Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Improving Data Integrity for Analysis

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The Minneapolis firm Colectica recently completed a project resulting from their third SBIR grant through the National Institute of Health (NIH). Focused on corralling the endless supply of unstructured data through Open Standards like those standards developed by the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), they have found their niche with research organizations responsible for securely analyzing data within the social, behavioral, and economic sciences.

Colectica was spun out of Algenta Technologies, a software company that delivered a variety of services that included DNS Hosting, custom development projects, and a series of contracts with the University of Minnesota Computer Science Department. The experience and capital allowed the founders the ability to pursue their interests in data integrity.

Dan Smith

Co-founder Dan Smith describes their platform as “enabling organizations to document the complete life cycle of data. This includes recording why and how the data were created, by whom, for what purposes, where it can be accessed, its representation, and what each piece of data is comparable to. This fine grained description of data, the concepts captured, and the data processes are all recorded using Open Standards from ISO/IEC and research consortiums”.

The data life cycle starts with a study concept, which is tranformed through data collection and other standardized processes, before it is analyzed. This complete data workflow, which is underlying the Colectica platform, serves as a foundation for data analysis. The data that moves through this life cycle is stored in a repository, which is essentially a version control system for metadata and relationships.

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Big Healthcare Data

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Datuit is an innovative software company that is developing a new platform for creating, storing, and managing healthcare data. The firm is taking advantage of federal regulations to drive demand for this technology which will allow patients, clinicians, and even patients to securely integrate and analyze healthcare information.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) was a major stimulus initiative enacted by the 111th United States Congress and signed into law in 2009 by President Obama. The primary objectives to this law were focused on immediate objectives in saving and creating jobs. The secondary goal was to provide short-term relief programs to industries decimated by the recession and also to provide investments in areas like health, infrastructure, education, and ‘green’ energy initiatives.

The healthcare industry received 19.1% percent of the $787 billion in funding at the time this was signed into legislation. The largest allocation of these funds within healthcare went to Medicaid funding, which was followed by health information technology (HIT) investments and incentive payments. For example, these federal guidelines will provide incentives for clinics to meet meaningful use thresholds. Among other things, this would require clinics to adopt structured documents whenever feasible and ubiquitous patient access to self management tools. …  [Read More…]

Scalable B2B Platform through Rocware

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The Minnesota-based SaaS company Rocware has recently released an enhanced B2B platform offering, which allows businesses to create, connect, and intuitively maintain their expansive online product catalogs. This platform allows businesses to seamlessly connect to existing and prospective customers through private invitation, technology features found in traditional social media.

This interconnectivity creates an instant conduit for information, which allows businesses to rapidly share updated product images, descriptions, customer specific pricing, purchase order details, and more all in a secured environment. Perhaps more interestingly, these small and midsized businesses can easily exchange messages and fully engage in purchase order and invoice transactions between businesses, without EDI.

The three-member team behind Rocware brings a unique combination of personal experience running product-based businesses, the vision and technical expertise to build a novel solution, and the business knowledge necessary to bring this solution to market. Together their talents represent a complimentary skillset at Rocware. …  [Read More…]

Predicting Human Behavior through Games

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Every week, people from around the world spend more than 3 billion hours playing video games. Professor Jaideep Srivastava of the University of Minnesota and Professor Dmitri Williams at the University of Southern California find this number too large to ignore. Their software company Ninja Metrics relies on social analytics to make sense of human behavioral data from these games.

Their startup coincides with a rising trend in game play and specifically an explosion in online games. Further, promotional forces like Dr. Jane McGonigal, an influential author and occasionally controversial visionary from U.C. Berkley believes that games can solve real-world problems through increasing the amount of time spent playing games to 21 billion hours per week by 2020. There is little doubt that gaming will continue to be an extremely important global activity.

The introduction of platforms like the Nintendo Wii, the Apple iPad, and the Sifteo Cubes has opened up a variety of new options for games. The social-gaming company Zynga has been steadily building innovative games delivered over social networking platforms like Facebook. The MIT Technology Review reported last week that Zynga is planning to produce a drastically more complex, strategic, and socially interactive gave than ever before. In a TechCrunch article last year, it was estimated that half of all Facebook users play games and that 40% of the time spent on Facebook is devoted to social games like those developed by Zynga. Clearly, there is an extensive amount of activity and data being generated through these evolving social interactions in massively multiplayer online games (MMO). …  [Read More…]

Discovering High-Quality Produce through Actionable Analytics

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The startup Produce Ratings recently released their new beta website at ProduceRatings.com, which allows consumers to find and rate produce in their local communities. This Minnesota-based firm has been flying under the radar while their concepts emerge into a product that provides real utility.

While they are in a prelaunch phase, they do have the fledglings of a product. Founder Colin Tuggle was kind enough to give me the backdrop on his firm and where they are headed. He explained that “ProduceRatings is an online community that helps users find and rate produce in their local communities.”

Tuggle went on about the origins of ProduceRatings, “It started out in the summer of 2010 as a conversation between brother-in- laws over a few pieces of Minnesota peak season sweet corn. Both wanted to figure out when and where to get peak season corn without having to try every stand in the Twin Cities. A few beers later, ProduceRatings.com was born. Our sites ratings differ from others in that our ratings are time-sensitive. We have a rolling window for ‘what’s good now’ versus other sites that aggregate years of ratings in their current rating. We also differ in that we rate products, not sellers/locations. What we want to answer is ‘Where can I get the best sweet corn right now?’ Of course, you can substitute sweet corn for your favorite produce in that sentence.”
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