Minnesota Keeps Feeding the iPhone Habit
DoApp has had a busy week. Their MyLite and MyTo-Do applications are currently available and moving up the rankings via the iPhone Apps Store and Magic 8 Ball and Whoopee Cushion are waiting in the wings. Current stats include MyLite ranking #8 overall on Top Free Apps, and #1 in Top Free Apps in the Utilities category along with MyTo-Dos showing at #81 overall on Top Free Apps, and #8 in Top Free Apps in the same category
Launched as PagePow, DoApp was founded in 2007 by former early Google employee Joe Sriver. The company positions itself as “a new kind of internet applications company.” They aspire to the rather lofty sounding mission of enabling “a glorious new world of distributed content and commerce.” Okay, so flashing lights and whoopee cushions don’t exactly sound “glorious”. However, in our interview Sriver assures me that there is more afoot at DoApp than finding your keys in the dark, telling the future, or goofing on your friends. The current applications for the iPhone are about establishing the firm and “gaining experience in the process.”
He goes on to say, “The iPhone applications are just one aspect of DoApp, making up part of a growing portfolio of work.” More serious applications in the commerce, utility (including MyTo-dos), and entertainment segments are planned.” We have a staff of eight and we are working furiously to keep pace with the ideas we are generating.” Those ideas include mobile and web based applications. In fact PagePow was originally launched as a widget builder. There is still a presence in that market with plenty of interest, much of it on an international level, but “the attention around iPhone applications has really replaced the buzz on widgets.” according to Sriver. Clearly, though it may be hard to believe, not everyone has an iPhone and there are still plenty of opportunities to supply applications for other platforms. This reality does not appear to be lost on DoApp.
As for iPhone applications, “Nobody really knows the criteria by which Apple decides which applications to release to the App Store, so we can’t really provide a timeline for what’s next there.” says Sriver. As the company expands beyond its current staff it will be less reliant on Apple because it will be delivering applications for other platforms. For now though, being ranked #1 in a category on the hottest application distributor site is not a bad way to bring recognition to a growing firm. Perhaps its own Magic 8 Ball app would say that it “appears likely” that this Minneapolis based firm will parlay that attention into serious application success.
(In the interest of full disclosure it should be norted that Minnov8 contributor Graeme Thickins is also the DoApp Marketing VP.)
TinyURL: Making long URL’s short
Did you know that a tiny service used 1.5 billion times per month was created in Minnesota? TinyURL is a service I’ve used often (especially when using Twitter) and this creation by Blaine, MN developer, Kevin Gilbertson, is quite popular.
I was first alerted that this was a Minnesota creation by St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata (column, blog) when he put out a ‘tweet’ on Twitter about the service’s Minnesota connection. Of course, I poked around to find out more and was just delighted on what I discovered.
Then sitting down to breakfast this morning with the StarTribune, I saw this article entitled, “TinyURL developer basking in website’s success” which covers the man behind TinyURL and a bit about the service. The article lays out how Gilbertson could make ~$1 million per month but chooses not to have annoying popup ads (thank you Kevin!). He makes enough per month that he apparently doesn’t need to work outside of making TinyURL better and is able to focus on his passion for unicycling (peek at the Strib article for more).
Julio’s writing, the Strib’s coverage and ours is fantastic for a new and successful Minnesota startup, but not everyone agrees that services like TinyURL are ones we should rely upon. Read more
Thirty Semifinalists Named in ‘Minnesota Cup’ Business Plan Competition
I attended and Twittered a bit at a reception Wednesday evening, June 25, at the grand, old James J. Hill Library in downtown St. Paul. (You remember old J.J., don’t you, the Bill Gates of his era?) It was an event to honor the startups who made it to the next round of the Minnesota Cup, an annual, statewide competition that seeks out aspiring entrepreneurs and their breakthrough ideas. The 30 lucky semifinalists were selected from a record of 840 entries in this fourth and largest year of the competition, and will vie for prizes that include $50,000 in cash for the first-place winner. An interesting tidbit I picked up at the reception: about 10% of the 840 entrants were Web 2.0 related.
Scott Litman, cofounder of the event, told me the competition this year was the toughest ever, and that many plans that might have made the cut in previous years didn’t. He also told me that, unfortunately, many entrants may have had great business concepts, but they were not understandable — the submissions were either poorly written, or riddled with so many acronyms and buzzwords that the judges flat-out did not know what the heck the submitter was talking about. (So, take heart, rejectees. You may be great at selling your ideas verbally — now work on the written word.)
Here’s how the Minnesota Cup site states its mission: “We’re looking for the next great entrepreneurial success story in our state. This competition is for all entrepreneurs, whether your breakthrough idea is high tech or no tech, whether you are just putting your ideas into a business plan or if you’ve been out building your venture.” Well, I wonder if it’s possible that any who entered, and especially the chosen semifinalists, could really be “no tech” in this day and age? That would be hard to imagine. And, in looking over the list, there’s nary a one that would seem not to rely on technology in their businesses. (Although some without a website certainly have the aura of no-tech at this point, perhaps awaiting prize money to build? And what’s with all the student semifinalists being listed with no websites?) As for the lack of a requirement that the business be new, i.e., that older startups can also apply, I know at least two on the list are four to five years old and still chasing $50k. Ah, hope springs eternal. Here’s the full list: Read more
Kwingo Launches Mobile Language Apps
What do you do when you’re a successful, female, mid-career IT and operations executive with several big-name companies, and you decide to try something different? Why, you launch a mobile web apps company, that’s what!
Actually Lisa Foote first took some time to give back by using her executive skills for a year or so of non-profit charity work (with the United Way of Minnesota), after successful stints at Target, GE Capital, and Prudential. But it wasn’t long when the for-profit drive was back, and soon she was plotting, with husband Brad Roberts, a new business idea for solving language challenges in today’s increasingly global economy. And it just so happened that Web 2.0 technology was going to play a part — because Brad, who has a highly eclectic creative and business background, had become a self-taught Ruby on Rails developer.
The Birth of Kwingo
Foote and Roberts newly discovered life as entrepreneurs soon resulted in the birth of Kwingo.net, a venture they introduced earlier this year. Its mission is to bring simple, useful productivity tools to professionals working in field occupations using web-based mobile devices as a platform for delivery.
With her experience working in large enterprises, Foote knew that labor workforces were continuing to globalize, and that language challenges would just continue to multiply. Kwingo would provide the tools workers in the field needed to communicate with coworkers who speak a different language, helping everyone work more productively and safely. Read more
CodeMorphic Is One of the First In Line with iPhone Apps
It’s almost the end of the week and, being a site centered on tech and innovation, I believe we have been remiss in not including a picture of a 3G iPhone and a story having something to do with it. Well…when the iPhone AppStore opens in July, Minnesota startup CodeMorphic is all set with native applications for iPhones of all kinds.
Longtime friends Damon Allison and Bill Heyman launched the company in early March, coincidentally around the time as the Apple iPhone SDK release. There is a sense of serendipity about how they landed in the first group of iPhone developers among the two but they believe their focus and quality coding was the key to being noticed and landing at the front of the line. They feel their singular focus on just building native applications for the iPhone, and not moving into other mobile platforms, will prove to be the best business model.
Heyman noted there is tremendous opportunity for application development in the enterprise market. “There will be great growth in developing internal corporate applications.” Areas like work flow, communication are clearly opportunities. Heyman continues “Right now that’s an area dominated by Blackberry so we see more needs for those types of applications for iPhone.” The consumer is the other opportunity. “Consumer focused applications that promote the brand, for example if General Mills were to target a younger consumer, where the iPhone or iPod Touch are really popular, they could develop an application or game that is tailored to them.” Read more
Enleiten: A Social GTD
If you have any interest in personal or group productivity, it’s likely that you’ve at least become aware of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system. It’s not only taken the corporate world by storm, it’s become the geek method/tool/approach of choice for moving far beyond a simple to-do list. The system has even spawned productivity sites like 43 Folders, an homage to one element of the GTD system, as well as its own blog and news site dedicated to GTD-centric productivity called GTD Times.
Due to the success of Allen’s GTD methodology and the sheer volume of software developers among the ranks of the faithful, tools abound for using the GTD method. From David Allen Co’s own Microsoft Outlook add-in to dozens of offerings for PC’s and Mac’s (as well as other types of tools), most work well but suffer from an increasingly evident fatal flaw: using GTD is a problem if all of your data is sitting on a single computer. More and more of us are on multiple devices and mobile…using a laptop, smartphone, desktop at home and the office (and even casually using computers in coffee shops, airports or at a friend’s house) and need to use GTD but be able to access it anywhere we have an internet connection.
In 2007 Eric Hedberg, an economics major from Carleton College, worked at Secure Computing and Stockwalk.com, the latter in financial sector software, and Hedberg became aware of the direction applications were taking by being delivered “in the cloud” (i.e., as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hosted and available to anyone with an internet connection) and started looking at ways to implement a SaaS data warehousing/workflow management application for the financial services industry.
After some prototyping and user feedback, he and his college friends who’d joined him (Doreen Hartzell, CEO, and Steve Bentley, in charge of interface design) realized that the best part of what they’d built was the project management piece, which delivered collaborative online workspaces using a GTD model. That revelation spawned the current company focus, Enleiten, which is a collaborative GTD application delivered in the cloud and available for single consumer users, small groups or businesses. Read more
Commercial Real Estate Search Made Efficient
As the Internet increasingly becomes a platform upon which entrepreneurs and opportunists build disruptive and inefficiency crushing innovative Web applications, organizations like GoFishCommercial will emerge to do exactly that and make the inefficient, efficient.
After hearing about the company and taking the time to poke around the site, I had the chance to talk with Asher Silber, VP of Sales & Marketing for GoFishCommercial, in order to understand their current deliverable and a bit more about where they’re headed.
Kristi Oman (commercial real estate developer and property owner) and husband Zev, looked at the simplicity and effectiveness of Craigslist and knew they could build and deliver a site that would match that and add significant value to both the search process by buyers as well as to the owners of commercial real estate and their brokers.
What is particularly intriguing and innovative, however, is how GoFishCommercial has aligned the incentives of buyers, property owners and brokers, and done so in a disruptive and efficient way. Read more
Entire U of MN At-Your-Fingertips
Every behemoth company or institution shares a fundamental problem: they’re so big and organized in silo’s that access to the wealth of opportunities and resources they could offer is minimized. If only people on the outside could figure out what’s available, whom to call and how to engage with the right people inside, this problem could be addressed head-on.
In 2005, the University of Minnesota (UofMN) surveyed Minnesota CEO’s and asked for input from members of the Itasca Project (a group comprised of big company CEO’s and key governmental leaders) with the basic question, “What do you want from the University of Minnesota?”
The wish list was extensive and reinforced their challenges in accessing the UofMN’s opportunities and resources: ready-for-hire graduates; continuing education for employees; consulting services from University faculty; research sponsorships; access to research facilities, and more.
After more research with focus groups and outstate Minnesota analysis, in July of 2006 the UofMN created the Academic and Corporate Relations Center (ACRC) and brought on board a guy wired as an entrepreneur, experienced in startup businesses, and full of energy to deliver what has become known as “the front door” to the institution: Director, Dick Sommerstad.
As a Minnesota startup, involved with an emerging company or an intrapreneur within a corporation, you may be thinking, “What in the world could Sommerstad’s ACRC offer me?” As you’ll soon discover, there is a wealth of resources at your fingertips just waiting for you to access them. Read more
Zanby.com Relaunched: Groups for Groups
After 2 years in development Zanby.com has relaunched with a different take on a community site. Rather than focusing on the individual profile with groups as an extension (how I think of Facebook). Zanby reverses it by putting groups at the core and extending them into a “group family” - a network of groups.
The simple example of this is a national professional organization with local chapters, or an organization with franchisees. Within Zanby, all those groups can communicate with each other while maintaining their distinct identity.
TheUptake.org, is moving their entire site off WordPress and onto a white-labeled Zanby to take advantage of all the social aspects of the platform.
Taking a Risk on Open Source
Sit back and let me tell you a story about a game-changing open source ecommerce project, an emerging web development firm in Bloomington, and how they discovered this project and I, in turn, discovered them. It’s illustrative of how Internet and Web connections are changing everything from value discovery to customer satisfaction to how awareness of an emerging company can happen if they’re in-the-game and leveraging new social media tools.
Last year I was performing some due diligence for a client on ecommerce software. Stunned by how poorly executed most open source ecommerce projects were, I was delighted when happenstance brought me to this blog with a link to an open source ecommerce package called MagentoCommerce. After thirty minutes on the site, scanning posts in the forum and looking at the demos, I realized that the sheer scope of the energy, effort and enthusiasm the community was exhibiting around this open source project was going to raise the bar quite high for any other ecommerce offering…whether commercial or open source.
Local Bloomington firm, August Ash, Inc., also found MagentoCommerce in much the same way I had, though they came upon it in early 2007. Turns out they are the only known Minnesota firm to have already launched sites on this new open source package (which shipped the very first version on March 31, 2008) and you also might be surprised to learn why they took the risk on such unproven software, how doing so actually aligns with their focus on quality and customer satisfaction, and how I came to learn about August Ash in the first place through the use of social media. Read more
-
The "Minnov8 Gang" Podcast
