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Jeff, successfully runs a Joint Venture Brokerage, an Internet Marketing Company and a Coaching/Consulting Company from his home office in League City, TX.

Jeff has created multi-million dollar partnerships with some of the biggest names in the Internet Information Marketing industry.

Jeff explains the value and importance of a JV manager for your Product Launch team and the overall success of your Product Launch.

Jeff Vacek is a Joint Venture manager and can be found at jvmanager@JeffVacek.com.

By MIGUEL HELFT

KOSMIX, a well-financed Silicon Valley start-up, is often described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google.

As flattering as that notion may sound, it rankles Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix. And that’s not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark. It’s because Kosmix is trying to do something that is quite different from traditional Web search.

“Search does what it does well, very well,” Mr. Harinarayan said. “I don’t think we can ever compete with that.” Kosmix, he said, is not about finding the best set of documents for a specific keyword or phrase. Instead, its goal is to “tell me more about something,” he said.

For a key word or topic that a user enters, Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.

If Kosmix succeeds in attracting a large following, it may well be the latest challenge, not to Google, but to a long string of old and new media companies struggling to hold on to their audiences and make a living on the Web.

Kosmix’s home page offers a mix of news, entertainment and other content from around the Web. But it is on searches that Kosmix becomes really interesting.

Type in “Kauai,” for example, and Kosmix will return a fairly rich page that includes an entry from WikiTravel, a user-created travel site; restaurant recommendations from The New York Times; photographs and videos from services like Flickr and YouTube; audio clips of local music; reviews of guidebooks, bed-and-breakfasts and other services; blog posts and more. It also has top results from Google, and suggests a list of related topics.

If anything, the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming — an average page can have 15 sources of information, each with multiple entries. But if you are planning a trip, it can be a great place to start.

A search for “back pain” or “Canon PowerShot” creates similarly detailed pages, but the content is culled from a set of sources appropriate to those topics. Like other online media companies, Kosmix makes money through advertising.

Plenty of other services use editors or machines or a combination of the two to aggregate content from multiple sources, including, of course, mainstream search engines. But Kosmix draws its power from the specialized technology that underlies its service.

By scouring the Web, the company has built a huge taxonomy, a set of nearly five million categories on topics from people and locations to car models, music groups and types of cheese.

The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories. That allows Kosmix to recognize that Kauai is not only a place, but also a popular travel destination, a tropical island and a beach resort. Based on those and other categories, it chooses the types of content sources most relevant for a query on Kauai and organizes them by using a proprietary algorithm. It draws that content not only from Web sites, but also from more than 1,000 specialized Web services, search sites that focus on single topics, and databases connected to the Internet.

Kosmix goes a long way toward addressing the challenge posed by the proliferation of online content — a challenge that many media companies have sought, but largely failed, to meet by placing links to outside Web sites alongside their own content.

“With the explosion of information on the Web, it is very hard to have an editorial function with only humans,” Mr. Harinarayan said. “We are giving you an automated editor for any topic.”

That’s where Kosmix could become a headache for media companies. Kosmix delivers pages that are often as detailed and relevant as those that media companies spend small fortunes creating — especially those in popular and lucrative categories like travel, sports, health or electronics. Of course, as an aggregator that creates no content, Kosmix drives users to other media sites. But if it establishes itself as a major online destination, it will also compete with them.

LATE in 2007, a year before it released the Kosmix service to the public, the company put the same technology to the test on a more narrow service called RightHealth, which focuses on health information. A year later, RightHealth would be the second-most-visited health site, behind WebMD, according to Hitwise, an audience measurement company.

Some analysts were impressed but cautioned that it might be harder for Kosmix to establish itself as it tried to compete with powerful content brands in multiple categories.

“Now, they are taking on a lot of different sites,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a digital strategy consulting firm. “People will like it, but they’ll have to remember to go back to it for all sorts of searches.”

Last week, Kosmix released another service, MeeHive, that applies the same technology to create a news Web site. It allows people to tailor the service to their interests to a far greater degree than traditional news aggregators like Google News or MyYahoo.

Asked whether he was concerned that the Kosmix approach further threatened media companies, Mr. Rajaraman said: “It’s unfortunate, but that’s life. The media world is in transition and transitions are not comfortable.”

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15ping.html?scp=1&sq=Kosmix&st=nyt

By AMY WALLACE

LOS ANGELES

IT’S a miracle. That’s what the humans believe, more often than not, after watching this compact, 40-year-old C.E.O. do his work. He enters a room purposefully, his chest thrust forward and a smile on his face. “How can I help?” is his standard introduction, and the way he says it — calmly, assertively — indicates that your problems are about to be solved.

It’s unbelievable. That’s what the humans say when they see what Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” can do. And the dogs? To a pooch, they appear to be thinking: “Thank God, help has finally arrived.” To prompt a visit from Mr. Millan, these dogs have exhibited seemingly irrational fears (of motorbikes, toasters, linoleum floors) and strange obsessions (biting rocks, ankles, tractor tires).

Their owners, meanwhile, have told poignant, if at times ludicrous, stories. One couple sought out Mr. Millan after their two pit bulls, hell-bent on killing each other, forced them to live apart. Another hadn’t slept in the same bed for months because their Yorkies wouldn’t allow it.

If you have a television, you may know Mr. Millan from “Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan,” whose sixth-season premiere was on Friday on the National Geographic Channel, a cable network piped into about 70 million homes. Nearly 11 million Americans tune in each week. You may have stumbled upon his new glossy magazine, Cesar’s Way, or his four books, the latest of which, “How to Raise the Perfect Dog,” went on sale last week. His first three books, all New York Times best sellers, have cumulatively sold two million copies in the United States and are available in 14 other countries.

Partly because he is based in Los Angeles, the epicenter of the entertainment industry, Mr. Millan has become something of a cultural icon, a Latino man who commands respect wherever he goes. He has helped scores of movie stars and moguls — among them alpha dogs like Oprah Winfrey, the actor Will Smith, the former Disney chief Michael D. Eisner and the director Ridley Scott — become pack leaders in the one place they fail to rule: their homes.

No wonder Mr. Millan’s reputation as a fixer — he says he rehabilitates dogs, but trains people — has been immortalized in pop culture. “What is the ‘Dog Whisperer’?” has been a winning answer on “Jeopardy.” An episode of “South Park” featured the mom of Eric Cartman, the spoiled, foul-mouthed brat, hiring Mr. Millan to discipline him. A New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell quoted scientists and dance experts analyzing how Mr. Millan’s bearing instills confidence. The conclusion: his fluid movement communicates authenticity better than words could.

Not bad for a once-poor native of Culiacán, Mexico, who crossed the border illegally 19 years ago with nothing in his pockets. (He became a United States citizen this year.) When he talks about transformation, in other words, he’s living proof that it’s possible.

With his wife, Ilusion, he runs Cesar Millan Inc., the center of a constellation of businesses that coordinates all things Cesar beyond the show, including speaking engagements; executive leadership seminars; a line of organic dog food, fortified water, shampoos and toys that sells at Petco; and the charitable foundation financed by an undisclosed percentage of the company’s revenue.

His Web site, cesarmillaninc.com, grosses annual sales in the mid-seven figures, according to a company spokesman, chiefly from DVDs, books and merchandise like the Illusion Collar, designed by his wife to help control challenging dogs. Nearly 400,000 visitors are on the site monthly. Then there’s his Dog Psychology Center, a 43-acre mecca he calls a “Disneyland for dogs.” Under construction north of here, near where he and his family live, it will be the first of many such centers nationwide, he says.

According to MPH Entertainment, the production company that is Mr. Millan’s partner in all its many offshoots and co-owns the TV show with the producers who discovered him, he will be a $100 million business in a few years. And he says he’s just getting started.

“Anything that is realistic, if I create it in my mind, it can become a reality,” he says, evoking one of his favorite authors, the self-help superstar Wayne W. Dyer. “That is the power of intention.”

Like the dogs that he is world-famous for understanding — and, notably, unlike some of their owners — Mr. Millan doesn’t judge others. Instead, he lives in the now and maintains a sort of über-balanced mien. For without balance, or what he calls “our most important tool: calm, assertive energy,” no one can be a pack leader. And that, more than anything else, is what Cesar Millan dearly wants each of us to be — for our animals, sure, but also for ourselves and the well-being of the planet.

“World transformation begins with self-transformation,” he advises. To achieve that, he says, you need a co-pilot: “My suggestion is you have somebody next to you that is willing at any time to transform the moment. That is called dog.”

THERE are 65 million dogs in the United States, where pet care is close to a $40 billion industry. By one estimate, dog owners spend an average of $11,000 over each pet’s lifetime. And even during a recession, such spending shows no signs of flagging. Simply put, Americans are nuts about their pets.

Or maybe we’re just nuts. Which is pretty much the underlying message of “Dog Whisperer.”

Did you see the episode about Genoa, the golden retriever who was afraid of the garage? Mr. Millan quickly sussed out that the woman of the house had strong feelings about the garage, too — namely, she resented it because her husband spent more time puttering there than he did cuddling with her. Problem solved.

How about the one about Li’l Miss Kisses, the Maltese whose owner was obsessed with pink? The woman’s apartment, her outfit, everything was pink. Including the dog. Can you blame Kisses for urinating on the floor? Then there’s the episode in which Mr. Millan sat down with Kathy Griffin, the comedian, and Pom Pom, her Labrador mix.

“What is she saying to you with her body language?” Ms. Griffin demanded. Mr. Millan didn’t hesitate: “That you are kind of crazy.” Ms. Griffin yelled, “Cut!”

That Mr. Millan keeps a straight face in these situations says less about his manners and more about where his focus lies: with the hounds. Over the years, he has learned that in a country where pet lovers treat their animals like coddled children (making them unhappy, he believes), he must delve into the human realm to put things right.

He’s the first to say, however, that communicating with humans didn’t come naturally.

He grew up on a farm in Mexico, where from an early age he was known as El Perrero, or “the dog man.” Dogs made sense to him. They telegraphed their anxieties in predictable ways. They loved to be led.

“They accept you as who you are — one leg, two legs, no eyes, no problem,” he says. “But they won’t be around unstable energy. That’s how much integrity they have.”

Not so with humans. “One of Cesar’s favorite sayings,” says Jim Milio, a partner in MPH, which produces the show out of a mini-mall in Burbank, Calif., “is that humans are the only animals who will follow unstable pack leaders.”

It would take years before Mr. Millan realized that to achieve his goal of being the world’s best dog trainer, he would need to understand not just pets, but also pet owners.

His wife, Ilusion, a Mexican-American whom he met at an ice rink and married when she was 18 and he was 24, recalls the moment he began to “get” his own species. After the birth of their first son (they have two), they’d hit a rough patch and separated. Cesar was too macho and too bossy, she felt, and ignored her feelings. At her insistence, they went to counseling, where the therapist told her to express her needs.

“I said: ‘You know, Cesar, I really want you to listen. I want you to be there in our household. I want to hear you say that you love me. I don’t want to be treated like I’m just a piece of property. I want to be acknowledged,’ ” Ilusion says, recalling how her husband looked at the counselor and exclaimed, “She’s just like dogs!”

Ilusion is wry about this “light-bulb moment,” which she says initially made her angry. But then she realized that for her husband, all knowledge walks on four legs. His mantra of “exercise, discipline and affection” — the essential trio that he says keeps dogs (and apparently wives and anyone else) happy and healthy — was born that day. Now, Mr. and Mrs. Millan are a team.

“We’re what I call Mr. Talent and Mrs. Brains,” says Ilusion. “You can’t have one without the other.”

Cesar agrees: “My wife rehabilitated me.”

BACK in 1991, Mr. Millan’s English was poor, which made him reluctant to charge much for his door-to-door training services. “My goods were good, but my delivery wasn’t,” he says, recalling that his initial rate per session was $10. “We couldn’t even afford Pampers.” But his reputation was spreading.

One of his first clients was Jada Pinkett, then 20 and starring in a television sitcom. As he helped Ms. Pinkett, just 5 feet tall, become pack leader to four huge Rottweilers, they became friends. When Mr. Millan told her he wanted to be on TV, she leveled with him: he wasn’t ready. Then, she hired him a tutor in English. He studied for a year.

For all Mr. Millan learned during that period, the actress says he taught her even more.

“When Cesar came into my life, I was a young starlet,” she says. “I had all this energy and all this power at my fingertips, but I didn’t know necessarily what to do with it.” She credits him with helping her have good relationships with both canines and humans. (She married Will Smith in 1997.)

“We want to have our own self-fulfillment, and we’re not paying attention to what the dog needs,” says the actress, now Jada Pinkett Smith. “Then we’re throwing the dog into complete imbalance and wondering, What is the problem? That was a crazy discovery: Oh, my goodness, I wonder if I’m doing that in other relationships.”

The Smiths started recommending Mr. Millan to friends. The director Michael Bay needed help controlling his 230-pound mastiff, Mason. Later, he sought out Mr. Millan for help with another mastiff, Bonecrusher (a nod to the Transformers villain of the same name). Bones, as he is called, liked to attack small dogs. Mr. Millan brought a tiny dog to Mr. Bay’s house, as well as his sidekick, Daddy, a gentle pit bull that “Dog Whisperer” fans will recognize from his frequent appearances on the show. For $60 a day, Mr. Millan and Daddy shaped Bones right up.

“It was the oddest experience in the world,” says Mr. Bay. “He doesn’t say hello. He doesn’t say, ‘Here, doggie.’ He doesn’t pet the dog. It’s like this animalistic thing between him and the dogs. They immediately respected him.”

In 2002, after a newspaper article about Mr. Millan drew dozens of producers to his door, he teamed up with two of them, Sheila Emery and Kay Sumner, whom he picked because the dogs in his pack liked them best. That pair teamed with MPH, which had made its name with other successful reality-based cable shows.

The National Geographic Channel, which had started in the United States only in 2001, was interested but didn’t want to bankroll the entire production. It ordered 26 half-hours with the caveat that MPH provide deficit financing to get the show on the air — what Mr. Milio said eventually amounted to “a low seven-figure investment.” The upside was that MPH and Emery/Sumner retained copyrights to the show.

The channel, a joint venture of the National Geographic Society and Fox Cable Networks, controls television distribution in the United States and Canada. MPH and Emery/Sumner control worldwide home video and foreign sales and share that revenue with the channel. Mr. Millan takes a big slice of that same pie.

“His profit definition is the same as our profit definition,” Mr. Milio says. “We’re not doing the studio thing where we’re taking off 25 percent overhead and then interest on the money and all that stuff. He’s got a really great deal.”

Mr. Millan calls the deal, which he agreed to on instinct, a blessing. “The goal that God and I have together is the whole world transformed through a dog. God was my lawyer,” he says. “And so he’s going to bring you great people, and those great people are going to give you your fair share without you asking.”

Mr. Milio also gives the National Geographic Channel credit for taking the initial plunge. “TV runs on fear,” he says. “No one gets fired for saying no and having it become a hit two years down the road someplace else. They get fired when they say yes and it tanks.”

The show premiered in 2004, and its audience grew slowly, by word of mouth. That first season, it wasn’t in prime time and the channel did little to market it. But Mr. Millan was magnetic. “I’ve been in the business 30-some years,” says Mr. Milio, “and I’ve met three people who had that kind of magic. One was Jacques Cousteau. One was Jim Henson. And the third is Cesar.”

In Season 2, the show expanded to an hour and moved into prime time. That’s when things started to take off.

NOT everyone agrees with Mr. Millan’s methods. “Positivist” trainers like Ian Dunbar reject the idea that a submissive dog is a happy dog. Mr. Dunbar advocates treating dogs as companions, not followers. While Mr. Millan uses his hand like a mother dog uses her mouth — to nudge dogs to behave — Mr. Dunbar shuns physical corrections and relies instead on treats and rewards.

To each his own, says Mr. Millan, whose favored “tsst!” sound is a correction heard around the world. “It’s just that I think I know something you might not know,” he says. “An open-minded human can learn from anybody.”

Soon, more humans will be able to learn from him. This summer, after a special 100th episode (and a third Emmy nomination for Mr. Millan), the National Geographic Channel struck a deal with Fox to syndicate “Dog Whisperer” next fall. That means 50 million or so of the nation’s 120 million households that might not know him will get their chance to meet El Perrero.

“Here in America, the dogs take over,” says Mr. Millan, and he doesn’t have to look far for evidence. Ms. Winfrey did an episode of her show with Mr. Millan in which she outed herself for loving her dog Sophie “like I gave birth myself.” She called her dogs “little people with fur,” until Mr. Millan told her this might be “good therapy for the mankind, but not for the dog kind.”

Mr. Millan says Mr. Eisner, whose home he visited for a private consultation, told him there was no way his German shepherd would get on a treadmill. “I said, ‘Well, sir, that’s your opinion.’ In less than three minutes, the dog was on the treadmill,” he recalls.

Mr. Eisner was unavailable to comment, but Mr. Millan said that once the dog was on the treadmill, all the business titan could say was “amazing.” Then he just walked away. “Because you know, he can’t be wrong,” says Mr. Millan.

On another occasion, Mr. Millan spent eight Sundays in a row eating breakfast with Mr. Scott, the movie director, and his two Jack Russell terriers, Scottie and Matilda. “When you can actually direct 2,000 people in a movie called ‘Gladiator,’ that makes you a very powerful man,” says Mr. Millan. “But two Jack Russells controlled this man.”

So how did the Dog Whisperer help? Mr. Millan attributes his success with the terriers to “patience, and sitting down and enjoying his cigar habit and waiting until he is in a zone,” he adds of Mr. Scott, who declined to comment. (A representative confirmed Mr. Millan’s account but says the director does not smoke cigars.)

“They get into zones, all these powerful people,” Mr. Millan said. “And they give you 10 minutes to listen to you.” Of course, by this point, he was charging handsomely for his time — $10,000 to $100,000 for a private consultation, which he usually donates to his foundation.

“What I learned about wealthy, wealthy, wealthy people is money talks. So you charge them a lot of money; you speak their language,” he says. “I don’t mind. I’m very happy with $100,000. Really. They really pay attention.”

ON a recent hot September day, Mr. Millan is standing outside his trailer in a San Fernando Valley suburb. On a break before shooting an episode about Spike, a year-old husky with a penchant for eating pool furniture, Mr. Millan speaks gratefully about the opportunities America has given him, and how he is determined to give back.

But when it’s suggested that Mr. Millan — trim in a white T-shirt, black track pants with red racing stripes and a big diamond in his left ear — now has more money and material things than he could ever have imagined growing up, he calmly, assertively objects.

“No, I want a plane,” he corrects. “Because people want to meet my 10 dogs, and I don’t want to put them in cargo. I just want them to ride comfortably, temperature adjusted, water when they need it. It’s not a luxury. It’s a necessity, you know, from a dog perspective.”

Despite his success, he says he never forgets that being a true pack leader means taking care of others, not just yourself. “Sacrifice is a must in any relationship. Animals are not selfish,” he says. He and his wife finance numerous efforts to promote animal health. Their Shelter Stars program provides educational materials to people who adopt pets; they also sponsor a spay-and-neuter campaign and have teamed up with Yale to develop “Mutt-i-grees,” a curriculum based on Mr. Millan’s teachings. The goal is to foster empathy in young children. And, if he has his way, someday every state will have a taxpayer-supported dog rehabilitation center.

Mr. Milio recalls how, at the end of the show’s first season, he teased Mr. Millan at the wrap party about his growing stardom. “If you get famous, you can’t, you know, ask for a bigger trailer and become this difficult guy and throw stuff,” Mr. Milio said.

Mr. Millan nodded, looking, as usual, utterly unworried. “The dogs won’t let me be unstable,” he replied. “If I’m unstable, they won’t follow me. And then, I’m in big trouble.”

Originally found at the New York Times

Published: October 10, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/business/11dog.html?scp=1&sq=Whispering+to+Rottweilers&st=nyt

By JOHN ANDERSON

By ROB WALKER

By ROB WALKER

Published: September 11, 2009

New York Times

By ROB WALKER

On some level, all stories of successful brands resemble one another: the competitors in some category of good or service seem interchangeable until one of them, often a newcomer, dreams up some way of standing out from the crowd. O.K., maybe it’s not always that simple, but differentiating one choice partly by way of advertising, packaging and other image-enhancing strategies has long been a way of persuading shoppers to reconsider what they had previously seen as a mere commodity. Even, it turns out, bullet shoppers.

The ammunition business appears quite healthy these days; there are even reports of shortages attributed to ammo-hoarding by Americans who believe draconian gun restrictions are in the offing. Of course there is more to the bullet market than fear-driven stockpiling. Alliant Techsystems (ATK), a defense contractor, is a leading maker and seller of bullets — to the military mostly, but increasingly to hunters and other civilian gun owners. (In fact, a Business Week article last year suggested that the company is putting even more focus on the latter market in anticipation of slackening military demand.) ATK has been in the consumer-ammunition market for only a few years, but the commercial-products group of its armament-systems division now manages a portfolio of about 20 consumer-ammunition brands. That’s a fair amount of differentiation. Some of the reasons are obvious: the ammunition needs of duck hunters and of pistol-range enthusiasts are quite distinct from each other. But some of ATK’s ammo-brand differentiation sounds more akin to the sort of image making many people associate with, say, energy drinks or deodorants.

ATK bought the ammunition-maker Federal Cartridge Company in 2001. That firm’s pricier Federal Premium line had been aimed (as it were) at those willing to pay more for, say, their bonded or all-copper construction; the line had been around since the 1970s and was advertised in hunting magazines and the like with pitches that emphasized function and performance. But outside this high end of the market, “ammunition tended to be a last-minute decision” for most hunters, explains Jason Nash, an ATK communications and events manager. Soon after acquiring Federal, ATK introduced a new bullet line called Fusion, with what Nash calls an “aggressive” box design, including a foil label. Advertising for the brand was intended for 25- to 35-year-old deer hunters — a younger and more mass crowd, in other words. Recently, Fusion signed on Brock Lesnar, a mixed-martial-arts star (and hunting enthusiast) as a celebrity endorser.

This experience guided the more recent introduction of the Black Cloud brand of shotgun ammunition, used by duck hunters. Waterfowl hunting laws mandate the use of nontoxic shot, most of which is made from steel, so there’s not much room for differentiation in materials, but Black Cloud does brag about elements of its shell design (notably the “unique and patented” Flitecontrol Wad) and the construction of the shot inside it (Flitestopper Steel, to “devastate waterfowl on impact”). Still, technology by itself is not a marketing strategy.

Nowadays there are a lot more options for reaching any given target audience than just hunting magazines. Among other things, Black Cloud forged a partnership with Phil Robertson, “the Duck Commander.” The star of an Outdoor Network show and a series of DVDs, Robertson favors a postapocalyptic ZZ Top aesthetic and relishes duck hunting even in the worst weather imaginable. The company also made “a couple of viral videos” designed to “build buzz,” Nash continues. (These short skitlike bits include a “Webisode” in which the day’s least successful hunter must wear a duck suit and be chased about by retrievers while goofy music plays in the background.) Most recently Black Cloud built a brand-specific social-hub Web site, StormChasersNetwork, which features Robertson, and has signed up 1,200 members in its first month.

And then there’s the package design. “If you go into a store like Cabela’s and see a lineup of ammo,” Nash says, “you’ll see that ammunition is kind of treated as a commodity.” Boxes of Black Cloud ($24.99 for 25 shells) dispense with the predictable picture of a mallard for a bright color scheme that “really pops off the shelf,” Nash continues. “You’ve got that emotion of ducks coming in, kind of a daybreak look. If you’re a duck hunter you really identify with first light — that’s when you’re able to start hunting, and there’s a lot of excitement surrounding that moment.”

Does that stuff really matter? After all, we’re talking about ammunition, not a lifestyle accessory. Nash thinks it does. Black Cloud is probably ATK’s most fully articulated effort to date to convert an afterthought purchase into a brand that shoppers know about and seek. “We’ve kind of reinvented that category,” Nash argues. Which is almost always how a brand becomes successful, whether it’s an energy drink, a deodorant or steel-shot ammunition.