Graeme Thickins

Marissa Mayer’s Minnesota Connections

July 19, 2012 By Graeme Thickins

Unless you were totally off the grid in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for the past few days, you surely know by now that Yahoo! has named former Google exec Marissa Mayer as its new CEO.

But what you may not know is that two of our fellow MInnesota techies have ties to her, going back years — they’re both friends of mine, and both have been startup clients of my consulting business.

One is Lief Larson (right), founder of Workface Inc., a venture-backed firm doing cool things to humanize business on the web. The other is Joe Sriver, who in 2008 founded the highly successful mobile app development firm DoApp Inc. (where, in addition to serving as an advisor, I was interim VP of marketing for a time).

Lief went all through school with Marissa in Wausau, Wisconsin, where both of them showed an early interest in programming. He gave me this reaction to the news:

“Yahoo! is ripe for reinvention, and I think Marissa is just the woman for the job. The one piece of news that came as a bit of a surprise is that she’s pregnant and will be taking maternity leave in October, just three months after taking the helm. I look forward to seeing what the next several months will hold for Yahoo!”

Joe’s connection to Marissa came later — he was hired by her in 2001 as Google employee #198. (She was Google employee #20, its first female engineer.) Joe was Google’s first UI designer and worked for Marissa for some years, directly involved in such early products as AdSense and AdWords. Here’s what Joe had to say when I asked for his reaction to Marissa’s new role:

“I was surprised by the announcement, as it sounds many others were. A pleasant surprise, that is. I feel she’s the best person in the Valley to bring Yahoo back — the best pick Yahoo could make. She has a great technical background, superb at driving products, and has a great marketing sense. She’s not an outsider, she knows the space well…exactly what Yahoo needs at the top. She will create a buzz around Yahoo. The analysts will be watching her moves closely, but she’s prepared.”

Of course, the tech community is almost universally supportive of this decision by the Yahoo! board — why wouldn’t they like the choice of a technology exec to lead the turnaround? Anything but an exec from the screwed-up media industry, huh?

I’m with Lief and Joe — I think Marissa is bound to bring some mojo back to $YHOO! What do you think?

(This post originally appeared today on Tech~Surf~Blog.)

Project Skyway Accelerator Graduates Four

May 31, 2012 By Graeme Thickins

Justin Kaufenberg, CEO of TST Media

Minnesota tech accelerator Project Skyway held its “Demo Day” on Wednesday May 30 at the New Century Theater in downtown Minneapolis. It was the culmination of its 2012 spring program. After opening remarks by Project Skyway officials, Justin Kaufenberg, CEO of TST Media, took the stage to tell his company’s story (photo). It is one of the state’s most successful Internet startups, now with close to 100 employees.

Founders of the four startups that participated in the program then took the stage to explain their businesses and their progress to date.

	HypeSpark offers consumers exclusive deals for the links they’re already sharing. The founder was introduced by the general manager of Toby Keith’s nightclub and restaurant in West End, a business that’s using its service.
	YumZing is a service to let you share your food experiences with friends, family, and the world. It’s launching soon.
	Political Harmony was described by its founder as “Match.com for politicians.” It’s aimed at college students to help them find political candidates most compatible with their views.
	The final startup of the class to present, QuadROI, is an information service for utilities that “transforms compliance documentation into industry intelligence.” It aggregates data on clean energy resource investments to create a single, searchable repository and enable data discovery and visualization.

Minnesota: A Great Place to Be for SaaS Companies

April 23, 2012 By Graeme Thickins

I had the pleasure of attending a workshop event held this past Saturday at the awesome CoCo coworking space at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. It was called SaaSCamp 2012. Note the year is part of that title, because it fully intends to be a recurring event. If you’re part of an early-stage software-as-a-service business, or planning one, and you missed this workshop — well, you missed a great one, and I would make sure you get to the next one when it happens!

The event was conceived and conducted completely by Lief Larson, CEO and founder of Workface Inc., with assistance from a couple of his team members. Workface is a growing startup in Minneapolis that itself developed a SaaS offering it now markets widely, which it calls a “customer engagement platform.” I was extremely impressed with the breadth and depth of the content Lief pulled together for this event. It included a extensive look at market data for SaaS in the U.S. and globally, monetization strategies and practices, selling to the enterprise, negotiating contracts, increasing adoption and retention of your app, marketing your app, creating a channel to sell your app, financing and funding a SaaS business, training your SaaS customer, and ongoing monitoring of your SaaS business. On top of all this, Lief related some really excellent stories throughout the workshop about his journey in funding and building Workface.

I had a chance to follow up with Lief afterwards to get some further perspective on the story behind SaaSCamp…

Q: Lief, why did you decide to do the event?

Lief: I’ve had a great group of mentors who have helped me during my entrepreneurial journey and I try to pay it forward by helping other young businesses and entrepreneurs to find success. A few of my “mentees” are building applications that are software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings and asked that I consider putting on an event. That’s why I created SaaSCamp 2012 — to bring together like-minded people working on SaaS. I think the event is already bigger than me, and I’m hoping the community will take it and run with it. … [Read More…]

Minnebar 2012: Tech Geek-Out!

April 8, 2012 By Graeme Thickins

Minnesota’s annual barcamp un-conference, aka Minnebar, returned for a seventh consecutive year on Saturday, April 7, and it was a blockbuster! Held again at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters in Richfield, the event attracted some 1300, the most in its history.

It just keeps getting bigger and bigger — and better! A pre-party the night before was a new, fun twist this year, held at Vic’s, across the river from Downtown Minneapolis. On Saturday, some 60 breakout sessions provided a wide array of learning and sharing experiences, along with awesome hallway discussions that were in full swing all day long — from 8:00 am all the way through the closing reception well after 6:00 pm.

Kudos to organizers Ben Edwards, Luke Francl, and Adrienne Peirce of Minnestar.org, and their many volunteers who work so hard to make this event successful. And thanks to all the great sponsors: Code42 Software, Fredrikson & Byron, 8th Bridge, W3i, ipHouse, August Ash, Bloom Health, Barcamp Tour, Split Rock Partners, ChowGirls, and Ech03.

It seems I say this every year, but it’s true (I’ve attended the last six annual events in their entirety): the level of energy and enthusiasm about Minnesota Tech was more than I’ve ever experienced! You can just sense the growth and excitement in our tech community. And, if you’re like me, you keep meeting so many more new and amazing people — technology and business professionals who are contributing to great new startups here in Minnesota, as well as to the broader technology industry in our state. It was a pleasure to behold. I had so many excellent conversations, trust me — there isn’t enough room in this blog post to tell you about them all <haha>.

But I can show you pics I shot Friday night and all day Saturday, which I posted on Instagram. Here’s a selection of those pics that I put into a Minnebar 2012 Flickr set.

Magnet 360 Acquires Reside, Rebrands as ‘Social Enterprise Agency’

April 4, 2012 By Graeme Thickins

Magnet 360, a Minneapolis-based marketing and technology consultancy, today announced it has acquired Reside, a Minneapolis-based cloud solutions firm, to establish a single entity that will provide a comprehensive set of social business services. The new business will operate under the name Magnet 360, with a Minneapolis headquarters and an office in New York City.

“We’re coming into this space early, and already we are seeing amazing traction,” said Scott
Litman, Magnet 360 founder and managing partner (photo), in the company’s news release. “Our clients – executive leaders – are recognizing that social is the next big thing that will transform the way we do business and engage with customers and other audiences. They are looking to us to help build and manage programs that will deliver meaningful and measurable outcomes.”

The news release said the new entity’s offerings will include CRM, social, mobile, user experience, agile application development, insights and analytics, marketing automation, and channel marketing – “all key components of an enterprise social strategy.”

The company said its social focus, paired with its deep technical capabilities, is “what will make Magnet 360 unique among agencies.” It quoted Jim Schroer, Magnet 360 investor and former EVP Global Sales, Marketing, and Service for Chrysler: “The demand for this kind of integrated offering is huge. Companies need to embrace social to stay competitive. That doesn’t mean that existing marketing programs go away – but it does mean that they need to integrate to an overall social strategy. Today’s big agencies were built for a TV-centric marketing world; Magnet 360 is shaping itself around the new integrated, social world.”

The company said the combined forces of Magnet 360 and Reside are already working with several leading brands to plan and implement social business programs. Active clients include General Mills, Ecolab, Medtronic, 3M, Honeywell, Toro, AMC Theaters, and Carnival Cruise Lines. It said the new Magnet 360 organization is planning for market expansion and rapid growth.

“We’ve worked with hundreds of clients to help them implement cloud solutions with social elements,” said Matt Meents (photo), Reside founder and now Magnet 360 Managing Partner, in the news announcement. “But that was just the tip of the iceberg. This combination allows us to enable the social business holistically, with total integration between marketing and IT and with exponentially greater bandwidth. It’s a very opportunistic time for our clients – both B2B and B2C – and we’re excited to help them gain huge competitive advantage in this space.”

Update 4/5/12: The “new” Magnet 360 has more than 60 employees in total, the majority in Minneapolis. It also has a New York office. The company said “all Reside and Magnet 360 employees have been retained in this transaction.” It also stated it is currently on a $15M annual run rate, with plans to grow revenue to $20M total in 2012.

Robert Stephens Rocks the #DefragCon Crowd

November 13, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

The 5th Annual Defrag Conference was held November 8-10. 2011, in Denver, and I was there once again reporting on all the action during this much heralded meeting of the Internet’s big minds. One of the highlights this time for me was the keynote on the final day by Robert Stephens, CTO of Best Buy and founder of Geek Squad. Robert was a huge hit, as I’d been telling all my Defrag friends for years that he would be. (A selection of the scores of tweets during his talk is shown below — screenshots I grabbed from my Defrag 2011 Live-Blog archive. The hashtag #defragcon was lighting up the web over the three days of the event, and still is with the afterglow. One of my favorite tweets, not shown below, was someone quoting Robert saying, “Everything at Best Buy is an accessory to your mobile phone – including your car.” Hmmm, and maybe even your electric motorcyle, a product category that’s been expected to show up in Best Buy stores, and may finally be coming soon — the first hint: there are actually reviews for one already posted on BestBuy.com — but Robert didn’t touch on this topic.)

In a 10-minute video interview I did with Robert while we were having coffee and rolls before the general session started Thursday morning, we covered a range of topics — including the recent announcement that Best Buy is acquiring managed services provider MindShift for $167 million. I also got a sneak preview of other topics Robert was going to talk about in his opening keynote:

… [Read More…]

Cloud Providers Spread Their Reach Across Minnesota

November 1, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

And what better place to start than, uh, St. Cloud? Actually, the company I’m about to alert you to, Vaultas, is a data center company that’s based in nearby Alexandria, Minnesota. But it just announced plans to expand into the much larger St. Cloud market, increasing its footprint in Central Minnesota. Vaultas develops, owns, and operates vendor-neutral data centers and business continuity/disaster recovery complexes. It has built a secure, high-speed fiber optic network along 1-94 from Minneapolis to Fargo, and plans to build multiple locations along that route. It’s all part of an overall growth strategy, they say, “to empower the state’s business community with affordable, collaborative cloud computing solutions and data center collocation services. ” The company recently completed its Alexandria, Minnesota data center.

Companies of all sizes are increasing choosing to have their IT systems hosted elsewhere on dedicated servers, or in private or hybrid clouds. So, it’s not surprising to see new data centers popping up in out-state Minnesota. Several well established data center firms in the Twin Cities area have offered a variety of managed IT services and cloud services for years — including Atomic Data, Visi.com, ipHouse, and others — and these firms also serve many out-state customers. But there will always be companies that prefer working with data centers closer to their own locations.

Here’s the press release on the latest announcement from Vaultas: … [Read More…]

MIMA Summit 2011: Interview With Tim Brunelle and Ed Boches

October 11, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

The president of MIMA, Tim Brunelle, and his team have put together an amazing 10th annual MIMA Summit event. MIMA, as the oldest and largest interactive marketing association in the U.S., with more than 1300 members, never fails to disappoint in drawing excellent, in-demand speakers to its annual event. I had the pleasure of running into Tim chatting with one of those speakers, Ed Boches, who was a founder of the famed Mullen agency in Boston, and is now its chief innovation officer. Tomorrow, Ed will team with a colleague of his, Dave Armano, EVP-global innovation & integration at Edelman Digital, to do a talk they call “Group Therapy for Would-Be Innovators.” It is sure to be a highlight of the event, and I will be there!

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