Paul Douglas's New Forecast

NoozMe is further developed. It is structured as a personalized video-news service. A constantly updating library of stories would be provided by local and national broadcasters such as WCCO, CBS, or CNN, as well as by “citizen journalists,” like the people who post video clips on YouTube. Users would select only the stories they want to see, individually or by categories such as “politics,” “sports,” or maybe just “hockey.” To access them, the user also would have to select certain ads, or categories of ads, to run between the news segments. Ad revenue would pay broadcasters for the content—but viewers would decide which ads to watch.

According to Douglas, NoozMe could use the Internet not to drain ad revenue from the legacy broadcast media but to boost it. He proposes, in fact, that NoozMe will use the Internet to help rescue television news—from the Internet.

“I think the idea of giving people the advertisements they want to see instead of just ramming ads down their throats indiscriminately is one that’s going to catch on,” Douglas says. “And everyone is going to think, ‘Duh, why weren’t we doing this 10 years ago?’”

But will advertisers be open to viewers opting in and out of their messages?

News à la Carte

In person, Paul Douglas comes across as the same affable fellow that Minnesotans have seen on TV for more than two decades, first at KARE and then at WCCO. Behind the Paul Douglas persona (or integrated with it) is Douglas Paul Kruhoeffer—Doug to friends—a successful entrepreneur who already has built and sold two companies.

EarthWatch Communications, which he founded in 1990, pioneered the use of 3-D weather graphics. Its technology was licensed to television stations around the world and used in the movies Twister and Jurassic Park. Douglas sold EarthWatch in 1998 for $3 million to a company later acquired by Madison, Wisconsin–based Weather Central.

In 1998, with Williams (who provided patent expertise) and Craig Burfeind as partners, Douglas launched Digital Cyclone, a localized, Web-based weather-forecasting company. In January 2007, Douglas sold that company and its online MyCast service for $45 million to Garmin, a Cayman Islands–based maker of navigational devices for pilots, drivers, and outdoorsmen. Garmin kept Digital Cyclone’s Minnetonka operation and plans to expand it, Douglas says.

Singular Logic, therefore, isn’t his first entrepreneurial venture, but it is his first not focused entirely upon weather. The company now has office space in Excelsior. In mid-April, the partners brought in Todd Frostad, a former sales vice president for Eden Prairie–based e-commerce giant Digital River, to serve as CEO.