Earth Aid is a service that measures consumer energy consumption trends, and then pays rewards based on how much energy is saved. Earth Aid gives consumers a big picture of their electric, natural gas and water usage on one platform.

The system identifies opportunities for rebates, tax incentives and discounts for saving energy. On August 26, BOALT had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Bixby, Chief Executive Officer of Earth Aid.

(Note: Sorry for the hard cutaways, it was my first time editing video but the content of the video is important for everyone to see.)

BOALT sponsored and attended the Social Matchbox Summer Social 2009 last Thursday at the E Street Cinema. The event hosted ten early stage start-ups that were picked from a pool of 50 applicants. The audience consisted of 200 handpicked industry leaders, investors, designers and press.

According to Social Matchbox, the audience also included representatives from Ashoka, Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, The DC Office of Economic Development, Department of Defense, Grotech Ventures, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, The Obama Administration, Sunlight Foundation, Valhalla Partners, the Washington Post, ThrillList, and TechCrunch.

Each emerging company presented their plan in a four minute secession followed by four minutes of Q&A. The event also set aside time for 60-90 second presentations in an open-mic session– “Opportunities and Ideas for Startups”.

Presenters:
TapMetrics – Mobile / Advertising (A Launchbox Digital Startup)

Diditz – Social Media

Wegora – Online Collaboration

Giv.to – Social Media

Unblab – Email / Productivity (A Launchbox Digital Startup)

SEC Watch – Government 2.0 (A Launchbox Digital Startup)

Grasshopr – Government 2.0

Earth Aid Enterprises – Green

WinTheTrophy – Gaming

GrouperEye – College Recruiting

Opportunities and Ideas for Start-ups:
Ashoka – Social Entrepreneurship

Apps for America – Sunlight Foundation

Apps for Democracy – iStrategy Labs

Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship

After the pitches, audience members were invited to invest in the most appealing start-up with their “MatchBUCKS.”

At the event reception, the Community Choice Award winner was revealed: Earth Aid Enterprises. Earth Aid, founded by Ben Bixby, is a site that helps consumers rationalize their home energy consumption and in return lower their utility bills.

The Social Matchbox Sticky Pick award, based on votes from the event’s 10 person organizing team, went to Unblab, a startup that helps consumers find email messages that matter most with machines that automatically learn preferences.

We want to thank all of the great startups and presenters and of course the organizers of Social Matchbox for a great night. We appreciate the opportunity to see the newest ideas in the tech startup world.

So you’re on a crowded street and you’re looking for a place to eat. If you have a smart phone, you’ll whip it out, open Google Maps, and do a search. Effective, but not sexy.

Today, at least for our friends across the pond, this has changed. BBC News has a story of a British company, Acrossair, that has created an iPhone application that overlays digital information on top of realtime video captured by the camera. Using this program, all you would have to do is look ‘through’ your iPhone camera to see points of interest on your path.

Smart and Sexy

Companies have already developed similar heads-up displays, but they’re nothing you’d wear in public; imagine donning this contraption on a first date. Using an iPhone to do the same is ingenious, socially acceptable and is sure to spawn even more innovation.

I wanted to do a quick product review for a product I started using today.  It’s called Litmus.  You got to see it to believe it!  It rocks!

Understanding the core principles of a Venture Capital deal can be quite the challenge.   For starters, you need to know that VC money can be smart money but its real expensive money too.

There are different stages of funding but today I’m going to be discussing an early stage term sheet.  Also, you need to know that east and west coast deals work differently.  West coast deals seem to have better terms than East coast – this is primarily due to the investment banking type of mentality you find in places like New York and Boston.   First question that probably comes to mind is why shouldn’t I just get west coast funding?  Well, it’s not that easy, West coast VC’s tends to want to have you in their backyard.  So unless your geographical located in Silicon Valley, this will be a challenge.

The most common mistake entrepreneurs commit is that they get completely blinded by a valuation and forget about the terms.  Whatever you do, make sure you get a good lawyer that knows about these things.  If you have a friend who’s already been down this road, don’t be afraid to ask them for a referral to their lawyer.

The most obvious point – if you need money, they’ll know it and the VC firm will try to lock you down so you don’t shop the deal.  Be careful, because it isn’t uncommon for them to change the deal more in their favor before closing it – yes, it’s kind of a bait and switch tactic.  With these types of situations, you always sit better when you don’t need the money.

There are a lot of components to a term sheet but if you can understand the following terms, you’ll be in good shape.

Valuation – this is the obvious one that everybody knows.  Try to get the highest valuation as long as it doesn’t sacrifice the other the terms.

Dividends – the thing to ask for is no dividends.  VC firms, especially on the East coast, will try to negotiate dividends that are cumulative and compound over time.  They accrue from year to year until there is some sort of liquidation event.  So let’s say you give up 30% of the pie – if you don’t sell your company for 10 years, you might find yourself in a situation where they now own 90% of the pie.   Be extremely careful of the dividends, they can really effect what you ultimately get.

Liquidation Preference – in a perfect world you want to ask for 1x non-participating.  Typically, venture capital’s will want to ask for 1x or 2x participating.  Let’s assume a venture capital firm invests $10 million for 20%.  1x participating would mean that they get first 10 mil out and then 20% of whatever is remaining.  It’s kind of like double dipping.

Antidilution – the standard for this term is generally weighted average.  This basically means that if the economy takes a downturn after you receive financing, you can go out and raise a down round at a lower valuation then the first.

There’s obviously a lot more to it than these four terms but if you understand the basic fundamentals of what a VC is looking for, you won’t get taken advantage of and hopefully you’ll sit in a much better place.

One last thing – don’t let some VC firm impress you with a few successes.  You need to find out which companies they financed that ran in to some trouble along the way.  How were those companies treated on that bumpy road?

This morning TechCrunch posted an article of some talks of Facebook acquiring Twitter.  The rumor on the street is that that Facebook was offering $500 mil of their already overvalued stock.

TechCrunch reports: “Facebook has raised $516 million in funding to date, while Twitter is backed by $20 million in investment. Twitter boasts 6 million active users, while Facebook reports more than 120 million.”

I’m on the fence as to whether this would be good for the tech community.   I like the idea of the expanding Twitter’s existing reach and making it a lot more powerful than it is.  I also like the idea of it becoming a more stable platform with the right team behind it.  My main concern is that Zuckerberg will try to integrate it in with Facebook too much and cause it’s unforeseen death.

Either way, Twitter, of which I’m a big fan, does need to start thinking about its future and quick burn rate.

What are your thoughts on Facebook acquiring Twitter?

TechCrunch featured a company called InLinks.com yesterday and referred to it as “hard to detect”, as in the world of blackhat SEO.  I’m not so sure about that one.  Let’s face it, the folks at Google are pretty smart.  It took me a few minutes and I quickly discovered some of the publishers by performing a few simple Google searches.  Here are just a few of the publishers I discovered: The Hunters Mark, Krimson News, TheRandToday.com,  Stephan Miller and Peer1.  Michael Arrington, are you telling us Google can’t do this?

I think that building a business model based on what is considered a violation of Google’s terms wasn’t the smartest idea by New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz.  Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guru, specifically states on his blog, “Google has been very clear that selling such links that pass PageRank is a violation of our quality guidelines.”

There’s a lot of talk about this in the new media industry.  Olgivy commented that appearing on TechCrunch is normally a good thing – but not this time.

My advice, stay away!  Don’t touch this one with a ten foot pole whether your an advertiser or a publisher!

UPDATE:  The Hunters Mark posted a comment below today in regards to this post.  InLinks.com had an excerpt from their blog which when searched on Google was the only result which lead me to believe that either InLinks.com is using thier blog as an example or the Hunters Mark actually did act as a publisher on their behalf.  Either way, our agency tries to encourage best seo practices and found Inlinks.com business model unethical on many levels.  If the Hunters Mark was never a part of it, I apologize for the inacuracy, however, I can assure you that we did research this thoroughly.

Embracing the green space in today’s eco-friendly world has proven to be an overwhelming success for my client and friend, Shawn Burst of Jeriko House.  Every bit of this story is like a marketing fairy tale.  Hug a tree, test the waters and find yourself in a forest of greenies lining up at your door for what could be the next, most revolutionary home to hit the housing market.

It all begins in the wake of hurricane Katrina when Shawn had just lost his family’s dream home.  Determined to build a new home and not willing to wait years, he set out on a mission to find a new high-end housing alternative overseas.  After visiting engineering firms in Germany and exotic finishing manufacturers in Bali, Shawn came home with the most incredible vision which he named Jeriko House.  He called BOALT to design and develop a new alternative home brand literally from scratch.

After investing a significant budget in developing his website, he left faith and one press release to do the rest.  It was only a matter of days before the website started to received hundreds of visitors a day from blogs such as InHabitat, TreeHugger, JetsonGreen, Luxist and Architect Magazine to name a few.  Some reviews better than others but you know what they say, all press is good press.
To date, Shawn has received approximately 30-50 leads a day consistently from customers all over the world with budgets exceeding over $500k to build a new Jeriko House.  Consider how many more leads would come in if the economy and housing market were better.

So what does the future hold?  Shawn continues to meet with prospect builders who want to build Jeriko Houses in different parts of the world.  He’s also getting ready to release the first online prefab builder which will allow you to price and design your custom home in real-time.  The word custom is probably an understatement when you get to choose interior finishes such as: coconut weave, palm fiber, crushed seashell along with many other exotic woods, bamboos and stones from Malaysia.

This is definitely one of the coolest projects I have ever worked on and I wake up everyday still in awe at the amount of leads that the website generates without ever spending a dollar on online marketing.

There seems to be an ongoing debate within our agency on how much time should be spent on information architecture.  In retrospect, I think the main reason we previously focused so much time on information architecture was because we needed a client sign off and found it more efficient to make changes in this stage.  But what happens when we’re working on one of our own start ups?  How should we approach information architecture?

The below snippet is from a 30 page set of wireframes that we provided to Aspen Snowmass when we designed and developed their booking engine user interface.  Information architecture was a must for this project because making changes in the development phase would have been extremely inefficient.

37Signals in their Getting Real book, swears by building out the interface first.  “Too many apps start with a program-first mentality. That’s a bad idea. Programming is the heaviest component of building an app, meaning it’s the most expensive and hardest to change. Instead, start by designing first.”

In some cases, I’m starting to find that the best approach for us is to develop loosely and build out the interface as you adaptively learn the application’s functionality.  Every time we’ve focused our energy on user interface it seems to delay the development cycle and I found ourselves unnecessarily changing the UI several times.  This approach worked particularly well in the development of DCHistoricTours.com because we had a vision of what we wanted to accomplish but we didn’t know the degree of functionality some of the API’s would provide. In this case, we jumped into development first.

It’s tricky and I don’t think there has to be a standard process. To me it depends on what type of project your working on.  Do you have a clear concise idea of what you want or are you unsure?

So with that said, I’m curious to hear what you think on the future of information architecture?  Have you had similar experiences?  What is your agencies approach?  Does it have a set approach?  Please comment below.

After several weeks of hard planning, I’m sure that Peter Corbett of IStrategyLabs is glad to know that the Apps for Democracy was a huge success.  I’m glad that BOALT took home the agency 1st prize and was able to build an application that was going to help the community so much. So what’s next for DCHistoricTours.com?

After speaking with D.C.’s Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, last night, he told me that one of the reasons we were chosen was because they wanted to use our application on main D.C. inauguration website.  This would provide the many anticipated visitors this January a helpful resource to learn more about our nation’s capitol.  I thought that was pretty exciting so naturally I stayed up last night wondering what I could do to improve the app.

Well for starters, we rolled out a social feature last night that allows visitors to comment on other tours. This way users can interact with the person who created the tour and the community.

Next on the agenda, is to create an official inauguration route as per the request of Vivek Kundra.  If anybody would like to help out, please contact me.

And finally, on the not too far horizon, we are planning on developing a location-aware mobile version of the app. That way visitors can retrieve their tours while they are on the actually tour and be provided with useful facts based on their location.

BOALT has no intention on monetizes this app at the moment, and welcomes any volunteers.

Disclaimer: Should the costs to maintain the website exceed our threshold in the near future we might be forced to find a way to monetize the app through sponsors, etc but the application will always remain free to visitors.