The X-Factor for new online media brands today is who you partner with not how much money you have to spend.

A month ago I was at the C@binet conference on the future of media, organized by the government at the impressively Footballers’ Wives Grove Hotel.

If all your customers have £500 a night to spend, and you like the idea of swimming in a pool so black that you hit your head at the end of every length, you might want to think about holding your next corporate event there too.

There were three really remarkable things about it.

Put the slides down

First there was a total ban on Powerpoint. Not a partial moratorium where people kind of used it in the background. But a total absence from any presentation in three days.

And here’s what happened: the world did not end. People looked the audience in the eye, told stories, expressed opinions, and engaged with each other.

Anyone doing a job like mine gets to go to a lot of conferences and do a lot of public speaking. It’s how you make new contacts. And I am now convinced that the as far as reading out powerpoint slides goes, zero tolerance is the best policy. Get up there and tell them a story, preferably a funny one.

(By the way, this classic and brilliant New Yorker article remains the definitive study of the saddos of Powerpoint. It’s a must-read.)

TV can be so last year

The second remarkable thing about the conference was the palpable marginalization of TV. I can recall barely any session where broadcast TV was centre stage, as opposed to a prop for a wider discussion of SEO, aggregation, atomization, YouTube revenue splits-..and not a mention of the creaking structures of the TV industry.

It’s a cross-platform world, and the government is totally onto that. For another interesting Northern media company like Mediaburst, this is of course old news  it makes its trade on the no. 1 universal media tool of the planet, the mobile phone. But for many in the finance trade, the redefinition of the media into new genres and not just, say, TV or publishing, is still a newsflash.

Take your partners

But the third point actually came from a finance person, and was the most interesting of all. Julie Meyer, a venture capitalist and one of the dragons on the BBC’s online Dragon’s Den (my tip: she’ll be on the real show any day now) said some really smart things about how you start and launch media projects these days.

Time was, say in year 2000, that the way to get an online business going was to raise £10m, have a huge marketing budget and outspend the rivals. Think Amazon.com for a successful implementation, and the original Boo.com for a failure.

But now, as Julie said, it’s about fighting smarter. The strength of your startup is about who you are partnering with and how.

Partners mean prizes

In a mobile phone content business that’s self evident. Almost everything a firm like Mediaburst does will have a service provision partner (a O2) and a client (a Kellogs).

And it’s true for Ten Alps too. We spent the last year really working up a portfolio of new media brands, and every one is about its partners. We start with a fairly low investment maybe £100k. Then we roll out it with friendly organisations.

Take Newton a new science project we will soon launch. It’s got some cool technology and great science content: but the real point of difference is the partners, the Science Museum, the Open University and the Royal Institution. It’s they who bring the traction, the existing traffic, the content credibility.

Take Yossa a jobs and entreneurship site we are rolling out next year. It looks like launching with as big an online partner as you can get. Or any of our TV programmes with broadcasters. Or Accountancy TV, which where we are looking to work with the big firms to help with their training. Partners, partners, partners.

Finally take Link2, the trade portal we are running out of our Manchester office. It’s not just a website, it’s a content aggregator providing sector based content from 437 published titles we have, which users can choose to select and then read on the device of their choice, including mobile. So our partners are-.ourselves, our own published titles. Without the titles, the site would never have been viable.

Mobile like Mediaburst’s output is about dissemination of content and user choice. And so is link2. The content you want, when you want it, with the freedom + flexibility of web and mobile. And all delivered by partners  keeping the platform elegant and profitable.

Partners can make things interesting. Some are just plain free like Facebook’s complimentary search optimization of your business name-.And they make you profitable too.

About Alex Connock

Alex Connock is Chief Executive of Ten Alps, a company he founded in 1999 alongside Bob Geldof. Ten Alps is now listed on AIM and produces factual media across all platforms.