“We’re coming into this space early, and already we are seeing amazing traction,” said Scott
Litman, Magnet 360 founder and managing partner (photo), in the company’s news release.  “Our clients – executive leaders – are recognizing that social is the next big thing that will transform the way we do business and engage with customers and other audiences.  They are looking to us to help build and manage programs that will deliver meaningful and measurable outcomes.”

The news release said the new entity’s offerings will include CRM, social, mobile, user experience, agile application development, insights and analytics, marketing automation, and channel marketing – “all key components of an enterprise social strategy.”

The company said its social focus, paired with its deep technical capabilities, is “what will make Magnet 360 unique among agencies.” It quoted Jim Schroer, Magnet 360 investor and former EVP Global Sales, Marketing, and Service for Chrysler:  “The demand for this kind of integrated offering is huge. Companies need to embrace social to stay competitive.  That doesn’t mean that existing marketing programs go away – but it does mean that they need to integrate to an overall social strategy.  Today’s big agencies were built for a TV-centric marketing world; Magnet 360 is shaping itself around the new integrated, social world.”

The company said the combined forces of Magnet 360 and Reside are already working with several leading brands to plan and implement social business programs.  Active clients include General Mills, Ecolab, Medtronic, 3M, Honeywell, Toro, AMC Theaters, and Carnival Cruise Lines.  It said the new Magnet 360 organization is planning for market expansion and rapid growth.

“We’ve worked with hundreds of clients to help them implement cloud solutions with social elements,” said Matt Meents (photo), Reside founder and now Magnet 360 Managing Partner, in the news announcement.  ”But that was just the tip of the iceberg.  This combination allows us to enable the social business holistically, with total integration between marketing and IT and with exponentially greater bandwidth.  It’s a very opportunistic time for our clients – both B2B and B2C – and we’re excited to help them gain huge competitive advantage in this space.”

Update 4/5/12:  The “new” Magnet 360 has more than 60 employees in total, the majority in Minneapolis. It also has a New York office.  The company said “all Reside and Magnet 360 employees have been retained in this transaction.” It also stated it is currently on a $15M annual run rate, with plans to grow revenue to $20M total in 2012.

Magnet 360 Acquires Reside, Rebrands as ‘Social Enterprise Agency’ is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

MIMA Summit 2011: Getting ‘Social’ With the Mall of America is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve been *so* wanting these folks to come to our town, and was delighted to represent Minnov8 at the event, along with my colleague Steve Borsch.  Tech Cocktail’s events have the stated purpose of “helping connect, amplify, and showcase the local technology scene” — and it’s now held such events in more than 20 cities, founder Frank Gruber told me.  The local sponsors who made this one happen were W3i and Ovative Group — kudos to them! (And a special shout-out to our friend Kim Garretson.)

Tech Cocktail Mixes It Up In Minneapolis is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Their startup coincides with a rising trend in game play and specifically an explosion in online games. Further, promotional forces like Dr. Jane McGonigal, an influential author and occasionally controversial visionary from U.C. Berkley believes that games can solve real-world problems through increasing the amount of time spent playing games to 21 billion hours per week by 2020. There is little doubt that gaming will continue to be an extremely important global activity.

The introduction of platforms like the Nintendo Wii, the Apple iPad, and the Sifteo Cubes has opened up a variety of new options for games. The social-gaming company Zynga has been steadily building innovative games delivered over social networking platforms like Facebook. The MIT Technology Review reported last week that Zynga is planning to produce a drastically more complex, strategic, and socially interactive gave than ever before. In a TechCrunch article last year, it was estimated that half of all Facebook users play games and that 40% of the time spent on Facebook is devoted to social games like those developed by Zynga. Clearly, there is an extensive amount of activity and data being generated through these evolving social interactions in massively multiplayer online games (MMO). 

The founders of Ninja Metrics have designed a technology platform, called the Katana Engine, to understand players’ behaviors in these new online communities. This platform provides a dashboard to help users understand patterns and predictive information which is computationally generated behind the scenes of the system. Dr. Williams describes this business as “providing analytics in social spaces, with both monitoring and predictive work.” These analytics, which consist of both proprietary algorithms and standard methods, are initially being applied to game data generated by players and collected by developers.

The Katana Engine enables analysis about what gamers did in-game, providing key insights into game mechanics.

This product is largely based on collaborative interdisciplinary research from the areas of social science and computer science. Specifically, social science theories have been meshed with advanced methods from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to assist in accurately predicting human behavior in this system. Dr. Williams goes on to describe a particular competitive advantage from their research which has been baked into the product. He said, “Our primary innovation is an algorithm that can measure social influence within friendship groups. Whereas many companies know how to take advantage of social network research and report who is most connected or central, we can provide who influences whom, and to what extent.” Determining these social influences provides insight into value characteristics of players or actors in the network.

These benefits can extend outside the context of social gaming to industries like telecommunications, retail, and healthcare. While this team’s initial focus is MMO or casual game analysis, which applies to thousands of titles in an exploding online space, their platform is suitable for anyone with large-scale data where people interact. Walmart beefed up its online presence through sophisticated social identity analysis with the purchase of Kosmix to form the entity @WalmartLabs. There is a compelling case for Minnesota-based Target, which recently brought its online stores control back in-house from Amazon, to pursue similar strategies.

Ninja Metrics is utilizing social analytics to help make sense of human behavior, whether it is through game interactions or mountains of data from established industries. Their research-oriented methods, partnerships with universities and overall passion in this space are all a function of innovation for this Minnesota company. 21 billion hours per week of game-play by 2020? We’ll have to see.

Predicting Human Behavior through Games is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

In today’s online media, content must be shareable, give me added value world, “On” is a brilliant strategy to be deeply involved in delivering high value content for a variety of needs and create even more reasons to lean on Best Buy for ones technology.

There is a lot of content at Best Buy On, but we went there today specifically to seek any content related to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) going on right now in Las Vegas. Take a peek at this CES press preview where the Best Buy crew shot video:

CES is THE place for most manufacturers in the world to rollout their new gadgets and tech. Today we’ve been viewing videos, listening to podcasts and reading blog posts about all the hot introductions at CES in anticipation for tomorrow’s recording of the Minnov8 Gang podcast.

Here’s the potential problem with how easy it is to be plugged in to CES’ introductions: Consumers who are interested in knowing what’s coming in the near future are consuming that exact same content! I’ve often wondered: wouldn’t consumers knowing the next generation technology shown at CES this week virtually kill the sales of the current products on the Best Buy shelves today? It stands to reason that if someone sees the next, hottest, must-have gadget in some CES recap online (and we can safely assume that that product will be on store shelves within weeks), wouldn’t consumers just wait to buy that new one?

Maybe…maybe not. Since the the watchword for any retailer is “sell what’s on the shelves,” peek at this CES-centric video and see how beautifully Best Buy has simply mentioned CES with scenes ostensibly showing a glimpse of the future, but instead emphasizing what they have in store, in stock, right now:

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

The Good: The site is beautifully done and easy to navigate. The categories of videos and other content are nicely targeted. The open source Kaltura player they use for playing the videos is embeddable for easy content sharing by bloggers and social media users. The content is very fun to watch and is quite entertaining.

The Bad: Video is maybe too slick and too high level. As I viewed several of the videos, blog posts and other content on Best Buy On, I realized that my reaction was that I was pretty certain that I’d probably not watch any more of them. Nor would it be likely I’d pass any of them along to the “newbies” in my life since the content is too “lite” to properly educate a newbie. Though I’ll check back in a few weeks to see what new content is up, the current videos are, unfortunately, as informative as a spec sheet or pamphlet.

What I’d *really* like to see are deep and comprehensive How-To videos that literally walk someone through challenging integrations in the home and are solutions-oriented. When I bought my home theater setup with new HDTV at Best Buy Eden Prairie, I’m enough of a geek that there was NO question in my mind I’d set it up myself but it turned out to be A LOT more complex than I’d anticipated.

It seems that the HDMI copy protection, Sony A/V receiver that didn’t pass HDMI audio through to the TV, a Sony BluRay player that didn’t output audio with interactive DVDs without significant changes to the settings, and a few other “gotchas,” were obstacles to a simple setup. It also made me realize why “Joe SixPack” needs the Geek Squad, but that thought angered me since this shouldn’t be that hard and most non-geeks would be forced to pay to have all of this stuff hooked up for them.

Not that Best Buy On How-to videos would be intended to replace the Geek Squad, but I can see that it would be an enormous value-add for those of us capable of figuring it out on our own…but with a little help from “On” videos. Of course, a tech-literate future customer base is what Best Buy will inherit in the not-too-distant future and these tech-savvy consumers will demand that sort of help (and if I were Best Buy On management, I’d certainly pressure vendors to pay for those How-to videos for their products!).

All that said, I am continually impressed by the risk-taking and willingness to try different approaches by the team at Best Buy. As THE dominant player in the marketplace, many organizations would simply sit on their hands and enjoy the position of strength. But not these folks at Best Buy….they’re not only continuing to innovate, they’re accelerating their innovation!

Best Buy “On” Officially Debuts is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Recently I sat down with the executive director of The Table Project, Ken Finsaas, to learn more about the project, their mission and get some more background. I have to admit that I was more than a bit skeptical about YASN (Yet Another Social Network) being developed when I was introduced to Ken by a guy I know who specializes in placing senior leadership in tech organizations (Kevin Spanbauer, a Senior Partner at VTL Search in Eden Prairie).

My skepticism came from the fact that there are so many other social networking, group collaboration and other similar platforms already in existence. Since Ken has a senior leadership background in I.T. systems, consulting, and outcome-based project delivery, it wasn’t until meeting him and understanding more about their approach—and mostly because Ken later provided me with login credentials so I could poke around inside The Table and actually experience what they’re delivering—that I completely changed my mind and realized that YASN for churches was not only needed, but perfectly positioned for the next phase of growth and meaningful connections by church-going youth.

(Click for larger image)

An non-profit organization called YouthWorks is the parent organization spearheading The Table Project. YouthWorks’ purpose is to, “…provide life-changing, Christ-centered youth mission opportunities. This is our reason for being. We create extraordinarily fun and significant mission adventures, targeted to the needs and capabilities of youth, ages 12-19.” That organization sprung forth due to a recognition that outside-the-U.S. mission trips were incredibly costly and beyond the reach of most youth and their families. Besides the positive impact on youth who engage in these mission trips, YouthWorks saw a great need right here on U.S. soil for youth to help communities and individuals in a myriad of ways.

Experiencing the acceleration in the always-on, always-connected, increasingly-mobile, and socially connected young people that comprise the core demographic YouthWorks serves, The Table Project was begun to empower churches to deliver a platform to connect their members together, while simultaneously extending their respective ministries in to the online and social realm, and to be where young people are increasingly congregating, connecting and socializing….and that’s online.

So is it likely that YASN for churches will work?

The beauty of the The Table Project platform is how simple it is to use and configure. From the moment I logged on the little touches impressed me. The signup process had elegant javascript transitions and the flow of the process (one which often feels jarring) was simple and visually attractive.

A box popped up to ask me if I wanted to take a tour or skip it and dive in. It took me just a few minutes to go through the tour, perfect for the non-web-savvy anxious to get going, but the logical and intuitive layout means that a youthful user with any online experience would be up-n-running in seconds.

APPLICATIONS
Next I jumped in to poke around adding apps. For a pre-launch platform I’m very impressed with what is already available. Facebook and Twitter are here, but The Table Project has curated many others like: USA Today; Dropbox; TED Talks; eBible; Calendar; and dozens of others. By integrating these sorts of applications within The Table Project, the intent is to make it a core place youth will hang out online and help to make their church something other than a place they appear at on Sunday and possibly in a group or two during the week.

(Click for larger view)

CHURCH INTEGRATIONS
Also seeing that The Table Project couldn’t be some “thing” that sits “out there” on the internet separate from a church itself, Ken and crew have already taken strategic steps to partner with leaders in the church space.

One such organization is Fellowship Technologies, a provider of web-based church management software solutions used by ministries around the world. While Fellowship offers rudimentary social networking within their solution suite, they instantly recognized the quantum leap forward made by The Table Project and ensured that those churches opting to extend their member’s social experience to The Table could manage aspects of it from Fellowship’s dashboards.

WILL THEY SUCCEED?
Will The Table Project succeed? If you’d have asked me that question a week ago I would’ve given them a 50/50 chance due to my natural skepticism and the sheer number of other like products in existence. Today I’d say their chances are over 90% since: The Table is already highly focused; aligns the incentives of the churches, their congregations and the youth; and embraces/connects to other relevant services with apps like any good platform should.

The objective is to make The Table Project a self-sustaining non-profit. One way is through the Store on the site. The Table Project will curate, and offer for sale, books and other products that will help generate revenue. We’ll have to see what else is in the offing as they come closer to launch.

All-in-all I’m pretty impressed with The Table and saw few downsides to their approach. The upside of a platform that churches all over the U.S. (and world, I assume) can use, evangelize to one another and help make better through recommendations to The Table Project leadership, holds the promise of being Yet Another Social Network that Christian ministries will embrace to extend themselves directly in to the always-on and always-connected world.

Innovative Social Networking with a Purpose is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

l-r: Co-host Erik Eskola; McKenna Ewen; Julio Ojeda-Zapata; Co-host Cathy Wurzer; Shayla Thiel-Stern (none of whom probably yet see the irony that this Almanac 'new media' segment won't later be shareable)

This past Friday night on Twin Cities Public Television’s (TPT) “Almanac” program, frequent contributor to Minnov8, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, made his first appearance on the show to talk about new media and I thought he knocked it out of the park. He was joined by two other delightful and very knowledgeable panelists, Shayla Thiel-Stern of the University of Minnesota (where she is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communications) and McKenna Ewen from the StarTribune where his focus is on new media work.

Co-host Cathy Wurzer began the segment by saying, “About once a month we gather a group of people to chat up media…old and new” and then went on to introduce the three panel members and jump in to the meat of the conversation. Julio did a fantastic job on the segment (fun video Julio!) and I was eager to create a post this morning here on Minnov8 and embed the Almanac segment, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write that I discovered that TPT is still living in an old media world:

TPT does not enable or allow video to be embedded in a blog!

“Wait a second,” I thought. “You mean that if I want to embed the “new media” segment with Julio in it I have to click on this link to load a new page and pop up a window just like an “old media, we gotta protect our content” company!?!” Sadly, the answer is “Yes“ and the irony is obviously lost on TPT.

Here is what you need to do, TPT.

Start off by reading the Cluetrain Manifesto (which you can read for free), then view a few research reports from Pew Internet on who is doing what online and how ubiquitous sharing is already, look at the 2010 State of the Media report to see the decline in old media like your own and how anyone under 45 isn’t paying attention anymore, or even ask the rhetorical question as to why people are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading, every minute of every day, 24 hours worth of video!

Or maybe, just maybe, you should bring in Julio, Shayla and McKenna to not just be on a 10 minute panel, but rather to talk to TPT leadership so you can create a strategy to be and stay relevant as a media outlet and make damn sure everything you deliver is shareable.

TPT, forget about locking things up in your “Minnesota Video Vault” (and please change that name when you do embark on an actual new media strategy) and instead, toss open the doors and let your community post, remix and curate your video content. We can help you make TPT a vital resource for an audience of we new media and social media consumers who rarely watch television anymore.

Almanac runs on Friday nights so I DVR it for later viewing, and as painful as it is to watch it online the content is so good that I always recommend that my friends and family make this show (and other stuff you deliver) a regular part of their week. It’s a great way to keep one’s finger on the pulse of the important community, political and cultural zeitgeist of Minnesota.

Thank God you’re bringing in John Daenzer, current Director of New Media at WCCO, who recently announced he is headed to TPT to be VP of Interactive. John “gets it”, spearheaded the WCCO iPhone app and The Wire, and has done a remarkable job courting the new and social media community like NO OTHER traditional media outlet has in Minnesota. The big bonus is that John is willing to listen and ask the hard questions…while respecting that the transition from old to new media is a tough one.

But start right now on breaking up Almanac in to its discrete segments and at least putting the content on YouTube. What you offer now for access vs. embedding is an embarrassment.

Without Any Sense of Irony, Almanac Hosts a Panel on New Media is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners will moderate a panel addressing Social Media in Marketing/PR, a topic that continues to evolve. Panel members include: Bob Brin, Padilla Speer Beardsley, Arik Hanson, ACH Communications, Kate-Madonna Hindes, GirlMeetsGeekMedia, Tyler Olson, SMCPros, and John Bernier, Best Buy. This group will explore the latest Social Media trends.

At the same time, on the other side of the wall at Best Buy, yours truly will be moderating a panel on Social Media in IT/Enterprise (the nifty 2.0 version of the word business).  Panel members; Rick Mahn, Social Media Consultant, Gina Debogovich, Best Buy, Ernest Grumbles, Merchant & Gould, and Nancy Lyons of Clockwork will discuss the internal uses of Social Media as they pertain to employee engagement along with addressing legal concerns.

We look forward to an interesting morning inside the heads of these Social Media thinkers. Get registered to day as it will close Monday, October 4.

MHTA Has a Two-Track Mind for Social Media is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

“The next wave of the Web will be about personalization. We’re focusing on using personalization to meaningfully improve discovery and decision making,” said Aaron Weber, CEO and cofounder. “The Inveni discovery engine leaps ahead of other online recommendation services.  What we’ve developed is unlike anything previously available.  Inveni consolidates ratings you put anywhere online – Netflix, IMDB, and more – provides tools to make and receive recommendations wherever you are, and helps you make better, more informed buying decisions.” The service has received positive feedback from users during the private beta over the past several months, said Weber.

Inveni provides its highly personalized product recommendations based on a consumer’s universal taste profile.  To create a personalized taste profile, Inveni empowers users to aggregate product and service ratings they’ve made across the Internet to quickly build deep, rich profiles of their tastes.  Beginning with the media categories of movies and TV, users can share their taste profile information with friends and other services online.  Inveni also facilitates product recommendations between friends (word of mouth), based on their tastes.

“We use this taste profile data, along with our unique crowd-refined recommendation engine, to provide highly targeted advertising, while simultaneously providing consumers with a compelling personalized service for discovery and sharing,” said Robert Bodor, CTO and cofounder, “We aim to become the premier provider of highly targeted consumer data for advertising online. We do that by turning the current consumer data model upside down, putting the user in control of their information.  We are entirely opt-in, and are raising the bar on consumer privacy protection.”

The company produced a fun, two-minute video to describe its value proposition to consumers, which you can view here.

Inveni describes itself as being “dedicated to driving the personalization revolution that will be Web 3.0.”  It was founded in 2008 by two experienced Internet entrepreneurs, Aaron Weber and Robert Bodor, and has a stellar set of successful Internet-industry executives acting as advisors. It is privately funded.  Prior to Inveni, Aaron Weber, CEO and Cofounder, was COO and cofounder of W3i (formerly Freeze.com), a software marketing company based in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Aaron helped bootstrap the company to $25 million in annual revenues in seven years.  W3i has been profitable every year since its inception, and has provided initial investors with a 10x return in the first 5 years.  Aaron has received the SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and the Ernst & Young Regional Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Robert Bodor is Inveni’s Chief Technical Officer and Cofounder, Prior to Inveni, he spent four years as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where he advised Fortune 500 clients in the high-tech industry on operations, innovation, and product development.  Previously, Robert was cofounder, president, and CTO of Point Cloud, an Internet company that provided interactive product visualization to prominent online retailers.  Robert holds a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering. He has invented and commercialized multiple Internet software technologies and has authored seven patents.

Follow Inveni on Twitter at www.twitter.com/discoverinveni and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/inveni.

(Disclosure: the writer has a consulting relationship with Inveni LLC.)

Stealth Startup Inveni Launches Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in SF, and midVenturesLaunch in Chicago is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Any offering like BusinessCard2 requires critical mass to be effective. The more that people adopt and use this free service, the more powerful it becomes. As Lief has accelerated the number of people using the service, he and his team won’t be satisified until it becomes the primary way people encapsulate their value propositions and is a one-stop-shop for contact info, marketing of products and services, and even more portable on the web than it is today.

For competitive purposes Lief keeps intentionally quiet on disclosures of the exact reasons for this acquisition, but I suspect the customer base was one reason (that critical mass imperative is why) but undoubtedly there was other value not readily apparent that makes this a smart move for Workface.

The press release is after the jump. Congrats Lief and team!

Workface buys card.ly

MINNEAPOLIS (September 1, 2010) – Workface Inc. completed its purchase of card.ly from Massachusetts based Harkness Labs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition will help Minneapolis-based Workface bring its technology to a larger user base.

Card.ly was launched in 2009 by serial entrepreneur Dan Blake, who also created the wildly popular video chat service, Tinychat. “Card.ly is a great service and it has tens of thousands of incredible users,” said Blake. “With the success of Tinychat we haven’t put more work into card.ly, but I thought it was important to find a good home for the service because I’m fully behind the need for an Internet business card.”

In 2007 Workface released BusinessCard2®, a rich interactive business card for the Internet. The company has been operating BusinessCard2 as an ongoing concern ever since. “Even in this challenging economy, we have been blessed to find opportunity and growth with BusinessCard2,” said Larson. “Our mission is to digitally interface business people with customers in a way that preserves the human condition and card.ly allows us to further that mission.”

At this time card.ly users will be unaffected, but Workface plans to integrate card.ly into BusinessCard2 in the months to come. “We’re very excited to bring these two services and visionary users together into a single, larger offering,” said Larson. “The result will be the leading network of interactive, web-enabled business cards on the Internet today.”

###

About Workface Inc.
Workface Inc. was founded in 2006 with the vision of humanizing the Internet and powering localized and relevant 1:1 real-time engagement. The company’s Workface® platform is customer engagement software that enables businesses to empower their sales and service force to digitally engage directly with customers on their corporate and third-party websites, search engines and mobile, in real-time. More information: http://workfaceinc.com.

About BusinessCard2
BusinessCard2 is a self-marketing tool designed to empower business people to create, promote, and broadcast their unique persona throughout the Internet. It is an open business tool that features improved identity-level search engine optimization, the ability to share business cards on select websites and social media, uploading of more than forty different file types, and engagement through messaging and live chat. More information: http://card2.com.

Contact:

Lief Larson, CEO Dan Blake
Workface Inc. Harkness Labs.
larson (at) workface.com and dan (at) harknesslabs.com

Phone: 612-310-5051
http://lieflarson.businesscard2.com

Workface Acquires Card.ly is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

A fake Skype call highly unlikely to ever occur

In a time when cybersecurity has become the new battleground among nations and calls for enhanced national defense online are accelerating, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is trumpeting the use of a technology for communications that has an unknown security model and seems at odds with the usual Republican focus on national security.

An article by Jeremy Herb in the StarTribune this morning caught my eye, “Bachmann pushes Congress to embrace Skype.” It outlines the reasons why Rep. Michele Bachmann is calling for the use of the free Skype program on Congressional networks—so she and others can talk directly with their constituents or hold “virtual town halls”—but its use is banned in the House of Representatives.

The article quotes a University of Minnesota computer science professor, Joseph Konstan, who says this about the fundamental reason a peer-to-peer program like Skype is problematic and why it would be banned: ”The reason people worry about using tools like these is they are inherently insecure. The design of Skype is something that hasn’t been carefully scrutinized, and so it may very well be there are bugs in there.”

Sure there could be bugs, but the biggest reason installing Skype on Capitol computer networks is a huge problem is because of that unknown security model of Skype. It is not possible to know much about the security of Skype since their code is proprietary and is not open to peer review or close examination of potential security holes.

As a fan of Skype and someone who has used it daily for several years, I evangelize its use constantly. That said, I wouldn’t want my government to embrace it without some very close scrunity and safeguards and I’m puzzled why Rep. Bachmann would now be banging-the-drum for Congress to adopt Skype. Here’s why doing so isn’t wise.

Lawmakers are questioning the Department of Homeland Security’s readiness for cybersecurity attacks and according to this article in NetworkWorld, “Reported attacks on U.S. agencies increased by 400% from 2006 to 2009, said Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and committee chairman. “Whether the military or intelligence-gathering operations of foreign nations; domestic or international terrorist groups; lone-wolf, hate-driven individuals; common criminals, or thrill-seeking hackers, those attempting to infiltrate and exploit this country’s computer networks are both numerous and determined,” he said.”

The need for enhanced cybersecurity leadership has been pointed out by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). This agency is adamant that the government doesn’t have a prioritized national cybersecurity research and development agenda. In a report released on July 7th (PDF), the concern is that government officials don’t have the ability to track all active and completed cybersecurity programs and much of a process to share key information between government and industry.

Quite simply, it is unknown whether it would be “safe” to load Skype on Capitol computer networks or not and when lawmakers are calling for coordinated and orchestrated approaches to cybersecurity and the GAO says we’re not ready as a nation, Skype red flags like these are highly troubling (from Wikipedia):

• “Skype incorporates some features which tend to hide its traffic, but it is not specifically designed to thwart traffic analysis and therefore does not provide anonymous communication. Some researchers have been able to watermark the traffic so that it is identifiable even after passing through an anonymizing network.” (PDF)

• “Skype uses a proprietary Internet telephony (VoIP) network based on peer-to-peer architecture. The protocol has not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are closed-source.“

• “Skype is a secure communication; encryption cannot be disabled, and is invisible to the user. Skype reportedly uses non-proprietary, widely trusted encryption techniques: RSA for key negotiation and the Advanced Encryption Standard to encrypt conversations. Skype provides an uncontrolled registration system for users with no proof of identity. Instead, a free choice of nicknames permits users to use the system without revealing their identity to other users. It is trivial to set up an account using any name; the displayed caller’s name is no guarantee of authenticity. A third party paper analyzing the security and methodology of Skype was presented at Black Hat Europe 2006. It analyzed Skype and found a number of security issues with the current security model. (see, “Silver Needle in the Skype” PDF).”

Unless this call by Rep. Bachmann is a veiled attempt to ask for the use of an insecure Skype use but is really all about drawing attention to an to-be-alleged cybersecurity leadership issue that can be leveraged in the upcoming elections, perhaps the U.S. Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, can sit down with her over a cup of coffee and educate her on the reasons why cybersecurity is in our national interest and Skype is a bad idea.

Congresswoman Calls for Skype Use? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

What pray tell is the purpose of Social Media Day? The folks at Mashable are glad you asked. It’s “A day that honors the technological and societal advancements that have allowed us to have a dialogue, to connect and to engage not only the creators of media, but perhaps more importantly, one another.”

Um…yeah. Allow me to translate; It’s a day to get your butt up from behind the monitor, your nose out of your smartphone, relax you thumbs and meet the people you tweet, poke and follow face to face.  A day to put the social in social media. Oh, and there’s booze and munchies. Of course, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore embellishes it a bit more in his welcome video. (Really…the video was meant to be played at gatherings around the world. Kinda creepy…) Perhaps he has a desire for this to be much more of a “revolution”. No matter, the intent is to get you out and about.

The local Minneapolis meet up was superbly organized by our friend and social media maestro, Mykl Roventine. Mykl is responsible for, or part of, everything social media from Social Media Breakfast, to Unsummit, to Tech Karaoke and beyond. When Mashable sent out the word to have a Minneapolis Meetup, Mykl stepped up and secured Chino Latino in Uptown, gathered up some sponsors (SMBMSP and Sterling Cross Media) and rallied the troops. Mykl tells the story in the video below.  (Forgive the sound quality..I guess the EVO 4G won’t replace my Flip cam, at least not without some sort of outboard mic.)

At 6:30pm some 50 of the 70+ who signed up began to congregate, the drink flowed and the tasty appetizers were savored. Much of the Twin Cities’ Social Media actives were in attendance and some new faces were spotted and welcomed. It was a great time. Of course, those of us who dig the social “media” are never really far from it as everyone checked-in, tweeted and posted photos throughout the evening. Yep, there was a tweet wall. However, well…there was just very little discussion of this “revolution” of which Mashable was speaking. It was just plain social.

Perhaps it’s because we, here in the Land o’ 10,000 lakes, already get the whole social part. While the concept of Social Media Day is all well and good, there are any number of meet-ups, tweet-ups, happy hours and  breakfasts of which you can attend during any given month in and around the Twin Cities. It makes me feel kind of sad for those in other cities who must look to, or be prompted by, Mashable to get together in “real life”. While no specific date for another gathering has been past down from the social media mount, you’re encouraged to once again step away from the warm glow of the screen and meet and greet your friends and followers in person at a location of your choosing. Oh…and don’t forget to check in on Foursquare.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqjwUlIFk0E

How Many Social Media Day Cards Did You Get? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music by Kahuna Kawentzmann w/tune, “Late Bird” from podsafe Music Alley.
Modified image based on the James Bond 007 knockoff from the 1960s, the Matt Helm movies series starring Dean Martin.

Links discussed during the show:

• Stillwater company Nibipedia led by Troy Peterson
• Internet Broadcasting, the departure of their CEO, David Lebow, partner Mashery
• Mentioned by Tom Bergerding: Polyvore
• Graeme mentioned Involver
• MOJO MN; Minnebar
• Visi Open House Friday, May 21st
• Open source alternative to Facebook, Diaspora. Just a concept, as of this writing they’ve raised $143k and have over 4k supporter/donators!
• Facebook controversy links:
  • OpenBook
  • New York Times stories compiled here
  • Excellent essay by social media researcher Danah Boyd (now w/Microsoft)
  • The case for staying with Facebook
• Fix your Facebook privacy settings or delete your account altogether
• FASCINATING infographic by a developer with the Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research Center for Social Software. The views expressed on it are his own, and do not reflect those of IBM (and read his disclaimers below the graph) BUT make sure you click on the years on the right in succession from 2005 until 2010 so you can visualize the erosion of privacy on Facebook since 2005. If your reaction is not “Holy Sh*t!” I’ll be surprised.

Minnov8 Gang 79: The Facebookers is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

It’s called “Izzy’s Flavor Up!” and it essentially allows customers to subscribe to their favorite ice cream flavors. Current flavors are updated every three minutes on its “flavor grid” web page.

With web site design and technology assistance from Bloomington MN-based The Nerdery (aka Sierra Bravo), Rogers MN-based RFID firm AbeTech, and CA-based tech vendor Phoenix Technologies, Izzy’s Ice Cream is now tagging all its 90+ flavors of ice cream in-store with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.  Each flavor’s tub is tagged with a unique code that’s automatically scanned when placed in the dipping cabinet.

What it means for an ice cream lover is nothing less than nirvana. Customers can now know, with absolute certainty anytime around the clock, which flavors are available in-store. When new flavors are removed from or added to the dipping cabinet, Izzy’s web site, Facebook and Twitter pages will automatically be updated, alerting fans to the latest changes. Customers can sign up for email alerts for their favorite flavors – so they’ll always know when their favorite Hot Brown Sugar, Soy Peanut Butter, or Peace Coffee ice cream is available. My buddy Al Maruggi told me today that Izzy’s has the best coconut ice cream in the Twin Cities, too, as he licked a sample thereof.

We also learned that SMS or text updates are on the way, if you’d rather get your alerts that way.  In-store customers can see the technology in action via a large-screen monitor that shows which flavors are now being scooped.

“Our customers are extremely passionate about their favorite flavors of Izzy’s ice cream,” said Jeff Sommers, Izzy’s owner, in a statement. “Their enthusiasm, while motivating me to continue creating delicious flavors, can also prove to be a customer service issue. Before today, our customers had no way of knowing if their favorite flavors were going to be available when they walked through the door.  This system solves that problem and makes it easier for our customers to enjoy their favorite flavors.”  The title of a video that Izzy’s crack PR firm put up on YouTube says it all: “How to Subscribe to Ice Cream.”

The nameplates for each flavor in the store have RFID chips built in, which are then read by antennae anchored in the dipping cabinet. The inventory is automatically updated simply through the act of an employee changing flavors in the dipping cabinet. That act triggers an inventory update, which in turn publishes the current flavors to multiple channels: the in-store screen, Izzy’s website, its Twitter and Facebook pages, and it’s automated emails to subscribers of individual flavors.

Izzy’s isn’t just a retail business. It has a catering business as well, and a wholesale business that has signed up several upscale grocery stores and restaurants throughout the Twin Cities that now offer its products — Kowalski’s, just to name one chain.

Regarding its latest new wrinkle, “This is undoubtedly one of the first uses of RFID as a customer service application,” said the company’s statement.  Izzy’s has a history of embracing new technology, having installed solar panels in 2005.  Owner Jeff Sommers also showed attendees at his media briefing today an innovative new cleaning system he has implemented in Izzy’s kitchen called “Zap Water,” which is an amazingly more environmentally friendly way to maintain a germ-free, allergen-free environment.

Izzy’s gets my vote as a true Minnesota innovator!  Now, excuse me, I’m jumping onto their web site to check if my favorite flavor is still available tonight….

Web Innovation Is Everywhere in Minnesota – Even In an Ice Cream Shop! is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

…and if you are in business, any kind of organization or in education, if you can’t see how this is already affecting you (and will affect you going forward) send me an email and we’ll talk!  ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng

via Crowdspring

The Social Media Revolution is Affecting All of MN is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Kris Layon with keynoter Doc Searls from the 2009 MinneWebCon Photo credit: Peter Fleck (@pfhyper) from his Flickr account

What most of don’t get to do before making a decision to attend an event that costs money is to understand the vision, depth and texture that lies behind a conference. Knowing this helps to determine the level of the sessions, their quality and whether it’s worth your investment of both time and money.

MinneWebCon, the full-day, three-track, conference for Web professionals, is directed by Kristofer Layon and I had a chance to talk with Kris today about the upcoming event, some background behind it, who it’s targeted towards and other sorts of deeper meaning stuff most of us don’t have a chance to discover in advance.

After hearing this podcast and visiting the MinneWebCon website, I’m confident you’ll immediately signup for this conference. Hope to see you there!

Direct Links:

+ MinneWebCon website w/keynote speakers
+ Schedule and Session Details
+ MinneWebCon social media: Twitter; Facebook

MinneWebCon: An interview with its director, Kris Layon is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Fear not, oh noble marketer. The folks at Uptown (Minneapolis) marketing firm Hello Viking have spawned Curation Station to provide you with a bucket to help you bail the endless deluge of web content into smaller pools. (Minnov8 colleague Tim Elliot gave me a peek at the private beta.)

As you might know, collecting the flood of online information isn’t the problem. News readers, RSS feeds, email newsletters, blog subscriptions, and bookmarking services all help you see every drop of data coming from your favorite online tributaries. The issue has always been separating the clean water from the black or grey water. (Those who have ever spent anytime emptying the water tanks of an RV know what I mean.)

According to it’s creators, “Social media have forever changed the way that brands connect with customers. In a non-stop trail of Tweets, blogs, Facebook pages, YouTube videos and Flickr sites, customers discuss products and services.” They say, “Curation Station was created by marketers for marketers to harness these conversations and share participants’ best insights and experiences.”

Through a very simple dashboard, any number of feeds can be added.  “Users can start by adding RSS and OPML feeds or alerts from external websites such as Google News. They also use integrated Twitter, Flickr and YouTube search tools. But inputs to Curation Station can be from any online source – web pages, news articles, blog posts, videos, photos” – via their bookmarklet tool.

Once inside the Curation Station dashboard a simple click of an item can channel it to a “playlist” or back to the online ocean from whence it came. Once you’ve vetted the content it can be distributed through a custom widget that’s designed by you in a live WYSIWYG tool. This widget can be plunked down in a website or blog. You can display one curated playlist or many, it’s up to you. This makes you the tamer of floods and sharer of all that is relevant…at least as you see it.

This isn’t the first time a Minnesota company has attacked this aggregation with curation. Garrick Van Buren continues to address it with his Cullect application, now on hiatus. The big dogs are no stranger to trying to tame this beast either. Google has, through it’s popular reader, and Yahoo has through their Pipes offering. I myself continue to bang my head against a wall trying to get Pipes to produce a virtual curated stream that really delivers what I need.

What I like so much about Curation Station is it’s ability to let me apply a trusted human opinion, my own, to all of my feeds. The simple one click curation of a bunch of feeds might take a few minutes, a few times each day, but the result really is more of a reflection of the curator. The handy custom widget output is also very appealing and a slick way to deliver your curated masterpiece.

What I don’t like is  the cost of this really slick system of flood control. After a walk-through of Curation Station I was all, “This kicks butt, sign me up!” When I found out that the cost started at $500 per month, I was all, “Maybe I need to take another crack at that Pipes feed.”

It’s apparent that the price structure for Curation Station is more tailored to the large marketing firms and businesses, certainly ones larger than mine. These firms are perhaps more financially able to dedicate resources as well as being in more of a position to monetize the result of this curation.

Perhaps in the not too distant future Curation Station can deliver a more cost effective solution for the more thrifty class of web whisperers. Also, one has to give these folks credit for rising above the business of “free” that has so crippled the ‘business’ social media.

One last thing, though I’ve opted for the water analogy here, the Curation Station folks are positioning the application by comparing it to a radio station. “Just like DJ’s curate music, Curation Station allows marketers and brands to easily organize social content into different playlists.” As a longtime ‘radio guy’ I’ll give you playlists (and the handy alliteration for the Casey Kasem like headline)…but that’s about as far as the radio analogy goes as I can see.

Curation Station…Sweeping the Nation? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

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

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

Stumble indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

Visions of Tomorrow, Yesterday is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s your chance.

Patrick Tedjamulia, one of the founders of a non-profit in Utah called the International Mentoring Network Organization (IMNO.org) reached out to me about a “Mentorship Auction” they’re holding and their Get in Their Shoes Campaign to promote it (thanks to Doug Pollei for the connection). Thinking a post about it might be a bit of a stretch for Minnov8′s mission focused on internet and web innovation in our state, I reached out to Patrick by email and tossed the ball in his court to give me a call so we could kick it around.

Tedjamulia is a brand manager at General Mills and he grabbed a few minutes to launch a call to me this morning. As we talked I quickly realized that yes, this sort of thing would definitely be of interest to the Minnov8 readership!

The first auction is currently running and is a 1-on-1 mentoring opportunity with one of my favorite authors Daniel Pink, the NY Times Best Selling author of “A Whole New Mind”, and “Drive”. Daniel’s auction ends Feb. 11th so there is still time for you to bid. The winning bidder will get a thirty-minute phone conversation (mentorship) with Daniel Pink.

Today, Feb. 8th, the next auction is opening and will be a mentoring opportunity with Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr and now Hunch. Coming up are auctions posted for mentoring opportunities with the following individuals:

• Fernando Aguirre, CEO and Chairman of Chiquita brands: Feb 15- 24
• Lawler Kang, author of Passion at Work: Feb 22-Mar.3
• Dave Logan, author of Tribal Leadership and The Three Laws of Performance: Mar. 1 – 10
• Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of Free!: Mar. 8-17
• Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group and co-author of Groundswell: Mar. 15-24
• Stephan Roche, CEO of Kapitall: Mar. 22 – 31
• Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, author of The Culture Code: Mar. 29 – Apr. 7
• Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor, FORTUNE and author of Talent is Overrated: Apr. 5 - 14
• Robbie Vitrano, CEO of Trumpet Group: Apr. 12 – 21
• Jeff Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak: Apr. 19 – 28
• Jeffrey Veen, web design and development guru and co-founder of Adaptive Path: Apr. 26 – May. 5
• Aaron Magness, Director of Brand Marketing, Zappos: May 3 – 12
• Rafe Furst, entrepreneur, investor and business leader: May 10 – 19
• Guy Kawasaki, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures: May 17 – 26
• …and more.

Proceeds from the campaign will go directly to the International Mentoring Network Organization (www.imno.org), a 501c3 non-profit organization aimed at making professional mentoring available to everyone and truly founders of what they term the “Open Source Mentoring Movement”. Also, stop by their site to listen to some recorded calls to get a sense of what these sorts of mentorship opportunities are like.

Don’t miss the chance to be mentored by Daniel Pink, Guy Kawasaki, and many others and bid today at Get in Their Shoes.

Get in Their Shoes: 1:1 Interviews for You is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As we’ve talked about on past Minnov8 podcasts and as I pointed out in a post on my own blog, these guides are nothing new in the broadcast world, but seem to have a few bloggers and online marketers a bit twitchy. How do you feel about them?

It was good to have the chance to talk with Ms. Engle and get a very clear explanation of the guides straight from the source. Thanks to Ernest for allowing me to join in.

Be sure and keep Ernest’s blog and podcast on your radar. He is a great local and national resource and offers plenty of great info on IP law on a regular basis.

The FTC Talks Guides is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.