Archives for February 2010

Minnesota Startup Launches ‘Spark Radio’ iPhone App

February 27, 2010 By Graeme Thickins

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. … [Read More…]

Startup Visa Bill Introduced

February 25, 2010 By Mitchell Hislop

Early Wednesday morning, Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Richard Luger introduced the “Startup Visa Act”, aimed to change the EB-5 visa to allow immigrant entrepreneurs to obtain a visa, if there is funding from a sponsoring VC or angel. This should fuel job growth, as one of the requirements to get the visa is adding 5 jobs a year. The plan has garnered the support of over 100 VC’s and angels, and is now an official bill before the Senate.

It is very interesting to see the support that this bill is getting. In a time of healthcare, economy, recalls, and scandals, over 1200 messages were sent to 164 different congressmen from 33 different states about the StartupVisa bill.

What does this mean for the MN startup culture? For now, not much. The bill is fairly down on the docket, so it may be awhile until it gets voted on. However, with our state having a rich startup culture, several VC’s and angels, and a history as a destination for people looking to make a new home, I would not be surprised if we started seeing new faces on the scene once this gets passed.

You can get the full text of the bill HERE, and the website for the group/bill is HERE.

Pew Internet’s “Future of the Internet IV”

February 20, 2010 By Steve Borsch

If you rely upon the internet in any way for your startup, business, learning or to feed your addiction to World of Warcraft, you’ll be interested that Pew Internet has released their fourth report on the internet’s future entitled, “Future of the Internet IV“.

It’s a survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders which reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.

The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. In this report, Pew covers experts’ thoughts on the following issues:

Will Google make us stupid?
Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center. “There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools.”

Yeah…like my former boss (now 69 years old) who insists that the internet is just a fad and that we’re destroying civilization with it. Or a former teacher I know who still believes that all relevant information we need must be stuffed in to our brains vs. looking it up via Google.

Minnov8 Gang 68: Falling Through the Cloud?

February 20, 2010 By Steve Borsch

Corrupted Podcast File

We apologize but the mp3 file for this podcast somehow became corrupted during a backup and is unavailable.

The reliability of the cloud is something that is discussed whenever there is a major outage of any kind. WordPress.com’s outage this past week took down sites like TechCrunch, GigaOM and over 10.2M other blogs. Media Temple (a place Tim and Steve host sites at) has consistent issues with slowness on their Grid Service and database calls (sometimes reeeeeally slow). All of our increasing reliance on the cloud is becoming more and more important as we shift our computing online.

We also discuss the Flash and iPad/iPhone controversy, Comcast bandwidth metering, upcoming events and more.

This Week’s Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Graeme Thickins (Phil Wilson is off this week)
Music by The Birdinumnums and the tune is “Thirteen Steps”. From the podsafe music network Music Alley.

The Podcast

Discussed during the show:

Cloud Computing links:
- Google backup articles from Lifehacker, Webmonkey, Labnol
- Virtual container company: Jumpbox
- Funny take from “Shouts from the Abyss” called, “The Great WordPress Outage of 2010“
- Comcast Bandwidth Metering in the Twin Cities
- Upcoming Event: CloudcampMSP
Flash and the iPad/iPhone controversy:
- New York Times article about no Flash on the iPad
- Steve’s post about a personal Flash video test
- Article about Adobe blocking HTML5 specification from supporting Flash
- AppleInsider’s post entitled, “Inside Apple’s iPad: Adobe Flash“. It’s a three page article so be sure to read all the pages
- An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash
Other links:
- Doc Searls (@docsearls)
- Maverick Beach south of San Francisco and this awesome video of a surfer
- Events:

Comcast Rolls Out Bandwidth Metering in MN

February 17, 2010 By Steve Borsch

I just received this email and went to check my usage. Since it started today I’ve used none, but will see how much I use on a monthly basis especially since my household streams a lot of video, does online gaming, and heavily uses the ‘net. This is, of course, nothing but a precursor to Comcast gearing up to attempt to meter broadband and get you to pay more as their cable TV revenues inevitably downtrend:

Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,

We are pleased to announce the pilot launch of the Comcast Usage Meter in your area. This new feature is available to Comcast High-Speed Internet customers and provides an easy way to check total monthly household high-speed Internet data usage at any time. Monthly data usage is the amount of data, such as images, movies, photos, videos, and other files that customers send, receive, download or upload each month. Comcast measures total data usage and does not monitor specific customer activities to determine data usage.

The current data usage allowance for the Comcast High-Speed Internet service is 250GB per month. This means that the vast majority of our customers – around 99% currently – will not come close to using 250GB of data in a month, and do not need to check the usage meter.

To view your current data usage, please visit http://customer.comcast.com and sign in to customerCentral (as shown at http://media2.comcast.net/anon.comcastonline2/support/Outbound_email/usage/cCentral-Login2.jpg).

After signing in, click on the “User & Settings” tab and click again on “View details” under “My devices”. The usage meter shows the current calendar month’s data usage for your account starting on the 1st of the month. Over time, you will be able to see the previous three months’ data usage as shown in the sample image at http://media2.comcast.net/anon.comcastonline2/support/Outbound_email/usage/Usage-Meter.jpg.

The usage meter is only available to Primary user accounts and Unrestricted Secondary user accounts with billing access.

If you would like to learn more about the usage meter and how it works, please visit http://networkmanagement.comcast.net/datausagemeter.htm for more information. Please visit our customer support forums at http://forums.comcast.net if you would like to ask us more questions or post comments. You can also visit http://www.comcastsupport.com/chat to chat with a customer service representative, or call 1-800-COMCAST for assistance.

Thank you for choosing Comcast!

This is a service-related email. Comcast will occasionally send you service-related emails to inform you of service upgrades or new benefits to your Comcast High-Speed Internet service.

Visions of Tomorrow, Yesterday

February 17, 2010 By Steve Borsch

From Matt Novak's PaleoFuture blog (click on image to see Matt's post)

If you, like I, follow the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) Twitter feed (@MNHS) then you might already have stumbled across an interesting lecture which may also have led you to a delightful St. Paul blog.

Stumble indeed.

It was pure happenstance that I came across a compelling MNHS lecture called, “History of Hip: Yesterday’s Tomorrow” and features historian Brian Horrigan and blogger Matt Novak (the guy with that cool St. Paul blog called “Paleo-Future“). In it they highlighted some of their favorite trends in science fiction of the past while they shared their own thoughts about the future of this genre.

With only three lectures posted (on a WordPress blog in a new category called Minnesota History Lectures), the innovative thing is that MNHS, like many historical societies around the country, are exposing more of their content and compelling attractions digitally and online. Most of the MNHS efforts succeed — like my favorites Family Search and the great images of Minnesota digitized and available through the Collections — but I must admit feeling a profound sense of disappointment that this particular lecture was delivered in video as a 320 x 240 window in M4V format. Perfect for an iPod or iPhone, but unacceptable for how I usually watch long-form video (through my Mac mini on my HDTV).

I downloaded the 513MB file and watched it on my iPhone and now wish I’d known about the lecture in advance (it was that good) and also so I could scrub through it and see portions of it again. There is some great content in it and in particular some of the retro future videos Matt shows in his portion of the lecture in the second half are really fun.

The challenges MNHS faces delivering long lectures of this type (and doing so affordably) isn’t lost on someone like me who has analyzed the economics of video. But so many of us now are streaming video over our computers or connecting our Roku (or next month the Boxee Box) to our HDTV’s, the stepping up of the qualitative delivery of video is an imperative and, I believe, will be “table stakes” to be in the game of delivering long form video content going forward.

All that said, I so appreciate the efforts of MNHS and that more and more of the content they hold is available online. I’d heartily recommend you head over to their site and check out what’s going on there and this lecture in specific and, by the way, Matt Novak is launching a magazine in April, you can help him raise the initial dough by donating, and this retro future magazine ought to be a fun one!

Minnov8 Gang 67: Is Google Buzz a Taser or Cupid’s Arrow?

February 13, 2010 By Steve Borsch

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson (Graeme is off this week)
Music: Mean Gene Kelton and the Diehards and the tune is “Running from the Law”. From the podsafe music network Music Alley.