Plant Food from Worm Poop

Waiting to board my plane home from Seattle-Tacoma Airport, I was wandering through the newsstand when an article on the cover of Inc. Magazine caught my eye. “The Coolest Little Start-Up in America: Meet Terracycle, the ultimate growth company. Built on garbage. Run by a kid. Loved by investors.”

How could I resist?

Four dollars and ninety-nine cents (plus tax, I guess) later, I have now read the article.

And, boy, this does sound like a cool little company!

Here is a brief description from the company’s website:

TerraCycle produces a potent, organic, eco-friendly plant food that is the first mass-produced product in the world to be packaged in used plastic soda bottles. To go even further, the entire product is made out of garbage – from the contents to the packaging. As a result, TerraCycle Plant Food is the first mass-produced consumer product to have a negative environmental footprint.

TerraCycle processes organic garbage destined for landfills through a revolutionary process developed by the company’s founders while students at Princeton University. TerraCycle is able to convert all this into organic liquid plant food in only three weeks.

Proven at Rutgers University to outperform the chemical alternatives, TerraCycle Plant Food is more than simply environmentally friendly – TerraCycle’s products are environmentally beneficial, from production to application.

TerraCycle collects its used soda bottles by conducting environmental fundraisers at hundreds of elementary schools across the United States. TerraCycle has also partnered with numerous recycling centers as a source of these used bottles.

TerraCycle Plant Food can be sprayed or misted directly onto houseplants, lawns, and gardens. It is also applied in mass agricultural settings, distributed through the existing irrigation facilities of farms, vineyards, even golf courses and parks.

I am dying to learn more.

Before boarding the plane, I left a voicemail for Tom Czaky, the 24 year old founder and CEO. We’ll keep you posted on this one.

PS: for any of you out there who are VCs, I have dibs!

Another Crazy Week!

It has been a pretty frenetic year so far, but I think this week may have topped them all.

On Monday World Championship Sports Network was in town updating my partners on what they are up to. That went great, but the real entertainment was the tennis battle that followed. I’m not sure who are more competitive, jock-wannabe VCs, or former jock enterpreneurs (including one who played on the pro tennis tour). Needless to say, there was plenty of smack talking, machismo and sweat involved.

Was down to NYC Tuesday, meeting with a company (in the local advertising/mobile space, very interesting), meeting a few candidates for various portfolio companies, then joining Claude and Carlos from WCSN for dinner (I put a good face on the fact that we had sushi, which I generally avoid) to try to recruit a candidate for a senior executive position. Negotiating a term sheet during cab rides and in between courses of dinner. I think we made some good headway with the candidate (not so much headway on the term sheet!), but dinner went late enough that I blasted right through my plans to have a drink with Sphere CEO Tony Conrad and to make it to Rafat’s ContentNext mixer. Sorry to have missed both!

Wednesday was truly insane. Early morning breakfast with Heavy.com co-founder/CEO Simon Assaad, a 9 am meeting with the founders of a new venture I’ve been chatting with for the past 6 months, and then a meeting with WCSN and some strategic partners trying to put together the outline of a very exciting partnership, all the while still negotiating a term sheet, and, lest I forget, madly signing and faxing documents to close the P&S on the sale of our home. I was supposed to fly from NYC to Cincinnati to meet a Seattle based company that happened to be in Cincinnati for a couple days, but Delta cancelled my flight so I just went back to Boston.  The good news was that I made it home in time to see the kids; the bad news was that I got home just late enough to miss Pedro pitching against the Sox (and I actually had tickets…).

Thursday I was, at least in theory, taking the day off, to close on the purchase of our new house, and move, all of which we did. But, since Delta had cancelled my flight to Cincinnati to meet the guys from Seattle, Thursday afternoon I had to head to the airport to take an evening flight to Seattle, where I am now. Spent all morning with a very, very cool company in the mobile sector — the trip was worth it — and now am heading back to Boston, for what I hope will be a relaxing (??) weekend with the family unpacking, getting settled into the new house, and watching fireworks.

As I told Matt Marshall last week, the silver lining of so much cross-country travel is that it gives me a chance to blog…

Enterprise Support for WordPress

The Automattic gang has taken a pretty substantial step forward, from a company development perspective, yesterday announcing enterprise support for WordPress. Toni and Matt both blogged it.

Major entities such as The New York Times, CNET and About.com, as well as big blogs like GigaOm, paidContent and TechCrunch, use WordPress, but the company has recently seen a swell of interest for enterprise deployment of WordPress, and often times enterprises are much more comfortable having a support contract in place.

This follows the release of a pricing model for commercial use of Akismet, Automattic’s kick ___ anti spam product.

Initial reception has been quite positive.

This is a big step forward for Automattic, as they build out a business model while still offering the world’s greatest blog software free to consumers and preserve the passionate commitment of their terrific open source development community.

Congrats, Rafat

I think we are the first (at 5:49 am!) to pick up the news, broken this morning on paidContent, that Rafat & team have closed their first round of funding with Greycroft Partners, the investment vehicle of the premier venture capitalist Alan Patricof.

Congratulations to both Rafat and Alan!

Although admittedly a tad jealous, I think this is great news. Following on the heels of Om Malik taking funding from my good friends (and Automattic coinvestors) at True Ventures, this is another data point suggesting that, at least in the minds of a couple smart VCs, there is a real business to be built by professional bloggers.

(Warning: unpaid portfolio advertisement to follow). It also is pretty cool, for me, that both of these guys use the WordPress blogging platform…

And it is also great to see Om and Rafat to be two of the early guys taking capital and looking to do something serious.  In their own way both are leading the way in building "Web 2.0" publishing platforms that are leaving traditional print and Web 1.0 publishers in the dust.

Will have a toast to Rafat in NYC tomorrow night.

Polaris Backs JibJab

So who says VCs don't have a sense of humor?

My partner Jon Flint just led a Polaris investment in the first round of funding for JibJab, best known for the election parody "This Land," which (together with its encore) was viewed on the web over 80 million times.

Unlike many of the unfiltered video sharing/video aggregation sites out there, what we love about JibJab is that founders Gregg and Evan Spiridellis have leveraged their creative genius, and the success of "This Land," into a rather well established comedy brand.

As with our investments in Heavy and World Championship Sports, we think there is a great opportunity for branded (and/or unique and proprietary) content that is created expressly for the new platforms.

Gregg and Evan are up to some pretty neat stuff, not the least of which is their recently launched Jokebox. Check it out here.

Two New Ad Measurement Models

My morning reading today surfaced two interesting announcements regarding ad measurement.

First, MediaPost's OnLine Minute announces that NetRatings finally is extending its web measurement to online video, and will develop a way to measure combined viewership for video consumed both on TV and on the Internet.

"NetRatings says it will beef up existing Nielsen/NetRatings products and patented technologies in order to properly measure digital media usage and work with Nielsen Media Research to develop integrated measurement services for Internet and television convergence."

Second, the next volley has been fired in the battle between programmers and advertisers over how to handle the increasingly substantial problem of time-shifted TV viewing.  MediaDaily News claims it has gotten its hands on a Nielsen report which documents that–surprise, surprise–"the impact of time-shifted viewing will be profound on the broadcast networks."  You may recall that a few weeks ago the major broadcast networks conceded that they would not charge advertisers for ads that are viewed on a time-shifted basis. Now, though, the broadcasters are working with Nielsen on a plan to measure commercials viewed both live and time-shifted. We'll see where this goes, but you can bet that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of the time-shifted advertising problem.

In my view, the mass adoption of time-shifted TV viewing will ultimately be viewed as one of the more important developments in the media industry, up there with the emergence of broadband as a key platform for TV and video content.

The Video Sharing Shakeout

Om Malik predicts a dramatic shakeout amongst the online video sharing sites, with many casualties. I have to agree.

Clearly, I think opportunities still exist for unique and/or well branded video on the web. But, watching the VC funding pouring into the user-generated/video sharing market, I can't help but be reminded of 1999…

paidContent Poolside Mixer

The paidContent LA mixer last night was at a fantastic locale — poolside at the Westwood W. Gorgeous night, gorgeous people, what more could you ask for?

Had a chance to chat with a bunch of fun and interesting folks, including the likes of Ross Levinsohn from Fox and startup-types like Greg Spiradellis (JibJab) and Polaris Digital Media enterpreneurs like Simon Asaad (Heavy) and Claude Ruibal (World Championship Sports).

All in all an enjoyable and, I think, quite successful event. Well done Rafat & crew.

Worth pointing out as well that the W makes a mean mohito!

You go, GigaOm

My good friend and blogger extraordinaire Om Malik announced yesterday that he is leaving his day job at Business 2.0 to dedicate himself full time to GigaOm.

I think it is awesome to see highly successful journalists like Om excited enough about their blog businesses to leave the cozy confines of a corporate home to become blogger entrepreneurs.

Good luck Om, we are rooting for you and expecting great things!

(And good luck as well to the great guys at True Ventures as Om's investors…)

Good Mo’ for Broadband Brand Advertising

Lotsa of optimism buiding for brand advertising on broadband over the last few days.

ComScore just announced an analysis of web consumption of both video content and video ads:

comScore Networks today released an analysis based on its newly launched Video Metrix service, the first-ever monthly reporting of consumer video consumption of both content and ads across the Web along with the demographic characteristics of video viewers.  Among notable trends was the marked increase in the number of consumers viewing video online, which grew 18 percent from October 2005 to March 2006.  In total, consumers viewed 3.7 billion video streams in March and slightly less than 100 minutes of video content per viewer per month, compared to an average of 85 minutes in October. 

While the composition of video consumers is fairly evenly split among males (52 percent) and females (48 percent), the male audience is much more engaged with video, with the average male viewer seeing nearly two hours per month, while females consume approximately one hour and twenty minutes of video per month.  Overall, males in the highly-coveted 25-34 age group have the highest intensity of video consumption, with an average of 140 minutes of video consumed per month.

 “Video consumption on the Web is rapidly approaching the tipping point for advertisers,” said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix.  “With two-thirds of consumers accessing the Internet from home using a broadband connection, and publishers continuing to innovate by using the latest technologies to deliver content in a way that engages users, video consumption is poised to become a standard part of the online experience for a majority of consumers.  Advertisers will increasingly seek opportunities to reach broad and frequently elusive markets, and do so with a level of engagement and richness that has not previously been available online.” 

Meanwhile, back here at the Piper Jaffray conference David Moore (24/7 Real Media), Brian McAndrews (aQuantive) and David Rosenblatt (DoubleClick) all agree that video/brand advertising on the web will grow more rapidly than search advertising.

(In a good quotable, Rosenblatt, taking issue with Moore on the question of margin pressure, fesses up that "that is the beauty of being a private company, we can say those kinds of things).