Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

ArcStone: Vision, Values, Products & Services

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arcstoneOver a year ago I became aware of a local Minneapolis firm, ArcStone, when they introduced Wonderfile, a very interesting offering that is sort of a nouveau document management system for today’s always-on and always-connected internet crowd, and I was reacquainted with them when they demonstrated their brand new Association Management Portal (AMP) at MinneDemo a few weeks ago (their demo here).

Completely out of the blue a few days after MinneDemo, I stumbled across something ArcStone had created for a client called the Interactive Roof Designer, a Flash piece for Trimline Building Products (more here) that allows color changes for roofing tiles. Since half my business focuses on trends for the home furnishings industry (The Trend Curve™), I was immediately interested in what they’d created since this is the sort of thing our customers would be interested in. Though there have been many similiar types of Flash-based “changing colors on the fly” web offerings like this, I must admit being pleasantly surprised by how good an implementation they’d done and that it was visually stunning and worked flawlessly.

I immediately thought, “Who are these guys and why haven’t I heard much more about them?” As a consequence, I called CEO David Carnes and went over to chat with him last week to find out more about what this Minnesota firm is creating and what’s at the heart of their innovation.  …  [Read More…]

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 27

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overnite

On this week’s show, Graeme Thickins heads down for a few interviews at the start of the Sierra Bravo’s Overnight Website Challenge.

Host: Graeme Thickins

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 36:03 — 20.8MB)

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Sierra Bravo’s Overnight Website Challenge again gathers ten teams of volunteer web pros to create free websites for ten nonprofits. Last time they dropped the F-word (free free free) they had more takers than they could handle.

A handful of Graeme’s photos:

owc_photomontage

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 26

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tjkudalisVideo. It’s the hot thing but most users seem to be seeing it as just another data type to be delivered for free and at low cost. Once most of us master deploying on-demand video on our personal or company website, blog or even with screencasts for training purposes, the inevitable next thing many of us do is to explore delivering live, streaming events.

The latter is a very different animal and the technical challenges, costs of bandwidth and ensuring your audience has a great experience isn’t for the faint of heart or dabbler. Our guest, TJ Kudalis, Senior Video Engineer from Internet Broadcasting Systems (IBS), is a guy involved in video delivery on the internet since its infancy, and is someone whose been in the trenches with his IBS team to deliver content after the 9/11 tragedies, to the 70+ local TV stations IBS supports, as the content feed for NBC’s Olympic coverage in 2006, and is someone who knows what’s possible, what the costs are like for bandwidth and, most importantly, has a solid handle on the trends in software, hardware and peer-to-peer video delivery.

B: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins (Phil Wilson is off this week).

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 36:09 — 24.8MB)

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LinBks mentioned during the show and are others you’ll find enlightening:

  • StreamingMediaBlog: News about the “business behind the technology of online video”
  • Contentinople: A news site for the digital delivery industry
  • Videonuze: Broadband video news
  • NewTeeVee: Blog magazine about internet TV
  • LostRemote: A multi-author blog written by people within traditional media but focused on, “…local TV and the battle for the Web.”
  • Ripcode: Video transcoding appliance
  • Mogulus: Is a hosted web (Flex) application to create LIVE, scheduled and on-demand internet television to broadcast anywhere on the web through a single player widget.
  • uStream: “…is the live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size.”
  • Oprah webcast: at the time (early 2008) was the largest webcast yet at 500,000 viewers.
  • Obama Inauguration sets new records for internet video delivery
  • For more on content delivery networks (CDNs) — and links to many of those providers as well as peer-to-peer technologies like the mentioned Octoshape — view this Wikipedia page.

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 25

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m8_25This Gang podcast is a short one with a focus on one, key thing startups need and care about: building awareness.

You’ve heard us talk many times about how the time of flux we’re living in has created new opportunities and that people are atypically open to listening to better, cheaper, faster or new ways of doing things. If your startup has one, how are you helping people know about it?

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 35:32 — 20.6MB)

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Over-n-over again your Gang members run in to people seeking ways to make their processes more efficient, find cheaper or better ways to do something, but one thing is clear to us: people just don’t know what’s out there, what’s possible or — for the most part — that you or your startup even exist!

Links to Items Discussed on the Show:

+ PrincipledInnovation.com

+ Shazam

+ CloudCamp Minnesota

+ Mogulus

+ TimElliot.us

+ Customer service is the new marketing and more links here on this topic.

Darwin & DNA

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darwin-dnaIn the days before the internet hit and technology like interactive programming, courses, kiosks and encyclopedias were delivered on CD-ROM or LaserDiscs, I was involved in the (now defunct) International Interactive Communications Society (IICS) and got to know a local artist by the name of Lynn Fellman.

With an artist’s eye and a geek-like fascination with science and technology, Lynn leapt into the IICS and applied her animation expertise and creative mind, along with her illustrating skills, in order to apply them to interactive media projects. In those early interactive days, most startups and developers didn’t think much about user interfaces, visual appeal, or that great design could (and usually did) take their work up to a “gasp creating and eyes widening” level.

A few weeks back, Lynn pulled together an “IICS Alumni” lunch, I toured her studio, and she gave me an overview and update on one, key aspect of her art and passion: taking DNA sequencing and illustrating it for people who’ve had theirs sequenced, and I’m certain she could tell that I was deeply impressed and delighted with her art.

With projects like 23andMe, a DNA sequencing lab co-founded by none other than Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, having your life patterns analyzed can give you all sorts of data about your ancestry and is a field accelerating due to the benefits being discovered when we have more knowledge about our own DNA. With her curious mind and scientific interest, Lynn saw a need that she could fill and is bringing this raw DNA data to life in her art and creating portraits for people around the world.

What’s that got to do with Darwin and why should you care?  …  [Read More…]

Upcoming Events: MinneWebCon

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minnewebconMinneWebCon is a full-day, three-track, continuing education conference for web professionals happening Monday, April 6, 2009. This conference delivers a practical blend of technical and creative information from industry practitioners and educators directly to University staff, students, and colleagues from other higher education institutions (as well as from other noncommercial and commercial areas of web practice).

The agenda focuses on latest developments and best practices concerning:

  • Web accessibility and usability
  • Design/development tools and applications
  • Web standards
  • Content management
  • Social networking
  • Internet law

Here are the day’s rates:

  • $200 – Standard registration
  • $150 – University staff registration
  • $100 – Student registration (full-time; must provide student ID#)

The 2009 registration fee includes a lunch buffet, and snacks and beverages throughout the day; it does not include parking.

Please refer to their Registration page to sign up.

The Spirit of MinneDemo

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Capturing the spirit and energy of MinneDemo is a challenge, so the Minnov8 team was really pleased when 2008 Emmy Award nominee, McKnight Filmmaking Fellowship holder, CurrentTV producer and videographer for MinnPost (who delivers videos like this one of local geek, Ed Kohler of TechnologyEvangelist and TheDeets, and his personal graffiti elimination program), Gabe Chefitz of 612Authentic, agreed to come to MinneDemo and shoot some video of this tech event. Take a peek….

This was a bit of an experiment to go along with the innovator demo videos shot by TJ Kudalis (and that I edited/posted this weekend) in order to provide those who couldn’t make MinneDemo with a bit of the flavor of it, the ability of those sucking the beer kegs dry with the ability to watch the demos after-the-fact, and to ensure that the next MinneDemo is even bigger by showing people what they missed. Thanks and great job Gabe!

Why You Need a Social Hub

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wdc1925

Any business today can’t function without technology like a telephone, fax machine or email. But when you think about how relatively unchanged office work was from the earliest part of the last century until the advent of personal computers in the late 1970’s, much of the technology used in offices evolved incrementally.

In less than fifteen years, however, there has been a leap. An acceleration of the global internet — and an increasing number of humans connected to it — has made the internet network effect one of the most profound shifts in how we currently connect with people, perform our work and even socialize.

The network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. The telephone is the best example: if you had a telephone but no one else did, the usefulness of that device would be zero. As more and more people obtain telephones and connect to the telephony network, you can call them, they can call you, both of you can call businesses, schools or the firehouse, and a dizzying array of uses are found to harness this connection and making the tool what it is today: indispensable.  …  [Read More…]

MinneDemo 2009 Innovator Demos

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minnedemo-logo2On Friday February 6th, nine internet and web innovations were showcased at the MinneDemo event held at Intermedia Arts. These entrepreneurs came to demonstrate their ideas, and what they’d built, to an appreciative audience of nearly 300 attendees. People from all over came for the demos, as well as to schmooze and connect with other geeks, developers and those interested in internet and web technology (and to ensure that the several kegs of beer on hand were properly drained).

A few points before you view the videos:

  • Each innovator was given seven minutes to present with the ground rules being, “No Powerpoint. Real working software only.”
  • The videos below were graciously shot (and streamed live via uStream.tv) by TJ Kudalis of Internet Broadcasting
  • Editing of that video by TJ, opening graphics, uploading and posting by Minnov8’s Steve Borsch
  • Listen to the Minnov8 Gang podcast with Graeme Thickins interviewing several attendees (editing by Tim Elliott)
  • Look for interviews done by Steve Borsch (shot by Gabe Cheifitz of 612 Authentic) to be available here at Minnov8 by end of day Monday
  • Another excellent event by Ben Edwards and Luke Francl and the terrific sponsors willing to support this event and make it happen. Thanks guys!

Now on to the videos (in alphabetical order vs. order of demo’ing) each 7-8 minutes in length:

…  [Read More…]

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 23

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m8-silverliningsThis Gang podcast is called “Silver Linings,” and we focus on good news, where your possibilities reside, how to create a different mindset and attitude about your current situation…and what action we all can take to move forward!!

One favorite meme about our current situation discussed is, “the world is undergoing an economic reboot”. In a nutshell, here’s our choice: Focus on the bad news, continued negative reports on poor economic indicators, and sit and do nothing (or continue on with business-as-usual as if nothing has happened). Or…look at this as an opportunity to grab market share, reinvent your business, or accelerate your startup.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 41:54 — 24.3MB)

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ANNOUNCEMENTS
+ MinneDemo will be live-streamed over uStream…and Minnov8 will be conducting video interviews there and we’ll then be delivering both the recorded live stream and our interviews here at Minnov8 as quickly as we can post-production done and them posted.

LINKS

  • That user generated YouTube Trader Joe’s ad mentioned by Tim Elliott is here
  • The group Phil is involved with as their new Director, The Association for Downloadable Media, whose mission surrounds providing standards for advertising and audience measurement for episodic and downloadable media. If you’re an individual podcaster, media company, publisher, syndication company, distributor offering downloadable media, advertising agency, marketer, technology supplier, hardware and software manufacturer of portable media products and services, market research firm or audience and advertising effectiveness measurement company, you’ll undoubtedly want to join.
  • Sprout, iWidgets, TubeMogul and Vimeo.