The event was conceived and conducted completely by Lief Larson, CEO and founder of Workface Inc., with assistance from a couple of his team members. Workface is a growing startup in Minneapolis that itself developed a SaaS offering it now markets widely, which it calls a “customer engagement platform.” I was extremely impressed with the breadth and depth of the content Lief pulled together for this event. It included a extensive look at market data for SaaS in the U.S. and globally, monetization strategies and practices, selling to the enterprise, negotiating contracts, increasing adoption and retention of your app, marketing your app, creating a channel to sell your app, financing and funding a SaaS business, training your SaaS customer, and ongoing monitoring of your SaaS business. On top of all this, Lief related some really excellent stories throughout the workshop about his journey in funding and building Workface.

I had a chance to follow up with Lief afterwards to get some further perspective on the story behind SaaSCamp… 

Q: Lief, why did you decide to do the event? 

Lief:  I’ve had a great group of mentors who have helped me during my entrepreneurial journey and I try to pay it forward by helping other young businesses and entrepreneurs to find success.  A few of my “mentees” are building applications that are software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings and asked that I consider putting on an event.  That’s why I created SaaSCamp 2012 — to bring together like-minded people working on SaaS.  I think the event is already bigger than me, and I’m hoping the community will take it and run with it. 

Q: In saying you’d like to turn SaaSCamp into a regular event, how often do you mean? 

Lief:  I think meeting up once a quarter or some greater level of frequency is important to stay current with new ideas and best practices in SaaS, but a larger annual event is a must.

Q: Why did you do it as a small, paid event, rather than use the barcamp or unconference model (sponsor-supported, with free attendance), like CloudCamp and so many others? 

Lief:  Whether you’re doing a sponsor-supported or attendee-supported model, the reality is that there are costs for hosting an event.  CoCo Minneapolis gave us a great deal, but they too needed to bring in people and security.  When you do a day-long event, people need to eat and drink.  Having a sponsored model takes some of the objectivity away, plus we don’t have a big list of providers who are focused on sponsoring the SaaS community (yet).  I think this will change over time. In any case, we analyzed the anticipated costs of the event, and used that to be the guide for what to charge for tickets.  Plus, having a cost/value relationship, in my humble opinion, ensures that you keep the event focused on the right type of attendees and preserve a focused and more intimate experience.  We’ve all been to those conferences that are a free-for-all and you often get a heavier mix of vendors that are simply coming to spend a day trying to sell to the attendees.  We had zero selling going on at our event, but rather a 100% focus on how to grow and improve your SaaS business.  SaaSCamp had a 100% money-back guarantee to ensure that the $200 ticket price was a non-consideration in the value received.  If/when the event has more attendees, I anticipate the ticket price will drop through economies of scale.

Q: You mentioned to me that you believe “we have the best place in the world to build a SaaS company here in Minnesota.”  Can’t it be done anywhere?

Lief:  Technically, a SaaS business can be built from anywhere. But I think for highly successful SaaS businesses to get off the ground, it is better positioned in a market where the cost of doing business is relatively low, and the technical talent base to execute against the opportunity is high.  Silicon Valley is well-positioned in terms of financing, but it’s also a very expensive place to build a business and the most competitive technology talent market in the world.  There’s no place in the world I’d rather be building my SaaS company than right here in Minneapolis.  We’ve found highly qualified engineers and programmers, incredible business support, affordable living and reasonable business overhead costs, and we’re well situated for travel to the east or west coasts.  Plus, we have more Fortune 500 companies per capita here than anywhere else in the U.S.  We’re well represented in terms of small, medium, and large companies to sell into. 

Q: What’s the latest with Workface, and what can you tell us about your upcoming plans?

Lief:  Like many SaaS companies, we’ve found a way to scale the business without dramatic headcount additions to the company.  That’s why SaaS businesses can become highly profitable when they scale.  Workface has only 7 full-time employees, 2 part-time, and the rest of our business is accomplished through our contingent force, which includes 16 contractors.  We currently service more than 110,000 users and count companies like Intuit and AAA as customers.  Though our revenues are scaling and we’ve seen double-digit month over month growth, we’re continuing to bring private and institutional capital into Workface for growing our market penetration.  The visibility to ROI with SaaS is usually spread out over a longer time horizon (incremental monthly recurring revenue vs. selling on premise all in one big chunk).  As such, we anticipate taking on outside capital for some time to come.

——–

Disclosure:  Lief Larson is a former client and, I fully admit, one of my favorite serial tech entrepreneurs in this town.

Funny story:  Lief and I traveled to Palo Alto a couple years ago for a conference where Lief was pitching to the Silicon Valley VC community, along with a bunch of other hot startups, and sharing the stage with speakers like the founders of Salesforce and SuccessFactors. We stayed in a funky old, ’60s-vintage Travelodge motel — about as low-priced as we could find in Palo Alto. After we checked in to our respective rooms, we both went online to work. First thing I see is an email from Lief with a photo attached of this gorgeous, expansive hotel room, saying, “Wow, I hope your room is as nice as mine.” I never laughed so hard, because I could hardly turn around in my dinky little room.

Minnesota: A Great Place to Be for SaaS Companies is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

“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.

enStratus Secures Series A VC Investment is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Companies of all sizes are increasing choosing to have their IT systems hosted elsewhere on dedicated servers, or in private or hybrid clouds.  So, it’s not surprising to see new data centers popping up in out-state Minnesota. Several well established data center firms in the Twin Cities area have offered a variety of managed IT services and cloud services for years — including Atomic Data, Visi.com, ipHouse, and others — and these firms also serve many out-state customers. But there will always be companies that prefer working with data centers closer to their own locations.

Here’s the press release on the latest announcement from Vaultas:

Vaultas Announces Planned Data Center Expansion into the St. Cloud Market

Minneapolis, Minn.—Oct.31, 2011—Vaultas (www.vaultas.com), a premier provider of collaborative, vendor-neutral data center, collocation and BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) facilities in the Upper Midwest, today announced an expansion plan into the St. Cloud, Minnesota market. Vaultas continues its overall growth strategy, bringing a powerful suite of vendor-neutral collocation, data backup, data storage, cloud services and hosting to Central Minnesota. This follows the completion of the company’s most recent data center facility in Alexandria, Minnesota.

Securing organizations’ mission-critical data assets remains a top priority among CIOs, and recent trends in data center and collocation outsourcing, coupled with overall growth in cloud computing and hosting, demonstrates continued acceptance of data center virtualization technologies. In Forecast: Data Centers, Worldwide, 2010–2015, Gartner is forecasting steadily increasing growth in data storage as more organizations shift from in-house to outsourced facilities. Data loss from either human error or a disaster can be disastrous to any business and is increasingly critical given that 93 percent or firms never recover from such a loss.

Vaultas develops, owns, and operates IT data centers and business continuity and disaster recovery complexes that provide customers with secure, strategically located, private, and semiprivate data center solutions that meet even the most stringent strategic and technical requirements. Vaultas’ vendor-neutral environments reduce TCO (total cost of ownership) for clients through effective use of infrastructure, energy conservation, vendor collaboration, network consolidation and strategic partnering.

“Our expansion into the St. Cloud market is a key milestone for Vaultas, expanding our footprint in Central Minnesota and further empowering our customers with flexible data center and cloud computing solutions that scale to meet their requirements,” said Vaultas President John Unger. “Our mission is to bring the St. Cloud business community collaborative, affordable security solutions to defend their data and ease operating expenses.  At Vaultas, we deliver best-in-class services for primary data center and collocation, website, and business application hosting; ultra-high-speed bandwidth, data backup, and recovery solutions.”

Note: Vaultas was on-site today to meet the local business community at the St. Cloud Chamber Technology and Education Conference, offering free data center and networking consultation to attendees.

Cloud Providers Spread Their Reach Across Minnesota is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

And it did prove to be a better bet for me, and for several of the folks I did said schmoozing with.  Wow, there were so many great conversations and introductions brokered, my head was spinning. Or was that the beer? No matter, a good tech time was had by all.  And you can read all about those startups that pitched in the auditorium here. A brief stop at the after-party (on the outdoor patio on the second-floor of nearby Brit’s Pub) put a nice capper for me on a very pleasant — warm! — evening, blabbing with so many of the key players in our awesome Minnesota startup community.  Thank you, Minnedemo organizers and sponsors, for another great get-together!

#Minnedemo Turns Up the Heat in Downtown Minneapolis is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

This interconnectivity creates an instant conduit for information, which allows businesses to rapidly share updated product images, descriptions, customer specific pricing, purchase order details, and more all in a secured environment. Perhaps more interestingly, these small and midsized businesses can easily exchange messages and fully engage in purchase order and invoice transactions between businesses, without EDI.

The three-member team behind Rocware brings a unique combination of personal experience running product-based businesses, the vision and technical expertise to build a novel solution, and the business knowledge necessary to bring this solution to market. Together their talents represent a complimentary skillset at Rocware. 

John Erck founded and ran a toy company called Extreme Bubbles in 2005. He then spent two years in IT Solutions at Cargill. Today, John is fully dedicated to his new venture Rocware. His brother James Erck, who is also a serial entrepreneur, started and ran a screen printing company called MPLS Ink in 2007, before cofounding Rocware. The last founder is their sister, Sarah Erck Welle. Prior to cofounding Rocware, Sarah worked in database strategy at Microsoft for four years, and then worked as the Director of Business Development at a business intelligence consultancy. All three siblings graduated from the University of Minnesota.

By delivering this solution with SaaS, Rocware is inherently providing many of the benefits associated with this technology, such as a lowered cost of ownership, availability, and accessibility. They have not only leveraged this technology, in the case of transforming viral tendencies into B2B relationships, but they have also built a scalable technology infrastructure to support it. The open source solution stack LAMP resides at the foundation, which provides a necessary relational data management structure for the data. This sits on top of a cloud-based hosting solution designed to handle both present and growing volumes of product data.

Through this enhanced B2B service platform, which now accommodates such a large spectrum of small and medium manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and sales representatives, Rocware is poised to scale.

Scalable B2B Platform through Rocware is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The Gang has used Workface’ profiles since the beginning and have watched this startup closely as they’ve continued to execute on their vision.

From their press release:

More than 75,000 professionals and over 2,500 different companies are now using Workface technology to enable their sales and customer service staffs to engage with prospects and customers online and in real time.

“Our ‘profile’ technology helps companies shorten sales cycles, connect with prospects at the moment of interest, and increase the level of engagement and intimacy with customers,” said Lief Larson, Workface founder and CEO. “This new round of capital will help us grow revenue from existing customers, add new customers and focus on several key platform enhancements.”

Congrats Lief and crew! See the full press release below…

WORKFACE LANDS ROUND OF VENTURE CAPITAL,
EXPANDS ON EFFORTS TO HUMANIZE INTERNET COMMERCE
Series A-1 financing brings total funds raised to more than $2.5 million to date

Minneapolis, July 26, 2011—Workface®, a pioneer in innovative online customer-interaction technology that helps companies market, sell and support their products and services, today announced it has raised more than $900,000 in new financing. Participating investors in the Series A-1 financing include Arthur Ventures and Omphalos Ventures.

Since its incorporation in 2007, Workface has raised over $2.5 million from its founders, private equity funds, angel investors and venture capital.

More than 75,000 professionals and over 2,500 different companies are now using Workface technology to enable their sales and customer service staffs to engage with prospects and customers online and in real time.

“Our ‘profile’ technology helps companies shorten sales cycles, connect with prospects at the moment of interest, and increase the level of engagement and intimacy with customers,” said Lief Larson, Workface founder and CEO. “This new round of capital will help us grow revenue from existing customers, add new customers and focus on several key platform enhancements.”

In 2007, Workface first launched its customer-engagement technology, one of the first examples how the Web can be used to interface with customers in real time. Sales staff and other customer-facing professionals create a Workface web profile that is readily visible and accessible by potential customers.

Through search engines, social media networks, rich social ads and corporate websites, prospects find these interactive profiles. Here, they can engage in a live text, audio and video chat with sales and service staff. Companies that want to promote their products and services outfit their sales staff with Workface profiles because a meaningful online interaction is more likely to lead to a face-to-face sales meeting.

About Workface
Workface Inc., headquartered in Minneapolis, Minn., is a technology company that helps other companies market their products and services by promoting their employees’ expertise and helping their staff engage with prospects online and in real time. Its customer-engagement platform enables sales and service professionals to create interactive profiles wherein they can chat with sales prospects and move them to the next stage in the buying process. More than 75,000 professionals in over 2,500 different companies are now using Workface technology.

About Arthur Ventures
Arthur Ventures is a venture capital fund that seeks investment opportunities in seed and early stage technology companies in the upper midwest region. The firm was co-founded by Doug Burgum, former senior VP of Microsoft Business Solutions and CEO of Great Plains Software. For more information, go to www.arthurventures.com.

About Omphalos Venture Partners
Omphalos Venture Partners works with founders and entrepreneurial management teams who aspire to achieve excellence. The firm is actively seeking investment opportunities in privately held, U.S.-based, early stage consumer, health care and information technology companies. For more information, visit www.omphalosventures.com.

Workface Lands $900k in Venture Capital is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

After an opening reception in the atrium, a series of speakers and presentations followed in an adjoining auditorium. The main focus of these talks was to inform and instruct the 47 semifinalist teams (across six categories, called “divisions”) about how they can best prepare for the ongoing judging.  That includes the opportunity for each these startups to work with their choice of “Mentors” chosen by the Minnesota Cup and the Carlson School (a major sponsor).  A list of 47 such mentors, with their bios, was handed out, and John Stavig of the Carlson School is coordinating the choice of mentors by the semifinalists.  Most all the mentors are graduates of the U of M, the majority with degrees from the Carlson School, and they represent a wealth of business-building experience.

What’s next for the Minnesota Cup semifinalists?  Here’s what we learned last evening about the upcoming schedule:

• Each semifinalist submits a 20-page business plan by midnight July 22nd.

• The division finalists are announced on August 19th

• The division finalists present and winners are selected on Augusts 30th

• The division winners present to the Grand Prize Review Board the afternoon of September 8th

• The Minnesota Cup awards event is held the evening of September 8th at the U’s McNamara Alumni Center

Congratulations and good luck to all the semifinalists! And thanks to the many sponsors and partners of the Minnesota Cup, as well as to Scott and his cofounder, Dan Mallin, for helping another great crop of our state’s startups go through their excellent program.  I really believe all the entrants (1000+ this year) are winners, because they get an opportunity to learn so much from the process. Go, Minnesota startups!

Minnesota Cup Honors ‘High Quality’ Crop of Semifinalists is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The major Amazon Web Services outage that began this past Thursday morning was unlike anything before it.  Countless AWS customers, big and small, went down, many for days. Surprisingly, other biggies like Netflix, SmugMug, and Twilio had little or no disruption.  One hungers to know why…

Over the weekend, George Reese, a cloud expert and author (and CTO of cloud-management tools company enStratus), wrote a fascinating post on O’Reilly about what some would call a cloud disaster — entitling it, ironically enough, “The Cloud’s Shining Moment.” George has a unique perspective on the cloud, and a large following. His post got huge play, and that continues — so I decided to message him on Twitter and set up a coffee so I could interview him Monday morning. I was anxious for him to elaborate on his post and share more of his thoughts, now that the outage is (mostly) behind us. 

Click on the link below to hear the whole chat. What follows here are some snippets from that 30-minute conversation (it was recorded in a busy coffee shop, so there’s background noise, but you can hear us fine):

• Thursday at 3:00 am: “We knew something significant was going down.”
• What happened, who was affected, and why.
• What about SLAs? “They’re not an insurance policy, they’re a refund policy… SLAs are a joke.”
• The “Design for Failure” approach vs. traditional application architecture gives you “control over your own destiny.”
• Why the AWS outage was a shining moment: it’s about learning what you can do in the face of an event like this. “So many survived.”
• The “cloud haters” came out after the O’Reilly post. Flame wars erupted in the comments. George pre-empted what they thought was, ahem, their shining moment!
• In large corporations, the “Department of No” is the real problem.
• George guarantees that CIOs who say their companies are not in the cloud actually are, and just don’t know it. Many others realize the cloud “genie is out of the bottle,” and are now coming to his firm, to be their window into what’s really going on in the cloud.
• George’s company now makes it possible to do “cross-cloud” backup and disaster recovery. Not only can customers do automated DR, but automated DR testing, too.
• He says his company is at “the most important point” in its life and the evolution of the cloud. In the last six months, “enterprise has gotten it.” He noted that he’s never spoken to so many Fortune 100 companies as he has in the past week.

• Download or listen to my interview of George Reese, CTO of enStratus … (MP3)

Two other excellent blog posts we touched on that came out over the weekend:
• “How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse,” by Don MacAskill, Cofounder & Chief Geek
• “Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage,” by Phil Wainewright, ZDnet

(Here’s more about my interview subject: George Reese has been delivering software as a service since 2003 when he founded Valtira, a suite of web-based marketing tools. Prior to Valtira, George held a variety of technology leadership roles with J. Walter Thompson, Carlson Marketing Group, and startups Ancept and Imaginet. George is the author of several O’Reilly books on Internet and enterprise technologies, including Java Database Best Practices and Managing and Using MySQL and the recently released Cloud Application Architectures. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, ME. Follow him on Twitter @georgereese.)

Full Disclosure: As mentioned during the recorded interview, the writer had a consulting relationship with enStratus in 2009.

George Reese on “The Cloud’s Shining Moment,” Four Days Later is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Brandpoint offers three core product channels, each enhanced by accurate, real-time reporting of results:

• Media creation and distribution: Consumer-focused feature articles help clients tell their brand stories, and provide high-quality content to a network of online publishers. Brandpoint guarantees clients online placement of their articles through its powerful, cost-effective media creation and distribution service.

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Brandpoint provides full SEO consulting services that range from website audits to keyword analysis. Placement of quality content on trusted media websites is an effective way for brands to increase their SEO relevancy.

• Social media: Brandpoint supports clients’ social media strategies with outreach tools and writing services that help brands maintain and grow their social media presence.

“Changing our name to Brandpoint reflects how our business has evolved from a heritage of print article distribution into a comprehensive content-based digital marketing platform,” said David Olson, SVP and general manager of Brandpoint, in the company’s news announcemnet.  “As the online marketing landscape becomes more dynamic, consumers are connecting with each other and the companies they patronize in new and exciting ways. By following consumer trends and continually integrating new services such as social media and SEO, Brandpoint is nicely positioned to serve as our clients’ strategic partner today and in the future.”

The parent company of Brandpoint, and another product called Adfusion, is ARAnet. It is an article-based digital media company that educates consumers, builds brands, and drives sales through product offerings that focus on digital advertising, SEO, and public relations, and leverage content and technology to achieve clients’ specific campaign goals. The company began life 15 years ago as Article Resource Association, providing copyright-free content to print media across the country. As the digital marketing world evolved, the company maintained its front-runner position by developing new content-based marketing tools and utilizing emerging technologies for a broad portfolio of public relations industry, corporate, and interactive agency clients.

Today, Brandpoint is recognized as a pioneer in content-based digital marketing and real-time reporting of measurable, effective results. For more information, call (866) 287-9168 or visit the company’s web site at www.brandpoint.com, where you can also click on an online demo.

Minnesota ‘Brand Storyteller’ Changes Name to Brandpoint is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Bet you didn’t know that we had a big-time semiconductor fab practically in the shadow of MOA, did you now? And it’s been there for more than 25 years, actually, under previous ownership. (More on that below.)

The current 200,000-square-foot facility at 2800 East Old Shakopee Road includes 62,000 square feet of cleanroom space. where the company performs semiconductor wafer fabrication.  Chips cut from these wafers are used in a variety of electronic devices.

TCB reported that company officials are not yet disclosing information about the expansion. Quoting from the story: “Sources close to the deal said the initial phase of construction will likely result in the addition of about 80 new employees, and when completed, ‘the addition will have generated need for about 300 additional employees’.”  No target date was stated for the expected completion of the new facility.

A report by the City of Bloomington’s planning and economic development division, said TCB, indicates the company hopes to expand on its existing property by adding 98,000 square feet. The building would occupy space north of the existing facility. (Shown above in an aerial photo.)

TCB said the planning division voted unanimously in favor of the expansion, and the City Council will vote Monday to make the final decision. “I have no reason to believe they won’t approve, but of course, can’t know for certain,” a representative of the planning division told TCB.  She said PSI plans to begin construction in early 2011, and once the “shell” of the addition is complete, it will likely finish the interior through additional construction phases.

Polar Semiconductor Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan-based semiconductor manufacturer Sanken Electric Company, Ltd.  It has been continuing to add headcount to its operations since it acquired the facility in 2005, according to the City of Bloomington report.

Now, some background: As noted above, the name Polar Semiconductor is relatively new. The facility on Old Shakopee Road — yes, it’s across the street from one of the only farms remaining in the Twin Cities — was originally owned by Control Data Corp., and operated as its Microcircuits Division, building pre-amp chips for disk drives.  That was until 1984, when the operation was acquired by a then-new venture partially funded by Control Data.  That new venture was VTC Inc., which was founded by two entrepreneurs who relocated to the Twin Cities from Fairchild Semiconductor in South Portland, Maine — one was from Minnesota, the other originally from the UK.  (Disclosure: VTC became a client of mine in 1984, and was for 15 years).  In 1999, VTC management sold off a portion of the company, which included about half its employees, to Lucent Microelectronics, a unit that was soon renamed Agere.  (I believe some of those employees may still work in Agere offices in Mendota Heights, while others had relocated or commuted to the company’s headquarters in NJ.)

After the partial sale to Lucent, VTC’s management, led by Larry Jodsaas, CEO, retained ownership of the building and “fab” at 2800 East Old Shakopee Road, and about half the employees remained there, most of them production related.  That management operated the facility as Polar Fab for several years, producing silicon wafers for other firms (i.e., as a “contract fab”).  In 2005, Jodsaas and his management team sold the business to the Japanese firm.  It was at that time the name of the firm was changed to Polar Semiconductor Inc.

So, the next time you’re cruising by the Mall of America on Killebrew Drive, continue on East where it turns into Old Shakopee Road and get a glimpse of a facility that has pumped out a whole hell of lot of chips in its day — and now promises much more to come.

Bloomington Firm Expects to Add 300 High-Tech Jobs is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

This is great sport, people!  We can’t beat Wisconsin in college football for seven years straight, but, oh yeah, we got those cheeseheads when it comes to the game of innovation!  Or do we?  (And, Gopher fans, I won’t even bring up South Dakota.  Shees.)

“Innovation?  Jobs?  Has Minnesota lost it?  Not for one day in October we haven’t,” says The Collaborative in one of its promos.  “2010 marks our second full year of the worldwide recessionary malaise.  Our state’s economy is also not what anyone is calling ‘robust’.  Our unemployment rate is higher than it’s been in decades.  On the plus side, we’re still one of the brightest economies in the nation,” the pitch goes on to say.

“The positive gap between our jobless rate as compared to the nation is at its highest in 30 years… Yet we also hear many reports of our state losing its way in innovation.”

Can you sense the drama, people?  I’m nervously doing finger and hand exercises right now, in great anticipation of the nuances I may be able to capture on my Macbook or iPad (decisions, decisions) as I contemplate the live-blogging nirvana that awaits me Thursday.  It has me breathing heavy.

“Last year, in the throes of the recession, 54 companies gave presentations, 400+ investors and entrepreneurs came, shared, and discussed growth in tough times,” said Dan Carr, CEO of The Collaborative, in his announcement of this year’s event.  “It actually felt optimistic! These companies also go on to create jobs.  Lots of them.  Minnesota is 8th in the nation in venture backed employment: 365,000 jobs.”  (No word on how many of those people may have been laid off in recent times because those ventures couldn’t raise enough money.)

Carr continues:  “This year’s ‘homecoming’ promises another day-long celebration of ‘doing’ more than ‘hand wringing’.  It’s true that some of our greatest companies rise from difficult times.  Our annual conference has a knack for bringing together Minnesota’s best ‘Up & Comers’.”

The 2010 version of the conference will begin with a look at the current state of venture investing, by way of an opening address from John Taylor of the National Venture Capital Association.  That will be followed by 18 Presenting Companies giving seven-minute presentations, plus somewhere between 20 and 30 more startups in the “Entrepreneurial Showcase” giving one-minute introductions.  (I’ll be particularly interested to see if any of those entrepreneurs can make a impact in that minuscule amount of time.  I’ve heard several of the new 90-second “Alpha Pitches” at the last few DEMO conferences in California, most of which fail to impress, and they have 50% more time.)

Notable in the 2010 presenter group, says The Collaborative, is the mix of industries and stages… “reflecting Minnesota’s variety and also our strengths: Medtech (Inspire Medical Systems, Galil Medical, and InterValve) … Cleantech (EarthClean, tenKsolar and Packet Power) … Technology (Alvenda and Swift Knowledge) … and mouth guard maker Bite Tech … and more.”  (I don’t know about you, but I beam with pride when I tell people about Minnesota’s rich tradition in mouth protection.)

But wait, there’s more!  Panels and workshops during the day (speakers and panelists) will address these topics:

• Financing Innovation circa 2010:  Angel, Venture Capital, and Private Equity
• Medtech in 2010:  Innovating with New Science, Products, and Markets amid FDA and Reimbursement Challenges
• Next Generation Technology:  Minnesota’s Unique Advantages and Opportunities
• Financing in a Challenging Economy
• Exit Strategies
• Intellectual Property and Financing
• Going Public
• Planning Your Long-Term Financing Strategy

You can still register for the event.  And (pssst) I hear the “MHTA” might even have a $100-off discount code.

Some 350 or more are expected at the confab, Carr tells me.  Sure, I know most of them already — but the thought that some in the group may be potential new social media friends for me makes me almost giddy.  And, doggone it, I don’t even have to drive to Wisconsin or South Dakota to meet them.  (This conference has been attracting more and more out-of-state attendees in recent years, which is commendable.)

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #mnconf.  I wonder how many of the blue suits might be tweeting.  Not holding my breath on that, but maybe I’ll set my live-blog software to display all the tweets attendees are blurting out during the event.  It’s time we loosened up this venerable conference a bit — thank God Twitter happened, huh?

Watch for our post with the link to my live blog here on Minnov8, which we’ll have up by late Wednesday.

In Its 24th Year, Venture Conference Asks If Minnesota Has ‘Lost It’ 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.

Founded in March 2009, EarthClean develops innovative, game-changing technologies and high performing products that are safe for plants, animals, fish and people. The start-up’s first product, TetraKO®, is a biodegradable and non-toxic water additive that helps firefighters knock down and suppress fires far more effectively than currently available suppressants. The product is pumped through standard fire equipment and adheres to any surface, in any attitude, of its targeted structure. Exposed to heat, TetraKO immediately attacks the fire tetrahedron (the chemical chain reaction of fuel, oxygen and heat) resulting in a dense, white steam that is cooler than the fire itself, thus further suffocating the blaze. The result is exceedingly fast and thorough extinguishment with far less fire destruction and water damage, and reduced risk for fire fighter professionals.

Congratulations to the EarthClean team! If you have a moment, check out this video on the fire retardant at WCCO.com and head on over to the MN Cup website and view the press release which is here.

EarthClean Takes the MN Cup! is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Today, thanks to the amazing advances of the Apple OS over the years and other Apple software offerings, I don’t have a single need to run a Windows app on my Mac. However, I realize many people do — they have a work reason, perhaps, to run Outlook, one of the Windows versions of Microsoft Office, or Internet Explorer, or other apps that just don’t (for some crazy reason) yet have a Mac version. I’ve been running the same Mac version of MS Office now for more than a decade; it works fine. (So, I can’t say I run a completely Microsoft-free environment; just a Windows-free one.) I also realize there’s another big universe of Mac users out there who want to run Windows on their machines: gamers. We’re not talking a work reason here (I don’t think!), but this is a big market. There are many more games available for the Windows platform than for Mac — though that is changing somewhat, since so many game apps are continually being introduced for the Mac iOS — that is, for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. (And the new “GameCenter” in Mac iOS 4.1, due next week, moves Apple even further into the games market.)

But why I am writing about running Windows on a Mac when I don’t have a need myself, and I’m certainly not a gamer? Well, before I tell you about “CrossOver Mac,” here’s why: I had a personal experience recently helping my daughter.  She’s also a longtime Mac user, but she needed to run a single Windows app for her business, which was required by a government agency she had to deal with. So, I told her, sure, I’d help her figure out how she could do that. I of course knew about two programs designed to do that, called “Parallels” and “VMware Fusion,” either of which we could buy (for about $80, I think).  And I told her I could help her get one of those installed on her Macbook. But we really didn’t like the idea of spending even that much money to run one little Windows app, maybe once a month — plus a friend, Steve Borsch, told me Windows doesn’t really run all that snappy with those programs, anyway.

But I was starting to think about buying one of those programs when another local friend, Gary Doan, said, “Wait, what about Boot Camp? That won’t cost you anything.” Apple started bundling that program with OS 10.5 and now 10.6, and you just need the original install disk to fire that up. Yes, plus a bonafide version of Windows, with an install disk — and we would have had to buy that. Cheapest I could find: an OEM version of 32-bit Windows 7 for $110 at our local Micro Center (closest thing we have to Fry’s here in MN). You can’t even buy Windows XP anymore, I learned, so that was not a cheaper option. That, combined with an onerous 14-page manual that Apple said you must print out and have by your side as you go through the detailed Boot Camp installation and configuration process, was making me start to think, screw this. Then I learned my daughter’s Macbook only has a half a gig of RAM, and would need at least 1G to run OS 10.6, which I wanted to upgrade her to, and preferably 2G. That would have cost me at least another $60, even if I installed the memory myself, which I really didn’t want to do. I thought, wait a minute, we’re getting close to $200 here — for something we really don’t want to do! Plus untold hours of my time screwing around to get it running.

Long story short: I found a brand-new HP Mini netbook on sale for $269 at OfficeMax (thanks to a friend’s tip), and I had a $30 off coupon! I told her I’d gladly pay for half of that. I figured I was coming out way ahead, considering I wouldn’t have to invest any time at all if we went with this option.  Plus, she wanted a second computer anyway, just for email and web use on another floor of her house, and the HP Mini came with built-in wifi capability, so it was a pretty cheap option for that. Now, we’re both happy.

Which brings me to the subject of my post: there’s a much simpler way to run Windows on an Intel Mac — and it might just work for you.  I wish I’d have known about it a week or two earlier, and I could have saved even more time (and money).  It’s a product called CrossOver Mac, from the playfully named CodeWeavers, based in St. Paul, MN.

CrossOver Mac integrates seamlessly with Mac OSX. There’s no need to boot a separate Windows partition, or move files back and forth between two separate environments. It lets you work natively in Mac OSX — you run your Windows apps directly in OSX and save all your work files there as well. And here’s a key point: running just one operating system means faster performance as well. (Yes, that means better than Parallels and VMware Fusion.) Running on OSX also means that even if you’re running virus-prone applications like Outlook and Internet Explorer, you’re completely protected. But here’s the best thing of all, you need no Windows OS license! That’s right: you don’t need spend that additional money; you just pay for the very reasonably priced CrossOver program.

It comes in two versions: Standard at $39.95 and Pro at $69.95, and both are of course downloadable. And, yes, there’s a free trial. The system requirements to run CrossOver are really pretty simple.  And check out the list of supported Windows apps near the bottom of the product page — all the major ones you would expect.  But what if you want to use a Windows app that isn’t listed in their database? Does that mean that it won’t run under CrossOver? Here’s what CodeWeavers says: “Not necessarily. Many applications work perfectly under CrossOver without any modification whatsoever. However, we may simply not be aware of them. So, just because an application isn’t in our database doesn’t mean that your application won’t run. You might consider downloading the trial version of CrossOver to see if your application works. And if it does, please consider submitting it so that it makes it into the database.”

For more resources and links on CrossOver Mac, check out this nice video, and the company’s online  Support Forums are quite active.  You can also follow CodeWeavers on Facebook or on Twitter.

I learned at a recent business seminar at my local Apple Store that CrossOver Mac is available in pretty much every one of Apple’s stores. You may have to ask a staff member for it, since they may store it in the back room, but it’s there, according to James Ramey, the company’s head of sales, who gave a talk at the seminar. The title on his business card:  “Minister of Greed”… hah!  You have to admire a company with some seriously good products, but also a sense of humor — and not afraid to put it out there. Check out this news release they put out a few weeks ago:

CodeWeavers CEO Names Himself “Employee of the Month” for 175th Consecutive Month
Software Developer CodeWeavers Leader Calls Feat “Jack Welchian” as He Awards Himself Honorary Plaque

The only Codeweavers press release funnier than this one was from July of 2009:

Codeweavers to Overtake Microsoft by 2018
Current Sales Trend Indicates Gadfly Open Source Developers Will Be Nation’s Largest Provider of Windows Technology; Microsoft Imperiled CodeWeavers Offers to Buy Microsoft Campus “On Credit”

The company manages this unique approach to publicity under the guidance of Minneapolis PR firm Haberman & Associates, one of the best (and most unsung) here in the Twin Cities. As a marketing advisor to tech firms, I take my hat off to them.

And I thank CodeWeavers for helping massive numbers of people (me included) to avoid buying Windows.

One more thing: I forgot to mention CrossOver Mac is based on the Wine Project. Thank your local Linux geek for that!  Also note that CodeWeavers has two other very popular products: “CrossOver Games” and “CrossOver Linux.”

(Note:  This post appeared first at Tech~Surf~Blog.)

MN Company Lets You Run Windows Apps on a Mac – the Easy Way 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.

CEO Björn Stansvik and I grabbed lunch last week to discuss his company, their approach, some of the things they do and where they’re headed. To say they’re accomplished is an understatement (the firm is on the State of MN approved vendor list; they’re delivering numerous mobile apps and focusing on cell phone application development; and even creating translation apps) Stansvik himself has quite a list of accomplishments himself.

Björn Stansvik, CEO

Deciding to come to this country as a tourist many years ago, he was focused on getting a work visa and staying in this land of opportunity. He ended up finding a company for whom he wrote an 80+ page market analysis of opportunities for their product in another country and politely inserted himself in to their company by asking for a computer and desk. They declined, but he appeared anyway and worked for free for two weeks. They sponsored and hired him.

The way he tells the story you can see how this is a man who becomes totally focused and consumed with a goal, achieves it, and goes on to the next one. Quite impressive but the proof is always in the deliverable for a company in this space, right? Let’s take a look at two that are public and visible.

One of MentorMate’s “paying forward” products is called SpyderMate. This search engine optimization (SEO) tool is free (registration required) and crawls your site. I did ours and was surprised to learn that our Google pagerank is “3″ for our categories and it linked to several competitors.

SEO seems like a black art and one that assumes you’re willing to hand over your soul to the devil in exchange for meaningful data and guidance. While most of us are self-taught in this arena—and tools abound to ‘help’ us get better at it—it’s a beautiful thing to start with a free tool and migrate up from there.

Take a peek at this presentation (PDF) that contains some solid information about SEO and the reasons behind the creation of this tool.

The other paying it forward offering that caught my eye is MigraineMate, a free iPhone application for tracking and managing migraine headaches (iTunes link). If you haven’t suffered from migraines or know someone who has, then you should know that changes in weather and barometric pressure is quite often a trigger for these headaches to occur. Nearly 12 million people will experience these debilitating migraines on an almost daily basis and this app can help them prepare for migraine onset, track its onset and course, and thus work with their caregivers to create strategies and tactics to mitigate their effects.

Some screenshots of MigraineMate, an iPhone application for migraine sufferers

It’s good to see this kind of giveaway strategy since MentorMate should be on my radar screen (and yours) more so than it is. As I read through several case studies on their website one theme stood out: companies “discovered” MentorMate through a Google search or at an event. While this is a positive for their own use of SEO and a willingness to network, I always wonder why companies and people of high intrinsic value are too often flying below the radar of those of us who could utilize their services and why MentorMate (and Stansvik) didn’t register on my metaphorical radar.

With work that encompasses multiple visions turned in to software—from Living Tradeshow to an employee tracking iPhone app called LocationMate, to MobileInspector, a Minnesota Dept of Health & Human Services mobile application to collect data on the 24,500 services providers in our state—I’m certain that you’ll be hearing a lot more about this company going forward and Stansvik’s reaching out to Minnov8 is one such example that he has a clear, overt strategy to get the word out on their accomplishments.

Stansvik is an avid conservationist (and quite interested in green technologies) and a lover of kayaking. So much so that he’s about to embark on a trip for which he’s been training for over a year: the Yukon 1000, a canoe and kayaking journey up the Yukon river for 1,000 miles (I get sore just thinking about it!). But it’s this sort of laser focus on achievement that makes me suspect he’ll be highly successful in making us all aware that there is a firm right here that can turn our vision for a product or service in to software.

MentorMate: Turning Vision in to Software is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Jerry Grabowski, Redliner’s CEO, carved out time last week to sit down with me and talk about Redliner, their target markets and a bit about the features of the product they’re delivering as software-as-a-service (SaaS). To say that they’ve got a unique opportunity is an understatement.

All the things you’d expect in an online collaboration space are here and then some you wouldn’t expect: Document editing like we’ve all come to know; an audit trail of who has edited the document and when; and even simultaneous editing by multiple users. What I haven’t seen as well executed as Redliner has done it is: The ability to accept or reject changes and (probably my favorite feature) is the ability to make private comments about a proposed change to someone else. I can’t tell you how often I could’ve used this when I was managing dozens of contracts simultaneously while running strategic alliances at Lawson Software and how it would have been enormously useful to be able to coach one of my alliance managers on some salient point within the agreement before our company would propose a change.

A screenshot of a Redliner document being edited

Another key feature I saw as critical (especially for those of us managing multiple documents) is a personal dashboard. Not only can you set up workspaces for a wide variety of projects, initiatives, agreements or documents with multiple different people, the moment you login to Redliner it explicitly details what you need to pay attention to right away and redlines you’re waiting on from others.

A Redliner personal dashboard showing collaboration workspaces one has set up, 'redlines' needing your attention, and edits still pending for others with whom you're collaborating

How big is the market for a strong play like Redliner? Jerry Grabowski was very clear about their very real market opportunity. With 84,000 agency and 488,000 marketing communication personnel, their initial potential user base is significant yet targeted. Adding in the PR client user potential such as client management and audit firms adds another 336,000. With over 840,000 attorneys and their business contacts, the total user potential grows to over 4 million creating a market in the $billions.

One thing Grabowski mentioned during our meeting was the obvious word-of-mouth marketing that is already occurring with the beta of Redliner. When one early adopter begins to use it—and drags others into it since it’s so remarkably useful—these others see its benefit and features and sign up for it themselves. In most agreement collaborations I’ve been in, for example, there are typically a client and a legal team member along with one of us and our lawyer, which equals typically four or more people who’d have to log in to collaborate on the agreement (usually from different locations). Each would instantly see the benefits and the viral spread of Redliner is pretty clear to any of us who participate in this web/internet/SaaS space.

In my view, the only missing element right now inhibiting explosive rollout of Redliner (but will be in the commercial version at launch) is a security model implementation. Upon Redliner’s commercial release both secure socket layer (SSL) and in-workspace document encryption will be deployed and will certainly give warm fuzzies to anyone who’d harbor concerns over whether sensitive agreements could be tampered with or cracked. That said, when I’ve brought up Redliner to two lawyers I know who’ve said, “So you’re saying Redliner is NOT yet secure?” I question them and soon am able to point out that they are attaching highly sensitive agreements and documents TO AN EMAIL and counsel them that by doing so, they’re sending those critical documents around through insecure mail relay servers and can either be stored or intercepted by God knows who or where.

Then comes their reaction: “Oh.” It’s clear that once people are educated on their current insecure practices and see how powerful, simple and secure Redliner is, they’ll sign up in droves and you can too here.

Grabowski has assembled a solid management team and board and from everything I’ve seen and know in the SaaS space (and with their potential competitors like Google Docs, Zoho or Adobe BuzzWord) Redliner has very strong competitive differentiators. With intent for a premium user offering (perhaps $50/month for a license which I would’ve happily paid at Lawson!) and the casual user/collaborator with a free “lite” version facilitating a quick adoption.

If you, or anyone you know, have an interest in making an investment in Redliner, reach out to Jerry Grabowski at jerryg (at) redliner (dot) com. This company has a significant opportunity just waiting for them to grab it, and with the right resources will do so quickly and profitably.

See a quick run through of a portion of their features by viewing this video or the others here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4GG2LqzwGY

Powerful Document Collaboration with Redliner is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

ReliaCloud, our own local (but national) cloud computing infrastructure company, has launched a full fledged channel program centered on their enterprise-class infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing offering.

According to Reliacloud, the five year growth outlook for IT cloud services revenue from 2009 to 2013 remains strong, with an annual growth rate of 26% – over six times the rate of traditional IT offerings (IDC, September 2009).

If you’re paying attention to cloud computing at all, then you can’t help but see that enterprise and small business IT spending is moving more and more to the cloud due to its easier set up, scalability, flexibility, built-in maintenance and support, and reduced costs for hardware and software maintenance.

ReliaCloud is focusing on making the reseller process as easy as possible, by providing a suite of tools that supports their resale process. ReliaCloud has developed a series of programs that maximize the use of their Cloud Storage and Cloud Servers for each of their customer profiles and, according to Brian Stevenson, Vice President of Sales for ReliaCloud, “We expect IT consulting firms and managed service providers to be the driving force of cloud adoption.”

I couldn’t agree more. Isn’t aligning incentives of others to leverage what you offer the basis of building an ecosystem? Great partnering is what made Microsoft so dominant for so many years and it’s obvious that ReliaCloud understands that making it easy for providers to build a business atop, around and with them will gain significant momentum for what they’re offering, and if the growth in cloud computing continues like IDC states (and which I believe is true) then striving to build and deliver — through as many channels as possible — an infrastructure layer upon which people can build toward that growing future, the more likely it is ReliaCloud will become a significant player in the space.

During a session at the recent Cloudcamp George Reese, CTO of cloud computing firm enStratus, laid out the layers of the cloud: SaaS; PaaS and IaaS. Think of SaaS as the layer where Salesforce.com plays (i.e., application layer); PaaS as the layer where companies expose their application programming interfaces to functionality others can use (e.g., AppEngine from Google and Force.com from SalesForce); and IaaS as the layer of hardware and administrative, policy-based services, internet connectivity and stuff that allows the other two to run (IaaS is sometimes known as Hardware as a Service or HaaS).

Nothing is more important than the IaaS layer since without speed, rock solid storage and a robust platform, the other two layers can’t function. With this new partner program at ReliaCloud, they’ll have a good shot at differentiating themselves from other providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Rackspace due to their focus on customer service which they’re carrying over from Visi and the learning they’ve gained from their direct client interactions at ReliaCloud.

ReliaCloud Releases Partner Program is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

This past week, I thought it would be an interesting little project for me to do a survey of sorts as the basis for this blog post. What I did (totally unscientific, I admit) was ask all the Twin Cities-area mobile developers I happened to know just how many apps they have on the two major platforms, Apple and Android, and how many users have downloaded their apps to date.  It turned into a bigger project than I thought!  It required a lot of back-and-forth emails to clarify all their current offerings.  But I’ve sorted it all out as best I can, and you’ll see the results of that survey in the second half of this post.

The two most-experienced mobile app development firms in Minnesota I have known quite well for some time, having been a consultant to both in the past: DoApp and CodeMorphic.  These two firms began developing for the iPhone platform as soon as Apple released the SDK in March 2008, and had their first creations in the App Store from the get-go, in the case of DoApp (July 2008), and CodeMorphic soon after. So, it was no surprise to me, then, that these two have the largest numbers of downloads locally. But many more Minnesota developers jumped in after them, and still are jumping in. In fact, I learn about a new one almost weekly. Some publish apps in their own name, some only for clients, and some do both. (For apps developed for-hire for client companies, developers cannot track ongoing download numbers in real time — only their clients know, unless they tell them or otherwise publicize the numbers. But the developers can certainly make educated guesses, which some of them did for me for my survey.) What triggered this idea for a post was a news announcement one of the two big local development firms just put out …

DoApp Inc. Announces One Million Downloads of Its “Mobile Local News” App

Actually, it’s not one app; there are more than 100 of these DoApp “MLN” apps out there, because that’s how many customers (media outlets) have signed up with DoApp to date to use what is really an “app platform.”  It allows DoApp’s customers — TV news stations, newspapers, online publications, and radio stations — to easily brand the app for themselves and deliver their content via smart phones and other mobile devices, including the Apple iPad.  (DoApp has not yet submitted to Apple an app designed specifically for the iPad, though its many iPhone apps do work on that new device.) In its recent announcement, DoApp counted downloads for all its locally-branded Mobile Local News apps, including both Apple and Android downloads, in saying they have surpassed the one million number. The company first made the Mobile Local News app available in April 2009. For more about all of DoApp’s products, see the company’s web site.   (In the photo: Joe Sriver, center, Founder; Wade Beavers, left, CEO; and Dave Borrillo, VP-Software Development.) I conducted an email interview with DoApp founder Joe Sriver to learn more about the current status of his company’s Mobile Local News app business, which follows….

First, here’s a map showing U.S. coverage of DoApp Mobile Local News apps. Click on it to go a page that also lists, below the map, all the media properties throughout the country that have the company’s app.

Minnov8: Just out of curiosity, Joe, what percentage of the one million downloads you’re announcing for Mobile Local News are iPhone vs. Android?
Sriver: “Currently, the breakdown is about 60/40 in favor of the iPhone. Android has really been gaining a lot of ground in the last year. 2010 is a big year for Android.  We are seeing over 49 different brands of Android phones that are tapping our MLN app — a challenge to maintain.”

Minnov8: How many of your existing customers for this app offer both iPhone and Android versions? Does our local WCCO-TV, your first customer, offer both?
Sriver: “Our platform offers the native iPhone and Android versions for all our media outlet customers — WCCO included. We will also have a Blackberry WAP version debuting in the next month.  We’re seeing a new influx of iPad users accessing the news, too, so let’s just say we will have an iPad solution soon.”

Minnov8: Most all your customers for this app appear to be TV stations. Are any radio stations or newspapers signed up yet? Do you expect more of the latter two?
Sriver: “We have been signing newspapers as well.  In the last few months, we signed Journal Communications, which includes Milwaukee’s Journal-Sentinel, and the Los Angeles News Group, which includes several newspapers in the LA area. Our SBT News app serves the newspaper in South Bend, Indiana.  We have also signed Swift Communications, whose properties include many newspapers in the western and northwestern U.S.  With our recent announcements, a flurry of radio stations are contacting us, and our first radio station app will be out in the first week of May.”

Minnov8: How much are you seeing media outlets developing their own custom, native apps for mobile devices — as opposed to simply skinning your app and configuring it for use with their local audiences?  What’s the difference in time and money with your approach?
Sriver: “We’ve talked to many media outlets. A few of them have decided to do development in-house. Many of them call us back a few months later after they realize all the development requirements for iPhone and Android. They tell us our Mobile Local News solution is the fastest, cheapest, and most efficient method to bring their content to mobile. The money difference is huge for them because its the support that kills them, and we have a solution that fits to scale.  We’ve done nine major enhancements in 12 months already, and for a property to do so is a huge resource drain.  It’s just tough to keep up with technology.”

Minnov8: How does DoApp Inc. make money from this app — licensing?  Revenue share? Where does your “Adagogo” ad platform fit in here?  What portion of your customers for this app have ads appearing on it?  What revenue do you make from ads that appear on the app?
Sriver: “We offer a subscription model where stations can receive 100% of revenue from advertisements, or an advertising revenue share model, where news organizations pay a small set up fee and then share advertising revenue with DoApp.”

Minnov8: Are all current customers for the app in the U.S.? If so, any plans to pursue business in other countries?
Sriver: “Yes, all current news entities who use Mobile Local News are in the U.S.  We do have plans for news organizations in other countries. We can support translations right now, and we are working to reach out to the growing Spanish-speaking consumer market.”

Minnov8: Your original partner for the Mobile Local News platform was Inergize Digital Media of Minneapolis — and I remember having the initial discussion with them on your behalf in the fall of 2008. What role do they play? What percentage of the media outlets that have signed up to use your app were existing customers of theirs?  And what revenue split does Inergize get from this partnership?
Sriver: “Inergize brought many of their existing stations who used their web solution to the mobile platform via DoApp’s Mobile Local News. We’re working to establish other relationships and also extending our direct model to TV news/radio/newspaper properties.  The relationship works like this: DoApp provides Inergize’s partner stations with the DoApp Mobile Local News mobile publishing solution. A percentage of ad revenue goes to the station or newspaper, Inergize, and DoApp.”

Minnov8: What does 2010 hold for DoApp? What portion of your overall revenues do you expect will come from the Mobile Local News and Adagogo combined?
Sriver: “We will continue to build our base of news entities who use Mobile Local News.  MLN is the most popular platform for mobile news delivery in the U.S.  Our Adagogo ad platform is currently being used on all Mobile Local News apps. We will continue to grow Adagogo as well. DoApp is also focusing on mobile real estate. We have created what is arguably the most advanced real estate solution, combining cost savings capabilities for agents with simplicity for their clients — allowing mobile access anytime, anywhere via smart phones and other mobile devices.”

So, what about DoApp’s total stats, for all their apps?  Here are the numbers I got from Joe:

-What is the total number of apps DoApp has had accepted into the App Store? iPhone: 125 (all but about 15 are Mobile Local News apps). Android: 110.
-Paid vs. Free? iPhone: 4 are paid apps, the rest are free. Android: all are free.
-What is the total number of downloads of all your apps? iPhone: 4.5 million. Android: 600,000.  Total= 5.1 million.

So, where do other Minnesota developers stand as far as downloads?  Well, here’s that unofficial survey of mine, with respondents in alphabetical order, by company name.  The first happens to be the other large player in the iPhone market I referred to earlier, who may in fact have the largest number of downloads of all, although that cannot be verified:

CodeMorphic – Bill Heyman, Founder
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 50. (All under the names of clients.)
-Paid vs. Free? 20 paid, 30 free.
-What is the approximate total number of downloads of all your apps? CodeMorphic provided a conservative estimate (because its clients have the download figures): 3-5 million.  The most popular of CodeMorphic’s apps has been the NPR Public Radio Player, which the firm said had 2.5M downloads as of two months ago. It also did MPR’s app. Its other popular apps include the “Smarter Agent” real-estate app. Some national brands CodeMophic has done apps for do not allow the firm to publicly disclose them as clients, but these apps have broad reach, too. To see a selection of some of  CodeMorphic’s apps, see the firm’s portfolio page.)
-Do you have apps available now in the Android Market? None yet.

Mentormate – Bjorn Stansvik, CEO
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 1 (“MigraineMate”).
-Paid vs. Free? Free.
-What is the approximate total number of downloads of all your apps? 858.
-Do you have apps available now in the Android Market? None yet. (“LocationMate app to be launched, for both iPhone and Android.”)

Mobile On Services Inc. (BuildAnApp.com) – Scott Pearson, VP-Business Development - UPDATED
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 22. (“We’re still in beta.”)
-Paid vs. Free? All free.
-What is the approximate total number of downloads of all your apps? 4,000 iPhone, 500 Android. (“Will be a much different story in a couple of months.”)
-Do you have apps available now in the Android Market? Yes, 12.

MobileRealtyApps.com, and Performant Design LLC – Aaron Kardell, CEO
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 4. (“Soon to be 5.”)
-Paid vs. Free? 2 paid, 2 free. (“Soon to be 2 paid, 3 free.”)
-What is the approximate total number of downloads of all your apps? 20,000.
-Do you have apps available now in the Android Market? No. (“But coming soon.”)

Mobile Roots – Lynn Smith, CEO/Founder
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 5. (Three are under Lynn’s name; two apps were developed by Mobile Roots for clients: “Margaret for Governor” and “Brazelton for House.” Two more apps are in development for political candidates.)
-Paid vs. Free? 1 paid (“What the Funkytown!” – $0.99), 4 free.
-What is the approximate total number of downloads of all your apps? 3,270.
-Do you have apps available in the Android Market? No. (“But releasing our first next week.”)

Recursive Awesome – Justin Grammens, Cofounder
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 7 public apps in the App Store; also 5 private apps for one client, which are installed using the limited “AdHoc” distribution method, whereby each app is manually installed on individual Apple devices.
-Paid vs. Free? 1 paid, 7 free.
-What is the approximate total number of downloads of all your apps? Estimate provided: 850,000.
-Do you have apps available in the Android Market? Yes, 6 — 1 paid, 5 free, and 1 in private development. Estimated total downloads for these: 60,000.

Refactr – Ben Edwards, Founder
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 2. (“And 2 more submitted.”)
-Paid vs. Free? All free to date.
-What is the approximate total number of downloads of all your apps? One app built for Mayo Clinic: download number not known. The firm says its own app, “Flashbang,” has been downloaded about 20,000 times.
-Do you have apps available in the Android Market? None yet.

Tiny Mission – Bekki Freeman, Founder
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 3.
-Paid vs. Free? 2 paid, 1 free.
-What is the approximate total number of downloads of all your apps to date? 1600.
-Do you have apps available in the Android Market? No. (But “working on it as fast as we can type!”).

One thing that occurred to me as I was working on this survey over the past few days: it isn’t just software development firms that doing mobile apps — many of those being firms that do development-for-hire, and some of which are doing self-publishing of their own apps.  But there are also other types of local firms that are developing their own apps, some in-house, including startups whose initial product is a mobile offering, or has a mobile version. One such startup I just learned about is this one, based in Stillwater:

Nibi Software – Troy Peterson, CEO
-What is the total number of apps you have had accepted into the App Store? 1. (“An educational app called Nibipedia, which mashes all the educational Youtube channels with Wikipedia articles — so that, when reading an article, the app recommends relevant videos. It also tracks your research path for you so you can review later. We have several other apps in the queue. Apple makes taking an idea from conception to market so much easier than with traditional web apps. We’re stoked.”)
-Paid vs. Free? Paid – $1.99. (“But we’re offering it to teachers in our Facebook Group for free.” Presumably, that would be via the AdHoc distribution method.)
-What is the total number of downloads of all your apps? No specific number reported. (“It was just released, and has not been promoted. But we’ve had several hundred downloads already from people who became aware of it in the educational marketplace. It’s really designed for the larger display screen of the iPad, so we are setting to work to promote that in the next few weeks.” Presumably, that would mean an iPad-specific version of the app is coming.)
-Do you have apps available in the Android Market? Not yet. (“But we’re going to, for sure.”)

A footnote: I only contacted firms that I know to be developing for the Apple or Android platforms, but I make no claims that this is a complete list. One firm I contacted that chose not to report its numbers at this time was Handcast Media Labs, creators of the “SparkRadio” app (one of my personal favs), which is available for both the iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad platforms. Another developer I contacted did not respond: Dan Grigsby, who was head of MobileOrchard.com, a company he announced recently he was shutting down.

Now we want your input: Who have we missed? Are you a developer doing mobile apps? Do you know of a Minnesota company that has released iPhone or Android apps?  Is your mother doing iPhone apps? How about firms based outside the Twin Cities? If so, please tell us in the comments!  Also tell us what apps you like.  And, lastly… is the iPad better than sex?

MN Mobile Developers Clocking Millions of Downloads is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.