Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Panel to Discuss the ROI of Digital Marketing

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A special event for senior executives and marketing professionals has been announced by long-standing Minneapolis web marketing firm Ciceron.  Entitled Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace, the half-day panel will be held Monday, May 11, 2009, from 8:00 to 11:00 am at the Midland Hills Country Club in St. Paul.  radicalroiforum

The event offers attendees a chance to hear how a panel of local business leaders have transformed their organizations to thrive in the digital marketplace — and I am privileged to be one of those panelists:

• Paul Douglas: CEO, Weather Nation (and former chief meteorologist, WCCO TV)

• Jan McDaniel: CEO, JTM Vision (and former CEO, American Red Cross Twin Cities)

• Phil Hotchkiss: Founder, BigCharts.com

• Joel Kramer: Founder, MinnPost.com (and former Publisher, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
[Note: Minnov8 syndicates some of its content to MinnPost.]

• Graeme Thickins: Founder, GT&A Strategic Marketing

• Andrew Eklund: CEO, Ciceron Digital Marketing

A special reduced rate of $195 per person is available till May 3 at this registration page, with a group rate of only $395 for up to five people from the same organization.

Ciceron is a web marketing and consulting agency based in Minneapolis. It offers full-service solutions from professional search engine optimization and email marketing programs to in-depth metrics and performance tracking. Its clients have included such major brands as Home Depot, Nascar, USBank, Andersen Windows, Best Buy, Target, and Pepsi. For more about Cicero, check out their about page, their full client list, and here are their management bios.

I hope to see you at “Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace” on May 11.  Again, use this registration page before May 3 to get those preferential rates.

What’s All This About ‘Moving to the Cloud’? One Minnesota Entrepreneur Can Tell You How

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If you’re in an IT professional or follow developments at all in this field, you’ve undoubtedly been noticing an almost endless amount of media coverage and online discussion lately about “cloud computing”  — one example being a front page story in The Wall Street Journal yesterday.  But, even if you’re just an Internet consumer, you too are hearing your share of the hype.  After all, many consumer Internet applications are also now accessed “in the cloud,” as opposed to being software you install on your own computer — Google’s Gmail probably being the best example.

georgereese-headshot Well, one local entrepreneur, George Reese, is right smack in the middle of all this buzz, and is in a position to help clear up a lot of the confusion about it — especially for enterprises looking to take advantage of the economic benefits of this form of computing.  georgereese-book-200w1 His new book on the subject is scheduled to be released by O’Reilly on April 10.  It’s entitled “Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud.” (And here’s the Amazon link.)  George is a Minneapolis-based technologist and startup founder.  I’ve known him since late 2006 and thought it would be interesting to get his thoughts on this very hot topic, and hear the story behind his book.  This is an interview I conducted with George earlier this week, which first appeared on the cloud computing site Cloud Ave. …  [Read More…]

Emerging Minnesota Software and Internet Technologies to Take the Stage on February 6

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Entrepreneurs, software developers, and computer professionals of all stripes will be rubbing shoulders again this Friday evening with other hopeful company founders, VCs, angel investors, bloggers, and media people from throughout the Twin Cities and other parts of the Upper Midwest.  minnedemo-logoThey’ll be gathering for what’s become a not-to-be-missed quarterly geek-fest called Minnedemo. Billed as “the Twin Cities’ premier technology demo and networking event,” it features free beer, pop, munchies, and lots of conversation, with product demonstrations mixed in between. The latter are delivered from the stage of an auditorium with theater-like seating. More than 200 people are expected to attend.

Minnedemo is being held for a second time at Intermedia Arts in Uptown’s Lyn-Lake neighborhood, and will kick off about 6:00 p.m. this Friday, February 6, with demos starting about 7:00. (Intermedia Arts is located at 2822 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408.) According to Minnedemo organizer Luke Francl, “All are welcome, just please remember to RSVP online.” The web site for registering (again, it’s free) is http://minnedemo.eventbrite.com/.  This quarter’s event will feature ten demos — five, then a break, then five more. Most demonstrators will be launching their products or showing off their creations for the very first time. Here they are alphabetically: …  [Read More…]

Honeywell Backup System Is Said to Have Saved USAir Flight 1549

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honeywell-logoAn auxiliary power system designed and produced by a company with a long history in Minnesota appears to have played a role in the miraculous landing of USAir Flight 1529 on the Hudson River on January 15.

I was alerted to this news by a colleague at one of the local Honeywell facilities (in Golden Valley): Rich Hoeg, who’s manager of web collaboration and knowledge sharing. (Honeywell was founded in Minnesota and based here for most of its life, but corporate offices were moved to New Jersey when it merged with Allied Signal in 1999. The company still employs thousands here in Minnesota.)

usair-planeonriverThe first known photo of the downed plane, taken with an iPhone — with a dirty lens! — as
the first ferry came alongside.  It was shot minutes after the A320 touched down on the river.
(Photo by Janis Krums)

…  [Read More…]

‘Phizzpop Tour’ Pops Into Town, Gets Coldest Day of the Year

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A design competition for interactive agencies, sponsored by Microsoft, breezed into town on January 15 and got a rude shock: the most brutal sub-zero temps and windchills in five years.  Nonetheless, about 300 brave souls huddled inside at downtown hotspot(!) Solera and saw five agencies compete for bragging rights and a free trip to the “South By Southwest” (SXSW) festival/conference in March for the final round of the competition. phizzpop-logo2

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.  …  [Read More…]

What Can We Learn from the Minneapolis Top 100 Twitterers List?

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For those of you not yet on Twitter — and aren’t you feeling so smug you’re not wasting as much time as the rest of us? — you’re likely not aware there’s a site called Twitterholic, which ranks the popularity of Twitter users by number of followers.  Actually, despite what non-Twitter users may think, this social-media “microblogging” tool is proving to be quite useful for many in business, media, and even government, if the list of Minneapolis’ Top 100 Twitterers is any indication.

To better understand who’s doing these rankings, here’s how Twitterholic cutely explains itself:

“A few times a day, we calculate individual statistics for each twittering twit in our database. In other words, WE”R IN UR TWTTR PAGES, READN UR STATZ.  This list is updated daily so you can find out who the most popular twitter users are. To participate, do what you normally do — twitter constantly — if you deserve to be on the list, we’ll find you.”
…  [Read More…]

Sierra Bravo Brings Back Its ‘Website Challenge’ Community Service Project

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It won’t be long before area web developers are losing more sleep helping nonprofits. Rapidly growing Bloomington-based web development firm Sierra Bravo has announced the second coming of its very successful Overnight Website Challenge — 24 hours of pure nerd energy applied to creating or spiffing up the web sites of some deserving Minnesota nonprofits.  The event is the firm’s signature event to give back to the community. For 100 volunteer web developers and 10 lucky Minnesota nonprofits, the 24-hour clock will count down on the weekend of February 28-March 1, 2009.

“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. …  [Read More…]

Upcoming Book on Hottest I.T. Trend: ‘Cloud Computing’

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Whether you’re in the computer business or not, chances are you’re hearing a ton about “computing in the cloud.” It’s widely being hailed as the top information technology (I.T.) buzzword of the year, thanks to applications many of us use every day — no matter what business we’re in — such as Google Mail or other online applications we simply access through a browser. Other examples would be customer relationship management software from Salesforce.com, or freely accessible word-processing software from Google, Zoho, and others. But there are many more types of these applications, and cloud computing can actually refer to both the software and the underlying infrastructure.

George Reese, a local software developer and tech company founder, knows a lot about the topic — so much so that he was recently commissioned to write a book on cloud computing by O’Reilly Media, based in Northern California, one of the most prominent names in computer publishing.  Reese is the founder of two Minneapolis-based companies: a new one called enStratus Networks LLC, a maker of high-end cloud infrastructure management tools, and an established business called Valtira LLC, the maker of an online “marketing platform” of the same name. Over the past 15 years, George has authored several technology books — with such names as MySQL Pocket Reference, Database Programming with JDBC and Java, and Java Database Best Practices. But his upcoming title, Web Architecture and Programming in the Cloud: Transactional Systems for EC2 and Beyond, may become his most popular yet.

…  [Read More…]

David Meerman Scott to Speak at ‘Social Media Breakfast’ in Twin Cities October 31

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I’m really happy to report that I successfully convinced one of my famous-author friends to speak to our next Social Media Breakfast here in the Twin Cities. We call it “SMBMSP” for short, and this is our eighth monthly event.  David Meerman Scott, a very well-traveled and popular speaker, is the author of the top-selling book, The New Rules for Marketing and PR.  He told me back in August that he’d be coming to MInneapolis for a seminar on October 30, so I asked him if he would consider staying over another night if we could schedule one of our breakfast meetings on the 31st.  He was gracious enough to say yes, so we got some sponsors, and now we have it all scheduled.

It will be held at Deluxe Corp’s headquarters in Shoreview, MN, thanks to my friend Steve Nielsen, whose company, PartnerUp.com, was recently acquired by Deluxe. The meeting is scheduled for 8:00 to 10:30 am on Friday, October 31. Attendance is free, open to anyone interested in social media, and the first 100 attendees will receive a free copy of David’s book. (By the way, David blogs here.) To register, go to our group’s social network site at smbmsp.ning.com, click on the “Events” tab, then click on “SMB-Twin Cities 8,” and then look for the “Order Now” button. Or, just go directly to our RSVP page. The Minnov8 gang looks forward to seeing you there!  Oh — and costumes are optional…  🙂

MIMA Summit Packs The Depot

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As practically every man, woman, and child in the Twin Cities must know by now, the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) held its annual conference Wednesday, themed “Feed“. These folks are marketers — they know how to hype, as they’ve been telling us for what seems weeks now that the event was sold out.  Prior to that, they promoted that it would sell out and the positioning was…so click and pay, friends, or you will never be able to live with yourself.

As you can see from Phil Wilson’s Unsummit post, there were those who ignored the hype and chose to do their own (free) concurrent event at a nearby pub, thank you very much. (Okay, many of them were too cheap to pay the big MIMA fee.) And the MIMA folks actually cheered them on (even from the stage the day of the two events), since they felt bad they couldn’t have accommodated more people. But the venue — the very nice Depot downtown — could literally take no more. (MIMA has vowed to find a bigger site next year though that won’t be easy — maybe the Convention Center?) This year’s attendance, I believe, was something north of 700. MIMA’s membership is now about 950, but the Summit’s attendees also included some non-members and invited speakers, of course.

So, how did the event go?  This was my first year attending (they have not given press passes to us lowly bloggers in the past), so I went courtesy of my employer, to do some serious working of the crowd.  My assessment: the hype didn’t quite meet the reality as far as the overall content, as quality conferences go. But this is an association, after all, not a professional conference producer. And don’t we all kinda forgive a certain percentage of marketing build-up most of the time?  Nonetheless, the logistics were handled quite well, and my hat’s off to the MIMA officers and their band of volunteers who pulled this thing off. (I’m sure they’ve worked out a lot of bugs over the several years they’ve sponsored this event.)…  [Read More…]