Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Archives for May 2008

Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs – June 4-5

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This looks like an interesting venue and am glad to see a Minnesota recognition of the shift in media taking place as alternatives-to-traditional media flourish. Complete details are here. Registration and meals is $139.

Online News Community, Editors, Entrepreneurs and

other “Placebloggers” to Convene June 4-5 in Landmark Conference

MINNEAPOLIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Entrepreneurs, editors and operators of local online news and community websites — placebloggers — will gather June 4-5 in one of the first convenings of its kind, to share the trials and tribulations of a news source growing without paper or printing press. “New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs,” will take place at the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota, immediately before the fourth National Conference on Media Reform, also in Minneapolis on June 6-8.

“America’s new online citizen-journalists are inventing a new business and a new passion — the business of building local, literate, digital domains on the web where community and commerce flourish,” said Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “But efforts — and structure — to share best practices are only just emerging.”

The program will pull together experts for discussions on the business, marketing, legal, advertising, journalistic, technical and fund-raising skills that are needed in order for local online news and community-building websites to approach success….  [Read More…]

Loudclick: Build Web Sites Together

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Loudclick\'s Alex HuffLoudclick has created a platform for collaborative web site creation that allows anyone — from newbie to designer — to quickly deliver a great looking web site for sports teams, homeowners associations, small businesses, or any group. I met with Alex Huff at a local Caribou Coffee to learn more about him and hear the Loudclick story.

Loudclick’s core value proposition is a hosted application which enables building these web sites together (i.e., multi-user, multi-admin, and/or multi-author). Inline content editing capability allows an approved user to log in and edit any “element” (block on the page) that they have permission to change. It’s an editing method that’s gaining acceptance in the marketplace and the Loudclick solution delivers in an elegant way.

As many of us know from the emerging acceptance of wiki‘s in business and organizations, inline content editing is powerful but often new or less tech-savvy users struggle with the wiki paradigm and require training. Editing a wiki page changes it from a page laid out nicely to a bunch of text with tags…and many users I’ve dealt with on wiki’s freeze up and think they’re looking at code and just don’t understand what to do next, making the use of wiki’s problematic in casual group situations where easy publishing and communicating is what’s important.

As we talked, I mentioned that, although it’s positioned as a web site/page builder, “this seems like it could be positioned as a wiki with no learning curve“. Alex didn’t disagree, but is clearly focused on their core market: groups of people who want to communicate and connect by building great looking web sites created with minimal muss-n-fuss.

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‘Minnebar’ Becoming Top Event for State’s Internet/Software Developers and Entrepreneurs

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An annual Minnesota event, playfully named Minnebar — which grew out of a grass-roots tech industry initiative called Barcamp — is happening for the third year in a row here in the Twin Cities this coming Saturday, May 10, at the U of M’s Coffman Union.
Minnebar logo By 8:00 am, somewhere between 300 and 400 software developers, startup founders (and hopefuls), web designers, interactive marketers, local media reporters, angels, VCs, and other investors will start converging in one place as they seldom do in any venue in these parts, at any other time throughout the year.

Coffman Union They come to talk shop, learn, share tips, listen to presentations on the latest tech developments and tools, share war stories, listen to startup pitches, and (of course) take notes, blog, and Twitter about all the proceedings on the laptops and smart phones they never seem to have far from their sides. …  [Read More…]

An Interview with CotterWeb’s Daren Cotter

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darencotter.jpgAt the age of 15, Daren Cotter was presented with the opportunity to get a birthday present every soon-to-be-a-licensed-driver kid covets: a car. Instead, he asked for what he really wanted, a computer, and so young Cotter began his adventure in computing and software development.

Within a year he started to program, creating educational games and other software to teach himself how to create in bits what was in his head, and ended up submitting it to shareware sites. Over a couple of years he pocketed somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,ooo and realized that putting his value in software was something others would pay for and a light bulb went on.

After graduating high school in 1999, he entered Minnesota State University in Mankato and was suddenly faced with a something he hadn’t expected that was life-changing: a very fast broadband connection (he’d had slow dial-up at home) and ended up investing significant amounts of time online.

Exploring, he came across AllAdvantage and joined, becoming enamored with the advertising space and the concept of receiving some sort of value in exchange for his attention and time surfing the ‘net.

He tore apart their model, their approach, and worked hard at understanding how it was delivered in an attempt to figure out how to improve upon what they’d put together (and this before AllAdvantage’s spectacular flame-out during the dotcom meltdown in the early 2,000’s).

The result of this effort was his own creation, InboxDollars, which Cotter delivered the summer after his freshman year and was the start of his company (CotterWeb, located in Mendota Heights, MN) which grossed over $12M in 2007.
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