by Sören Stamer March 12, 2007 at 07:17 PM

Until a few weeks ago I thought content is king. It was one of the basic assumptions of CoreMedia. It made us successful in the first place. And it is still the holy grail of most if not all media companies as well. However, now I am sure, content is NOT king anymore. As an entrepreneur I recognized the importance of rethinking your basic assumptions constantly.

Eleven years ago I was a little nervous to have my first meeting with dpa, Germany's leading press agency. For me, dpa was an icon and still is. It is the most trusted source for German news in the world. Fortunately, the meeting went perfectly well. And with hindsight, I must say it was one of the most important meetings in CoreMedia's history.

Why is that? Well, CoreMedia was founded only a few weeks later and dpa became our very first customer. Being a spin-off of the computer science department of Hamburg University, the CoreMedia team had plenty of skills in designing and implementing superior software systems. However, we were still looking for a great problem to solve. Dpa told us about such a hairy beast: the future of multi-channel publishing. However, until we started to work with dpa, we had no clue about the media business at all.

At that time dpa was already in the heart of Germany's media for nearly fifty years. They understood perfectly the art and science of real-time news production and multi-channel delivery. And they made us think of information as a very valuable asset. We learned how to structure information to unleash its potential, how to manage it to process it in real-time, how to create value with content through distributed value chains and how to deliver it fast and reliably to every single customer.

Since then, CoreMedia's focus has been the development of software for real-time multi-channel content infrastructures. And the core idea of our software solutions is still the concept of Content being a very valuable asset as we have learned it from dpa eleven years ago. In other words: dpa has contributed a lot to CoreMedia's core idea by shaping CoreMedia's basic assumptions.

Last week I had the great pleasure to meet the team at dpa. Some of them are friends for more than a decade now. Christoph, Meinolf, Hubertus, Justus, Renate, Gerd and Kalle at dpa-info.com, a subsidiary of dpa, celebrated the tenth anniversary of our mutual project at Saliba, a very nice restaurant in Hamburg. It was great fun to meet them all, to tell war stories about the past and to think about the future. A great evening to remember. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Renate.

I am grateful for dpa's effect on CoreMedia. Now, it is time to reshape our basic assumptions. Let's do it together!