Nozzl Media, Inc.

USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE.

MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED.

To understand Nozzl Media, it helps to know Richard Brautigan’s quirky 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. The narrator visits a place called the Cleveland Wrecking Yard to find out about a used trout stream that he’s heard is for sale. He finds it out back, magically disassembled, transported from Colorado, stacked like lumber and selling for $6.50 a foot length for the first 100 feet, $5 a foot thereafter.

“O I had never in my life seen anything like that trout stream,” the narrator marvels. “It was stacked in piles of various lengths: ten, fifteen, twenty feet, etc. There was one pile of hundred-foot lengths. There was also a box of scraps. The scraps were in odd sizes ranging from six inches to a couple of feet….

“I went up close and looked at the lengths of stream. I could see some trout in them. I saw one good fish. I saw
some crawdads crawling around the rocks at the bottom. It looked like a fine stream. I put my hand in the water. It was cold and felt good.”

Today, as we release Version 1.0 of our Real-Time Stream Widget, it feels good, like Brautigan’s fine stream.

When Nozzl Media’s four co-founders decided in March 2009 to build a product and a company, all we had were ideas and snippets of code, stacked like a disassembled trout stream. Steve Suo, a lifelong journalist, envisioned making public records easily accessible to the public and the news media. Brian Hendrickson, a programmer and photographer, wanted to create software tools that enhance the value of social media for users. Greg Griffiths, a veteran marketer with printer’s ink in his Indiana family’s veins, was looking for an opportunity to help take a sexy new product from zero to 60. And Steve Woodward (that’s me), a student of the news media during my 30 years as a reporter, editor and general manager, sought to do something more than wring my hands over the declining state of the industry.

The four of us found common ground in Nozzl Media.

Strong content. Real-time delivery. A platform that can evolve as news, the media and the audience evolve.

For the past 10 months, we’ve assembled pieces of Brautigan’s trout stream, usually with success, sometimes not, but always advancing in the right direction. Brian chose the stream pieces, bolted them together and made the stream flow. Steve Suo stocked it with information from 10 public records sources, 24 news sources, about 100 blogs and four social-media services: Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube.

Today, we have more than 20,000 items a day streaming in real time — and we’ve only just begun.

Like many startups, what we set out to accomplish is not necessarily what we ended up with. We initially thought our market would be buyers of real-time bulk government data; we ended up focusing on news organizations, particularly newspapers. We thought we would be a mobile-only company; instead, newspaper editors asked if our stream would work on their websites, prompting the development of our Real-Time Stream Widget — the product we’re releasing today.

I want to emphasize that our original vision for a real-time mobile product is very much alive. In fact, even though our debut product is a web widget, Nozzl Media’s Real-Time Mobile for smart phones will emerge this year as our marquee product. We hope to wrap up development in the next couple of months. We’ll keep you posted as the release date approaches.

The important point is that the product we’re releasing today will not be the same product or products we’ll be building at the end of this year. The Real-Time Stream Widget, you see, isn’t so much a product as it’s a launch pad. The 10 public records sources in the initial Portland stream, for example, are a trickle compared to what we could add from among the thousands of sources available from local, state and federal agencies. Other improvements could, and probably will, include geotagging, location-based advertising, self-service advertising, archival search, saved user and filter preferences, trending topics, and dashboards for news and advertising staffs and for advertisers themselves.

A final thought: We don’t have the solution to the crisis in the news industry. But perhaps we have the beginnings of at least one solution. We hope that you — our news partners and our users — will help guide us in the coming months as we try to grow beyond beginnings into a mature solution. We’ll be asking for your thoughts, and we sincerely hope you let us know. If we build the product we want, we will have failed. But if we build the product you need, I know we will have succeeded.