted to be more like the strong matriarchal biblical foremother whose Hebrew name I carried, than the conservative American housewife Carol Brady with whom I had come to associate the name.  There is an old photograph of my great grandmother ‘Rebecca’ after whom I am named that reminds me that I am connected, not to the false laugh of a sixties Hollywood set, but to a commanding line of strong Jewish women who stand behind me in life, labour and love, holding onto my hips, grounding me into the earth, whispering in my ear: you can, you will, you have.

When we arrived to live in Israel I thought about these women, who sent their husbands ahead on boats to foreign lands, and with whom I now share a common story, of migration, separation  and change of identity. The official, who took down my details after a twenty three hour flight, wrote and spelled my surname phonetically, as he heard it in Hebrew. He handed me my Israeli Id card, and suddenly I was no longer Rebecca Bermeister, but Rivkah Barmistar. My grandfather had changed our family name once before when he came from Russia to South Africa, turning Obermeister into Bermeister. Some of his brothers who went to America and England shortened the family name even further to Masters. One grand uncle who now lives in England kept the original grand name. Growing up in South Africa, and even later in Australia amongst South Africans of my parent’s generation, the name always returned a gesture of recognition. My grandfather had opened the first photographic shop in South Africa aptly named “Bermeisters”, a name which became synonymous with all things technical and photographic for a generation of South African Jews.

 I looked up our family name on About.com, to try source its origins. Were we really over-see-ers, masters over some other subgroup? There are rumours of aristocratic lineage in the family, perhaps our Prussian surname was a clue? My oldest brother Kevin thinks our name was simply procured, or even worse bought. About.com ‘s Genealogy pages tell us that  “Jews in what is today Germany had to have a surname after 1808…The name they received sometimes depended on how much a family could afford to pay. Wealthier families received German names that had a pleasant or prosperous sound…” - perhaps he was right. Either way some great grandfather down the ancestral line was wheeling and dealing, enough at least to buy a good name.

My brother Steven uses both his Hebrew and English names. In business, he is known exclusively as Steven Bermeister, amongst family and friends, he is Yitz. Familysearch an online genealogy resource recently added the Jewish Family History resource tool, providing online indexing, links and information for Jewish families.  Still with the help of this state of the art technology in cyberspace if my brother makes Aliya on a day where the officer spells his name dramatically different from mine (which is already so far removed from any data stored in any base) how will our ancestors know we were once brother and sister? Only through the mothers, for they and they alone will  laboriously and persistently pull together all the missing threads, gathering ancestral stories about madwomen and heroes, villains and rebels, reminding us that we are part of the same fragmented family, the daughters and sons of the ancients, the Over-Masters of our own destiny, the traders of our own futures.

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