St. Cloud-based W3i is in the app distribution business — in a big, profitable way (33 successive quarters thereof).  But till now that business has been all about desktop apps, and Windows only. Well, mark down yesterday as the day they entered the world of mobile, with this bombshell: W3i Launches New Incented Mobile App Distribution Service for iOS App Developers.  A separate version of the release, for consumers, gets more to the benefit: Consumers Can Now Earn Rewards for Installing Apps.  Those rewards, my friends, would be cash — for consumers who register at a W3i site called Apperang.com.

Naturally, app fanboys and girls everywhere loved the news — after reading about it on some of the sites they frequent the most.  TechCrunch (MobileCrunch) ran this story: Apperang Pays You Cash to Download iPhone Apps… Ka-Ching! And VentureBeat (MobileBeat) ran concurrently — amazing how that happens — with their take: Get paid to install apps with W3i Mobile Solutions and Apperang.  Numerous other sites and blogs picked up on it immediately, and Twitter was going crazy on it (just search on hashtags #apperang and #w3i).  [Oh, sure, there was a story in the StarTrib last week, too, but that didn't light up much of anything... <rimshot>]

I asked the CEO of a local app development company for his reaction to this W3i news, from a business perspective:  ”The model and integration W3i has developed for desktop distribution has been a huge success in the past, so I wouldn’t bet against them on making their mobile version a success,” said Wade Beavers, CEO of DoApp Inc. “For developers wanting to get a core base of users fast, it makes sense to use this service. The key will be how long those users keep your app, because that’s where the return on investment is.”

I also asked one of Minnesota’s most experienced iPhone app developers for his reaction: “Will app publishers readily jump to use this type of service? Small developers, maybe,” said Bill Heyman of CodeMorphic. “But small developers may not have budget to support this type of promotion… Will it be enough to hit the tipping point for more organic sales because of a higher App Store ranking? Well, ultimately, it would depend on how much a company wants to spend to buy a ranking.”

But, actually, W3i signed on some pretty successful big developers for its private beta before the announcement yesterday (the service is now in public beta).  That list of launch advertisers — just those that let W3i use their names for PR purposes — includes these firms, with the name of their app in parentheses: Big Stack Studios (Sigma), Inert Soap (FingerZilla), Booyah (MyTown), Gist (Gist), Thinking Ape (Kingdoms at War), Flixster (Movies), Slacker Inc (Slacker Radio), xCube Labs (My Health Records – Health n Family), and infinidycorp (Zombies vs. Aliens).

I’m sure we’ll be hearing about a lot more, as W3i tells me they are crazy-busy now following up with other app companies who are inquiring.

(Disclosure: the author has had a consulting relationship with W3i for providing PR services.)

W3i Lights Up the ‘Net with Its Latest App News is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Best Buy Co. Inc today announced the availability of its new digital video service CinemaNow which will provide customers same-day instant access to new release movies and TV shows.

This month the service will be available on the CinemaNow website, but also with internet connected BluRay players. Netflix has been delivered on these devices (as well as the Roku box, internet connected HDTVs and more) but Best Buy is in a highly unique position with consumer electronic manufacturers.

Add to that their ability to explain to consumers how to use the service, Geek Squad ‘officers’ to set it all up in the home, and the potential to begin to reallocate the sheer square footage devoted to merchandising TVs and movies on DVD/BluRay discs.and you can see why this is of such strategic importance to Best Buy.

The full press release is after the jump.

Best Buy Provides Customers Same-Day Instant Access to

New Release Movies and TV Shows with Launch of CinemaNow(TM)

Digital Entertainment Platform Debuts on Devices This Month

MINNEAPOLIS, May 18, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Best Buy Co. Inc today announced the availability of its new digital video service CinemaNow which will provide customers same-day instant access to new release movies and TV shows.

The service will initially be accessible through select connected Blu-ray Disc players and HDTVs, and on most PCs via the web at www.cinemanow.com. Beginning this month, the service will be available on all new connected Blu-ray Disc players and home theater systems from LG Electronics. CinemaNow is also expected to launch on an array of other devices from various manufacturers, including Insignia, later this year.

CinemaNow, the result of the previously announced strategic relationship between Sonic Solutions(R) and Best Buy, will be powered by the RoxioNow(TM) technology platform. Best Buy owns the legal rights to the CinemaNow trademark, and will use it going forward to market the service to consumers who will have the ability to buy or rent from an extensive library of premium content, including new release movies and TV shows, with no subscription required.

The platform will also allow customers to seamlessly access their premium content on a wide range of Internet-connected devices from multiple manufacturers. The initial product launch, which is expected to be followed by an improved and updated version later this year, will allow customers to easily browse, search and purchase premium content through a highly-functional, straightforward user interface, and will deliver a high-quality viewing experience through enhanced playback technology.

“With the introduction of CinemaNow, Best Buy continues our commitment to evolve with our customers as their demand for digital entertainment grows,” said Chris Homeister, senior vice president of entertainment for Best Buy. “The convenience, selection and flexibility of the CinemaNow service offers customers more freedom in the way they choose to consume entertainment from Best Buy. This service, which complements our existing suite of digital entertainment brands, will be available to customers in their homes and on-the-go through a broad array of devices and will be brought to life in store with the help of our Blue Shirts and Geek Squad Agents.”

“At LG, we’re committed to enriching in-home entertainment by delivering the ultimate HD viewing experience and limitless content options,” said Peter Reiner, senior vice president, marketing, LG Electronics USA, Inc. “Best Buy, through its compelling CinemaNow service, will provide customers with one of the most interactive entertainment options available making it easy for people to access their favorite content using LG’s NetCast Entertainment Access feature simply from the remote.”

“With a track record for bringing innovative technologies to a broad audience, Best Buy is in a great position to expand the market for on-demand home entertainment,” said Mike Dunn, Fox Home Entertainment worldwide president. “We are thrilled to partner with them and provide a wide selection of entertainment that can be accessed across many popular devices.”

The first update to the CinemaNow service is expected to release on select devices later this year and will include an advanced user interface and expanded video playback features aimed at further improving the video entertainment experience.

About Best Buy Co., Inc.

With operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, China, Mexico and Turkey, Best Buy is a multinational retailer of technology and entertainment products and services with a commitment to growth and innovation. The Best Buy family of brands and partnerships collectively generates more than $49 billion in annual revenue and includes brands such as Best Buy; Best Buy Mobile; Audiovisions; The Carphone Warehouse; Future Shop; Geek Squad, Jiangsu Five Star; Magnolia Audio Video; Napster; Pacific Sales; The Phone House; and Speakeasy. Approximately 180,000 employees apply their talents to help bring the benefits of these brands to life for customers through retail locations, multiple call centers and Web sites, in-home solutions, product delivery and activities in our communities. Community partnership is central to the way we do business at Best Buy. In fiscal 2010, we donated a combined $25.2 million to improve the vitality of the communities where our employees and customers live and work.

For more information about Best Buy, visit www.bby.com.

Best Buy Announces Movies & TV Online is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

A screenshot of WCCO's The Wire zoomed in on the timeline

People in Twin Cities social media circles got a sneak peek at WCCO’s The Wire last October and its promise looked intriguing. We here at Minnov8 were particularly pleased to see John Daenzer and crew be so bold and embracing risk as it pertains to delivering news in an increasingly changing (and fragmented) media landscape. From what we can see, it looks like the experiment is off to a very strong start.

Here’s how it works: A WCCO reporter or staffer kicks off a story in the timeline. As the story unfolds, updates are done but where it gets interesting is this: We, formerly known as the audience but geared to be highly participative in today’s online world, are able to submit relevant perspective, information, and media we capture digitally and report on the story! In essence, you can connect the dots in your own way and quickly gain additional information and other people’s perspectives on a news story (and how I wished this had been available during the Minneapolis bridge collapse since so many people had multiple angles and photos of what was occurring).

WCCO's 'The Wire' FAQ page with a video fully explaining this new way of delivering the news

After my adventure attending the WCCO hosted Bloginar in October, Minnov8′s Phil Wilson reported on The Wire with this post, “WCCO Walks The Wire.” In it he interviewed Daenzer about the effort and there is a short screencast. At the bloginar, and in subsequent discussions, Daenzer has been quite clear that they see themselves as engaging the community for input and not trying to be the “ultimate brokers of all news”. If the way that WCCO leaders, reporters and staff have leapt into the social media space and how they’re using it daily is any indication of their sincerity with engagement of the community, The Wire is going to be a resounding success.

The Wire is a platform that recognizes we all have multiple sources for news and information. It also is one that is setup to recognize that fewer of us are willing to be a passive recipient of the news, especially when we have pertinent and relevant pieces of information that really should be part of the discourse if one is to get a holistic view of a story.

With more of us online finding tidbits of information, on the scene with cameras shooting video or photos of an incident or event, The Wire embraces those of us willing to submit our contributions and someone inside WCCO adds us to the timeline if we have relevant information or facts to add to it. With The Wire we are no longer the people known as the audience, we are potentially participants in the story.

The Wire comments on Twitter (hashtag: #wccowire) have been varied thus far, from David Erickson participating with a story, to questions about the interface, to the expected and typical engagement by John Daenzer himself. The Wire has only been out for a few hours and is in “beta” status so the only way to get the ultimate “read” on its usefulness is to have people use it. As more people do use it, I’m certain we’ll see comments that are more praising, and more filled with vitriol, than these few I plucked from a Twitter search:

No question we social media early adopters will kick the tires on The Wire and give it a good shot and, if what you’re seeing above and in the Twitter search for the #wccowire hashtag, Daenzer and crew will have no shortage of ideas, suggestions, criticisms and rants to take advantage of in its beta phase and continue to quickly evolve this platform. Whether The Wire can migrate to the mainstream is another story and we’ll keep an eye on its adoption curve.

By the way, as one of the first news stations in Minnesota with a website (www.Channel4000.com done by Internet Broadcasting Systems), WCCO is no stranger to innovation or taking risks. With that willingness, WCCO’s commitment to the community (and engagement with the community), smart people like John Daenzer and crew driving these sorts of initiatives, I have no doubt we’ll see a Minnesota-led platform for the next generation of news and The Wire is a magnificent beginning.

WCCO Launches ‘The Wire’. Connect Your Own Dots is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The first offering, dubbed “Cloud Servers,” allows business users to establish an account online. They can then quickly and easily set up one or more computer servers that run in one of  VISI’s data centers and are accessible to them and their users “in the cloud” — meaning via any Internet browser anywhere in the world.  Customers of the service thereby avoid the expense and work of having to purchase and maintain their own computers servers at their own site.  ”It’s a pay-as-you-go model,” said Gary Elfert, director of marketing at VISI, which is headquartered in Eden Prairie and has its original data center in downtown St. Paul. The pricing model for these Cloud Servers is by the hour, starting at 5 cents.

Why would anyone be crazy enough to enter a market that is already dominated by notable heavyweights like Amazon?  “Though there are some large players already in the public cloud computing marketplace, it’s still a nascent business, and a rapidly growing one,” said Antonio Piraino, Research Director at Tier 1 Research, in VISI’s press announcement.  “There’s certainly room for a competitive offering such as ReliaCloud.” His firm has projected that cloud computing services will be a $1-billion market in 2011.

A local observer sees another reason a public cloud offering from VISI has a place. “It’s no secret IT directors and CEOs like knowing where their company data actually is located, which can be almost impossible with the big players’ globally dispersed data center operations,” said Graeme Thickins, a Bloomington-based technology startup advisor, who has been a consultant to VISI and is a colleague here at Minnov8. “And beyond just peace of mind, firms in many industries have compliance requirements whereby they must prove in which state or country their data resides.” With both its data centers being in Minnesota, that is not an issue for VISI’s cloud customers. And many firms in the region will also prefer working with a firm they know, he said, with people they know, and a long history of stability here in Minnesota.

What’s more, Jason Baker, CTO of VISI, added another differentiator in the company’s press announcement: “We specifically designed the new cloud service to be more reliable than the commodity providers in the market.” He also noted that “we didn’t want customers to have to re-architect their solutions just to work reliably in the cloud.”  Other goals in designing the service, said Baker, were elasticity and affordability. “We wanted customers to be able to scale from 10 servers to 100 servers, and back down again.” Regarding affordability, he said, “We made our pricing transparent and competitive — with a slick web management portal, high availability, load balancing, 24x7x365 support, and a complete API.”

VISI said the service is targeted both to IT managers in established, small to midsized firms, and to startup firms that want to take advantage of the significant economic benefits provided by running their servers and applications in the cloud.  Business users apply to be beta testers for the ReliaCloud service by filling out a one-page form at  the ReliaCloud web site.  Over time, the ReliaCloud brand will encompass a suite of cloud computing services, with “Cloud Storage” expected to be introduced in 2010. In the meantime, ReliaCloud “Cloud Servers” are complete computing environments that users can provision 24 hours-a-day, with full administrator access.

Founded in 1994, VISI is the Upper Midwest’s largest locally owned data center services and managed hosting provider, offering cloud computing, colocation, and managed hosting services.  VISI serves 10,000 customers with products and services provided through its two world-class SAS 70 Type II data centers, in St. Paul and Eden Prairie, Minnesota.  The company provides a full range of robust Web and application hosting services, first-rate Internet services and support, and personal, expert advice.

In another press release last week, VISI announced a cloud storage offering unrelated to its new ReliaCloud brand.  This service, part of its main VISI.com hosting service offerings, is a pay-as-you-go cloud offering geared for business customers whose need for storage is increasing, but can’t justify the capital necessary to expand their storage pool. With VISI Cloud Storage, there’s no need to buy new storage hardware. The new cloud storage service is “an elastic, pay-as-you go service, meaning businesses pay only for the storage and data transfer actually used,” said the announcement.  Pricing starts out at $0.25 per gigabyte per month, with no minimums or monthly contracts, “making it ideal for temporary storage requirements as well as off-site storage, backup, disaster recovery, and Web 2.0 storage.”

VISI’s Elfert said, “This initial cloud storage product is not an entirely pure ‘cloud’ service, by the strictest definition. However, it does have many benefits for companies such as per-hour pricing, no term commitments, and the ability to scale on-demand.” He added that the company expects to launch a 100% pure cloud storage offering under the ReliaCloud name soon, perhaps before the end of first quarter 2010.

Twin Cities Firm Joins Ranks of Public Cloud Computing Providers is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The seminar featured talks by Mike Sowada, CEO of Visi, shown here on stage. (Photo courtesy of Charles Robinson.) Visi is the state’s largest Internet services and hosting firm, with data centers in both St. Paul and Eden Prairie.  A talk followed entitled ”Cloud Computing as a Business Advantage” by Chris Howard, a VP at analyst/research firm Burton Group.  Jason Baker, CTO of Visi, wrapped up the event by presenting the first details of his firm’s new ReliaCloud offering, which included a live, online demo by product manager Johnny Hatch that came off flawlessly. I captured a few of the key slides for you…

The suite of ReliaCloud services starts with the obvious one called “Cloud Server,”and Visi tells me they have already signed up more than 100 qualified beta testers for the public beta of this service, now underway. There is no cost to be a beta tester, and you can sign up here. The demo made it very clear that no special knowledge is required to quickly “spin up up a server” in the cloud. Visi’s cloud service is clearly being positioned not just for IT professionals, but for business users as well. And the firm is targeting organizations of all sizes — large enterprises, midsized companies (Visi’s sweet spot), and certainly startups as well.  Cloud computing is, of course, especially a favored choice of the latter, with their minimal IT budgets.

So, Why Would a Company Choose a Regional Player Like Visi as Its Cloud Computing Provider?

The obvious advantage for Visi that I heard attendees discussing following the presentations — as compared to the large cloud players such as Amazon EC2 and Rackspace — is the peace of mind that many firms will have in knowing where their servers and data are actually located. That is, the “comfort factor” that it’s all nearby — not in some unknown location that could be on the other side of the world. Also, more responsive, local customer support — including live, 24/7 online chat that Visi will offer — will have appeal to many firms, as opposed to the big national or global players, which have support that’s largely self-service or provided only by email.

CTO Jason Baker said that the second service to be offered in the ReliaCloud suite will be “Cloud Storage,” and that pricing for that would be by Gigabyte, and highly competitive. Watch for that announcement soon — in November, I gathered.  I also learned, after the event, that the ReliaCloud service is not even officially public yet on the Visi.com web site.  But a new site — www.ReliaCloud.com — will be going live in November. In the meantime, you can start reading more at Visi’s blog, including a brief recap of the October 21st seminar, complete with PDF downloads of the slide presentations.  You can also check out other blog posts there that chronicle the ongoing construction process at Visi’s new data center in Eden Prairie — including some cool time-lapse photography — a facility that CEO Mike Sowada told me he expects to be fully up and running in December. Financing for the project took well over a year, Sowada said — “a process that would have taken three days in previous years.”

A final note: to get ongoing updates on Visi’s new ReliaCloud services, you can start following along at special new Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as a new ReliaCloud blog.

Visi Launches ‘ReliaCloud’ Services to Packed House is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Along with the demo and pitch Visi featured a presentation on Cloud Computing as a Business Advantage by Burton Group VP, Chris Howard. Chris took some time to talk about opportunities, concerns, and even the multiple definitions of “the cloud.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ktP0i143B4

The slide deck of the presentation is available now from Visi.

Our Head In The Cloud: Minnov8 Talks With Chris Howard is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Vendors like Apple and Google recognize that the cloud is central to the mobile experience. Without the ability to access ones data, sync to the desktop, laptop netbook (and soon, a tablet?) with our mobile smartphones whether we’re stationary or mobile, our digital life is fraught with nothing but frustration.

The center of the action in communication and being social surrounds mobile devices as does an increasing amount of our consumption of music, video, news and information (and if you head in to a typical retail outlet selling CD’s or DVD’s, you’ll notice a continual downtrending of floor space devoted to merchandising them because, quite frankly, sales in these categories continue to drop in bricks and mortar stores). With smartphones sporting GPS and applications that allow providers (and the marketers who work for them) to have a HUGE amount of data about usage, consumption, social, demographic and location patterns, if you were Best Buy with only stores and a website with typically limited connection to customers, what would you do?

Get in the game, of course. To that end, Best Buy has announced mIQ, a free, cloud-based service with 1GB of storage that you can sign up and use with smartphones (except the iPhone…go figure). What is mIQ?

mIQ from Best Buy Mobile helps users sync their contacts, text messages, calendar events, calls, photos, videos, and internet favorites from their mobile phones to their private web-based mIQ account. Once in sync, the user can backup and interact with their information, share their experiences with friends and social sites, discover the top solutions available for their phones, and restore their content when moving from one phone to the next.

The four key areas they pitch are: Backup your phone; Access and interact on the web; Share your experiences; Restore your phone content; which are very Apple MobileMe-like (except for Apple’s nifty Find-my-iPhone feature).

Developed by Dashwire, a privately held company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA who says about themselves, “The company is backed by investors who built the wireless and technology industries at McCaw Cellular, Western Wireless, Voicestream, Nextel, China Unicom, and Microsoft; and by Best Buy Capital.”

No question this beta mIQ offering has been in development for some time and Best Buy management is planning for the continual shift away from people buying media and interacting by walking in to a store and, instead, to interact online via a smartphone or other mobile device. Having a cloud-based service is table stakes for a retailer like Best Buy to even get in the game…let alone win it.

Want to sign up and give it a whirl? You can make a request by doing so here and submitting your email.

mIQ: Best Buy’s Cloud-based Sync & Backup is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As social media and networking continues its advance and integration in to the very fabric of our lives (which is especially the case as more of us become a part of the always on, always connected online culture) it continually intrigues us at Minnov8 that most organizations are still either taking a wait-n-see attitude toward the whole category while others have quickly become a part of the smart and select few taking calculated risks and subsequent bold actions. We’ve seen very little in-between, even as the shift in marketing and communications has accelerated as traditional media has downtrended rapidly while social media and networking use has increased dramatically (e.g., Twitter grows to 8M users).

Fallon, a division of Fallon Worldwide (a part of Publicis Groupe S.A., based in Paris), has moved forward with an innovative new lifestreaming application called skimmer. Lifestreaming is the practice of collecting one’s online digital breadcrumbs and presence — on sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube or Blogger — within applications or services which enable we connected folk to bring all of our friend and acquaintance connections (and everything we’re each doing online in all of these various online venues) together in one central place and with a single, unified application.

What is skimmer exactly? As Fallon describes the value proposition for the app they say, “Skimmer is an Adobe AIR-based desktop application that serves as a dashboard for a person’s social networks, saving people the time and hassle of manually checking Facebook®, Twitter®, Flickr®, Blogger® and YouTube® by consolidating their feeds into a single stream of real-time, relevant content on the desktop.” Skimmer was developed in conjunction with the firm that seems to be popping up everywhere, Sierra Bravo, and the application has performed flawlessly for the few days I’ve been using and feels rock-solid.

I had a chance to to talk with Chris Wiggins, Creative Director at Fallon about the motivations and strategy behind skimmer and what initially appeared to me to be fuzzy reasons why a creative brand agency would deliver such an application. I also wanted to potentially uncover whether the app they’re delivering is intended as a true value giveaway or just another scheme to surreptitiously give away a platform that would end up as another backdoor carrier of ad or messaging distribution. 

We started off talking about the motivations behind why they moved in this application direction within the context of the downtrend in traditional media distribution channels while the growing social web is shifting the need for brands to engage with their audiences.  Most agencies aren’t moving forward. “In our industry, there are a frustrating number of ad agencies who are looking at the social web in a quizzical way and poking at it and wondering what to do,” Wiggins explained. “Those agencies aren’t spending their time experimenting or getting their hands dirty actually trying to sculpt what it is.”

He was clear that this experiment, “in the grand scheme,” is a small but important step for them to have taken, but illustrative of their drive to get their hands dirty and deliver something that has true value for the social web. As I discovered, the outcome they are moving towards from this effort and giveaway is all around building the Fallon brand and, most importantly, walking-the-talk they give to clients about the brand concept they’ve strategically aligned the agency around: branded generosity.

In an January 2009 article by Fallon’s Director of Brand Innovation, John King, in Contagious Magazine (a quarterly intelligence briefing publication that identifies the ideas, trends and innovations behind the world’s most revolutionary marketing strategies), he began by positioning brand generosity in this way,

“Earlier this year, Fallon Minneapolis reached for the crystal ball. We didn’t like what we saw in the mirror. We had become schizophrenic, pitching new business under the banner of everything from ‘platform creativity’ to ‘challenger branding’ to ‘return on imagination’. We made the collective decision to call time-out. We stopped. We took a breath. We quit trying to fit words around an assignment, and stopped trying to read clients’ minds. Instead, we wrote down where the leaders of the agency saw the world going instead of what we thought could help us win the next pitch. We didn’t need another banner; we needed an altar — a movement we could all believe in.

We believe generosity is the recipe for modern branding.”

Those of us primarily in the Web space would describe this concept as the “freemium” model (a business model which works by offering basic services for free while charging a premium for advanced or pro features) but it’s much more. Even though a free entry point for a Web application is somewhat analogous to Fallon’s approach, the deeper meaning of branded generosity takes this concept to a far higher and broader level, ostensibly touching every single aspect of a brand and therefore can be a guiding principle behind delivering value to ones prospects, customers, ecosystem, or audience with the “return on generosity” being greater acceptance of the brand, more loyalty, deeper trust, perhaps delight, and all the other desired states brand builders struggle to attain.

THE PLATFORM
Curious about why they chose the Adobe AIR “container” vs. using a dashboard vendor (e.g., NetVibes) or some other method for creating and delivering a lifestreaming social web application, we talked about the relative merits of each approach and Wiggins was clear about why they chose AIR, “It’s a pretty safe bet. Especially at this point in AIR’s existence when they’re gaining such incredible momentum. I don’t remember the statistic exactly, but it was mind-blowing. Something like 10 million installs of Adobe AIR have occurred. Add to that it works on all three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) and it was the clear choice.” (UPDATE: Adobe’s PR agency saw this article and sent a correction. AIR’s install base is not 10 million, but rather 100 million).

Though Fallon sets expectations in their FAQs that they won’t be able to provide support like an app developer would (it’s free, after all) they also point out elsewhere that they do have a feature roadmap and will continue adding functionality to the app over time (including the possibility that they will deliver a “premium version” as well as a mobile version of skimmer). They’ve also been receiving many feature requests and feedback — including things like a “night mode” so there isn’t so much white — so no question they’ll continue to drive forward. Any further development will, of course, be dependent upon the level of acceptance of skimmer.

Though there are other Adobe AIR apps and web applications which deliver lifestreaming-like capabilities (e.g., TweetDeck or FriendFeed), the former is Twitter-centric and the latter is delivered as a webpage requiring a manual refresh. Skimmer is targeted at people who are engaged with multiple offerings on the social web (and whose friends are as well) and is meant to make engaging with all of these services and your friends in a more efficient and delightful way.

After our platform discussion, Wiggins wanted to step back for a moment and add something to the motivation questions I’d asked earlier. “Our overarching philosophy at Fallon is that for ad agencies to continue in the same direction — interrupting people with what they’re engaged in to deliver a message — isn’t effective now and is becoming less so all the time, especially with today’s socially connected people online. Interruptions work if the message is entertaining enough (which also hints at deeper meaning with the brand), but it’s just not enough and is far too limiting.”

He then went on to discuss how it is their belief in the imperative that all brands must deliver deeper intrinsic value to people today which engages them far longer than those sorts of fleeting messages ever would. Obviously this is the key to them expending the effort and resources to deliver skimmer and why they harnessed their creativity, and that spirit of generosity, to give something to the social web community that would add value to our lives.

FREE VALUE…FROM AN AD AGENCY?
As soon as I downloaded and began to use skimmer, I instantly noticed the gray header area with significant open space. Same thing along the left sidebar column with a lot of open white space. Both of these areas were ones that I assumed would be space within the application in which Fallon (or clients who’d deliver ads or even brand this app to give away to their own customers) would target for ad delivery once a critical mass of skimmer users had downloaded, launched and were keeping the app open all day long.

My skepticism continued since I’m acutely aware of the capability and momentum of other “containers” to deliver value (e.g., iWidgets; Sproutbuilder; BrightCove) and how most of these viral deliverables have, as a key part of their value proposition, the ability to track and quantify use (and where they’re embedded). I was thus fairly certain that there had to be some form of analytics behind the delivery of skimmer and the possibility to measure and identify location and presence by users.

As it turns out, these were faulty assumptions on my part.

Doing any of those would run counter to the entire meaning of their branded generosity philosophy and, as Wiggins so diplomatically pointed out, was “too obvious” and would be an unwelcome intrusion shunned by users and therefore be totally against their belief in that philosophy, creating a great user experience and generously delivering something of real and actual intrinsic value.

Upon reflection, I’ve realized that the folks at Fallon have completely immersed themselves in the zeitgeist of today’s social web and are making their strategic moves in an extraordinarily enlightened way and exhibiting true thought leadership in the ad agency space. As we ended our discussion, I tried to probe a bit on what’s next with their strategy of branded generosity and what Wiggins thought was particularly exciting and cool at this moment. “Ahh…I’d rather not get into that at this time,” he said with a chuckle.

I suspect we’ll be delighted.

Fallon Releases Free Social App? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

According to Mayo’s about page positioning this new blog, Each year over 500,000 unique patients from every U.S. state and nearly 150 countries come to Mayo Clinic for diagnosis and treatment. These patients and their families and friends, and 50,000 employees and students are part of a global Mayo Clinic community.

The goal for the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog is to provide a virtual place for this community to connect and share their experiences. It’s the online companion to the new newsletter for patients, also called Sharing Mayo Clinic, and is a hub that links to Mayo Clinic’s pages on other social networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube.

Unless you’re a constant observer of Mayo Clinic, you may be as surprised as I was to learn how truly significant and holistic the Mayo online presence has become, and how its online initiatives actually spring forth from the innovation DNA of the Mayo Clinic. This premiere healthcare organization is leveraging social tools to extend their reach and to ensure they’re at the points online where people are increasingly focusing their attention: the internet and web with a primary focus on social media applications.

This morning I talked briefly with Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic’s manager of social media and syndication. When I expressed my surprise at how dramatically different their online presence is compared to what I’ve seen in the past, Aase pointed out that innovation is at the heart of Mayo itself and leveraging these social media technologies in an innovative way makes perfect sense and were easily accepted within the Mayo culture. As a way to illustrate that point, he talked about how Dr. Will and Charlie Mayo invented the group practice of medicine and, along with the Franciscan Sisters, they were able to figure out how to prevent surgical infections through completely new and asceptic surgery techniques, so instead of people going to the hospital to die, they lived to tell about their experience…and did. (For more Mayo history, see this page).

Today we expect to live (or at least to know specifics about our odds of survival before surgery) and the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog is really a systemic way for 21st century stories to be told using social media and therefore to be accessible to people worldwide.

Sharing Mayo Clinic builds on Mayo Clinic’s existing social media initiatives:

Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel
The Mayo Clinic Channel has more than 250 videos for consumers to watch and share. They include patient stories, information about Mayo services and programs, background on Mayo Clinic’s history and people, and details about Mayo’s latest research and treatment advances. Through the “Share Your Mayo Clinic Story” campaign, patients are encouraged to post videos about their personal experiences with Mayo Clinic on YouTube. Patients who do not have the technical expertise or equipment to do this may have their stories recorded during their visit to Mayo Clinic.

Mayo Clinic Facebook page (Type Mayo Clinic Facebook in any search engine.)
On this social networking site, patients can tell their Mayo Clinic story, watch videos about Mayo’s latest news and research, become a Facebook “fan” of Mayo, and share it all with their friends. They also can read and discuss what others say about their experiences at Mayo Clinic.

Mayo Clinic podcast blog
Dozens of Mayo podcasts are available on this site. Mayo’s podcasts include extended conversations and news stories on many diseases and conditions, emphasizing conditions that Mayo Clinic experts treat and research. Consumers can search by topic, post comments and subscribe to have new episodes of a particular podcast delivered automatically.

Mayo Clinic news blog
In this blog, journalists and consumers can see and hear video and audio excerpts featuring Mayo Clinic physicians and researchers providing context for stories about their research and other health and medical news. They also can join discussions with other readers through the blog comments.

MayoClinic.com consumer blogs and podcasts
MayoClinic.com offers consumer blogs on topics such as stress, smoking cessation, pregnancy, nutrition, depression, diabetes and more. MayoClinic.com podcasts are available in portable audio files that contain consumer-friendly information from a Mayo Clinic expert. Consumers can sign up for RSS feeds for new blog posts and podcast topics, as well as several other content features from MayoClinic.com.

I must admit that my attention on Mayo hasn’t been too high as of late. In the mid-1990′s, while at Apple in the prepress and publishing space, Mayo remained a strong supporter and key customer of the company and I spent a fair amount of time in Rochester. Pleased that Steve Jobs had returned and new energy was being infused in to the company (e.g., the new iMac), Mayo continued to deploy Mac’s where it made sense (i.e., printing and publishing) as well as within the biomedical computing and research areas.

While calling on this organization and interacting with folks like Dr. Bijoy Khanderia, head of cardiology and chair of the I.T. Steering Committee at the time, I was always struck by: the quality of their vision; hyperfocus on the patient; long history of quality healthcare and positive patient outcomes; solid and atypically nice people with big-city smarts and small-town values; good content; and a work ethic that was pervasive throughout the organization and — combined with all those other factors — are obviously the foundation of their success. That said, it was also clear that this was a conservative organization which moved somewhat slowly on pushing the envelope, and my reaction to most of their online publishing in the past was that everything was basically an online brochure with well scrubbed content.

No more. They’re in-the-game and on-the-net in a big way.

It’s delightful to see Mayo opening up in this way and I’ll be interested to see where their online engagement leads them and how it might mold, shape and influence the course of their patient and employee interactions in the future. I presume the goal of any effort they put forth is to enhance, extend and improve the health and well-being of people in the world. To that end, reading, hearing and seeing the stories of people whose lives have been saved, made better and changed will be a powerful way to move that agenda forward.

Mayo Accelerates Their Online Presence is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Today’s hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.

Our discussion surrounded a variety of topics:

- How did the idea to open up the Best Buy catalog come about? What is the vision for Remix?
- How does it fit with broader plans or strategies of the corporation?
- Can you talk about how you came to select Mashery as your API delivery partner?
- What about higher level tools to increase access to the Remix API?

As you may have heard, a guy by the name of Keith Burtis (based in Buffalo, NY) was just hired to be community manager of the Remix program and is running the Twitter presence. During this podcast, we discussed the role of the community manager, what Keith is doing, and why it matters.

Links:

+ Kallow.com

+ Blog:  http://remix.bestbuy.com/blog

+ Twitter:  http://twitter.com/bestbuyremix

+ Kevin’s article, Agile Software Development: Bridges to the Future in BusinessWeek.

+ Follow @kevinmatheny on Twitter here.

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 19 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As they say on their site, “Remix is an API that gives you access to BestBuy.com’s product catalog data. What you do with it is up to you.”

Really? I’d assume that some sort of terms of service would be forthcoming. 

Joshua Michele Ross over at O’Reilly Radar (O’Reilly is the brain trust behind the Expo), has this excellent post about the import of Best Buy doing this:

“Best Buy is thinking much more strategically about the value of the Internet by allowing anyone to reinvent their entire online store. With “access to all the data that feeds Bestbuy.com” imagine the potential of creating your own, curated site on top of Best Buy’s catalog and supply chain. Imagine top Blue Shirts running their own online stores with select merchandise that they stand behind or imagine a thousand home-theater geeks and “go-to-guys” (and girls) extending their expertise and word-of-mouth via their own online stores.” 

I’ll throw in one more: imagine you run a price comparison site that allows an online shopper to instantly compare pricing to another (though this can be done with screen scraping, but this API makes it much easier).

I must say that with BlueShirtNation, their prediction markets, what we experienced over at the Social Media Breakfast (specifically with this video), I grow more impressed by the week with the calculated risk, openness and forward-thinking this retailer is pursuing. Kudos Best Buy.

Mashup Best Buy is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

I carry a small Panasonic Lumix camera with video capture capability with me at all times. Also in my briefcase is my M-Audio Microtrack recorder and I’ve frequently pulled it out for instant interviewing. Too often I’ve been in situations where a projector like this would’ve come in extremely handy and I’d definitely have one with me if something this small was available.

Popular Science (PopSci), having a pre-release version of this projector, agreed to wait until launch in the US, but 3M’s German subsidiary apparently beat their US counterparts to launch. PopSci does have the ‘official’ 3M press photograph on their site (the one above), and I’d encourage you to read their informative post here.

More intriguing to me, however, is that this projector appears to work in fairly bright ambient light. If you’d like to see a couple of videos of a pre-release prototype from January of this year (and it’s pretty tough to get a true feel for the quality with YouTube videos shot with a camcorder!), take a peek at this PopSci article.

At the stated price-point of $359, I predict this little gadget is going to sell like crazy.

3M Unveils Handheld Projector is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Our friend, Paul DeBettignies of MNHeadhunter, included Minnov8′s Graeme Thickins on an email, and we thought our readers — many of whom invest significant “face time” with our butts in seats working, playing and interacting with others in front of computer screens — might like to know about this upcoming TV news show segment.

Oberon, LLC and its affiliates SALO, LLC and NumberWorks, LLC will be featured on ABC News’ 20/20 in a story about innovative workplace wellness programs.  As you may have heard, Oberon was invited by the Mayo Clinic to be the first corporate partner to test the impact of movement at work on weight and wellness. The story will appear this Friday, August 1st at 9 PM CST on ABC (Channel 5 (KSTP-TV) in Minneapolis/St. Paul).

For six months starting last September, 20/20 producers were in Oberon’s offices to monitor their movements and progress. And move they did. Oberon added treadmill desks to their workspace and conference rooms. Walking meetings became more the norm than the exception.

The company is very appreciative of the opportunity provided by Mayo and Dr. James Levine to include 18 volunteers from Oberon, SALO and NumberWorks in the study.  Oberon believes that the Mayo Clinic may really be on to something new in workplace wellness, and they hope you can tune in to the ABC News’ 20/20 broadcast to see the progress that they’ve made since then.

Working Out While Working the ‘Net is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

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:

Minnesota Cup 2008 Semifinalists (Team Leader – Entry Name)

Delmar Dehn, Achievance, Inc.
Gerardo Ruiz, An Effortless Shift to Solar
Steve Sahl, Barrier1 Network Security Appliance
Rick Diamond, Breathe Laser Therapy
Kelly Lucente, Bye Bye Monster
Tim Eaton, Canoeing.com: The Ultimate Guide
Christine Horton, CoreSpine Technologies
Amy Noble Seitz, Exhibits Development Group
Robert Carr, Fruchi – the Vital Energy of Fruit
Craig Mack, Glowskin Active Illumination Systems
Deborah Brister, Hope Fish Company
John Bjelland, Infobionics: a Cellular Database Management System
Amy Lyon, Izzy Bell Advanced Baby Monitor
Elli Ansari, Klodas Foods: Fibre and Beyond
Alex Huff, loudclick.net – build websites together
John Dinnusson, Medical Device for Osteoarthritis using EMT2
Dawne Brown White, Molar Express Minnesota
William Solboe, Music Mayhem Online Gaming Network
Sue Kruskopf, MyWonderfulLife.com
John Freund, Nabbit
Shawn Rankin, Perfect Fit Health
Robert Ziebol, Pursuit Medical LLC
Joseph McEriane, Putting the care back into Healthcare
Slade Smith, Quick Mold Test
Jessica Netter, Rear Window Media Recoups Consumer Fuel Costs
David Struyk, Somnatek – Innovative Snoring Solutions
Julian Reytel, SuddenDeals.com
Jon Norris, The Future of Location-based Marketing
Adam Sellke, Tunebloom – let music grow
Tom Roering, Wilcraft
Matt Bartel, YouRankIt.com

Okay, let’s see, we have medical devices and healthcare (no surprise here in MN) … food (hey, everybody eats, right?) … death (but no taxes) … music (is there a more disrupted business out there?) … radio (see music) … local news media (did I mention disruption?) … babies (oh, cute) … snoring, mold, fish, canoing, energy savings. Oh, and marketing and IT, too. How’s that for a lineup, friends?

Minnesota Cup 2007 Student Semi-Finalists:
-Kyle Henderson, HowThree – The Next Generation of How-to
-Eric Severson, Power-2-Go: Next-Generation Laptop Power Supply
-Brian Limborg, Sirkl
-Shyam Sivaramakrishnan, Wireless respiratory carbon dioxide sensors
-Jonathan Pearce, Zipnosis

The Judges

So, who was it that culled down this list of 840 applicants to 30? A “review board of local business leaders” is how it’s stated, though the group also includes several sponsors, association and government types, and the two founders of the event. It also includes some investors in startups, angel and otherwise, who get a free, early look at a firehose of deal flow. These individuals will select the five finalists of the Minnesota Cup after reviewing the second-stage plans submitted by the 30 semifinalists — though the exact way they do that is not explained. (A simple up or down vote by each judge on each company?) This “review board” will choose the winner from among the five finalists after listening to them present their plans orally. Review board members are:
-Dave Cleveland – Cofounder, Riverside Bank
-Leslie Frecon – CEO, LFE Capital
-Art Fry – 3M Corporate Scientist (Retired), Inventor of Post-It Notes
-Skip Gage – Chairman and CEO, Gage Marketing Group
-Morris Goodwin – President and Chief Operations Officer, The Hogan Company
-Michael Gorman – Managing Director, Split Rock Partners
-Sima Griffith – Founder, Aethlon Capital
-Fred Haberman – President, Haberman & Associates
-Gary Holmes – President and Owner, CSM Corporation
-Joel Lebewitz – Partner, Lurie Besikof Lapidus & Company, LLP
-Brad Lehrman – Managing General Partner, Portage Equity Investments II, LP,and Partner, law firm of Lommen Abdo PA
-Joy Lindsay – President and Cofounder, StarTec Investments, LLC
-Scott Litman – Cofounder, Minnesota Cup, and Managing Director, SDWA Ventures LLC
-Dan Mallin – Cofounder, Minnesota Cup, and Managing Director, SDWA Ventures LLC
-Dan McElroy – Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED)
-Shawn McIntee – Partner, Maslon
-Mike Moore – Director, William C. Norris Institute.
-Jay Novak – Editor/Publisher, Twin Cities Business
-Debra Paterson – Regional President, Metro MN Community Banking Wells Fargo & Company
-Doug Ramler – Principal Co-Chair, Entrepreneurial Services Group, Gray Plant Mooty Law Firm
-Sam Richter – Chief Executive of SBR Worldwide and SVP/Chief Marketing Officer at ActiFi
-Thom Sandberg – Founder, The Kenyon Consortium
-Dale Wahlstrom – CEO, The BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota
-Jessica Zeaske – Associate Director, Venture Center, University of Minnesota
-Student Judge: John Stavig – Director, Carlson School of Management, Entrepreneurial Studies

The Next Steps

The semifinalists now have about one month to work on their semifinal entries, which are due by midnight on July 25. The review period for these semifinal entries is three weeks. The Minnesota Cup finalists will be announced on August 20, after which the finalists have two weeks to prepare for their oral presentations to the review board. The Minnesota Cup Awards Event will be held at the University of Minnesota’s McNamara Alumni Center on the evening of Thursday, September 11th. Yes, that date. Wonderful, if I want catch it, I’ll have to fly back that day after covering both the DEMOfall and TechCrunch50 conferences in California, back-to-back. So, it will be interesting comparing our state’s latest crop of promising startups to those from elsewhere in the country.

Watch for coverage of some of the MN Cup semifinalists on Minnov8 in coming weeks and months.

Thirty Semifinalists Named in ‘Minnesota Cup’ Business Plan Competition is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Instead Gary Koelling, now Senior Manager of Social Technology at Best Buy, was in the advertising department with his colleague, Steve Bendt (also now a Senior Manager of Social Technology). These two went ahead and built just such a network and did it on the cheap and outside the confines of the organization. As you’ll soon learn, they did so with great success, but this is a cautionary tale.

The BlueShirtNation adventure began because these two didn’t think their advertising was as effective as possible and they were wrestling with new methods to reach people in 2006 — especially how to reach those in the Millenials demographic — and had been doing so by going out to the stores and talking to retail employees. As they explored ways in which to connect people and have them be involved with input into messaging and advertising, they’d been playing around with podcasting and some other ideas but hadn’t hit on the right solution.

They knew that employees wouldn’t fill out surveys online or other online feedback mechanisms so Koelling, who had been using the open source content management system Drupal, cobbled together something with that platform in order to test out an idea: building some sort of destination site that employees could use to connect with one another, share content and information, and other typical uses of a social network, giving these ad guys and their department better visibility into what these customer-facing folks were thinking and experiencing in the stores daily.

Fortunately the culture at Best Buy is one of embracing change, experimentation and understanding the benefits of taking risks and sometimes failing. From their Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) project that allows employees to drive toward outcome-based work vs. putting time in at the office to the Women in Leadership Forum (WoLF), Best Buy is an organization willing to leap forward and provide support for the innovative and creative ideas of their people.

As a consequence, Koelling and Bendt quickly gained “air cover” and a small amount of funding to pursue the scalability and feature building required for this Drupal-driven social network with the goal of it being something capable of being used company-wide.

As Koelling and Bendt describe it: “It started with an idea — an idea that we couldn’t get sponsored. The idea was to create a place where employees could talk to each other. The hope was that we could learn more about what our customers were going through in the stores so we could create better marketing. People loved the idea, they talked about it, supported it, but no one would fund it.

So in June of 2006 blueshirtnation.com went online — funded by Gary Koelling. For the domain name and a year of hosting it cost a hundred dollars. The software that built the site was free. There was one user, the administrator.

After the initial hacked version was live and there was a usable prototype, people started to take notice. Management shifted and our new Chief Marketing Officer heard what we were doing. He decided to give us some time, some cover and a little money to see if this thing could grow.”

We know now that BlueShirtNation (BSN) has been a success, but Koelling and Bendt seem a bit dumbfounded by that success and even more so now that they’re being held up as some sort of thought leaders or gurus in the social-media-within-companies space. Instead, they kind of shake their heads as they explain that it was actually a fluke and that THE most important step was that they started.

Even though these two are lauded as thought-leading startup intrapreneurs who must possess some sort of “silver bullet” or able to sprinkle “magic social media pixie dust” over an audience with instructions on how to re-create their success, they will not accept this responsibility.

They’re on their fifth or sixth iteration of the site and it will continue to be honed over time, especially as more people join. 23,000 have signed up thus far and that is a sizeable number — especially since 65% are active at least once per month — but Best Buy has roughly 150,000 employees so 85% of the people in the company are not yet participating.  BSN is a work-in-progress and is, as they describe it, one that will always be so.

Quantifying results of BSN is a bit of a challenge — they don’t currently have sophisticated analytics or tools to harvest knowledge or conversations — but another story did illustrate the effectiveness of Best Buy people connecting on BSN. “We delivered The 401K Challenge — a video contest hosted on BSN to promote enrollment in our 401K. The simple assignment of creating a video in your words that tells others about the benefits of the 401K program.

The buzz and impact of the contest resulted in a 30% increase in 401K enrollments. That’s 40,000 employees signing up for the 401K that hadn’t before.”

DEVELOPING THE SITE
Koelling and Bendt gave a presentation at the February 2008 Social Media for Internal Communications conference, where they described their initial development process:

“The first thing we did was get to know the people that we thought would want to use it. We held what we called Hack Slams. Twenty volunteers from our stores came to Minneapolis to talk about BSN. We sat in a room, talked politely about what it is and then went bowling. We went bowling to get to know each other. We took cameras. We ate pizza. We came back and got honest. We talked about what really sucked about the current site. We took the pics and videos from bowling and posted them to the site. We talked about what it would take for them to use the site. We made changes to BSN right there in the room. Then we talked about those changes.

We talked about things like trust and anonymity on the site. We talked about things that would ruin the experience for them and make them never come back. We talked about the things that would make them want to tell others to join.

After the Hack Slams we went out on the road. We personally visited 130 stores across the country. We brought stickers and t-shirts. We met with thousands of employees and told them a simple message. “We built a site that’s kind of like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Digg. Its just for Best Buy employees. Here’s a t-shirt- will you check it out? If you like it, tell others. If you think it sucks — go ahead and post it on the site.”  We did both.

While all of this was going on, we tried to stick to a few key principals. Build the site fast, be able to adapt quickly, listen closely. We focused on winning the trust of the most skeptical audience which was our store employees. We did that by talking 1:1 with them in our store visits. Promoting the site in ways that were frankly counter culture. We tried to address the main problem they told us- “My opinion doesn’t matter.”

Building upon an open source, content management system like Drupal could’ve been a support challenge, though with no budget there wasn’t any way BSN could have been started without using free software.

Koelling didn’t express any second thoughts about building on Drupal, and he and Bendt told a fun story about one experience working with the responsive and strong community surrounding this open source project that is telling:

“We needed some help trying to get a module to work and there was this student from Italy whom we met through the Drupal forum, his name is Fabio, and it turned out he’d worked on that module. “Could we pay you to help us?” we asked, but he was a student, he cautioned us several times that it would “be expensive,” and that we’d have to wait until he was done with his school term. When he was finally available, he completely re-configured the module, we gave him a login in to BSN so he could install and configure it, and he finally billed us for the incredibly low sum of $500! We even paid him via PayPal!” The guys chuckle about this since it illustrates the true nature of the skunkworks that BSN was, and in some respects still is, today.

In a show of Drupal and open source community support, the BSN team has even placed modules back into the community.

WHAT’S NEXT?
In general, employees using BSN talk about how to make Best Buy a better place. Improve on the things they don’t do well, share the things that the company does do well, talk about and express the culture that they hold, and even talk about experiences they have had with customers — both good and bad.

Koelling and Bendt are now involved in a new, stealth adventure at Best Buy that is social media related (and you’ll hear more about this on Minnov8 in the coming weeks), though they’re still actively sought out for advice about how others can repeat their BSN success within other companies.

They don’t think others can, and this is truly why BSN is seen as a fluke by these guys.

They both strongly believe that — unlike the culture within Best Buy — in most companies this sort of effort is a top-down, strategy/project/planned adventure. There is pressure to move fast; it looks dangerous and seemingly fraught with all sorts of legal and human resource risk; it flattens the organization; empowers employees to talk about the good (and especially bad) about the company and its leadership; measurement will be critical and demanded; and there will be a drive toward perfection before it’s launched….and it will fail miserably.

Their advice? Start small. Find the people that are passionate about it. Give them freedom, give them cover when they need it, give them a small budget, and most of all, give them time. Let them learn, let the idea grow, and encourage them to fail. Better yet, require them to fail and often.

BlueShirtNation: Success from Risking Failure is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The recently released on-line game “Budget Hero” launched in May by American Public Media in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, may not get you spot at the cabinet table; it could give you valuable insight into the budget process.

According to Michael Skoler, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Journalism at American Public Media, “Budget Hero is a new type of journalism that gives people the big picture on the complex and fragmented federal budget process. We created this news game to help Americans feel they can understand and participate in the national debate over the election, the budget and the direction of our country.”

Skoler shared with me that the game was in the talking stages for over a year and a half. “We sometimes thought we were crazy to build something as ambitious as a game…something that was journalistically sound yet simple enough for all to understand and take part in.“ With the involvement of many firms, think tanks, the Budget Office, as well as help from game development consultant Ben Sawyer, Budget Hero soft launched in May.

“The saying ‘you can’t understand until you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’ best describes Budget Hero,” said David Rejeski, who heads the Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “The game empowers players to take on the role of our government officials and allows anyone to try out their solutions and ideas on how to manage the federal budget.”

So let’s play…

Both audio and graphics are very appealing, giving you the feeling you’re playing inside a “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoon. Instructions are clear and easy to understand, completely unlike the legislation process you’d really have to endure in real life. Once through the “briefing” and just a few clicks into the game you realize this is much trickier than another round of Clue or game of Life with the family. And this definitely is no Guitar Hero (Slash would be so busted.)

[viddler]4835b00f&[/viddler]

View the introduction to Budget Hero

You can open up large categories of the budget and review “cards” that represent specific policy decisions. You make your policy decisions by “playing” the card or cards that align with the values you chose early in the game. So under Defense and Diplomacy, for example, you may choose to pull all troops from Iraq by 2010, withdraw troops over five years, or stay the course in Iraq and add two new Army divisions.

Your experience with the game is enhanced by working to achieve a variety of financial and policy goals. Financial goals might include balancing the federal budget by a certain year, eliminating the national debt or limiting the size of government by keeping it at a certain percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (or GDP, which measures the size of the economy). Policy goals might include providing universal health coverage, fully funding No Child Left Behind, or raising or lowering income taxes.

While it’s quite the juggling act and incredibly challenging, the real value is in the learning. I never really accomplished all that I wanted in my first session though, my fellow Americans, I’m not sure you would be that much worse off under my proposed budget…well maybe. However, I thoroughly enjoyed digging into the cards to explore the pros and cons. Even the best of intentions have their downsides. The site also allows you to learn how the choices were made for the game allowing even more insight to the process and the power of the decisions made.

And that’s the point of Budget Hero: finding out what impacts our federal budget from many sides. “Budget Hero is unique in that it provides the player with immediate feedback on how their choices affect the federal budget in terms of revenues, spending, deficit and debt, and the economic, societal and individual impact of their policy choices,” stated Skoler.

Not just a way for individuals to learn, Budget Hero also allows you to compare how your policy choices and budgets stack up to other players across a wide range of demographic groups based on gender, income, age, political loyalty or region. American Public Media is also hosting an online discussion for players of “Budget Hero” on group discussion site Gather in this area here. Skoler adds, “And the game collects the choices players make, as well as their comments, so our journalists learn how people think through the budget debate.”

Budget Hero is also available as a widget for the websites of public radio and television as well as commercial news organizations. It’s likely you’ll hear more about it between now and November. So go play the game and, if all goes well maybe we’ll see you on the ticket. Me, I think I’ll take another crack at the family budget. We have a far less complicated foreign policy.

Budget Hero Arrives Compliments of American Public Media is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Nabbit was born some two years ago as Freund and his team at Jump Technologies were discussing the eBay purchase of Skype. “I remember saying how great it would be to have 50 million subscribers to anything.” The discussion included colleague (and radio fan) Norton Lam’s thoughts about tagging radio content. So was the birth of Nabbit. According to Freund, “The first year we dedicated about 10% of Jump Technologies resources to Nabbit.” That has clearly grown as Nabbit has evolved, indicating a great deal of confidence in the potential of the business.

At first, it truly was a “content play” offering listeners of radio the ability to tag songs and advertisements via internet enabled cell phones. Those tagged pieces of content are placed into the Nabbit user’s account for later action including purchase or artist and advertiser info.

“We found that while users were tagging music they were actually tagging more advertising and the calls to action that they provided.” This led to what Nabbit describes as the first service that allows marketers to combine broadcast, mobile, direct response, and online advertising into one integrated consumer marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works.

Once a consumer downloads the free application to their internet enabled mobile phone they assign stations to the buttons on the phone. When they hear something they want to “nabb” they press the button for that station. If it’s an ad, the Nabbit Ad engine springs into action. Not only is a copy of the ad placed in the listener’s account, it can also send a text coupon or place a call to their phone though the Nabbit Callback feature (and it should be noted that all the features are opt-in via the user’s Nabbit account).

This is where Nabbit’s media relationships come in. Freund and Nabbit have been working with radio station KTTB (B96) here in the Twin Cities (CBS isn’t the first). Freund says that the desire for exclusivity by stations was a barrier to getting deals going with the bigger companies. It took plenty of proof, and persuading, the likes of CBS that Nabbit truly needs to be on as many stations as possible in order to be successful.

There are still barriers that Nabbit will face from a revenue generation standpoint. The service is free to consumers so the business model is based on advertising revenue sharing with media partners. According to a quote from the press release on the Nabbit/CBS partnership, CBS VP/GM of CBS Radio in Minneapolis explained, “Nabbit offers our advertisers a unique ability to leverage multiple advertising platforms while at the same time benefiting our listeners by making our stations interactive.” Of course, there is no mention of whether radio will be be successful at selling this new platform in addition to all of the other products they must sell, but at least for CBS, there is a commitment to new platforms and to making this partnership work.

From a consumer/user’s standpoint, one might say (and I’m one) the need to download and access an application — which is how Nabbit is currently delivered — is a bit of a challenge for some mobile users. Nabbit seems to be on top of this issue. They will address it by providing an SMS process for tagging content within the next few months, according to Freund, and removing the need for an application download and a configuration on ones mobile phone. (Update: Nabbit also provides access via mobile browser at http://m.nabbit.com.)

John Freund is well aware of the marketing and education process that lies ahead. In addition to targeting the tech community and other PR initiatives, there is much they expect from those radio stations that participate. Introducing the Nabbit technology and trademarked words like “nabb” mean there are high expectations for those media partners to clearly explain and provide benefit to listeners and creating demand for using Nabbit. The advertiser side is bit easier. When you can supply multiple marketing channels and deliver — not only consumers to the advertiser’s doorsteps but can deliver proof of performance with metrics based on actual use — you go a long way in addressing advertiser resistance.

According to Freund there are currently 1,500 Nabbit users in the Twin Cities. Projections call for 20,000 in the next 2 months and 1.7 million in the first year. After a planned national rollout in two months, Nabbit hopes to have 10 million users by the end of 3 years. With deals pending that may or may not include Clear Channel here in the Twin Cities Nabbit, self funded by the employees and 2 additional partners, hopes to be profitable within one year. Freund explains, “The goal is to keep the company small. The largest area of employee growth will come from sales and marketing but we are certainly adding staff in all areas.”

Nabbit is one a many technology driven companies that are looking at and acting on ways to merge traditional media with new media to increase the share of advertising dollars for both sides.

Nabbit Moves Beyond Tagging is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

If one had any doubt about the intensity of our state’s information technology and Internet community, one only had to be anywhere inside the U’s Coffman Union on Saturday for the third annual Minnebar “unconference” (part of an international phenomenon called Barcamp). To say the joint was a-jumpin’ simply does not suffice. And numbers alone don’t tell the story (though attendance was an event record at 430). Rather, it was the intensity of energy through the entire day that could only impress one about this somewhat quiet, and definitely underrated, sector of Minnesota’s economy.

I was there for at least 12 hours of the event — yes, it went on that long, and no one was complaining — and I can surely say that even the most skeptical of attendees who sacrificed part of their spring weekend were impressed with what they experienced, and left beaming with an elevated sense of pride in the industry they’re a part of. One needs only to scan the voluminous talk that went on in real-time — thanks to the magic of Twitter, and all archived here — to see that something big was happening in the Gopher state on this rainy fishing-opener Saturday. (In fact, Minnebar was ranked during the day as one of the top-five conversations going on in the entire, global “Twitterverse.”)

Speaking of Gopher, that’s when the Internet industry really started here — back in the early ’90s with the invention of the browser by that name. It flourished for a few years, but, alas, was disrupted by a little thing called Netscape (first called Mosaic), and soon was relegated to just a note in history. But our state’s involvement in Internet development began thriving in the ’90s and has continued in many ways ever since.

The industry has some notable local companies, who collectively employ thousands, such as Digital River, Internet Broadcasting, and Dow Jones’ local operations (which began life as BigCharts and was soon acquired by MarketWatch), not to speak of Minnesota being home to top-50 ecommerce destinations like BestBuy.com, Target.com, and ShopNBC. But the core of Minnesota’s Internet industry are the developers, designers, engineers and other technologists, marketers, and entrepreneurs who gathered on Saturday at Minnebar, and the many hundreds of smaller entities many of them work for, not to speak of the countless new startups and products they’re building, or just beginning to plot in their minds.

What did the attendees do all day, throughout the many meeting rooms of the wonderful new Coffman Union? Well, the event was organized by two volunteer developers named Ben Edwards and Luke Francl (and anyone they could get to help them), and it featured no less than 40 sessions, all proposed and led by attendees themselves, on a wide variety of technical, design, business, and marketing topics, as we identified in this blog last week here. Several sponsors, who picked up the tab for everything, included the U of M’s Software Engineering Center (the venue sponsor), Split Rock Partners, SwarmCast, FindLaw, SierraBravo, and ipHouse. Probably the biggest highlight of the day was the noon panel on The State of Technology in Minnesota (see our previous post for the audio link). But it became apparent as the day progressed that it was really the networking — the interchange between the attendees — that was surpassing even knowledge-sharing as most valuable benefit for most of the attendees.

Some Key Takeaways

As someone who attends many of these local gatherings, and reports on several national Internet industry events as well each year, I can truly say I was impressed with the impact this event had — on so many levels. As I thought about it over the weekend, I realized I left with not only a much-renewed excitement for Minnesota’s Internet technology and software community, but many great takeaways. Here are some of them:

• Networking is something our community needs more of, getting out from behind the keyboard and meeting people, mixing it up. One panelist talked about the need for more “dense networks” as something Minnesota’s tech community can learn from Silicon Valley. (And I say that means local, national, and social networking — everything.)

• We may focus too much here in Minnesota on our own state/region. We must remember we’re really in a global market, and must constantly strive to be world class — not just to emulate other, better known tech regions in the U.S. We need to benchmark against the best, wherever they may be, and that can be anywhere, to build great companies here in our state.

• There’s a real pride here in Minnesota. Techies love it here, and don’t want to leave! Many who did previously have returned. This is a strength that we can very definitely build on.

• We need to do more to connect the outstanding technology students on the East Bank with the great business students at the Carlson School on the West Bank.

Minnesota’s Internet Tech Crowd Flexes Its Muscle is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

They come to talk shop, learn, share tips, listen to presentations on the latest tech developments and tools, share war stories, listen to startup pitches, and (of course) take notes, blog, and Twitter about all the proceedings on the laptops and smart phones they never seem to have far from their sides.

The nice thing is, especially for the many self-employed among them, is that it’s all free — breakfast, lunch, a closing reception, even a free event t-shirt, and, best of all, more wi-fi bandwidth they they can possibly consume in one day — all courtesy of a bevy of sponsors that covet the attention of this highly influential and hard-to-reach group. The sponsors for this year’s event include VC firm Split Rock Partners, ipHouse, Swarmcast, SierraBravo, FindLaw, and the U of M’s Software Engineering Center (which is a special venue sponsor).

The original organizers of Minnebar — and its companion events called Minnedemo, which are evening gatherings that happen the other three quarters of the year — include three Twin Cities developer/entrepreneurs by the names of Dan Grigsby, Ben Edwards, and Luke Francl. (Edwards and Francl planned the ’08 edition of Minnebar.) The April ’07 event, held in St. Paul, had the distinction of being the largest Barcamp ever held in the U.S. to that date.

Something For Everybody

Sessions at this year’s events — all suggested by and conducted by the attendees themselves, many of them forming into panels, include such topics as these:

• The 7 Deadly Sins of Startup Marketing

• Scaling High-Traffic Web Sites

• Blogging for Benjamins: How To Turn Your Topical Blog Into Cash

• Communication For Geeks: How to Influence Your Boss, Your Customers, and Your Team

• From Programming to Profit: Skills To Pay The Bills

• Merb 1.0: Ruby on Rails that Scales

• The Mathematical Foundations of Music

• Enterprise Information Mashups: Web 2.0 + SOA + Data Visualization

• Distributed Teamwork: Managing Virtual Development Teams

• And much more…

A Soapbox for Pitching New Ideas

Minnebar even has a “Lightning Talks” session that gives anyone the opportunity to sign up to give a five-minute demo or presentation, whether it be a new technical idea or business concept, or perhaps you’re an existing startup that wants to update the attendees on your latest progress or product introductions. Anyone who wants to sign up for a Lightning Talk pitch may simply to go to the event wiki site, specifically to the Minnebar Sessions page, and look for the email link to apply. Or, to sign up for a full session (which can be 15-30 minutes or more), have your session title and description ready, then hit Edit Page and enter that information. Just be aware that time is running short, as the organizers will need to cut things off soon to publish the full schedule for Saturday’s event.

To simply sign up to attend (pre-registration is not necessary, but certainly recommended), just go to that same Minnebar wiki page, click on Edit Page at the top, and enter your name and company name or link at the bottom.

I’ll be at the event, along with the entire Minnov8 team of contributors, reporting on all the action. Watch our blogs or Twitter pages (as identified in the bios in the “About Minnov8″ tab at the top), if you can’t make it. For example, I’ll be posting at www.twitter.com/graemethickins throughout the day. But nothing beats being there in person! This is one fun, high-energy event, and really a must-attend if you’re involved in any way in Minnesota’s Internet or software industry. So, we hope to see you there!

UPDATE (5/5/08):  Forgot to mention!  Minnebar’s organizers have also mentioned there may be a “pre-event mixer” either this Thursday or Friday.  Keep watching the Minnebar site for details on where and when…

‘Minnebar’ Becoming Top Event for State’s Internet/Software Developers and Entrepreneurs is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

According to the U’s own business development people (see link to Powerpoint presentation at bottom), the 20-year success record of the U’s technology company spinoffs is only half the university average nationally — and less than one-fourth the success record of the nation’s premier schools. What’s more, in one recent year (2004), for example, the U of MN spun off only one company compared to 14 at the University of Michigan and 16 at the University of Illinois. Why I am focusing here on spinoffs? Well, because, according the U’s own business development people, creating university spinoffs is “much more profitable than licensing (revenues)” to the school.

And, besides, the largest source of the U’s licensing revenues will run out soon. That was the focus of a recent Sunday feature in the StarTribune by my friend Thomas Lee, entitled U’s Transfer Problem: The University of Minnesota needs more eggs … and more baskets. With time running out on its royalty income stream, the U is scrambling to find the next Medtronic. An excerpt:

Judging from the university’s recent track record of converting its vast reservoir of research into cash, the U faces an uphill climb. The school that’s known for inventing the pacemaker, the heart valve and one of the Web’s first Internet browsers is desperate for a hit.

At a time when the state’s economy is slowing and its medical device sector is maturing, the U’s long commercialization slump has attracted the urgent attention of lawmakers, venture capitalists and others concerned about where Minnesota’s next Medtronic or St. Jude will come from.

The next day, we find this look at innovation at the U is a two-part series in the StarTribune, with another article appearing by Thomas Lee, this one entitled: His Job: Magician – The University of Minnesota’s research VP brings his experience honed in Madison to jump-start innovation in the Gopher state. In this piece, we hear about specific programs the U has undertaken since 2005 in an attempt to make up for the expected drop off in licensing revenues, starting next year.

One of Mulcahy’s first priorities when he arrived in Minnesota was to recruit industry professionals like former Honeywell executive Jay Schrankler to run the Office of Technology Commercialization. The office traditionally had been staffed with academics who had little or no business experience.

In the past, many of the university’s start-ups failed because the school lacked the business talent to fully develop the ideas before it sought outside capital, experts say.

The school hired a half dozen “strategy managers” with experience in fields like software, pharmaceuticals and medical devices to determine if faculty research or technology can be licensed or spun out into new companies. The Venture Center, under former investment banker Doug Johnson, launched a “CEO in Residence Program” in which outside entrepreneurs and business people regularly examine potential start-ups, mentor MBA students and help structure deals.

The article says the U has set some lofty goals compared to the numbers I cite in my first paragraph above. To wit:

Schrankler and Johnson say their goal is to spin off three companies a year, including one that has the potential to go public in five years with at least a $250 million market value. They also hope to generate $50 million to $60 million in royalty income annually.

Johnson said, “There is plenty of world-class technology at the U.” He cited a company called Orasi Medical, which the U recently spun out, and another university medical startup that several VC firms are interested in. He also cited the work of a medical researcher at the U, Dr. Doris Taylor, which recently received wide attention:

• Here’s the story as published by UMNnews: Researchers Create a New Heart in the Lab: Work Opens a New Path to Replacement of Hearts and Other Organs.

• The day before, the doctor’s work was published by the journal Nature Medicine: Technical Report abstract – Nature Medicine 14, 213 – 221 (2008).

• And here’s how the New York Times reported the breakthrough that same day: Researchers Create New Rat Heart in Lab.

Dr. Taylor will be the keynote speaker May 29 at the U of M Alumni Association’s 2008 Annual Celebration, being billed as “The Heart of Discovery,” and the featured guest is Earl Bakken, the founder of Medtronic. Tickets are available to the general public at the alumni association web site.

What’s the take of the investment community to the U’s latest initiatives in technology commercialization? Well, one VC gives the U a big thumbs-up. David Spreng is a Minnesota native (and U of M grad), and is now based in Palo Alto, CA, as Managing General Partner of Crescendo Ventures. On his blog, called “Lightbulb,” he wrote an upbeat blog post citing Doug Johnson’s CEO-in-residence program: The University of Minnesota May Have Cracked the Code.

(By the way, here’s a link to the Powerpoint presentation I mentioned at the beginning of this post, actually a PDF: A Presentation on Industry/Academic Partnerships, by Doug Johnson, Office of Business Development, University of Minnesota, which is dated May 2006.)

What’s your take on the U of M as a source of technology innovation? What about the Institute of Technology — are you aware of any promising new technologies coming out of the computer science and EE programs? Is medical technology sucking all the oxygen away from IT and Internet startups in Minnesota? And do the innovations that really matter happen outside the walls of academia, anyway?

Speak your piece in the comments.

The Latest on U of M Technology Innovation and Commercialization is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.