Tim Elliott started a team for the Overnight Website Challenge called “Full Court Press” and the team members are comprised of folks in the Minneapolis/St. Paul WordPress Users Group. He and Phil Wilson hosted an on-site podcast this week by having a conversation with Mark, one of the Nerdery founders of the Challenge as well as with Brad Slaker, head of the non-profit DesignWise Medical, Inc. whose site Full Court Press is building out.

When it comes to websites and technology that can improve outreach and increase donations, many nonprofits are lagging far behind. Thus was born The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge.

Beginning the morning of March 20, 2010 and concluding the next day, The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge will again provide a fun forum to highlight creative ways for nonprofits to strategically use web technology to accomplish their missions.

Hosts: Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson (Steve Borsch is off today and Graeme Thickins is on his way to DEMO & will liveblog here)

Music by Dexter Freebish and their song, “Everybody Knows Somebody” from the SXSW Music Showcase.

Update: Apologies to Brad Slaker (sounds like laker) of DesignWise Medical for the name mispronunciation by an already punchy Phil Wilson.

Minnov8 Gang 71: At the Overnight Website Challenge is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music by Endlouz and the tune is, “Bad Advice” (Disclaimer: This was NOT chosen as an indictment on the commentary by the Gang!)

Discussed during the show:

+ Clove (by Spice Apps)
+ Analyst Noise on the Apple Tablet
+ IDC predictions for 2010
+ Minnebar
+ Mary Meeker’s Internet presentation at Web 2.0 Summit (video)
+ Jolicloud, Google Chrome OS
+ Social Media Breakfast Minneapolis/St. Paul (SMBMSP)
+ Don Ball and his new collaboration workspace concept (announcement; pictures; pricing)
+ Overnight Website Challenge (please note the AWESOME faux dot matrix printer feed on the page…nice job nerds!)
+ Chuck Olsen (@Chuckumentary) in Copenhagen and here is TheUptake
+ 91st PGA Tournament at Hazeltine in Chaska and hundreds of Tiger Woods jokes.

Minnov8 Gang 60: Staying Ahead of the Storm in 2010 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.

Discussed during the show notes:

+ Social Media Breakfast-Minneapolis/St. Paul (SMBMSP) last week

+ Best Buy’s new Twitter initiative

+ MagentoCommerce

+ Upcoming WordPress meetup/unconference on Thursday, July 30th at 6:30pm

+ GDGT.com

+ Vendor Relationship Management

+ Posterous

Minnov8 Gang 41: What if George had an iPhone? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Wired for 2020 is the Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota’s year long engagement campaign to get more mentors involved with youth in the state of Minnesota. Their mission is to interest caring adults in becoming mentors to youth. Caring adults who are willing to help young people spark their future career interests and expand their possibilities.

Sponsors included names such as General Electric, Best Buy, Target, Federated Insurance, MN Dept of Education, Minnesota Interactive Media Association, Qwest, Science Museum of Minnesota, 3M, Thomson Reuters and many more.

With a daughter in college and a son in high school, you bet I care deeply about the future of education and work, the world they’ll inherit from us, and the value we can add to kids if we can help them locate their own, personal spark within and help them to see possibilites and opportunities that match their dreams.

In a world where high paying, yet low value jobs can be done elsewhere at a fraction of the cost of labor onshore, the challenge is in coaching our youth on how they can each strive and focus on higher value work and that they can, in fact, invent the future. It won’t be easy as global competition continues to grow. 

When it came out, I immediately devoured Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat.” There was one concept that leapt off the pages at me: that even PhD-level, linear and serial processes could (and are) being outsourced because they are defined and understood. I thought about the profundity of that reality and realized that once a process is identified and mapped out — regardless of how sophisticated — it can be handed off to people elsewhere in the world who are willing to do it less expensively.

So do we want to focus our youth as innovators of tomorrow — and mentor them as such — to be more efficient linear, serial thinkers and laborers? I don’t think so and neither do others.

A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age by Daniel Pink accelerated my thinking along these lines about creativity and innovation with his premise: “The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities — inventiveness, empathy, meaning — predominate.” In this book Pink describes a new era beginning to take shape in the global economy. This new economy calls for skills and talents that, historically, have been largely discounted in the workplace – creativity, empathy, intuition, and the ability to link seemingly unrelated objects and events into something new and different.

Seeing in parallel, making associations (i.e., connecting the dots), is a skill our kids must have for the future. While they will certainly need to understand how to link seemingly unrelated objects and events, that’s pretty useless if they lack the skills to communicate the idea, the innovation or the vision they have for an outcome. Our youth will need to understand how to grab all the relevant pieces coming at them in parallel, package them up and communicate them to people whom they may never meet in person but rather only virtually through some online venue.

Talk to anyone spending any time on the internet — looking at news, information, Twitter, or just trying to keep up with their friends in Facebook — and you’ll hear things like “river of news” or “I’m drowning in a tsunami of digital stuff” or “everything is getting a lot more complex” as we struggle to keep up with the flow of data that comes with online participation. Dealing with all of this in parallel, and drawing associative inferences from it or finding nuggets of gold within it, is already a skill most need but few possess.

Though my session was entitled, “Creating Online Content: Why You Need a Blog,” it really wasn’t solely about either content creation or blogging. Instead, the themes that ran through it was the imperative that mentors get their heads around the concept of dealing with the online world in parallel, engaging in social participation, why all of it is so potentially empowering for them and a must, and especially how we all are experiencing online media, news and information at different times of the day or night (vs. the old “watercooler talk” from pre-internet days when we walked in to work the next morning after seeing some live show broadcast, and we commiserated with our colleagues about that shared experience).

My overall point was that the only real way to understand this new realm of streams of information and social connection online and to have consistent and ongoing shared experiences today — especially between a mentor and mentee — would be if each was participating online within a social network, uploading photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube (or their equivalents), and sharing experiences while having them at different times of the day or night or even within a week or two.

The skills that both the mentor and mentee learn by participating online by creating and delivering their own content are invaluable (and there is no question that the mentee may become the technology mentor!). I can’t tell you how often I sit with 40+ people who want to know “the process of how to Twitter” or “what’s the workflow in publishing to a blog” or “if I do this participation thing, what’s my return?” as if they were still living in a linear, serial world where Step 1 leads to Step 10. Most savvy online participants are involved with the social web and online pursuits in a highly parallel way, connecting dots on the fly and being very fluid with their creation and delivery and connections to other people. Which is precisely the sort of behaviors that come naturally to youth today and will be a skill set necessary as a worker going forward.

What struck me about Wired for 2020 was how many of the people associated with the event, the organizers, volunteers, speakers and workshop creators (i.e., TEL.A.VISION and see this post on the Wiredfor2020 blog) down to those responsible for the Interactive Lab in which I participated (Mark Kurtz VP of New Media, Gage Marketing Group and someone with more energy than a bagful of bobcats, Wendy Meadley, from WM Consulting LLC), completely understood that there is a shift going on in the world and that they are completely geared toward ensuring our youth are ready to confront the challenges and opportunities facing them in a connected world with ideas and information moving around it at the speed of electrons.

Wired for 2020: Mentoring Our Youth is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We believe generosity is the recipe for modern branding.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suspect we’ll be delighted.

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

Minneapolis Phizzpop Winners & Best Buy Remix at SXSW 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.

“Sierra Bravo is committed to this event as long as there are nonprofits whose websites could be better, powered by nerds,” said Luke Bucklin, Sierra Bravo’s president and one of its founders. In the inaugural Overnight Website Challenge in March 2008, volunteer web pros from Sierra Bravo and the broader Twin Cities web development community donated more than 2,000 hours to nonprofits — providing a real-world market value of donated time worth nearly $250,000, according to the firm’s calculations.

Volunteer developers and nonprofits and can now go online and apply to participate in the event at www.overnightwebsitechallenge.com. The event’s website has video testimonials from nonprofits chosen for the first Challenge, as well as tools for web developers and designers to build teams of 8-10 volunteers. Teams have until January 9, 2009, to register and boast of their qualifications on the site. Likewise, nonprofits have until the same date to articulate how “working smarter online” would further their mission — if they only had free, skilled labor! After a nonprofit completes its online application, its constituents can post testimonials about the organization’s good deeds, or lament about its “bad website,” as the Sierra Bravo’s Challenge site states.

The development teams and nonprofits selected will be announced by Sierra Bravo on January 16, 2009. However, the firm says volunteer teams and nonprofits won’t know with whom they’ll be paired until one hour before the Overnight Website Challenge begins.  The event will be held again at the University of Minnesota’s Continuing Education Conference Center, and will likely be covered by Twin Cities local TV news, as the first event was in March of this year.

The ten lucky nonprofits selected will also get complimentary computer training from one of the event sponsors, New Horizons Learning Centers of Minnesota.  And each will also receive a one-year complimentary web-hosting subscription from the Twin Cities’ own VISI.com.  In-kind sponsors to date include Buffalo Wild Wings, Chipotle, Peace Coffee, and Red Bull. Now, those are some serious refreshments for the attendees!

Here’s more about Sierra Bravo:  Founded in 2003 by three programmers, Sierra Bravo has grown to more than 80 people. The firm executes interactive projects for clients and partners, including ad agencies and design firms. The web development firm, based in some great new digs in Bloomington, specializes in completing creative ideas online, including social media and Web 2.0 applications. As one of America’s and Minnesota’s fastest growing private companies, the firm recently was named to the “Inc. 5000″ and to Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s “Fast 50″ list. Sierra Bravo’s blog is at http://blog.nerdery.com. To find out more about working for Sierra Bravo, check out www.nerdery.com.

Sierra Bravo Brings Back Its ‘Website Challenge’ Community Service Project is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.