Minnov8

On Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is delivering their Broadband Plan to Congress. Most of us in the tech community are anticipating the plan and are eager to read it in its entirety when released.

Within this plan, the FCC has the unenviable task of encapsulating the complexities of the markets, technologies, other country’s use of broadband as a competitive advantage, possible use-cases for broadband (e.g., telemedicine, distance learning), demand for rural use (a market segment seen as horrifically expensive to build-out with wired broadband) and determine the possibilities for broadband in total, whether wired or wireless. Ensuring the public good, and that the internet remains a conduit for innovation and entreprenurialism, is a vital part of their mission.

In conferences I’ve been to, discussions I’ve had with broadband experts, and interviews I’ve held with internet-centric startups and entrepreneurs, all are adamant that nothing is more important to internet innovation and entrepreneurialism than ubiquitous and fast broadband (except for startup funding, of course).

But moving from a Plan to Congressional action in the way of law is another matter entirely. (more…)

This week’s podcast features a conversation with local Minnesotans and social media players Meg Canada (@megcanada) and SMBMSP founder Rick Mahn (@rickmahn; blog) from the South by Southwest® conference in Austin, Texas. Billed as, “The South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW® is the premier destination for discovery” it’s the interactive festival that is the focus of Meg and Rick’s adventures in the Lone Star State.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson (Graeme Thickins is off this week).
Opening & closing music is “Fight the Start” by the Kilians (article; website) a German band, part of the SXSW music artist showcase.

Discussed During the Show:

+ SXSW music page: http://2010.sxsw.com/music and the two torrents (5GB total) of all the mp3’s on the SXSW website showcasing artists

+ Rick’s cohort on their driving adventure to Austin: Albert Maruggi (@albertmaruggi; blog; podcast)

+ Federal Communications Commission Broadband Plan (includes discussed broadband speed test) and its submission to Congress on 3/16/10 (NYTimes article; FCC broadband blog).

Podcast: Download (Duration: 38:12 — 28.9MB)

Pretty sobering assessment of our state and the future of innovation here….we might not have one if we don’t get moving in a positive direction!

Minnesota faces a crisis of competitiveness in attracting high-tech industries, and needs a comprehensive science and technology initiative to remedy the problem. A 16 member committee of experts from the public, academic and private sectors have been assembled to assess the challenge and make recommendations to the legislature, and on February 16th, Co-Chairman Dan Mallin (@danmallin, partner in Magnet360 and co-founder of the Minnesota Cup) presented the findings of the committee to the state legislature.

The full report is available on the DEED (Department of Employment and Economic Development) website here. Watch these videos in two parts and listen to the end for the recommendations the committee makes around incentives for investors to accelerate funding for startups and growth of companies in Minnesota:

Mary Beth Schubert, VP of Corporate Affairs, Comcast

This morning’s post, “Comcast’s Oscars Fail in MN” was one that’s received a fair amount of traffic today and in it I promised I’d update you, so here you go.

Moments ago I got off the phone with Mary Beth Schubert, Vice President of Corporate Affairs for Comcast in Minnesota. While pleased to receive an apology and that my squeaky wheel was getting greased, essentially there’s no identified cause and I came away from the call not knowing anymore than I did before receiving it.

“The particular incident that you mentioned I can confirm and that it was in isolated spots in Minneapolis and the southwestern suburbs and was intermittent. We cover 111 different cities — and you’d mentioned Chicago or something — but it was isolated to small areas of the Twin Cities,” said Ms. Schubert. She then mentioned feedback she’d received from Comcast engineering staff and that, “It appears the problem was first identified at approximately 8:15pm (CST). We immediately began researching the cause of the interference and it appears that it cleared itself about 11:15pm late last evening. We continue to look in to the cause of it.”

The anecdotes I, and others on Twitter, had about this stuttering and video pixelation going on for at least two days wasn’t formally acknowledged and not addressed. “Again, we have recognized, our engineering area, that the interference was identified approximately 8:15pm on Sunday and gone late that evening.”

Perhaps it was record viewing of this year’s 82nd Annual Academy Awards, too many people tangling up the series of tubes by sending their internets, or some internal infrastructure fail as Comcast does away with analog signals over cable so the tubes don’t get filled up (you know, like with trucks), I received no hard data on why the Oscar telecast was a disaster for so many of us and what they’re doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Ms. Schubert was very gracious and listened patiently to my additional concerns — and I do appreciate her reaching out — but I think Comcast needs a blog to talk to customers, some transparency, and especially system updates that tell us what’s going on and what they’re doing to fix technical issues since it’s highly likely we’ll see more of them. Perhaps, since they’re literally across the river from the upcoming light rail depot in downtown St. Paul, they’ll be able to easily catch the Cluetrain.

Though the problem seemed to begin on Friday with our Comcast cable TV service, we didn’t much care until the family sat down to watch the 82nd Academy Awards and the video stuttering and audio dropouts were so horrifically bad that it was almost unwatchable.

Rebooting the device during a commercial break was a mistake since it took forever to come back up and didn’t fix the problem, so I grabbed my iPhone and did a search on Twitter for the word “comcast” to see if it could possibly be a network issue rather than our cable DVR failing.

I was stunned to see that there were dozens of people tweeting about the “stuttering” and “pixelation” of video and audio and it appeared that most of the problem was in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul and the surrounding metro area (see SheilaBird; KeinKernMusic; DFRevert; CSWebGrl).

But in further investigation this morning, I’ve discovered that many of the people tweeting were in Illinois (e.g., JoshMeans) so this might’ve been a regional problem. During the Oscar telecast I reached out to Frank Eliason via Twitter (@ComcastCares and he’s Comcast’s “Twitter man” according to BusinessWeek) and he was, with his typical Johnny-on-the-spot follow up, checking into the issues but nothing has come of it yet. I’ve reached out to him this morning to ask for a statement about what went wrong, what Comcast did and is doing about it, and Eliason responded by asking for a private, Twitter direct message (DM) with my email address in it, so we’ll see what Comcast says about the issue and I’ll update this post if-and-when I receive something.

I suspect that this sort of “fail” is going to become more frequent, rather than less so, since more of us are maximizing the use of our wired and wireless internet connections and the cable companies are accelerating the services they’re trying to shove down an internet broadband pipe that — while admittedly fat and robust with seemingly high capacity — is still a finite resource.

Opportunity and growth is all around us and glimmers of it are appearing in the web, mobile and other tech spaces. But are you willing to take the risks, explore and deal with all the obstacles in the way of you seeking riches?

In the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart’s character Dobbs, and two other gringos, embark in to Mexico to find gold in the Sierra Madres, an area in great flux and riddled with banditos, but policed by the Federales. In one of the signature lines in the movie the banditos, trying to convince Dobbs and his cronies that they’re Federales, say, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!“ (usually misquoted as “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!“). There are several moral and philosophical questions in the movie and Dobbs dies, the banditos are killed by the Federales, the gold is lost and thus the analogy might as clear as mud: chasing opportunities won’t be easy but they’re out there; barriers and obstacles (and bandits) stand in your way; but we thought exploring opportunistic thoughts in this podcast was worthwhile.

Special Guest: For part of the podcast, Meg Canada joins us to talk about libraries, the iPad and more. Meg is a senior librarian for Web Services and Training at Hennepin County Library and currently coordinates public training and  social media efforts for the library. She volunteers helping with the Unsummit, recently presented at MinneWebCon, and is a regular contributor to Social Media Breakfast.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Opening & closing music is “Santa Maria” by Will Kriski from Music Alley, purveyor of podsafe tunes.

Discussed during the show:

+ Past Events: CloudCampMSP (see Minnov8’s coverage here); IgniteMPLS; Social Media Breakfast;

+ Upcoming Events: Mobile March; MIMA; DEMO; SxSWi; MinneWebCon

+ Mobile: MixMobi; Wordpress mobile plugins (Mobile Edition; WPTouch); Square (mobile commerce)

+ Devices: Apple iPad; Microsoft Courier; Dell Slate

+ Other: Google pagerank to require speedier websites?; Hacker News.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 56:44 — 39.0MB)

A local Minnesota blogger and 22 year old college student, Geoff Dutton (blog; @geoffdunton), reached out to me about a healthcare startup called Koozala and his interest in writing for Minnov8 but I needed to do some investigation first before running the story.

Koozala has been put together by an entrepreneur, Ashish Gadnis, who is a guy I knew nothing about though he’s in tech in Minnesota. Ashish is the CEO and Founder of Forward Hindsight, Inc. as well as the founder of Koozala. He was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2009, plus he has even written a book, Sustainable Disruption.

Doing some fact-checking on both Geoff Dunton and Ashish Gadnis, I reached out and we went back-n-forth by email. The most important verification had to do with the number of registrants Koozala had garnered to date (to see if it was gaining any traction) and I was delighted to learn that the UofM student health services launched with Kazoola last October with a notification to about 4600 students and that Koozala processed / registered about 4300!

David Golden, Director, Public Health and Communications at the UofMN Boynton Health Service, had this to say when I reached out to him via email to tell me about Koozala and their experience with it:

“The Koozala site helped us reduce time correcting student immunization information. They submit their immunization dates online and we then get a report daily of the students who have successfully completed filling out the required information. It saves our staff (time) by insuring the self reported information provides us with the information needed to bring them into compliance with their immunization requirements.”

As a consequence of this and some other research, I decided to run Geoff’s article on Koozala — a very promising local Minnesota startup — and even invite Geoff to be a future contributor to Minnov8.

Now I Don’t Have To Ask Mom About My Medical History Anymore
by Geoff Dutton

You may have noticed just a few things in the news lately about health care reform. Don’t worry, this is not an opinion on it. I’m way too young to be worrying about health care. One thing I do like though is technology making my life easier, and that is exactly what Koozala will do.

Founded by Ashish Gadnis in 2009, Koozala is secure place to store your and your family’s medical history online. So far Koozala has nearly 6,000 registered members since going live with the University of Minnesota this past fall. Koozala will continue to roll out with Universities around the country to reduce errors in verifying student immunization records. And what’s a better state than Minnesota to start a company in the health care industry?

As a 22 year old college student, I basically know nothing about my medical history, much less my family’s. Obviously, this is bad. Koozala makes it easy to store all my information online and connect with my family member’s health records. So, this is clearly valuable to me.

What about the rest of the industry? According to Ashish, “Koozala is in line with the National Health Information Network requirements, thus making medical doctors’ lives a lot easier. Plus, the consumer gets to manage their health care, not the insurance companies!”

Koozala faces some pretty big competition, such as Google Health, but as much as I love Google, it has been known to have a few privacy issues, especially with its recently launched Buzz. Furthermore, Ashish describes Koozala as a consumer-focused site to store medical records. You are in complete control over who has access to your records and whom to share them with. When I logged into Google Health, I saw this which made me a bit uneasy:

"In the unlikely event we discover a security breach that allowed an unauthorized person to acquire information in your Google Health profile. Google will notify you at the email address you provided. You can also choose to receive such alerts by US mail."

Another huge plus is Koozala is already working on an Android app to access your records. Finally, you can even store your pet’s medical history, although I don’t have a pet, but maybe someone can chime in on the usefulness of this.

Minnov8 liveblogs important events in Minnesota so that those unable to attend are still on top of important and key themes at these events. Below are links to three discrete pages of recent liveblog events by Minnov8:

The Minnov8 Gang is liveblogging CloudCampMSP here.

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions.

At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

Is it possible to design a radio app that delivers the ultimate radio experience, complete with visually stunning graphics and social media capabilities, too?  Minneapolis’ own Handcast Media Labs LLC thought so, set out to prove it, and just launched the result on the iTunes App Store a couple of days ago.  It’s called Spark Radio (press release), and works on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s available for $5.99 at this link at the App Store.

I grabbed it the day it came out and have used it multiple times since, in a variety of situations — at home, on a road trip, even in a foreign country (Iowa) — and I must say I’m impressed.  Right now, I’m listening to a great station that’s all Grateful Dead all the time, which I discovered via the app. It’s called RadioIO Dead, and “Big Boss Man” has been my favorite track so far.  I’m on wifi in my motel room at the moment, and the sound is perfect — and I’m not even using an external speaker.  On the way down here to Des Moines, I used the app via my iPhone on AT&T’s 3G network (note: I was in the passenger seat!) to tune in multiple stations, including WSL in Chicago, and the sound was way better than any station I could tune in on the car radio.

Spark Radio not only gives you tons of station choices and social media features designed to make radio listening more interactive, but it also features visually stunning animations. Far out, huh? Its robust, visual radio tuner uses the guide from a company called RadioTime.com to give you access to more than 10,000 terrestrial and Internet-only radio stations worldwide.  Handcast says it’s adding new stations to Spark Radio daily, and will support more than 30,000 stations by April.  You can listen to precisely what you want to at any given time — music, talk radio, sports events, public radio, or special programming from around the world.  Its elegant interface lets you search for stations or programs by keyword, location, or the station URL, and you can browse programming by genre or location. (I’m still looking for two of my fav genres: rockabilly and surf.)  A GPS component lets you find local stations in any given city based on current GPS coordinates.

I took the opportunity to dial up the founder of Handcast Media Labs, Terry Anderson, whom I’d met in 2008, to ask if he’d be up for an interview. That follows. (more…)