Seriously, this company has a uniquely strong value proposition that has already put them on the map in Eau Claire and in several markets where organizations have adopted TSTMedia’s offerings for mission-critical sports websites.

Founded in 2004, TSTMedia started off as a web development shop but focused their efforts around the sports passions of college buddies and co-founders Justin Kaufenberg (CEO) and Carson Kipfer (COO). Quickly they identified that the sports niche was woefully underserved and filled with group and collaboration needs not being addressed in the marketplace.

They quickly began moving forward with Team Sport Technologies, building out sports-specific web applications. The applications enabled amateur sports organizations to efficiently manage a website with little or no previous technical knowledge. TST Media, under the Team Sport Technologies brand, then released a complete roster of sports specific products for hockey, soccer, basketball, lacrosse, baseball, softball, football, volleyball, swimming and others.

The websites they built and delivered for sports clients included a combination of online tools (online registration, interactive multi-team calendars, highly sophisticated statistic engines, etc.) that made publishing website content, sharing information and communicating with members extremely easy.

In 2009, they combined their Ruby on Rails experience, knowledge of the sports domain, and the engine they’d already created to make it brain-dead-simple for non-technical users to deliver a great team or organization website, and consolidated their various organization products and features into a single platform called NGIN.  

Justin graciously carved out time on two different occasions to talk with me about their NGIN platform, the market spaces they’re addressing, the venture capital they just raised, and he even walked me through the backend administration interface for an hour, showing me how easy it is to setup and run an NGIN created site.

To say I was impressed is a gross understatement and I’m a guy not easily enthused by tools like this one, especially after spending four years of my life at the content management systems (CMS) company Vignette, then becoming a power user of Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, and been someone who has examined nearly every CMS commercial and open source package on the planet. Besides that, in my spare time I’ve analyzed far too many hosted web applications that purport to be perfectly positioned for affinity groups, teams or organizations…but usually they are square-pegs-in-a-round-hole requiring huge workarounds to be usable.

What impressed me? There are so many pieces and parts to the system that blew me away, but here are just a handful:

• Very fast setup. All the baseline required elements are in place ready to be added, subtracted or modified by the user
• Easy site manipulation with features such as inline editing of content and an innovative “admin/user ‘switch’” which shows incredible attention to detail and usability
• Fluid layout and a page hierarchy feature that makes it simple to make wholesale structure changes to the website
• Superb calendaring functions
• Social media aspects
• Member management, the lifeblood of these sports organizations, was easy to use and manage
• Volunteer management, another key need since harnessing the interest, and willingness to participate, by parents and family members in the sports organization is an imperative
• Lots of Ajaxy goodness and a forthcoming API.

One aspect that intrigued me was the positioning of NGIN. As Justin and I talked, it became increasingly clear to me how TST is sitting on a major opportunity to verticalize their solution (which is obviously what they’re doing and likely the basis for VC investment). He and I kicked around ideas of the kinds of organizations that require the capabilities–modified somewhat of course–that they’ve already built for sports organizations and we talked about a half dozen, it’s that obvious an opportunity.

Their engine (NGIN) solution goes beyond what others deliver that’s for sure, but their challenge is moving beyond the sports-oriented domain expertise they own, knowledge that would need to be translated to other market segments. Can they do it?

I’d say “yes” judging by how they’ve already executed and that they’ve created and shipped a highly robust engine. The one last thing to mention was that I was impressed by how much Justin and team “get it.” Every overt and covert query I made while we talked on those two separate occasions (e.g., What about sharing calendars and microformats? Will you have an API? What about leveraging web services and widgets?) were answered with aplomb, honesty and with enough information that I learned they’re on top of their game. I’m sure that we’ve seen just the tip of the iceberg with NGIN and we’ll hear a lot about TSTMedia going forward.

It’s the NGIN that will make TST Media go is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Completely out of the blue a few days after MinneDemo, I stumbled across something ArcStone had created for a client called the Interactive Roof Designer, a Flash piece for Trimline Building Products (more here) that allows color changes for roofing tiles. Since half my business focuses on trends for the home furnishings industry (The Trend Curve™), I was immediately interested in what they’d created since this is the sort of thing our customers would be interested in. Though there have been many similiar types of Flash-based “changing colors on the fly” web offerings like this, I must admit being pleasantly surprised by how good an implementation they’d done and that it was visually stunning and worked flawlessly.

I immediately thought, “Who are these guys and why haven’t I heard much more about them?” As a consequence, I called CEO David Carnes and went over to chat with him last week to find out more about what this Minnesota firm is creating and what’s at the heart of their innovation.  One of the things I always look for in any company is some sign or articulation of their vision and values. How do they see themselves? What do they care about and are they aligning their work around their core values…and do they even know what their values are? David talked about their values and just being there, seeing their offices and getting a sense of the environment, made it clear that yes, they’re living their values.

At the outset of our discussion, David and I talked about his vision about the company, its direction and the spaces they’re in (e.g., Wonderfile, AMP, eBrochure) and the important work they do creating web strategies and web “assets” for their clientele.

They’ve been at this internet/web game since 2000 and have a couple of dozen people in their company now — some of whom are aligned with specific properties like Wonderfile or AMP — and have approximately 400 clients. They’re in the former carriage house of the historic Semple Mansion on Franklin in Minneapolis which, as they describe it on their website, “…has housed a bank, an architectural firm, and now houses our unique blend of web developers, consultants, and guppies.” You’ll have to poke around their website to discover more about their fixation on guppies.

What I found particularly interesting is that ArcStone is doing what many startups and emerging companies are increasingly relying upon as their core infrastructure to deliver their applications: Amazon Web Services and specifically their S3 storage service.

One aspect of our conversation, and my contemplating our interview afterwards, was that many smaller firms and companies (not just in Minnesota but everywhere) have one fundamental problem that ArcStone exhibits: getting the word out. Why is it, for example, that I’d not known they’d embraced the leading open source ecommerce package I’m particularly hot on, MagentoCommerce? Or that they’d delivered that Interactive Roof Designer product? Or that Wonderfile is as robust and mature as it is?

No question marketing and sales is always a trade-off between resources and time; energy devoted to clients or to one’s own company; managed growth vs. an unmanageable spike if buzz makes a product like Wonderfile take off too fast and beyond the ability for ArcStone to scale. Still, it’s the one thing that troubles me whenever I am exposed to a company like ArcStone that has strong products, client base, team and core values driving it all and yet aware of how few people with checkbooks (i.e., prospective customers) have any clue about who they are and what they do.

I think, however, that you’re going to be hearing a lot more about ArcStone in the months and years to come as they continue to deliver on their vision and create momentum around their products and services.

ArcStone: Vision, Values, Products & Services is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Today’s hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson. (Photo credit: Lee Odden (TopRankBlog; Flickr).

Joining us on the podcast is a brand new Minnov8 contributor and participant, Gary Koelling, who is Senior Manager, Social Technology at Best Buy Inc. After interactions with Graeme Thickins — who isn’t bashful about promoting Minnov8 — Gary decided he’d like to create for Minnov8 and completed the form (hint: you could too!).

Gary is the founder of BlueShirtNation.com, Giftag.com and leads several social technology projects within Best Buy. He describes himself as a tinkerer, gadfly (and an aspiring iconoclast), reader, tryer (someone who tries), teacher and listener (with a fairly tuned bullshit meter). Due to the success of the efforts he’s involved in, and the high profile of our hometown consumer electronics retailing giant, Gary has been able to talk to lots of people and companies around the country about social media and social technology.

Our favorite quote about his speaking around the country from his LinkedIn profile? “I don’t know if it’s helping, but I enjoy it.” We sure think so since he’s in-the-game, taking risks, experimenting and driving towards high value outcomes for his employer.

LINKS
Here are links to sites, products or other resources discussed during the podcast:

• Good economic news for MN tech firms in Q4 2008: MTS revs up 9%, EPS up 21% (view MTS “Test Suite“) and NVE up 24%, EPS up 44% (view NVE “Fun Facts” page)
• Mashable article on 40 Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them (Scroll down to the “Retail” section)
• Fortune Top 100 Best Places to Work: Mayo (24th) and General Mills (39th) as great places to work (via MNHeadhunter)
• Forbes listing America’s Top Most Wired Cities: Minneapolis is #7 on the list
• The (mostly mythological) “Osborne Effect” but is there some reality to it in an online world?
• Macintosh image editors increasingly used by Tim Elliott: Acorn and Pixelmator
• Gary headed to Etail in Phoenix and a Computerworld event (both he and his cohort and colleague, Steve Bendt)
• EVENTS: Social Media Breakfast 1/30/09; Minnedemo (RSVP if you want to get in!) 2/6/09; Unsummit 3/7/09.

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 22 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Scattered geographically once again, the Gang comes together for another show where we chat about:

+ Our potential economic meltdown and what it means for internet and web startups and companies

+ What’s up with Best Buy? We chat about how this behemoth retailer has now suddenly burst onto the scene with a whole range of internet-centric initiatives (see Minnov8 posts here and here)

+ Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote where he denigrates developers seemingly focused on trivial applications like throwing sheep

+ The “Unsummit” going on as an alternative for those unable to get in to the MIMA Summit (it’s sold out).

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 8 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

This ink on paper, manual handing out process was adequate in a day when contact information was relatively static and there were inherent limitations on the number of people whom we’d ever actually meet. In a time when 75% of adults are participating, communicating and engaging with others on the Web and meeting dozens, hundreds or in some cases thousands of others virtually, a static paper card is becoming much less useful. By the millions, we participating adults are engaged in numerous social networks and affinity groups, are blogging in record numbers, possess multiple email addresses and phone numbers, use Twitter, Skype and instant messaging accounts, and often have different identities with personal, business, or some other affiliation with required contact information that can often change frequently.

One Minneapolis company has created an innovative solution to meet those multiple identity needs with a digital equivalent of the trusty paper business card, one whose capabilities go far beyond what a static paper card could ever deliver.

BusinessCard2 by Workface, Inc., “…is a simple tool that helps business professionals to improve their individual-level professional identity, relevancy and visibility on the internet. BusinessCard2 represents a new but rapidly growing site based around individual-level professional data. BusinessCard2 enables people to build a web-enabled version of the business card they use every day that can be viewed, passed, collected, downloaded, and searched throughout cyberspace. The service is complimented by a powerful Lead Generation Engine (LGE) that provides increased business opportunities.”

Workface CEO, Lief Larson, and I have talked many times about their various offerings and initiatives. This risk-taking, serial entrepreneur keeps driving forward on the creation of new companies and offerings, and BusinessCard2 is his most recent one (and, I would argue, his most promising one to date). I talked yesterday with Lief and his chief technology officer, Jereme Allen, and received an overview of their next generation business card.

Last year I talked to Lief about an earlier offering, Lyro.com, which was a service of theirs that now appears to have been a developmental step along the path toward delivering BusinessCard2. While Lyro had a few of the elements of what would later become BusinessCard2 (e.g., a business card and a profile page), the latters features have gone far beyond it by adding multiple card creation (for all those different identities we each have), listing by industry in a directory, “badges” which can be embedded anywhere you’re able to do so on the Web (e.g., your blog, Facebook, collaboration site, web page, etc.), metrics to see how many have viewed your card(s) or “pocketed” them (i.e., stored them in their own account page), and probably my favorite and a key feature: downloadable vCards.

vCards are an industry standard file format that nearly every digital address book or contact manager accepts, regardless of whether they’re on your desktop, mobile phone or in a Web application. I’ve grown to despise handing one of my staff a stack of business cards I’ve received to enter in a database or to scan them in myself. It’s always seemed ridiculously inefficient and it’s even tougher when I’m meeting someone virtually and they have their contact information in their email signature, which I then have to cut-n-paste by hand into an address book. With just this one, tiny feature, I was sold on BusinessCard2.

Why would you use BusinessCard2? The big benefit to what they’ve built is allowing easy dissemination of your contact information. I’ve placed one of their ‘badges’ on my blog under my photo and another on the Minnov8 About Us page…each pointing to one of the separate cards I created for just two of my separate identities. Visitors to either site can view my card, download the vCard, quick import it and so on.

The current feature-set offers more and their roadmap for the next phases are significant. While I agreed to leave certain next steps out of this post, they allude to a few on their website:

• It is the goal of BusinessCard2 to empower you through the formation and marketing of your professional brand, resulting in improves visibility and broader sales opportunities

• By adding BusinessCard2 to your website, you can bring a whole new human element by allowing users to download your BusinessCard2 as well as drop their card on your site

• Web widget is coming in order to “extend ties” across the Internet

• Enhancing the directory and adding significant Lead Generation services.

As I went through the site with Lief, I found myself very enthusiastic about what they’d built. Trying to maintain a pragmatic stance, I asked some tough questions, but then came to the conclusion that there was no question that BusinessCard2 is a platform that could become a one-stop-shop for identity management and contact information exchange, but this category is not without its competitors and barriers to adoption.

CHALLENGES
There are three issues that are key to their success:

1) Attracting users and subsequently increasing utility not found in any competing offering.

When I showed Lyro.com (BusinessCard2′s predecessor) to several colleagues, all immediately said, “Oh….is that like LinkedIn?” (referring to the popular professional connection network). At that point I didn’t think they compared since LinkedIn had a critical mass of people and Lyro was, basically, one business card and a page. Initial impressions of Lyro was that it didn’t “do enough” (as one colleague stated) and wasn’t attractive enough to invest time, energy and effort in using it.

After Lief rolled out BusinessCard2 and talked me through the site, the openness of it impressed me. This is, arguably, one of the key limitations of sites like LinkedIn or any walled garden where all the good stuff is behind a login: to get any benefit from it or see most data you must join, while BusinessCard2′s model is complete transparency and openness. In my view, this openness — and the instant recognition people will have about the utility of having a business card(s) on the Web — will drive people to use BusinessCard2 and I believe Workface has an inherent competitive advantage through their laser focus on the virtual business card everyone needs.

The key execution piece will be delivering on feature-sets that increase the utility of the digital business card and keep users doing more and wanting more, while balancing what may be the most critical PR and management issue for the next few years.

2) Protecting the privacy of users and offering data portability.

BusinessCard2′s model of attracting users is akin to what most current offerings are doing, be it Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or many other services: get people to use your offering and participate in it; build a critical mass of users; and then begin to offer value-added and salable services to advertisers, marketers and others who’d like to reach these users.

The problem is that there is a groundswell of awareness of data portability, privacy and the usage of our data…especially our social data. Michael Arrington, CEO of Techcrunch said it best in an article for the Washington Post yesterday:

Internet giants know that the days of getting you to spend all of your time inside their walled gardens are over. So the next best thing is to at least maintain as much data about the user as possible, and make sure they identify with your brand while they are out there not being on your site. The most valuable information a user has is his or her identity (that’s why the big guys are so eagerly adopting the issuing side of OpenID so you log in with, say, your Yahoo account on other sites), as well as their friend list (valuable, plus users hate to keep redoing it all over the Internet) and other information.

After further thought, I’m not yet certain how I feel about allowing the downloading of my vCard since it’s populated with a wealth of information about me. Though they’re secure against automated attacks to harvest vCard’s, it still makes me nervous to see how simple it is to grab my card and all it contains.

Fortunately, Lief Larson and crew are on top of these issues and he addressed every point I brought up to prove it, which gives me confidence they’ll carefully, transparently and judiciously deliver new features that balance the needs of the user, those who’d like to reach us, along with Workface’s need to accelerate and build a world-class business.

3) Feature creep. Inevitably, users begin to ask for and then demand new features and balancing #1 above with trying to do too much is always tough for a startup.

As I went through the site with Lief, I asked for something I thought would be simple: let me input multiple email addresses on separate business cards I create. Turns out that it’s not trivial to use these multiple emails since one email address must be tied to the identity of the person and all email addresses can’t come back to the same BusinessCard2 user record.

As we talked, it became clear that they were already thinking-through options for solving this problem (e.g., creating an alias for emails) but these sorts of feature requests can quickly get out-of-hand and sidetrack a product roadmap. I think this is a must-have feature while someone else might have their favorite. It will be interesting to see how this emerging company manages their roadmap and keeps users excited about BusinessCard2 as a platform that will grow over time, without diluting their resources and getting little accomplished.

If you are struggling with all the different identities and services you have in this time of accelerating change around the Web, or just want to try it out for yourself (it’s free), check out BusinessCard2.

Your Business Card for the Web is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Most of us are visual learners and communicators and thus have to see what you’re talking about and, of course, doing so is at the core of the idiom, “to be on the same page.” To communicate your vision in the most profound, efficient, synchronous and impactful way means that your virtual communications must include the ability to show others documents, presentations, Web pages, images and more in real-time so you can interact in the most powerful way possible.

In addition (and perhaps more vital) reason to find virtual ways to connect with others and be on the same page is the explosion in personal and company actions globally that are “green” in nature. More of us are trying to discover ways to consume less oil, spew fewer carbons into the atmosphere, and be just as, or more, productive without continuing to move atoms around (either our bodies or physical goods) like we’ve been doing in the past.

Meeting these needs (and more) is at the heart of what a Minnesota firm, Yugma (pro. “Yoog-mah” and not like many do “yugg-mah”) offers to the marketplace. As they say about themselves, “The name Yugma is a word from the Sanskrit language meaning “the state of being in unified collaboration.” Yugma, Inc. is a privately held venture-backed company headquartered in Minnesota , USA and has offices in Minneapolis, Mexico, Argentina and India.”

To me, being in unified collaboration means collaborating with others has to be easy to understand for everyone participating, nearly instantaneous to connect, and as simple to use as a to use as a word processor. Yugma delivers as you’ll see.

Yugma is positioned as a free web collaboration service, but they wisely deliver several paid premium levels of service enabling you to have numerous collaborators in a session or use the service for mass presentation delivery. Their service offers web conferencing with all of the requisite baseline services (e.g., whiteboard; host control switching; mouse and keyboard control of remote systems and more) and easily enables people to instantly connect over the internet. Their service supports Windows, Mac or Linux for both host and presenter functionality.

While you can easily poke around for yourself on their site, try out Yugma for free, read the FAQ’s and learn about all the bells-and-whistles they deliver, I’d like to first give you a quick snapshot of their current status.

I met last Friday with with CEO Lingaraj Mishra (right), and COO, Karel Lukas (left), to get an update on their status and probe a bit in order to try and get behind all the positive buzz they’ve been receiving as of late.

A quick disclaimer is in order: Yugma was a client of mine in 2006 in their early stages (and I have some options) so I’m quite familiar with where they were and how far they’ve leapt ahead in a short time. Perhaps I’ll come across as a bit of a cheerleader in this post, waving my pom-poms for their success, but just know that I intend to provide you with a balanced report.

I’ll be up front and clear on one thing about the web conferencing space Yugma competes in: there are dozens of competitors. Nearly all of them target the enterprise while a handful (Go-to-Meeting as the most notable example) do that and target consumers (especially home and small business workers).

The space is also becoming more consolidated with Cisco buying the #1 vendor WebEx (I posted about why that happened here and my thoughts were validated by one of my heroes: Internet visionary and publisher Tim O’Reilly here) and IBM acquiring WebDialogs (for their Unyte product). In addition, basic screensharing is being built in to operating systems (e.g., Microsoft’s Vista-centric Windows Meeting Space and Apple’s iChat in Leopard) which gnaws away at the edges of what Yugma delivers.

As evidenced by some of these consolidation moves, web sharing functionality is becoming “table stakes” to be in the collaboration and unified communication games. While most of these larger services offer every flipper, flapper and dweebezaarb feature you could ever imagine, most of us just need to instantly pull up a service while we’re on the phone with someone or a team and collaborate quickly with minimal setup and fuss. We also don’t want to be concerned with high costs or whether or not some individual or some group we need to connect with has the same computer platform or latest version of an operating system.

Yugma has smartly focused their efforts right smack dab in the sweet spot of the millions of people that are connecting up with Web 2.0 applications and services, joining and participating in social networks, and living an always-on, always-connected lifestyle in record numbers. People who are using a variety of computer platforms and operating systems. Whether we participants are in a coffee shop using Wifi, at the office or at home, we need to connect and collaborate with others across the internet in increasingly more robust ways.

Here are just a few of the results of that focus according to Lingaraj and Karel:

• Yugma is now fully Skype Certified. This is a big deal since (as I write this post), there are 11,805,212 people online with Skype running. Any of them, at any time, could launch Yugma. Read this latest reporting in VOIP News that talks about the top five Skype Extras–with Yugma at #1–and you’ll see that others in-the-know think this service is brilliant

• Version 3.0 is in beta and will be released February 29th. Sporting a new streamlined interface, faster launch and significantly enhanced performance, my use of this version to date shows it be to rock solid and the Mac version on full parity with the Windows version (haven’t tried Linux)

• They’re actively working on new application programming interfaces (API’s). This is huge for them as it enables other Web application developers to consume Yugma as a service and as a part of their application. It also facilitates Yugma moving into delivering their functionality into a whole host of other areas by inserting their service into those places where people congregate online (hmmm….that was pretty nebulous Borsch…but I’m embargoed on revealing anything more so was intentionally vague)

• Have rolled out playback capability for recorded Yugma sessions. An option for server-level transcoding of a Yugma session in to Apple’s Quicktime video format is available. This is important since more and more of us are investing our intellectual capital in communicating with others and delivering that communication asynchronously (on-demand when someone can watch it) is a must

• Their core infrastructure is now massively scalable (which was an issue a little over a year ago when hosting sessions globally since latency was high) as they have presence at major peering points on the internet with an up-n-down scaling of the server-side applications as demand dictates. They’ll soon deliver service level agreements for enterprise customers, something they demand, and confidence is high among reviewers who’ve put Yugma through the paces

• Usage:
  • Are experiencing 800 sessions per day with 200 concurrent sessions at any given time
  • 4 million minutes per month (and 400,000 minutes of conference calling per month through the free conference calling service)
  • 3.5 people average in each session
  • Average session is one hour
• They’ve significantly expanded their distribution offerings:
  • They have a widget you can post on a blog, web page or in a social network so any visitor can instantly start or join a Yugma session. My only concern with this strategy is grabbing a Yugma widget is buried in their developer section and not easily available to a mass audience
  • An affiliate program paying a 15% commission on monthly recurring revenues
  • Discussions of a private/white label program are underway where a co-branded or branded offering would be available to organizations or developers at a negotiated price.

What’s not clear to me is their path to monetization and ongoing ability to offer enough competitive features to keep the Internet crowd interested. With more major vendors building this web conferencing capability into the infrastructure layer (e.g., Cisco with WebEx or even at a low level from within personal computer operating systems), it may accelerate an already major race toward commoditization, lower prices and less gross margin for everyone involved.

Simultaneously, however, costs will continue to come down for bandwidth (which Yugma and other vendors pay handsomely for) while broadband companies offer ever faster speeds (e.g., Comcast DOCSIS; Verizon FIOS) for the same or lower costs to consumers and businesses. This means services like Yugma’s will only become a better experience for users (i.e., faster screen refreshes, video capability, etc.), more affordable for those of us accessing the Yugma-type services (as well as Yugma-type providers themselves), and thus demand for internet-centric communications will be a continuously accelerating one.

Yugma has continued great opportunity as this demand curve goes up. If they continue to focus and execute as they have in the past year or so, I expect you’ll be hearing alot of people properly pronouncing their company name as it rolls of the tips of their tongues while on the phone, “Let me show you something…give me a second and I’ll set up a quick Yugma session.“

Yugma Accelerates is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.