Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation
If you have any interest in the future of journalism in a day when newspapers are going bankrupt and traditional media losing their grip on our attention — all while citizen journalism and new models are emerging — then you’ll want to be aware that former Best Buy VC and now “Innovation Accelerator”, Kim Garretson (a Missouri School of Journalism or “Mizzou” alumnus) has been actively engaged for some time at the school.
Kim has had the students working on two of his startups, LikeMe as well as one founded in Minnesota, BackstageGallery, which we’ve covered before at Minnov8.
If have any free moments today between 3:30pm and 7:30pm, please tune in the live video stream and you’ll be able to watch five teams of Mizzou seniors in Strategic Communications & Convergence Journalism presenting the results of their semester-long social media campaigns & execution for those two of Kim’s startups.
Having done this several times, Kim said that the students “…are guaranteed to KILL IT with their creativity and enthusiasm.” If you’re watching and tweet, use hashtag #mizzou09 as there will be a live Twitter stream screen in the presentation room. On-site judges are CEOs of digital agencies, the head of Social Media for H&R Block, and several others.
Ask people what the word “innovation” means to them and you’ll hear such phrases as, “…it’s all about making processes more efficient” or “…brainstorming new ideas and implementing them” or “…ways in which we can disrupt and leapfrog our competitors.” Clearly there are many ways to think about the process of innovation, but almost never do you hear entrepreneurs, business analysts or corporate strategists openly discussing the rate of change that’s occurring…
…and how that rate of change is accelerating exponentially…. [Read More…]
The Gang was goofing around in our pre-show emails signing off with “Breaker Breaker 19 Good Buddy” using 1970’s CB (citizen’s band) Radio talk.
Poking around ahead of the show led us to reading this article about the CB radio ‘bubble’ we experienced and the reason this form of communication exploded on to the scene: “Following the 1973 oil crisis, the U.S. government imposed a nationwide 55 mph speed limit, and fuel shortages and rationing were widespread. CB radio was often used to locate service stations with a supply of gasoline, to notify other drivers of speed traps, and to organize blockades and convoys in a 1974 strike protesting the new speed limit and other trucking regulations.”
The Burt Reynolds movie Smokey and the Bandit was one (and what some term unfortunate) result of the huge CB radio boom in the 1970’s and really shows how it permeated our culture at the time in many ways like Twitter is today with CNN and Oprah jumping in and using it as Twitter grows like crazy…even though quitting Twitter is perhaps the new trend.
It got us to thinking about how much human communication and connection has changed since then and even how Twitter might be construed as ‘the CB radio of the internet age’. No question we have many ways to connect with one another and we talk about some of those in this show, how to achieve higher quality communications, consider what happens if we need to virtualize our communications even more today since most people are not preparing their families, companies or work processes in the event of a crisis (e.g., swine flu, terrorist attack, etc.). As always, we wander off on tangents that seem logical at the time!
Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins (our buddy Phil Wilson is off today).
Podcast: Download (Duration: 39:46 — 23.1MB)
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“Discussed During the Show” Notes:
+ NetBriefings, OnePlace, Yugma, Minnedemo
+ GLUE Conference (and contacting Graeme (email) about the two free passes he has)
+ Leo Laporte using a new Friendfeed groups feature to have chat accompany the TwitLive netcasts
+ Biz Borsch, 20 year old daughter of Steve, in community management with Social Media Eyes (launching soon)
+ Graeme uses TweetGrid for monitoring specific Twitter mentions of a keyword
+ Innovation Accelerator, Kim Garretson, and a new offering he’s ‘accelerating’, Involver
+ A good story that encapsulates the 1970’s CB Radio boom in an entertaining way.
Several items hit the radar today worthy of posting and a few from discussion at this morning’s enjoyable and informative Social Media Breakfast:
Bloggers, particularly moms, are an audience of such growing importance to General Mills that the consumer-goods company has built a formal network to feed them free products and enable them to run giveaways for their audiences.
MyBlogSpark has recruited more than 900 bloggers — over 80 percent are moms — to register to be eligible for everything from sampling campaigns to product coupons to news of a new ad campaign. General Mills plans to use the network to promote its wide portfolio of products in the food and beverage, beauty, home, electronics, health and automotive categories.
On our respective journeys heading toward a world where the internet is at the heart of connection, communication, commerce, work, play, education, healthcare and so much more, it’s an incredible delight to come across a site like the Ideas Project, described by them as, “…an entirely new way to connect with some of the most visionary and influential thought leaders in communications technology and their disruptive ideas. A project of Nokia, hosted at www.ideasproject.com, IdeasProject brings together these important big thinkers to contemplate the big ideas that matter most to the future of communications, joining them up through video clips, links, articles, podcasts and dynamic maps to push the boundaries of Web navigation and the thought process itself.”
Top thought leaders in a variety of spaces are brought together — aggregated, really, since it appears most media is hosted elsewhere — and there are big ideas for you whether you’re in a Fortune 100 corporation or are a startup.
At Minnov8, we’re constantly hunting for internet and web-centric resources that will help you persuade and motivate your colleagues, investors, bosses, (or spouses if need be), that this ‘internet thingy’ is actually the greatest shift any of us will live through in our lifetime. To get a taste of what the Ideas Project is offering with innovation ideas, here are two videos you might find as interesting as I did… … [Read More…]
It’s refreshing (and validating) to have a prestigious news organization like the United Kingdom-based Economist, write an article that supports the position I (and many others) have taken that ISP bandwidth caps and authentication are nothing but control measures to protect Cable TV revenues.
This past week, the Economist published this article about what’s happening in the United States as it pertains to the explosion in internet video viewing and the threat this poses to cable companies and started off like this:
“IN THE land of free enterprise and the home of discount shopping, there can sometimes be an appalling lack of competition. High-speed access to the internet is one. Cable television is another. The reason is that in America cable-television companies, which provide a lot of the high-speed access, do not want their customers to cancel their contracts and watch television over the internet instead. (SB: my emphasis).”
The article goes on to discuss what’s happening, how the cable companies sell bundles — sometimes with 100 channels or more — though the average consumer watches only 15. Now that we have an unprecedented ability to watch online TV, movies, video podcasts, and rent from Netflix or iTunes, many of us are asking a fundamental question: why do we want to continue to pay for what we don’t need or want?
The author does, in fact, cut to the chase and get to the essence of what’s happening (which I explained at length in previous posts):
“Consumers’ new-found freedom to choose has struck fear into the hearts of the cable companies. They have been trying to slow internet television’s steady march into the living room by rolling out DOCSIS 3 at a snail’s pace and then stinging customers for its services. Another favourite trick has been to cap the amount of data that can be downloaded, or to charge extortionately by the megabyte.”
PUT DOWN THAT REMOTE FOR JUST A MOMENT and connect NOW with the Minnesota Ultra High Speed Task Force members and let them know why and how this issue matters to you.
The Task Force needs to hear from you. They’ll be making their recommendations to the State Legislature this Fall and key portions of those recommendations are being formulated as you read this post. If they don’t hear from you and soon, they’ll never know an open, unfettered internet matters as much as we online participants do.
Minnesota Ultra High Speed Task Force Member Emails (full contact info here). Task Force chair, Rick King, has asked that all email correspondence be directed to Diane Wells (email) as she’s compiling them and releasing a daily digest to the members.
Having information and facts at-your-fingertips about the internet and web is absolutely critical whether you’re a startup needing content for your pitch, a marketer needing to understand a 40,000 foot view of trends, a corporate user needing to understand mobile access to the ‘net or international usage, or if you’re just someone like me: an info-junkie who needs a constant data fix in order to constantly track what’s hot and what’s not.
This report is put out by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, an organization that is a “…market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. Its mission is to educate policymakers, opinion leaders, and the public about issues associated with technological change, based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets, and individual sovereignty.”
“PFF’s research combines academic analysis with a practical understanding of how public policy is made. Its senior fellows and other scholars are leading experts in their fields, with distinguished careers in government, business, academia and public policy. Its research is substantive, scholarly, and unbiased.”
Covered in the report are these key areas:
One of the best parts are the active links in each chapter’s EndNotes which allow you to drill down into many areas covered within this report.
Here is the download page and a direct link (PDF).
Anyone born in 1978, and now in their early thirties, never knew a time when there weren’t mainstream personal computers. For the most part, those who entered this world in the late 1980’s (and are in their twenties like my daughter), haven’t lived in a time when PC’s weren’t in their school or at home, and this thing called the ‘internet’ was in place before they were out of grade school.
Best Buy clearly recognizes that these digital natives are voracious users and purchasers of the technology they sell, but they also seem to truly understand that there is an entire ecosystem of these digital natives who have become web developers. These folks are adept and using new faster and more efficient tools (e.g., Ruby on Rails), a “web stack” (i.e., Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP or LAMP) — along with leveraging the accelerating number of exposed application programming interfaces (API’s) available digital data that’s exposed — and are building and delivering a dizzying array of new web applications, mashups and remixes.
Curiously, the latter term “remix” is usually used in the context of someone taking an original song and mixing in other elements to create a new one, but in my opinion Best Buy has extended that term to include what they’re offering, an open API called “Best Buy Remix.” This API opens up Best Buy’s product catalog, featuring full product information including pricing, availability, specifications, descriptions and images for nearly a million current and historical products and thinking of using all of this to create a ‘remix’ vs. a ‘mashup’ seems to me to be positioning it as being used for an elegant and lyrical web application vs. what many people think of when the term mashup is used: connecting a database to a Google Map and delivering something of interesting but inherently low value. … [Read More…]
People in Minnesota are quickly shifting their focus toward innovations on the internet and web. This is reflected by the array of events that showcase Minnesota startups, help leaders identify trends and figure out how to capitalize upon them, and the Gang discusses some that happened in April as well as a few coming up.
Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
“Discussed During the Show” Notes:
Podcast: Download (Duration: 42:55 — 24.9MB)
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