We had a chance to interview Ariella at the Sustainable Operations Summit in Monterey, California.

Thanks to SOS for letting us attend and to everyone who sat down with us.

Ariella Maron, Deputy Director for New York City’s office of Long Term Planning & Sustainability, believes that living in New York City is one of the most sustainable choices a person can make. The average New Yorker produces one-third the greenhouse gas emissions when compared to the average American citizen. With smaller personal footprints and with more transit oriented communities, the density of New York is scaled such that its planners and citizens are forced to consider the social implications of sustainability.

Maron plays an integral role in developing and implementing Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 master sustainability plan. This includes a number of different initiatives, from catering to local green businesses and entrepreneurs, to making New York City’s streets more pedestrian-friendly to reducing building emissions and energy consumption.

By being so close to businesses and industries every day, Maron believes that New Yorkers are quicker to innovate and understand the concepts of sustainability sooner. With little pockets of green designers and manufacturers sprinkled across the five boroughs, Maron believes that the growing number of New Yorkers will see more and more sustainable solutions in their communities and the City as a whole.

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Just as people during the mediabistro sale for $20 million plus a $3 million earn-out over two years quoted its revenues of a year earlier and ignored the 30-40 percent yearly growth as well as the inherent value of some of mediabistro’s assets (such as its list of more than 700,000 registered users, more than 10,000 of whom were paying members).

But even if CN’s valuation is lower than FishbowlNY is saying (they should, I think, subtract the earn-out to get a base value for the deal, which may be lower than $30 million) there are many reasons for it be high. One, as HighBeam and Newser.com CEO Patrick Spain noted to me on the phone yesterday, is the value of the core ContentNext audience — media executives, decision makers with budgetary control.

It also has a budding and growing group of conferences for which attendees pay hundreds of dollars admission to see even higher-profile execs speak (Murdoch, Cavuto…), a strong list of email recipients, high-profile business and financial advertisers it has cultivated and maintained for years, successful media properties in the U.S., U.K. and India (India!), a growing research component, and ContentNext Dex, a listing of media-tech stocks it has created and which serves as a technological bit of value.

The participation of high-profile investor Alan Patricof, former WSJ.com GM Nathan Richardson as CEO, and, of course, editorial co-chief Staci Kramer, as well as a cadre of strong, international journalists who’ve stuck with the company for years, and a growing and successful sales team all adds up to value as well. The Guardian group, I’d say, bought the management as much as the company’s book assets, and I’d wager that the earn-out is larger than mb’s. Add, too, the U.K.-based Guardian group’s professed desire to go more international, the synergies with its other properties, the fact that it is a trust able to think and act more long-term than a typical public company, and there’s a lot of value to be wrung from its purchase of ContentNext beyond a typical times-revenue or even more cumbersome financial calculations, such as WACC. (I doubt there’s much if any debt on the CN’s books, and also doubt that capital structure played much of a role in the decision to buy it.)

I love mediabistro, where I’m proud to have serves as editorial director before the sale, and ContentNext, where I’ve helped in a couple different ways, and for the record my analysis here of both properties is from publicly available reports and discloses no private details. Mediabistro’s audience of media professionals is and was, like CN’s, worth a lot more than an average consumer audience. Rafat duly noted in his interview with Kara Swisher after his company’s sale that it does cost quite a penny to produce their brand of journalism: “We’re a news media business on the Internet, but we’re not a consumer Internet company. We will never be.”

While it’s impressive that he got $30 million for the company so soon after Patricof invested, and in the midst of looking for a second round of funding, one eyebrow raiser from the Swisher interview is the speed with which the deal took place: “It all came to be in three weeks,” Rafat says, something he also says on ScribeMedia.org.

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This video was filmed during the Metropolis Magazine conference @ ICFF - Design Entrepreneurs: Make Good and Prosper.Sponsored by ASID and Lonseal.

Architect, author, and activist Cameron Sinclair talks about Architecture for Humanity, a charitable organization that seeks architectural solutions to humanitarian crises and brings design services to communities in need.

Cameron Sinclair was trained as an architect at the University of Westminster and at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. During his studies he developed an interest in social, cultural and humanitarian design.
Sinclair is the co-founder and executive director of Architecture for Humanity. Currently the organization is working in fourteen countries on projects ranging from school, health clinics, affordable housing and long term sustainable reconstruction.
In 2004 Fortune Magazine named Cameron Sinclair was named as one of the Aspen Seven, seven people changing the world for the better. He was the recipient of the 2006 TED prize and the 2005 RISD/Target Emerging Designer of the Year. Recently he was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Along with co-founder Kate Stohr, was awarded the Wired Magazine 2006 Rave Award for Architecture for their work in responding to housing needs following Hurricane Katrina.
As a result of the TED Prize he and Stohr launched the Open Architecture Network, the worlds’ first open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design.

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This interview took place at the Sustainable Operations Summit in Monterey, California.

Jonathan Fink is the Director for the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He is also the university’s sustainability officer, a position within the president’s office at ASU. Fink is also an accomplished vulcanologist, but that’s another story…

At the Institute, Fink brings individuals in relevant areas of expertise across campus together to talk about sustainability initiatives and solutions. The institute funds and applies research done within the university to campus operations, as well as operations within the ity of Phoenix. At the same time, the Institute also identifies areas where the the campus can be more sustainable, making its buildings more energy-efficient, for example.

Fink’s work permits for cutting-edge technology and innovation to quickly transfer into real-world use. By treating the ASU campus as both a research center and a test bed, Fink is able quickly usher new concepts from creation to application. Directing this process and forming working alliances between the separate campus communities and the community of Phoenix is integral to fostering a more enlightened and eclectic culture of sustainability.

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This interview took place at the Sustainable Operations Summit in Monterey, California.

Janelle Kearsley, the Director of Strategy & Sustainability at Wal-Mart is charged with educating and inspiring 1.8 million associates to integrate sustainability into their business operations. This includes Wal-Mart’s executives all the way down to the truck drivers and local buyers for each store.

Kearsley engages suppliers, government officials and organizations in a number of sustainable value networks. These networks gather Wal-Mart’s assorted associates and created dialogue centering around the ideation and application of sustainable business solution.

At the same time, Kearsley monitors several prototype stores that integrate new technologies such as solar panels and energy-efficient lighting in order to apply the more informed sustainability strategies to the rest of Wal-Mart’s existing stores.

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This interview took place at the Sustainable Operations Summit in Monterey, California.

Ray Anderson, founder of InterfaceFLOR, Inc., faced a difficult question 21 years into his successful modular carpet company. His customers, particularly interior designers, were asking what Interface was doing for the environment. For the longest time, Anderson could only answer that his company was complying with regulation, but when he was pressured into giving a speech on august 31, 1994, he knew he had to reach for a deeper, fuller answer.

Two weeks before his address, a copy of Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce fell into Anderson’s hands and ever since then, Interface has been working towards Project Zero. Not only has Interface slashed their Greenhouse emissions and reduced their energy intensity, but Anderson wants to do more. He wants his company to do good; to restore the environment while influencing others along the way.

In doing so, Anderson has become a symbol for the sort of business leader the world lauds and needs. A successful industrialist who speaks the language of the environmentalists.

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From Print to Digital provides an in-depth look on the transformation of print media to digital media. Each show, focusing on a different aspect of media, examines the opportunities and challenges that media outlets and advertising agencies face in order to position their companies for the future.

It’s a cliché because it’s true: reports of print media’s demise have been greatly exaggerated (sorry, Mark). Nevertheless, print publications face tremendous challenges to stay viable (and profitable) in an increasingly digital age. In the second installment of ‘From Print to Digital,’ Mary Murcko, VP-Publisher of Women’s Health, discusses how the magazine has been able to buck the downward trend in print advertising and how the brand’s ink-on-paper product coexists with its online companion. As Murcko makes clear, the question smart marketers are asking these days is not print versus online versus events versus Web 2.0, but how can the brand (in whatever medium) help me reach customers?

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Dave Morgan, founder (and $275 million seller) of Tacoda (to AOL) and newly named chairman of the Tennis Company, stopped by Naked Media and told Dorian what entrepreneurs need to do to have a successful business. He also detailed how he plans to make Tennis’ magazine and Web properties work better than ever.

Hosted by award-winning journalist and media veteran Dorian Benkoil, Naked Media is a monthly live webcast that cuts through the bloviation, challenges the conventional wisdom and gets at real issues. Whether in one-on-one interviews or panel discussions, Naked Media explores a wealth of issues, from making money using the latest ad technologies to the privacy issues surrounding behavioral targeting.

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Visit the Executive FaceTime show home page to watch all past episodes of Executive FaceTime.

The show is hosted by Hal Espo and sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Association.

“Not too soon,” says L. Gordon Crovitz when asked when he might land a new job after resigning as publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive VP of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group last January.

But Crovitz is hardly idle.

He’s writing a weekly column for the Journal titled “Information Age” and, we’re betting, is racking up those frequent-flier miles as he travels around the country to speak about the ever-changing media landscape.

He shared some of his thoughts about media, digital and otherwise, in the latest segment of Executive Face Time with Hal Espo. Among other things, he talked about the litany of woes facing the newspaper industry (read: erosion in circulation, advertisers shifting more of their spending to online venues), the particular challenges facing metro newspapers and the changing definition of a “brand” in world of infinite consumer choice.

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On Monday, June 9, 2008 The Rt. Hon. Peter Mandelson PC, European Commissioner for Trade, delivered the Winston Churchill Lecture in New York City.

Whoever moves into the Oval Office on 20 January 2009 will be the first US President whose foreign economic policy from day one will so clearly need to face up to a fundamental shift of global economic and political power from West to East. In the annual Churchill lecture, delivered in New York, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson argued that this means rethinking some central assumptions about how power works in the global economy, and how American and European governments can best defend their people and their interests. “The Atlantic world is no longer the centre of the economic world”, Mandelson says, “because the economic world no longer has a centre”. Mandelson argues that our response to that fact could have immense consequences.

About the speaker:

Peter Mandelson studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. After working as an economist at the Trades Union Congress and as a current affairs TV producer, Peter Mandelson was later appointed Labour Party Director for Campaigns and Communications in 1985. Later he was Tony Blair’s Campaign Manager in the May 1997 election. In 1992 he was elected as MP for the constituency of Hartlepool. Peter Mandelson was appointed to the British Cabinet as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1998 and in 1999 he was appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Peter Mandelson is honorary Chair of Policy Network, a European and international think tank whose journal and conferences promote the exchange and debate of centre-left policy ideas and European social democratic thinking. He was appointed European Commissioner for Trade in 2004.

The infomation above was provided by British American Business, Inc.

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