One thing the Aussies liked, and we do too, is that the PitchIt prize does not require commercial winners give up any equity. But we do ask for something back from the winners – they’ve got to “pay it forward” by sharing what they learn with founders who follow in their footsteps. We think that’s a fair bargain with real value on both sides.

We’re working on plans for the next PitchIt Challenge. For news and announcements on submission deadlines, join our email list, follow along on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.

The first is NewsIT, a crowd-powered news service, which was one of the winners of the We Media PitchIt seed investment challenge earlier this year in Miami. (Stay tuned everyone – Pitch 2011 details and entry info will be announced soon).

The other is Ringio, a slick virtual PBX service with built-in CRM. Ringio works out of WeSpace, the co-working studio we opened in Reston, Virginia, this past summer. Good luck Melinda and Sam! (aka CNCPundit and @samaparicio.

We saw awe-inspiring work, a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet and its period of technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievement. Old-school publishers such as Popular Science, Zagat and Thomson Reuters rediscovered their game with sharp-shooting apps aimed at connected audiences. NPR and ESPN enhanced experiences that were already compelling online. There were untethered virtuosos, too, such as Electric Literature, the Ghost in the Machine (under development) collaboration, and soloist Rob Kelley’s BeatPad. We’ll revisit and follow the development of their apps in subsequent posts, examining the qualities that make them successful.

More critically, we saw, heard and felt a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet, the Web and its culture-bending technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievements. In just four weeks since the launch of Apple’s iPad, a flurry of applications has been released to expand engagement, enhance understanding and extend meaning and utility.

Design-driven innovation from a fresh, creative class of developers has delivered a whole new mind for experiencing a world gone digital — high concept, high touch connections that enable us to cope with our unrelenting craving for transcendence.

Finally, we have devices and a number of very good starts that deliver abundance with an aesthetic imperative, as well as a new and better way of organizing things: the new order or order.

Yet, initial responses to our questions were cautious and meek: It is early. We don’t really know. Where’s the money?

Where’s the money?
As a way out of ingenuity, the last response is the first one cited. “Where’s the money?” is the mantra of the unimaginative. A circular question, it is an excuse for inertia, a business plan for standing still. Again. The question is almost as pathetic as its cousin — the position that we won’t invest in an online or mobile strategy until we are certain it works. Good luck with that one.

We weren’t surprised that some who participated in Tabula Rasa, and some who covered it, could not or would not get their minds around the theme of the event: innovation in the emerging Conceptual Age. Mea culpa, we invited discussion at a where’s-the-money session called Good Apple, Bad Apple / Good Business, Bad Business. Given both the dissension over “paid models” and the noisy discourse surrounding it, the topic is a requirement on the conference circuit. Not even a fresh take could take us out of the weeds.

We thought our friend Merrill Brown, the former Editor-In-Chief of MSNBC who’s been dealing with the issue for a coupla decades and currently promotes a freemium model for publishers (some content free, some paid), summed it up rather well: “Putting up a pay wall does not solve your business problem,” said Brown. “Publishers who think they can put their magazine on an iPad and make a lot of money are making a significant mistake.”

We love surprises … almost as much as provocation. Jeff Jarvis didn’t disappoint. We showed the stunning TIME magazine app — high concept, high touch, and only $4.99 issue. The Buzzmachine turned buzz killer:

“I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever,” said a skeptical Jarvis., “The ego of it was unabashedly awful.” On his blog he writes: “It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.”

Josh Quittner, TIME’s editor-at-large and one of the creative forces behind its iPad app, gave it back to Jarvis in a blog post called “And the horse you rode in on.”

“Jarvis, a former Time Inc.-er, can be forgiven for the disgruntled, I-hate-my-ex-wife tone that creeps into his rhetoric, whenever he discusses his former employer. It’s tiresome, dude, and intellectually dishonest given that you’re still stumping for your Google book.” 

Turns out the dispute was not about the money, but a little about the distribution of media bundles, a little about concerns that Apple and its partners are attempting to control the “open” web and kill the link econony (Google), and more than a little about Jarvis and Quittner.

Can we turn the page, please?

The Meaning Model
Enough cautious and meek. We need some bold. Why not look at economic issues with the same creativity and integrity as we do conceptual ones? The current “where’s the money” debate is framed by rules developed for the economies and societies, factories and mass production, of the Industrial Age. Forward-thinking enterprises adapted to the atomization and proliferation of content in the Information Age. Now we enter the Conceptual Age with a universe of creators. The new currency is meaning. Off the top, how many business plans can you conceive for a meaning model? Maybe a hundred for, say, anyone?

From Tabula Rasa, we put that first word on the blank slate: meaning. As we reconsider what it means to be human, we’re discovering new metaphors for storytelling, creating new ways to engage, connecting with a world of friends and information, and designing innovations that will guide our lives and shape our universe on almost any device.

Where’s the money?

We’ll answer the question with a better one: Where’s the love, y’all? We put that one to music (Black-Eyed Peas with Justin Timberlake) and video when we started we this crusade back in ought-three. If you don’t know the answer to “Where’s the Love?” by now, you’ll never get the one that asks “where’s the money.”

This is one of those moments – an important shift in digital culture that will be old news, obvious to everyone, a few years from now. There’s an electrifying crackle in the air as digital creatives, businesses, investors and visionaries collide in a mad dash to define the future around the next big thing. Not even the old masters of the universe can stop it. Their hands are slipping off the controls.

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I may lead them.

Sorry. Your people are leading the way in this universe.

Journey to the Conceptual Age
It’s not just the iPad, it’s the promise of a more personal, more creative, more fulfilling, more inspiring and more beautiful digital experience. It’s the promise of something more human, more wonderful. It’s bigger than Facebook or Twitter or Apple. It’s the next PC, the next smartphone, the next printing press. It’s all of that – in a simple, mobile shiny-new-thing powered by something entirely new to media: human touch. Gigs and hard drives fade into the cloud, replaced by pictures and words and shapes and sounds we can mold like clay. That’s magic. The result isn’t merely something hard and shiny that resembles a notepad. It’s something old, deep and rare: pure joy.

Over the next weeks we’ll continue our journey to the Conceptual Age. We’ll stop at the guideposts along the way, showcasing innovative examples of work defining the creative moment. We’ll conduct activities that show where the moment is leading. And we’ll identify the qualities of design-driven innovation that will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

To get started, we have five questions ….

“>

Amra Tareen, the savvy and ebullient founder of AllVoices, has
just closed a $3 million funding round for the innovative, citizen journalism site. That brings funding to $9 million for the two-year-old start-up. Not bad. TechCrunch has a good take on the AllVoices funding.

How does she do it? Amra returns to We Media Miami this year
for Amra’s Great Adventure, a workshop on how a Harvard MBA, electrical engineer, and Muslim mother of two rose to partner at an investment fund to capture opportunities in communications, managed info-tech and telecom businesses, set up micro-credit programs for women and orphans of the Pakistan earthquake to rebuild their lives, and raised millions to start a global news company with local context provided by anyone. Is there funding to extend the AllVoices model into the future of news?”

You can meet the amazing Ms. Tareen and discover great insights on the successes, struggles and experiences of launching a good idea at We Media on March 9-11. Register here.

Acquisition is part of the solution for “big media” companies to catch up in the era of new media. But they need to go further, including more investments in early-stage ventures.

Some recent deals illustrate how innovation through acquisition works:

• Examiner.com purchased the citizen-media site NowPublic in a deal valued at $25 million.
• MSNBC.com acquired hyperlocal news aggregator EveryBlock.
• Patch and Going are now rooted at AOL.

Traditional media companies should take their cues from these deals and go further. They should become early-stage investors, too – particularly as new media outlets show an ability to exit and provide some return on investment.

Private investment firms have been doing this for some time. Maveron invested in The Wrap, a Hollywood news site run by former New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman. NowPublic had raised $12 million from firms including Brightspark Ventures, Rho Capital Ventures and GrowthWorks Capital. Sites like VentureBeat, SEC Watch and Xconomy have received early-stage investments.

The old media empires have their own investment strategies too, though largely in ad networks, shopping services and social media.

• Gannett has a stake in companies like MetroMix, Topix and Imaginova, and it acquired Captivate Network and Ripple6.
• Comcast Interactive Capital is an investor in the online sports community SBNation.
• Hearst in 2007 purchased the social shopping site Kaboodle for $30 million.
• Belo, McClatchy, Gannett, Tribune and The Washington Post all invest in Cars.com.

But there needs to be more media-to-media investment, particularly in the early stage with cutting-edge content providers and mobile solutions. It’s amazing to me that while Google employees see the value in an outlet like VentureBeat there aren’t announcements from wire services and other traditional chains that they, too, are putting seed-level investments into these kinds of businesses.

Pharmaceutical companies use investment and acquisition as a method of research and development. Why shouldn’t big media? Even in today’s economy, semi-annual seed-level investments — between $100,000 and $500,000 — in four or five promising businesses is possible for major media outlets.

Then, instead of having to attempt radical innovation within their own traditional shops — efforts that largely fail because they are traditional shops — big media companies would, through their investment and equity, own a piece of new ventures, technologies, approaches and revenue streams. They would put themselves first in line when their investments were worth acquiring. Plus, they would likely get first crack at the management talent that lead these ventures (and that’s as important for traditional outlets, too).

Think there aren’t enough new media ideas to go around? This year’s We Media conference in Miami showcased nearly two-dozen investment-worthy businesses in its early-stage venture competition and in the aisles of the conference. One of last year’s We Media winners, SeeClickFix, has raised $265,000 and seems to be looking for more. Also, literally thousands of new media ideas (mine included) are preparing to fight for a few million dollars in Knight News Challenge grants. A handful will win, but there will be scores more out there.

There have to be rules of engagement as the media bigs invest in new media companies. But they are not hard to create. Consider:

• Businesses with third-party validation, meaning companies that have won money through grants or seed investors who have done some due diligence on these outlets.
• “Successful” businesses that have validated at least a portion of their business assumptions and have customers.
• Businesses with a clear business plan (not a marketing plan).
• Journalists who have made the transition to business leaders and are backed by strong boards or advisers, depending on the stage.
• Outlets ready to give up a board seat and the fiscal and management transparency that goes along with it.

If you’ve done the math on the NowPublic exit, you’ll know there’s plenty of work to go to satisfy investors. It’s unlikely — because of the $12 million in equity investment and a $25 million acquisition — that the return was enough to excite many investors out there. And anyone who invests in early-stage companies must accept that many investments will flop or even turn out selling a product that didn’t exist when they first invested. But recent media exits are a signal that better days are coming and that the things done in the new media space are working.

Plus — and unfortunately for folks like me — the down economy makes now a time to invest. Valuations today are more favorable for investors than they would have been a year or two ago (or will be a year or two from now).

Private Equity Hub (registration required for archive) recently argued that investment firms should start rethinking investments in newspapers. That funding should start going to new media outlets. Traditional media shouldn’t be left behind. They have a chance to do some R & D and hit fast-forward on their own attempts at winning a stronger foothold in the media’s future.

You may recall Knight was one of the winners of our We Media Game Changer Awards earlier this year, for reasons cited by Forbes: the foundation has pledged to invest $100 million to fund experiments in digital media focused on filling the void of shrinking or disappearing local newspapers.

The investments are important, the experiments they support are important – and most are likely to fail or have marginal consequence. In the Forbes interview, Ibargüen explains the foundation’s investment strategy much like a venture capitalist’s, with a similar formula for success and failure: “We need to fund lots of these experiments, so when 80% of them fail, we can figure out which ones really got it right and then replicate them.”

Here’s our Game Changer case study of Knight (PDF download) published in February of this year, and here are the others in the series profiling our 2009 winners.

Here’s another juicy excerpt from Forbes:

Q: Conventional wisdom says newspapers squandered their opportunity to make big inroads on the Web when, in an era of towering profit margins, they spent little on their digital strategy. True?

A: I resent people who, with 20/20 hindsight, have become harsh critics of what newspapers tried to do digitally. … I don’t remember any analysts ever saying to newspaper companies, “You guys should cut your profits and invest more in your Web strategy.”

My reply: Analysts weren’t in charge. Yes, hindsight is all too convenient. Foresight can be equally inconvenient. Many business, technology and culture watchers saw the changes coming to the news industry and recommended shifts in business models, outlooks and processes to lead, rather than follow, the transformation to a We Media culture. See, for instance, the many analysts and datapoints cited in our original We Media forecast, published in 2003.

The Forbes question (evasively attributed to “conventional wisdom”) was wrong – news companies invested a great deal in the web, starting in the mid-1990s. But at critical points – especially around 2000-1 – they shifted from strategic to tactical investments. Experimentation and innovation dwindled as news companies focused on operational efficiency and short-term returns. That pleased investors and equities analysts just as a new wave of powerful new social services and approaches were launched or under development elsewhere. And yes, that’s when news companies could have and should have been investing more in the future, instead of watching it unfold.

Here is what I wrote:

I have come to the conclusion that most (maybe all) business and strategy books are useless. They over-generalize. They offer little value. I go in with such high expectations, based on reviews and descriptions, and am almost universally disappointed.

For a project that I am working on, I want to be find the business and strategy books that do help, that really deliver value.  I want to find the must reads.

I want books that offer guidance and support on how to start and run a effective businesses and organizations.  I’m looking for authors who really understand how to change people’s minds or understand their behavior.  I know there must be a book out there that can help me (and others) to be organized and efficient, creative, and successful. And of course, I want to find a book that offers really good advice on how to break through and make a difference/impact in today’s connected society.

I have been trying for years, with nothing to show for it.  So now, I am asking for help.

If you are an author, a publisher, or just a reader — you can help.  Read the full post and send me your suggestions.  C’mon WeMedia community, this seems right up your alley.

I will share everything that people send me and try, through my blogging and other outreach, to help others figure out what to read. So please, help me find the must reads.

The online interview will be conducted live at Noon ET. For more info and to register, click here.