Alex Meshkin is a technology executive and serial entrepreneur having founded or led organizations in healthcare, digital media, sports, and global outsourcing services.

Meshkin is  Executive Chairman of huvi, a social commerce platform, enabling consumers to buy and sell digital movies. huvi works in partnership with major Hollywood studios to reduce piracy, monetize consumer to consumer transactions and enable a secondary market for digital goods.

More recently, Meshkin co-founded a health IT Company where a team of leading health care providers, technology entrepreneurs and product development ninjas are building a platform to improve collaboration and communications in healthcare.

In 1999, at the age of 19, Meshkin launched his first consumer internet start-up and experienced the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. In the years that followed, Meshkin became the CEO of Toyota Motorsports’ flagship NASCAR racing team, Bang! Racing. Toyota selected the young Meshkin from 83 NASCAR race team candidates; to lead Toyota’s factory supported NASCAR racing team. Toyota’s partnership with Meshkin created one of the most successful racing organizations in its first year of operations.

In 2004, Bang! Racing made NASCAR history – setting numerous milestones. As the principle owner of Bang! Racing, Meshkin became the youngest team owner in NASCAR history and the team became the most successful first year NASCAR race team – winning Toyota’s first two races in their inaugural season.

Bang Holdings, the parent company of Bang! Racing was also a success off the race track.  In its first year of operations, Bang generated over $15 million in revenues; partnered with Vertrue to form a joint venture; and with their strategic technology partner eBay created and operated a NASCAR consumer membership and affinity marketing club.

By the age of 23, Meshkin was one of NASCAR’s elite team owners and a recurring guest on Fox News Channel and CNBC Squawk Box; and featured in numerous publications, including Fortune, Sporting News, Racer, Associated Press and Sports Illustrated.

Bang! Racing sponsors included, Toyota Motor Sales, DuPont, Viacom (Showtime Networks), Line-X, Valvoline and Snap-On Tools. In 2005, the race team was acquired by Toyota Motorsports and Bill Davis Racing. The technology divisions were merged in 2006 into Cloverleaf Partners and the NASCAR membership club became FastTrack Savings operating as DealPass.com.

Prior to Bang! Racing, Meshkin founded and operated a global software development company with a focus on healthcare and pharmaceutical platforms with clients such as Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly.

Additionally, Meshkin served as Director of Product and Strategic Development of cyberCFO, a venture funded financial services firm and later as VP and GM at Cloverleaf Partners.  Meshkin started his digital media entrepreneurial career at the age of 19, when he founded and led the first online “points” based dynamic commerce/auction model.

To learn more about Alex Meshkin, please visit his blog at http://alexmeshkin.com and LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/meshkin. Check out his videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/alexmeshkin

I believe it’s time for NASCAR to hire a Chief Digital Officer to lead the development and implementation of a marketing strategy and business model to engage fans across digital platforms. And equally as important, work in concert with broadcast partners, corporate sponsors, teams, drivers and digital media entrepreneurs to maximize the potential of the digital medium.

For the sake of all stakeholders, let’s hope Brian France is listening and takes intelligent action that is currently available to quickly reverse the downward trends before ratings, attendance and corporate sponsorships are permanently in reverse.

What most fans don’t realize is an insider’s little known secret – nearly ALL NASCAR teams are financial failures. Even the most successful teams, such as Hendrick Motorsports or Penske Racing – are dreadful businesses – and would be unsustainable if not for their wealthy owners. Unlike nearly every other sport, where the most successful and popular teams are profitable and have long term shareholder value, the on-track success or even popularity of a NASCAR team has little impact on the financial results of the team. It is shocking to learn that the operating budget cannot even be met for a team that wins every single race, when the race winnings are barely 40% of the operating budget. How can teams survive – and even more so, how can this sport survive?

Some may argue an antiquated assessment – successful on-track performance will translate into more sponsorship dollars. However, in today environment the annual NASCAR team budget (each car) exceeds $20 million dollars.

With that being said, NASCAR has the potential to unlock opportunities to revive the financial outlook of the sport. But it must begin with reacquiring all the digital rights that have been irresponsibly divided and parsed between Turner Sports and Sprint. NASCAR needs to stop licensing and giving up rights for short term financial gains of the sanctioning body and recognize that the digital channel may be the last and best hope for teams to survive. This begins with a cohesive digital strategy that works across all broadcast partners – instead of isolating TNN (Turner) from Fox, ESPN, and NBC. If NASCAR.com is going to offer a live simulcast of races during TNN broadcasted races, which I support, NASCAR needs to find an acceptable business model to extend this platform to all broadcast partners. While this would be a good foundation, the real opportunity is to unlock real-time data from the on-board black boxes (telemetry) and team communications to a broader set of partners and participate with revenue sharing agreements to monetize these underutilized assets. (NASCAR Must Embrace New Media: Proposal Attached).

While many believe that Spotify and/or Mog are going to transform the music industry and somehow replace the revenue from the fast eroding music purchaser, I am doubtful this approach will save the industry.  Furthermore, this dialogue camouflages the true problems with digital sales. In the physical world, Ownership and Access are clear cut user experiences each with their own value proposition. In the Digital Age content is easily available through illegal file sharing, and digital ownership experiences are limited and governed in a way that challenges the integrity of the intended experience. Therefore, if media executives are committed to electronic sell-through or download to own content, they must re-examine how they define digital ownership and encourage meaningful innovations.

Again, looking at the music industry, Lala introduced a novel access based business model – but failed to gain traction because of other more compelling (free) access models in the marketplace. Without question “free” access is highly desirable for consumers, but content owners and entrepreneurs have yet found a profitable monetization strategy. In December, when Apple acquired Lala, most industry insiders recognized Apple’s desire to transform iTunes from a pure download to own experience to a cloud-enabled ownership model. The complexities of music licensing however, may prevent this vision coming to fruition.

In the music industry, there are competing opinions of what is meant by “Digital Ownership”.  Michael Robertson, an outspoken critic of the licensing practices of the industry, founder of MP3.com and current CEO of MP3tunes.com, has spoken frequently that consumers should have the right to stream their personal owned music from personal lockers or cloud services without the service provider being responsible paying additional royalties to labels. But labels on the other hand, contest this position and argue that cloud based streaming constitutes a different licensing right than electronic sell through and thus triggers additional royalties.

No matter which side of the argument your business interests may place you, the greater argument where I believe most would agree is that increasing the rights associated with “Digital Ownership” will make digital content more attractive to consumers, thereby making them more likely to become purchasers.

Those who believe that consumers want Access and don’t care about Ownership may be right. But then again, it may be those who believe that consumers want to own content, who are correct. Regardless, both sides would likely agree that Digital Ownership needs flexible usage models that include anywhere, anytime access – and responsible sharing or trading, otherwise, it is just not an attractive enough proposition to purchase digital content. Without innovation around Digital Ownership, the media industry may not have a choice – leaving them without an electronic sell through option to monetize digital content.

Just as technology has created unprecedented opportunities for Access models, the same holds true for commerce models that deliver on the promise of Digital Ownership. To date, there isn’t a single digital music, movie, television, book or gaming service that has delivered a Digital Ownership experience that exceeds the physical media experience.  Until entrepreneurs and content owners effectively deliver on the promise of the Digital Age – none of us will fully embrace digital content ownership.

(Disclaimer: I am the CEO of huvi, a digital media service that is under development that promises to revolutionize what it means to own digital content.)

Josh Kopelman pointed out some fascinating empirical evidence to support the need for massive innovation in the ecommerce marketplace.

• More than half of today’s top 15 most trafficked websites today did not exist back in 1999.  That is not a surprise, as Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, Myspace, Blogger, Live.com and Twitter are all new — and are representative of the massive amount of innovation and disruption that has occurred in the last decade.
• Yet, of the top 15 most trafficked eCommerce websites today, just one of them did not exist back in 1999 (NewEgg – which launched in 2001).  Which means that over 90% of the top eCommerce websites are over 12 years old!  That is pretty remarkable to me — and reflects an amazing lack of external innovation (and disruption).

As Josh Kopelman further points out, the online shopping paradigm is finally changing.  In the past year, there has been an increasing amount of innovation, including, group buying, private shopping sites and alternative payment technologies.

As an entrepreneur and ecommerce innovator, I believe the best is ahead of us. The future of ecommerce a/k/a Commerce 2.0 is a future whereby the service itself will be able to generate traffic in much of the same ways that Twitter and Facebook have transformed social media.

At my company huvi, we are developing a next generation digital media marketplace that will transform how consumers buy, share and consume digital content.

“We’re trying to do more with less. That’s the difficult part of this economy,” France said following his state-of-the-sport address to media at NASCAR’s Research and Development Center. Just back in December, NASCAR issued a statement stating that NASCAR heading into 2009 was “strong”.

This outlook is a rather quick reversal, but perhaps the gravity of the current economic climate and mass sponsor deflections is making an impact.

Doing more with less? Working with teams to develop new business models? I apologize, but in my humble opinion, it’s a little too late for a half-baked plan. But even worse and what is frustrating is NASCAR’s continued unwillingness to restructure the distribution of television revenues to rightly supplement teams’ operating budgets.

What NASCAR needs is a business model which more closely replicates Formula 1 or a franchise structure like every other major sport. As a fervent advocate for team rights, I have repeatedly voiced the need to develop a franchise model that would enable teams to weather macroeconomic difficulties; and subsequently, become less cyclical and more stable during recessions and economic turmoil. The time for leadership, sacrifice and decisive action on behalf of the France Family is NOW. But to the contrary, the Brian France plan is nothing more than reinforcing their past strategies of working with teams to help locate and secure sponsors. While his intentions may be honorable; they are nevertheless naïve when considering there is a global economic recession; and specifically, when the NASCAR industry is in a depression of historic proportions. At this moment, I don’t believe there is a single corporation that is considering spending $15-$30 million required to fund a primary sponsorship program for a NASCAR Sprint Cup team. So I am rather befuddled with Brian France’s simplistic strategy to save the sport, which unfortunately in its current form will contribute to the sport’s certain collapse.

Is it possible that the past success of NASCAR is blinding Brian France from seeing the light? Reflecting back to 60 years ago to the earlier days of NASCAR, Bill France Sr. (Brian France’s grandfather) executed a flawless business plan to convince the then stock car racers and event promoters to become part of his newly formed organization and sanctioning body (NASCAR), whereby he gained complete control over stock car racing. The foundation of NASCAR’s “business model” problems ironically stem from the grand success of Bill Sr. and his unilateral control of a racing empire, including control over the majority of racing venues (International Speedway Corp) and the stock car sanctioning body. Over the past half-century, teams competing in NASCAR relied almost exclusively on corporate sponsors to fund their operations – enabling the France Family to retain a majority of the sports revenues and amass a large network of racing venues, and establishing NASCAR Holdings, an incredibly profitable wholly owned private company.

Those times have dramatically changed and for too long, NASCAR teams have tolerated the exploitation and willingly bore the total burden to exclusively fund their operations through advertising and sponsorship. The rapid increases in costs of racing and teams’ operating expenses of the past 5 years, combined with the minimal increase in sponsorship value – have brought the teams’ very existence into question.

One must wonder, how long can the France Family continue their racing monopoly? Historically, race teams have avoided conflict with the France Family; and the only entities to challenge the France Family’s monopoly have been race track owners, such as Burton Smith and Speedway Motorsports. Even through the France Family has weathered many possible anti-trust challenges with settling most disputes outside the judicial system; I believe the current financial crisis and advertising recession is about to test the resolve of the France Family and their prehistoric business model.

In a stark contrast to the past decade, NASCAR is falsely promoting an image of growth and strength by stating that 15 new organizations have applied for licensing to compete in the Sprint Cup Series. What they fail to mention and what many novices are unaware – almost all of those “new” teams are merely opportunistic racers attempting to profit by a method called: “start and park”, which allows them to collect sizable race winnings (in comparison to their expenses) with a team and car specifically built to just run one or two laps, enabling them to collect profits – all without adding ANY value to the sport. What a sad day it is for the diehard NASCAR fan.

As many of you know, I was the founder of Bang Racing which was NASCAR’s most successful first year team in history. At the young age of 23, I built and operated this highly successful team and we made history finishing 2nd in our first race (Daytona) and winning our 13th race (Michigan International Speedway), which was the first win for Toyota in NASCAR history. While all this is now historical facts found in the archives of NASCAR history, what is typically not understood is that even as a very competitive team, our business model was fundamentally flawed because generating a profit was nearly impossible. Simply put; the cost of running a NASCAR team far exceeds its sponsorship/advertising revenue potential and without significant “business model” changes by the France Family, teams are doomed for failure.

NASCAR must be the only sport where the most profitable teams are the biggest losers’ and where finishing dead-last or not even attempting to win makes more money than being a top competitor. Something is dreadfully wrong when the most competitive teams with great on track performance cannot survive because the costs of running their teams far exceed their revenue potential. The problem is clear: without teams receiving a larger share of the sports’ multi-billion dollar television contracts – there will be no strategy that can make viable a long-term solution for the sport – that is the simple reality.

However, being the “optimist”, I hope Brian France and will realize quickly that his family has the unilateral ability to deliver the change in business model the teams and sport require to survive.

Nothing could be further from the truth and it pains me to see the sport I love destroyed by in-action and failure to comprehend the gravity of the economic times. The Big 3 automakers are on the cusp of bankruptcy, unless President Bush provides an immediate multi-billion dollar bridge loan from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Without the Big 3 – the NASCAR economy will rapidly contract and a large percentage of teams will be added to list of defunct organizations. And with that – NASCAR thinks the sport is “strong” – but in reality – teams are dissolving faster than Kyle Busch racked up victories in the beginning of 2009; and without competitive teams – NASCAR is heading for a death spiral.

Without sweeping changes to the fundamental way NASCAR operates – the long term future is bleak. In comparison to Formula 1, following the announcement of Honda to close their F1 Racing operations, the FIA, the sanctioning body of Formula 1 racing, immediately acted with the support of their constructors (teams) to implement meaningful cost cutting measures for the 2009 and 2010 seasons. Formula 1 Cost Reduction Plan

This type of leadership and decisive action may curb future team closures and ensure the viability of the sport. Contrasting the bold leadership of FIA and F1 to NASCAR’s failure to address their challenges is cause for great concern. NASCAR’s value proposition for automakers and corporate sponsors is decreasing rapidly and they must act not only to increase their value proposition; but act to immediately cut costs and increase teams’ participation in the television revenues.

Without describing my complete cost reduction plans, the key areas that MUST immediately be changed by NASCAR are the following:

• Length of the race weekends – two day shows instead of three days at the track
• Reduction of race team members allowed at the track
• Elimination of credentials and “hard card” for necessary race team personnel
• Limitation of number of sets of tires available for use per race weekend
• Elimination of track testing at non-sanctioned race tracks
• Limitations of wind tunnel testing for aerodynamic development

As always, I offer my opinion to strengthen the sport and help ensure its long term viability.

Looking to catch a NASCAR wreck? Here’s one: The racing association’s sponsors are pulling out, NASCAR CEO Brian France told a Reuters summit. France insists he’s talking to potential new sponsors, but wouldn’t name names.

NASCAR saw a $150 million gain in sponsorship revenue in 2008, a gain France says won’t be repeated. “The question is, are we going to back up,” he said.

Hypothetically, let us assume Smith’s statements are backed by an element of fact and that the France Family is looking to sell NASCAR. It is my opinion that a change in ownership from the France Family to Smith would not bring about the change needed to put NASCAR back on the track for growth. As discussed in my most recent blog entry, The Failing NASCAR Economy: A Time for Action! - NASCAR must act to bring forth changes to support its lifeblood – the race teams. A Smith regime would only continue the same old policies of providing the race tracks a disproportionate share of the television revenues as compared to the racing teams. These policies need to change – NASCAR Sprint Cup Teams must receive a greater portion of the television revenues earned by the sport – because without Teams there is no NASCAR. Yes, tracks are valuable, but as Formula 1 has proven, track owners and promoters are willing to host events without large subsidies from the governing body.

The best avenue to save our sport and put it back on track, allowing it to grow into the next decade, is for an entrepreneurial executive; who understands the sport, new media and the market trends to lead a leveraged buyout – partially funded by a team franchise model – where 43 Sprint Cup Teams would receive a minority ownership and participate in profit sharing to ensure the stability of the premiere NASCAR series – the Sprint Cup.

The impending fluctuations expected in the number of competitors in the second most watched sport in country – the Sprint Cup Series, is completely unacceptable. A new ownership structure must include policies and an agreement to secure the future of the Sprint Cup Series by enabling Team Owners to purchase Franchises and receive votes in the future of the sport that they have all built. This new structure would eliminate the sanctioning body from competing with teams for sponsors and create a more healthy sport to ensure its long term future.

2008 has been the year of “change” – Americans want “change”, NASCAR Fans want “change”, NASCAR Teams want “change”. If the France Family provides the opportunity for “change” in the leadership of NASCAR – let us all hope that it is the “right change” that comes to Daytona Beach.

“We’ll have no factory-funded teams.”

Delahanty told ESPN.com,

“When times are tough, there are certain things that are lower on the priority list than others.”

This leaves us to ponder: Are the other series next? For years, rumors have circulated that Dodge would pull out of NASCAR- is it finally happening?

Earlier this decade Dodge was a powerhouse in the NASCAR Truck Series, winning 46 of 99 races from 2001-2004 and championships with drivers Bobby Hamilton in 2004 and Ted Musgrave in 2005. This year, Dodge scaled back its involvement and provided manufacturer support only to Bobby Hamilton Racing-Virginia. However, Dodge informed the team that its factory support would end this season. Delahanty said the manufacturer’s involvement with the Sprint Cup and Nationwide Series is unaffected.

Now you might ask: why hasn’t NASCAR attempted to “fix” the Truck Series value proposition to raise its “priority” with Dodge and the other manufacturers – the answer is part of the problem for NASCAR – with unprecedented sponsorship deflections in the Sprint Cup Series, the Truck Series is a low priority for NASCAR.

As the former owner of Bang Racing, Toyota’s first NASCAR Team to compete in the Truck Series and the leading competitor of Dodge Motorsports, it is a sad day for the entire NASCAR community. As I have predicted, it is only a matter of time before all of the Big 3 reduce their involvement in NASCAR. The writing is clearly on the wall – the inverse proposition of marketing costs versus benefits is an alarming trend and appears to be continually ignored by the NASCAR leadership.

Instead of squarely addressing the concerns of corporate sponsors and automotive manufacturers’ – NASCAR seeks new automotive partners to rejuvenate the floundering Truck Series. In 1999, Dodge Motorsports announced their plans to enter the Truck Series and, at the time, were widely credited with saving the series. In 2003 the Truck Series was still floundering andfloundering and the Big 3 began scaling back yet again, but Toyota Motorsports and Bang Racing soon entered the the Truck Series and delivered an unprecedented amount of media attention which fueled substantial increases in technical, financial and marketing spending from the Big 3 manufacturers in the Truck Series. But now times are tough; and with the uncertainty and questionable sustainability of the Truck Series, combined with plummeting light-truck sales; the odds of NASCAR finding new automotive manufacturer partners is rather slim. Sadly, it appears NASCAR will attempt to solely treat their symptoms and leave the underlying problems unresolved.