Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Commercial Real Estate Search Made Efficient

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As the Internet increasingly becomes a platform upon which entrepreneurs and opportunists build disruptive and inefficiency crushing innovative Web applications, organizations like GoFishCommercial will emerge to do exactly that and make the inefficient, efficient.

After hearing about the company and taking the time to poke around the site, I had the chance to talk with Asher Silber, VP of Sales & Marketing for GoFishCommercial, in order to understand their current deliverable and a bit more about where they’re headed.

Kristi Oman (commercial real estate developer and property owner) and husband Zev, looked at the simplicity and effectiveness of Craigslist and knew they could build and deliver a site that would match that and add significant value to both the search process by buyers as well as to the owners of commercial real estate and their brokers.

What is particularly intriguing and innovative, however, is how GoFishCommercial has aligned the incentives of buyers, property owners and brokers, and done so in a disruptive and efficient way….  [Read More…]

Entire U of MN At-Your-Fingertips

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Every behemoth company or institution shares a fundamental problem: they’re so big and organized in silo’s that access to the wealth of opportunities and resources they could offer is minimized. If only people on the outside could figure out what’s available, whom to call and how to engage with the right people inside, this problem could be addressed head-on.

In 2005, the University of Minnesota (UofMN) surveyed Minnesota CEO’s and asked for input from members of the Itasca Project (a group comprised of big company CEO’s and key governmental leaders) with the basic question, “What do you want from the University of Minnesota?”

The wish list was extensive and reinforced their challenges in accessing the UofMN’s opportunities and resources: ready-for-hire graduates; continuing education for employees; consulting services from University faculty; research sponsorships; access to research facilities, and more.

After more research with focus groups and outstate Minnesota analysis, in July of 2006 the UofMN created the Academic and Corporate Relations Center (ACRC) and brought on board a guy wired as an entrepreneur, experienced in startup businesses, and full of energy to deliver what has become known as “the front door” to the institution: Director, Dick Sommerstad.

As a Minnesota startup, involved with an emerging company or an intrapreneur within a corporation, you may be thinking, “What in the world could Sommerstad’s ACRC offer me?” As you’ll soon discover, there is a wealth of resources at your fingertips just waiting for you to access them….  [Read More…]

Taking a Risk on Open Source

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Sit back and let me tell you a story about a game-changing open source ecommerce project, an emerging web development firm in Bloomington, and how they discovered this project and I, in turn, discovered them. It’s illustrative of how Internet and Web connections are changing everything from value discovery to customer satisfaction to how awareness of an emerging company can happen if they’re in-the-game and leveraging new social media tools.

Last year I was performing some due diligence for a client on ecommerce software. Stunned by how poorly executed most open source ecommerce projects were, I was delighted when happenstance brought me to this blog with a link to an open source ecommerce package called MagentoCommerce. After thirty minutes on the site, scanning posts in the forum and looking at the demos, I realized that the sheer scope of the energy, effort and enthusiasm the community was exhibiting around this open source project was going to raise the bar quite high for any other ecommerce offering…whether commercial or open source.

Local Bloomington firm, August Ash, Inc., also found MagentoCommerce in much the same way I had, though they came upon it in early 2007. Turns out they are the only known Minnesota firm to have already launched sites on this new open source package (which shipped the very first version on March 31, 2008) and you also might be surprised to learn why they took the risk on such unproven software, how doing so actually aligns with their focus on quality and customer satisfaction, and how I came to learn about August Ash in the first place through the use of social media….  [Read More…]

Your Business Card for the Web

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Throughout the last few centuries, people would meet and exchange trade, social, or what we now know as business cards, ensuring they could re-connect with one another if there was any interest or need in doing so again.

This ink on paper, manual handing out process was adequate in a day when contact information was relatively static and there were inherent limitations on the number of people whom we’d ever actually meet. In a time when 75% of adults are participating, communicating and engaging with others on the Web and meeting dozens, hundreds or in some cases thousands of others virtually, a static paper card is becoming much less useful. By the millions, we participating adults are engaged in numerous social networks and affinity groups, are blogging in record numbers, possess multiple email addresses and phone numbers, use Twitter, Skype and instant messaging accounts, and often have different identities with personal, business, or some other affiliation with required contact information that can often change frequently.

One Minneapolis company has created an innovative solution to meet those multiple identity needs with a digital equivalent of the trusty paper business card, one whose capabilities go far beyond what a static paper card could ever deliver….  [Read More…]

Minnov8 at MinnPost

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What could be better than to have been approached by the editor and publisher of MinnPost, an organization whose mission is to bring high-quality journalism for news-intense people who care about Minnesota, and asked if Minnov8 would be willing to participate weekly with one of our posts published there? Maybe bags full of $100 bills dropped on our doorstep would be better, but this is certainly at the top of the list.

Upon their launch, it was clear to me that MinnPost really was serious about their mission and I’ve been a loyal reader since they went live and recently donated as well. While scanning stories in competing publications about puppies, gossip about celebs at the Mall of America, the annual “Get Ready for Summer!” article or the provocative teaser at Digg is interesting when our minds need a cotton-candy-content fix, but more of us crave deep thought, analysis and perspective which those contributing to MinnPost deliver….  [Read More…]

State of the State: Technology in Minnesota. A Minnebar Panel Discussion

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One of the highlights of Saturday’s Minnebar was a panel discussion entitled, State of the State: Technology in Minnesota. The panelists included: Douglas Olson (Microsoft), Jamie Thinglestad (formerly of Dow Jones), Michael Gorman (Split Rock Partners), Robert Stephens (Geek Squad), Dan Grigsby (Unpossible), Matthew Dornquast (code42).

Ed Kohler at Technology Evangelist has a post with highlights here. You can also listen or download the one hour podcast below.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:00:08 — 74.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs – June 4-5

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This looks like an interesting venue and am glad to see a Minnesota recognition of the shift in media taking place as alternatives-to-traditional media flourish. Complete details are here. Registration and meals is $139.

Online News Community, Editors, Entrepreneurs and

other “Placebloggers” to Convene June 4-5 in Landmark Conference

MINNEAPOLIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Entrepreneurs, editors and operators of local online news and community websites — placebloggers — will gather June 4-5 in one of the first convenings of its kind, to share the trials and tribulations of a news source growing without paper or printing press. “New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs,” will take place at the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota, immediately before the fourth National Conference on Media Reform, also in Minneapolis on June 6-8.

“America’s new online citizen-journalists are inventing a new business and a new passion — the business of building local, literate, digital domains on the web where community and commerce flourish,” said Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “But efforts — and structure — to share best practices are only just emerging.”

The program will pull together experts for discussions on the business, marketing, legal, advertising, journalistic, technical and fund-raising skills that are needed in order for local online news and community-building websites to approach success….  [Read More…]

Loudclick: Build Web Sites Together

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Loudclick\'s Alex HuffLoudclick has created a platform for collaborative web site creation that allows anyone — from newbie to designer — to quickly deliver a great looking web site for sports teams, homeowners associations, small businesses, or any group. I met with Alex Huff at a local Caribou Coffee to learn more about him and hear the Loudclick story.

Loudclick’s core value proposition is a hosted application which enables building these web sites together (i.e., multi-user, multi-admin, and/or multi-author). Inline content editing capability allows an approved user to log in and edit any “element” (block on the page) that they have permission to change. It’s an editing method that’s gaining acceptance in the marketplace and the Loudclick solution delivers in an elegant way.

As many of us know from the emerging acceptance of wiki‘s in business and organizations, inline content editing is powerful but often new or less tech-savvy users struggle with the wiki paradigm and require training. Editing a wiki page changes it from a page laid out nicely to a bunch of text with tags…and many users I’ve dealt with on wiki’s freeze up and think they’re looking at code and just don’t understand what to do next, making the use of wiki’s problematic in casual group situations where easy publishing and communicating is what’s important.

As we talked, I mentioned that, although it’s positioned as a web site/page builder, “this seems like it could be positioned as a wiki with no learning curve“. Alex didn’t disagree, but is clearly focused on their core market: groups of people who want to communicate and connect by building great looking web sites created with minimal muss-n-fuss.

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An Interview with CotterWeb’s Daren Cotter

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darencotter.jpgAt the age of 15, Daren Cotter was presented with the opportunity to get a birthday present every soon-to-be-a-licensed-driver kid covets: a car. Instead, he asked for what he really wanted, a computer, and so young Cotter began his adventure in computing and software development.

Within a year he started to program, creating educational games and other software to teach himself how to create in bits what was in his head, and ended up submitting it to shareware sites. Over a couple of years he pocketed somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,ooo and realized that putting his value in software was something others would pay for and a light bulb went on.

After graduating high school in 1999, he entered Minnesota State University in Mankato and was suddenly faced with a something he hadn’t expected that was life-changing: a very fast broadband connection (he’d had slow dial-up at home) and ended up investing significant amounts of time online.

Exploring, he came across AllAdvantage and joined, becoming enamored with the advertising space and the concept of receiving some sort of value in exchange for his attention and time surfing the ‘net.

He tore apart their model, their approach, and worked hard at understanding how it was delivered in an attempt to figure out how to improve upon what they’d put together (and this before AllAdvantage’s spectacular flame-out during the dotcom meltdown in the early 2,000’s).

The result of this effort was his own creation, InboxDollars, which Cotter delivered the summer after his freshman year and was the start of his company (CotterWeb, located in Mendota Heights, MN) which grossed over $12M in 2007.
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