Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: “The Favourite” by Dig via the podsafe Music Alley.

Discussed during the show:

• Tekne Awards-Finalists
• About Windows 8; Windows 8 Gets Sad New Blue Screen of Death
• Laptop, Tablet Differences May Fade, Intel Says (WSJ Digits Blog)
• DEMO Conference
• Graeme’s live-blog of DEMO Fall 2011; All Graeme’s posts tagged DEMO Fall 2011
• Video of onstage pitch at DEMO of Minneapolis startup Me&MyMoney
• The DEMO People’s Choice Award winner (and one of five DEMO God winners): Aurasma
• Interview with Ernest Grumbles on patents.

Upcoming Events:

• Tuesday, Sept 20th: Mobile Twin Cities
• Thursday, Sept 22nd: WordPressMSP
• Saturday, Sept 24th: She’s Geeky Unconference
• Minnedemo – Tentatively scheduled the first week of October
• Tuesday, Oct 11th & 12th: MIMA Summit 

Minnov8 Gang 137 – Major Mojo Baby! is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott & Phil Wilson (Graeme Thickins is off this week).
Music: “Running from the Law” by Mean Gene Kelton & the DieHards via Music Alley.

Discussed during the show:

• NASA on the tech made possible due to our space program
• Apple blows out quarter; New Macs (Air; Mini); Mac OS X Lion; Lion Downloads Top One Million in First Day; Apple to buy Hulu?; Disappearing $69 iPad 2 triggers buyer outrage at Sears; Tablet PCs Threaten PC Dominance
• Google blows out quarter; Brand pages on Google+; Vic Gundotra On How Google+ Handled Brands: “It Was Probably A Mistake”
• Microsoft Beats Expectations but Microsoft Posts a 30% Increase in Profit, but Sales of Windows Are Weak; Mary-Jo Foley: Microsoft worldwide tablet operating-system share at 5 percent; Anybody Who Thinks Microsoft Is Going Out Of Business Is Nuts — Here’s Why
• UPCOMING EVENTS: WordPressMSP on July 28th on Gravity Forms; CoCoMSP Kickoff Party on Saturday, July 30th (note slow link…be patient)

Minnov8 Gang 132 – Hot Enough for ‘Ya? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

• Apple sells 1 million iPads in 28 days. Took iPhone 74 days. Plus, Minnesota-based analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray estimated that Apple sold about 300,000 units over the weekend, similar to the 300,000 Apple sold the first day of sales April 3. He said the 3G unit was sold out in 49 of 50 stores he checked, suggesting that long term, 3G units will make up about 40 percent of all sales while Wi-Fi units will make up the remaining 60 percent. In related news, is the iPhone code ban facing antitrust inquiry? and Apple Policy Said to Prompt U.S. Allegation by Adobe

• HTC’s Incredible Android Smartphone Hits the Market

• Twitter Launches Embeddable Tweets and PCMag’s Lance Unaloff thinks Twitter is the new CNN

• Governor Pawlenty says Minnesota needs to be more competitive. Healthy state economies will play a critical role in future job creation, but Minnesota does not rank among the nation’s top 10 “growth performers,” according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study rolled out Monday by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

• KeyOn Announces Acquisition of Network Assets in Iowa and Minnesota. KeyOn is one of the largest providers of wireless broadband, satellite and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services in the United States, primarily targeting underserved markets with populations generally less than 50,000. (Good thing for rural Minnesota?)

• Google Acquires 3D desktop company Bump Technologies

• Microsoft’s IE Sinks While Google Chrome’s Market Share Triples

• Seven things you need to stop doing on Facebook and tech pundit Leo Laporte mentioned on TWiG 39 that he’s going to delete his Facebook profile over the incomprehensible social graph moves — and Leo’s inability to understand their impact on privacy settings (which he explains as, “If I can’t understand them…how can the average person!“) — made by Facebook at F8, their developer conference.

• Bill Gates says that Microsoft has some tablet projects in the works.

Newsbytes for Tuesday, May 4, 2010 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

In the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart’s character Dobbs, and two other gringos, embark in to Mexico to find gold in the Sierra Madres, an area in great flux and riddled with banditos, but policed by the Federales. In one of the signature lines in the movie the banditos, trying to convince Dobbs and his cronies that they’re Federales, say, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!“ (usually misquoted as “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!“). There are several moral and philosophical questions in the movie and Dobbs dies, the banditos are killed by the Federales, the gold is lost and thus the analogy might as clear as mud: chasing opportunities won’t be easy but they’re out there; barriers and obstacles (and bandits) stand in your way; but we thought exploring opportunistic thoughts in this podcast was worthwhile.

Special Guest: For part of the podcast, Meg Canada joins us to talk about libraries, the iPad and more. Meg is a senior librarian for Web Services and Training at Hennepin County Library and currently coordinates public training and  social media efforts for the library. She volunteers helping with the Unsummit, recently presented at MinneWebCon, and is a regular contributor to Social Media Breakfast.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Opening & closing music is “Santa Maria” by Will Kriski from Music Alley, purveyor of podsafe tunes.

Discussed during the show:

+ Past Events: CloudCampMSP (see Minnov8′s coverage here); IgniteMPLS; Social Media Breakfast;

+ Upcoming Events: Mobile March; MIMA; DEMO; SxSWi; MinneWebCon

+ Mobile: MixMobi; WordPress mobile plugins (Mobile Edition; WPTouch); Square (mobile commerce)

+ Devices: Apple iPad; Microsoft Courier; Dell Slate

+ Other: Google pagerank to require speedier websites?; Hacker News.

Minnov8 Gang 69: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Graeme Thickins and Tim Elliott sat down with Steve for coffee the morning after he arrived back in Minneapolis for a holiday family visit.  What ensued was a 30-minute+ discussion on a whole raft of topics related to Steve’s new role, the Windows 7 rollout, hints of future plans, other MS initiatives we asked Steve to weigh in on (though of course he couldn’t speak officially for the company), and Steve’s personal experiences in making his big career move.

Show notes:

• Steve Bendt’s social media coordinates: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Steve’s personal blog
• truCAST from Visible Technologies
• Radian6
• Crimson Hexagon
• Windows 7 House Party
• Hosting Your Party video
• House Party parody video
• The social conversation aggregator for Windows 7
• Microsoft Looking Glass post at TechCrunch

Listen to, or download, the interview with Steve Bendt

Steve Bendt Interview: A Chat About Windows 7 Social Media and Life at Microsoft is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

I have been using a Windows Mobile phone for the past 18 months and have been looking for a way to sync my data wirelessly for some time. A while back I installed the beta of Microsoft’s MyPhone service but never got it working correctly. Not sure if it was something I was doing wrong but such services should just work without a lot of user intervention and MyPhone never got there despite repeated effort in it’s beta form (it sort of worked for me once launched; read on for details).

Last week Best Buy launched their mIQ service which I noticed supported Windows Mobile so I signed up and a couple days ago was sent my account invitation. After a somewhat complex setup process that involved both the handset and computer browser, I was ready to sync. And after quite a while it seemed to be about the same as MyPhone; not really working. So I rebooted my phone, started again and this time let it sync overnight in it’s charging stand. The next morning when I checked the phone had fully synced and after a logout and login all my photos, contacts, calendar entries, text messages and other data was backed up in the mIQ service online, as advertised. My one suggestion is that the status screens on the phone be a bit more clear that something is happening since I think the sync would have worked the first time without my reboot (just a more animated status bar would work here).

Both mIQ and MyPhone are linked to popular social sites. MyPhone supports Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr while mIQ links to Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and Flickr. On the phone the mIQ service lets you update status on these services from their client, a nice touch. mIQ integrates all the communications for each contact in it’s web app so you can see all the text messages and phone calls linked to each contact. It also lets you send SMS messages from the web and easily make Skype calls to your contacts if you have a Skype out account on your computer. mIQ easily allows you to share photos and videos from the web app and seems to be automatically set to push these as they are taken from your phone by default. mIQ also has helpful stats on your phone memory usage that cleverly links to memory cards available at Best Buy making it easy to buy what you need for your phone. Overall, mIQ is very complete, stable and useful for a first release service. Along with Windows Mobile, mIQ also currently supports Blackberry and Symbian (mostly Nokia) smartphones.

MyPhone is a basic backup service with one killer feature in it’s freemium mode. Like mIQ, MyPhone backs up contacts, calendar, text messages, call history, videos, music and tasks but adds the Apple MobileMe-like ability to find your lost phone. For an additional fee, MyPhone will allow you to ring your lost phone remotely (presumably to find it in the cushions or antagonize whoever has it), lock or remotely erase it. This feature alone will be enough to sway many people to use MyPhone but in my testing I found issues that outweighed this advantage over mIQ. The first annoyance was all the photos in my web browser cache were synced and then for no apparent reason replicated back to the internal memory of the phone. Not only did this take a long time but it completely filled the internal memory of the phone causing all sorts of problems. The next issue I had with MyPhone was that contacts, tasks and calendar entries are not backed up if they are linked to Exchange servers. Since I use Exchange sync with my Google account, MyPhone did not back up any of this information. mIQ, on the other hand, had no problems backing up all this data. Lastly, MyPhone’s free service limits you to 200MB while Best Buy’s mIQ gives you 1 GB of storage.

Overall, both MyPhone and mIQ will backup data from your Windows Mobile phone and make media more accessible and sharable. But for me Best Buy’s mIQ service was easier to use and more useful than Microsoft’s MyPhone. If you have one of the supported smartphones, I encourage you to check out mIQ here.

Best Buy’s mIQ Beats Microsoft’s MyPhone At It’s Own Game is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The MIMA folks and Jennifer Kane Consulting, the people that brought you “little Seth”, are giving the geek meter a workout by providing plenty of tech fun gadgets and mobile access. For those of you who thought that free wifi at a conference was the shizznit, prepared to be amazed…

Behold, courtesy of the M Group, the Wayfinding Station. Not to be confused with the Wayback Machine (Sorry Mr. Peabody), this little gem, built on Microsoft’s Surface technology, is, and I quote, “a multi-touch experience to deliver conference information and services to attendees”. Check this, “Users can navigate a map of the conference facility and related breakout sessions by grabbing digital information with their hands and interacting with content on-screen by touch and gesture – without using a mouse or keyboard.” Sweet!

Wait there’s more. MIMA created “conference personas,” each with a pre-configured schedule based on an area of interest. You can chose a “persona chip” and be Social Media Maggie, Suzy Search, Email Ian, Mobile Mack, Victor Video, or Brady Branding. (Sorry, no Pete Propeller-Head.) You’ll then get an itinerary of sessions related to that area of interest. “Because Surface sees and interacts with objects, guests will be able to place their conference persona chip onto the Surface screen to trigger different types of personalized digital responses, and then the transfer of digital content to their mobile devices,” explains the M Group’s Janessa Meyer.

No, wait! There’s even more. MIMA is even using  individual tags that are embedded with the URL to each of the conference speakers’ social networking site of choice. These tags are printed on the conference signage corresponding with that speaker’s session. Using the Microsoft Tag Reader application you just use your mobile device to connect with the speaker’s sites and social media outlets just by snapping a photo of the tag with their device. Shnikies!

If they only had an iPhone app…wait…they have one of those too! Geek metered…pegged!!!!

(Crap! I don’t have an iPhone. My coal burning Treo 650 probably will only buzz and click pittifully. But still…it’s pretty cool.)

MIMA Summit Goes Gadget Happy is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Doug is the Product Unit GM of the Expression group (who recently put in place a Microsoft engineering office in St. Paul), is today launching Silverlight and Expression 3 at a press event in San Francisco. It’s a big day for his main product, Expression Blend 3, which finally gets to the point where is it very competitive with Flash & Flex. Not only that, but Microsoft is including a major innovation with it called SketchFlow (here is a good overview of it) which is getting tons of buzz and changing the way folks think about conceptual design (prototyping).

One other note: SketchFlow, and another big-deal feature (fully enabled Photoshop file format support, apparently done better than even Adobe’s Flash CS4 does it) have both come out of the team based right here in St. Paul lead by Bob Pappas and Rick Keeney.

Microsoft Launches Expression 3 & Sketchflow is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Microsoft had plastered us with messages like this one for months: “Join us on the PhizzPop Tour to watch the top agency talent as they show us their Expression Studio and Silverlight skills.”  Get the picture?  Uh-huh, yessiree, they’re trying to sell you software.  But at least they’re out to make it entertaining. And no industry in the world likes a competition more than the ad industry. These folks live for this stuff.  

(Side note on the Minnesota connection: You may find it interesting that the promotional talent Microsoft chose to plan and hype these events is none other than Minneapolis-based Gage Marketing.  But, wait, there’s more.  Did you know Microsoft maintains a development office here that’s focused in its Expression Suite product?  The company recently announced it will lease new digs near downtown for this operation, headed by software industry veteran Doug Olson.)

As the Phizzpop about page explains, this Microsoft promotion includes both live events and an online competition.  This year, the PhizzPop Tour is visiting seven U.S. cities — which, naturally, includes Minneapolis, as we’re one of the top advertising centers in the country.  Microsoft touts the event as “a prestigious design competition combined with a social gathering for top web professionals, brands, designers, and developers. Watch the hottest agencies compete in an interactive design challenge in front of a panel of judges and YOU, the live audience.”

The latest tour began in November 2008 and continues through March 2009.  In each location, agencies compete to design the solution that best solves a unique design challenge using Microsoft technologies. Before each event, the agency teams are trained in the newest Microsoft technologies. They’re then given a “design challenge” to solve. Each city’s local ad and creative community is invited to their respective event, where the competing agencies present their solutions to a panel of judges and the event attendees. The winning team from each regional event is flown to the SXSW festival in Austin, TX, to compete against each other for what the event promoters call “best in U.S. bragging rights.”

And the Winner in Minneapolis was … ?

So, five teams of three web pros were given the same business challenge and a few days to come up their own online solution using Microsoft technology. The winner, announced at the close of the January 15 evening event, was Zeus Jones, which had teamed with local development shop Sierra Bravo.

Design team members were Christian Erickson, Chad Hancock, and Sierra Bravo’s Greg Wurm.  As reported on the Phizzpop site, they “created a winning next-generation proof of concept that clearly demonstrated enhanced online browsing and cross-sell scenarios, as well as enhanced physical shopping experiences.”  For more on what that was exactly, I guess you had to be there (and I wish I could have been).  But, the winning entry will be available for viewing soon at this Phizzpop Tour Event Detail page, they say. Also, links to a video and photos of the Minneapolis event are coming soon, to be posted on that same page.

Other Minneapolis agencies competing in this year’s Phizzpop event in Minneapolis, besides winner Zeus Jones, were Colle+McVoy, Hanson, MOOV WorldWide, and space150.

Sierra Bravo is a Bloomington-based web development shop that, by its own words, “executes creative ideas online, including social media and Web 2.0 applications.”  It was recently named to the Inc. 5000 and Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s Fast 50.

It claims to have made Phizzpop history by accepting invitations to join competing teams — the firm also partnered with the MOOV agency’s team.  Tom O’Neill, Sierra Bravo’s VP of software development, explains: “Phizzpop lets Sierra Bravo publicly showcase our most essential capability: partnering with ad, marketing, and design agencies to make their creative vision live and breathe online. With our programmers on two different teams, we liked our chances.”

Sierra Bravo’s Jeff Klawiter worked with MOOV – even crashing on the agency’s office couch for two nights before Phizzpop, O’Neill added.  Winner Zeus Jones had previously engaged Sierra Bravo for multiple web projects for its clients, according to the latter’s news announcement.

The Zeus Jones/Sierra Bravo team will be winging their way to the Phizzpop finals in March at the interactive portion of SXSW in Austin, TX, taking on regional champs from Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco.

‘Phizzpop Tour’ Pops Into Town, Gets Coldest Day of the Year is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.