Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation
About one year ago, Erik Qualman, the author of Socialnomics, produced a popular video highlighting the impressive facts and figures about the growing popularity of social media and now has this new one you can watch below…
…and if you are in business, any kind of organization or in education, if you can’t see how this is already affecting you (and will affect you going forward) send me an email and we’ll talk! 😉
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng&feature=player_embedded
The Gang discusses several topics but then talks with Kelly Heikilla from MixMobi who is out at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit in Mountain View, CA, an event exploring the latest Mobile development trends — both the technology and the emerging business applications — in an unconference format. Kelly was just about to head to lunch and then go to the “speed geeking” event where he’d have a chance to pitch MixMobi over-n-over again to attendees (more here).
This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Podsafe music by Matt Mays & El Torpedo and their song “Travellin”…from Music Alley.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:55 — 29.7MB)
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Show Notes:
+ FCC Broadband (CNet has good overview here and FAQ here)
+ Toktumi and their Line2 app for iPhone
+ Kelly Heikilla brought up Burbn and Shopify
+ Graeme brought up Pedalbrain.
GetListed.org, a company committed to helping small business owners maximize their online presence, is presenting a seminar called “Local University” on Thursday, May 13th at the Westin Edina Galleria. The event will feature representatives from Google, Bing, and respected leaders of the local search marketing field. The goal of the seminar is to provide business owners actionable advice about how the search engines work, and a clear understanding of what they can do to improve the presence of their business on the Internet.
The event features two identical half-day sessions (8am – noon and 1pm – 5pm) and the cost is $129 but you can visit them here and if you’d like to attend, use the discount code ‘minnov8‘ and get in for only $49.
Newsbytes is a collection of links to articles and posts from around the ‘net of interest to Minnov8 readers:
"Fail Whale" photo by binxitron
You can find anything online, including legal documents. But that doesn’t mean you should use them. Two local lawyers recently put LegalZoom and LawDepot, two popular online legal forms providers, to the test.
LawDepot calls itself a “trusted, do-it-yourself legal” website. LegalZoom says “we put the law on your side,” and features favorable quotations from the Wall Street Journal and a lawyer on its front page.
It remains true, however, that you get what you pay for. For example, employment lawyer Karen Lundquist recently took a good, hard look at LawDepot’s $15 employment agreement. She found that it actually contained a provision that was illegal under federal law. In other words, there is no state in the country where the term would be legal. In every state, a company that tries to cut costs by using LawDepot’s employment agreement is just begging to get sued.
Another local lawyer, Greg Luce, took a look at LegalZoom’s $69 will package. Luce tried to put a positive light on what he got, calling it “a good start.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
There is an old saying: “only a fool has himself for a lawyer.” Downloading online legal forms is like playing Russian Roulette with your business. Unless you have the expertise to spot the problems Lundquist and Luce ran into, you probably shouldn’t use them. Of course, if you had that expertise, you probably wouldn’t need the forms, anyway.
Cheap legal forms may be tempting, but sometimes the cheaper path costs a bit more up front. You will have trouble keeping your startup lean while you are defending yourself from an employment discrimination lawsuit. Pay a lawyer for the right document, and you can avoid that ugly scenario.
Skip the online legal forms unless you know what you are doing.
Sam Glover is a Minneapolis business lawyer for geeks. He also edits the law firm marketing and practice blog Lawyerist, Lawyerist, and Caveat Emptor, a consumer law blog, and speaks frequently on law practice and lawyering. We’re pleased to have Sam as a new contributor to Minnov8.
Local developers of apps for mobile devices, especially those designed for Apple’s platform, are quietly amassing large numbers of users for their creations, I’ve been learning.
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…. … [Read More…]
Recorded on May Day, the Gang talks about the Minnovation week just passed, stuff upcoming, and editorializes about the Flash/Steve Jobs brouhaha and what it means for developers and users of “iStuff” from Apple — as well as the shifting landscape of video technologies and the major companies that support various technologies.
Hosts: Steve Borsch; Tim Elliott; Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: By the Birdinumnums’ Michael Caine in this instrumental. Podsafe music by Music Alley.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:00:50 — 35.4MB)
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Discussed during the show notes:
+ MOJO MN post
+ Startup Zipnosis signs this significant deal with Park Nicollet
+ Audiofile Engineering
+ BusinessCard2 User Conference (BC2 website)
+ TEDxTC at the Science Museum
+ Compellent’s CDrive event
+ Minnebar at Best Buy HQ on May 22nd
+ Aaron Kardell runs Performant Design and created the iGarageSale app
+ Minneapolis-based Crashplan for backing up “in the cloud”