Deal update

Look for news soon on Engine Partners, the micro-venture fund I am raising with Kelly Rodriques, the recent CEO of Totality. We are bringing in strategic investors from media and marketing companies plus working with several mainline venture funds on deals they like but that are too small for them.

Also look for announcements about BackstageGallery(.com), SuperBuild, and several others.

The wake-up call among consumer lifestyle media companies

Consumer lifestyle media companies in magazine publishing and cable broadcasting are realizing that for some time now Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon have been snapping up early stage companies to gain affinity among what traditionally has been the emerging audience sought by the media companies. They now know that their next generation online properties can not simply be media storytelling sites. And they can not simply add the basics of community. They must fulfill more of the audiences' needs and desires for the optimal digital lifestyle. They must sell real stuff to help their audiences.

Recently I was at at the University of Missouri Journalism School and its New Media Research Institute as one of 10 current and former owners of advertising agencies. The focused on the place of advertisers and advertising in the next generation online communities from media companies. In lifestyle media, one question coming out of the discussion is how multiple advertisers can beam messages to viewers when the executable Web is going to reduce or even eliminate the 'paginess' of the viewing experience. Stay tuned for more.

Notes about summer deals

I thought conventional wisdom was that deals simply do not get done in the seed and venture capital world between July 4 and Labor Day. After being on the road this early summer, I can tell you that while the deals I'm seeing might not get finalized, many certainly are on the cusp of being completed.

For example:

* Swarmcast, where I was retained for business development and marketing, has its technology in beta with Major League Baseball and should go live by the post-season. The technology improves MLBs video quality by more than 4x and will help MLB to cost contain its projected surge in bandwidth expenses with the higher quality video and increasing number of subscribers to its online services. In addtion, Swarmcast, now backed by major Japanese financial and media companies, has signed a deal to embed the technology in next generation consumer electronics devices from a major brand.

* Magnify Media, where I am an advisor, is off the races with its user shared/generated video platform with dozens of small Web communities and will be launching with several major media brands this summer. This spring the Missouri Journalism School used Magnify to launch user video services for local high schools. Also, I expect the company to announce a new venture capital round with one of the leading VCs in the video space. I looked at all of these deals, including YouTube, at Best Buy, and I like Magnify the best because it is so simple for an existing Web community to implement. Most importantly, a Web community invites its viewers to search for and rate relevant videos at YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo, etc. and the Magnify platform then shares these videos hosted by the other sites within its clients' Web communities, while compiling the deepest database of user meta data on special interest communities on the Web.

Speaking at Stanford

I'm just back from the Stanford Publishing Course where I spoke to magazine executives on emerging Internet TV technologies. Should magazines be concerned that their text and graphics will lose ground to video content via the Web? Yes, they should. But they don't necessarily have to sink big dollars into video production. With new technologies such as Swarmcast delivering a full-screen TV-quality experience, their limited video can be presented as premium content. And with the best of the user-video platforms from Magnify Media launching, magazines can invite their viewers into the conversation in unique ways.

Seeing Jim Autry, my hero in business

Jim Autry, my first boss at Better Homes and Gardens magazine, and a former president of the Magazine Division at parent Meredith Corporation, is my hero in business. Now retired, he is a poet and author of national reknown. Some of his work focuses on the need for humility and humanity in the go-go world of business.

A white paper on early-stage companies and Big Box retailers

My draft white paper is titled “10 Ways to Blow Your Chances at Getting Your Early-Stage Company’s Consumer Tech Product or Service Distributed via Big Box Retailers.” Whew! I need to work on that.

My initial list:

1. Assume that you can find Big Box corporate staffers who will care.

2. Figure that if some do care, they will have the influence to get you “on the shelf”.

3. Expect that buyers (merchants) are motivated to find and buy innovations from young companies.

4. Propose “partnerships” for product and market develop to merchants.

5. Compare your company to a winning early stage company product such as the Slingbox.

6. Load up your product or service with cool features and add a monthly subscription service to give the retailer reoccurring revenue.

7. Plan for enthusiastic response and sales velocity through in-store sales personnel.

8. Assume that because your product is digital and can be bought online from home, you’ll leave Big Boxes in the dust if they don’t distribute your thing.

9. Approach Big Boxes about first launching at their e-commerce Web sites to prove their merit for in-store distribution.

10. Read 1 through 9 and give up.

Leaving Best Buy's venture capital innovation network

This blog's initial experiment: Listing my conversations and topics to perhaps trigger ideas or interest from viewers. Discussions this week:

Just back from Chicago, discussing projects for the summer with:

* Stepheny Lauer, vice-president of marketing, Coldwell Banker, and co-founder, Art.com. Topics: future of real estate marketing.

* Rich Gordon, professor, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. Topic: future of journalism education, including a focus on studying audience trends.

* Tom Collinger, associate dean, Medill and professor, school of Integrated Marketing Communications. Topic: future of Integrated Marketing Communications education.

* 30 of Collinger's IMC grad students. Topic: The successes and failures of Best Buy's venture capital innovation network.

* Steven Hanson, CEO, Hanson Inc., Toledo.. Topic: future of Web publishing and marketing for building products industry.

* Senior executives at Scripps Networks Interactive Group. Topic: the future of Web video-on-demand and video search in lifestyle media.

* Senior executive at Meredith Interactive. Topic: the focus on Web 2.0 viewer experiences in lifestyle media.

* John and Melissa Uppgren, principals, TechBarn. Topic: their online advertising lead tracking and fulfillment systems for tracking ad results in consumer lifestyle media, both for media companies and for leading advertisers.

* Dean Ekman, CEO, Online Builder. Topic: launch of SuperBuild, a breakthrough online best practices business management tool for contractors and landscapers, with a consumer service to help consumers manage their building, remodeling and landscaping projects.

Conversations

Wrapping up Best Buy Venture Capital Innovation Network projects, including transitioning some early-stage companies to Advisory Boards that work.

Discussions this week:

* David Friend, CEO on online back-up company Carbonite,Boston, a new client. Topic: setting a new standard in ease-of-use and low cost for online back-up.

* Senior executives at Compass Marketing. Topic: accelerating innovation for big box retailers by doing the upfront work for buyers who want to make decisions when products are nearly ready to ship or launch.