Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Minnov8 Gang 149 – Holiday Zeitgeist

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Minnov8 Gang Podcast 149 artwork

A smaller Gang discusses the past week’s news including the W3i Tech Holiday Party, Google Zeitgeist, Facebook Timeline and more.

Hosts: Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson (Steve Borsch is on holiday)
Music: Uncle Seth sing “Little Pieces” from the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 33:26 — 19.4MB)

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Discussed during the show:

Upcoming Events:

Note: We will be off next week but return the following week to discuss our 2011 predictions and gaze into the crystal ball again for 2012.

Minnov8 Gang 125 – Keeping It Straight

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The Gang returns with two guests this week. First up is blogger and curator Patrick Rhone talking about his new book, “Keeping It Straight.” Then we welcome back Don Ball from  CoCo MSP to talk about the new Minneapolis coworking and collaborative space coming this July. We also kick around some of the news of the week including the Groupon IPO, local/social deal sites and our inevitable Apple speculation before next week’s WWDC.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: “Heartbreak Road” by Lazy Poker via the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:49 — 29.7MB)

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Discussed during the show:

Minnov8 Gang Podcast 82: Vicarious WWDC

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We revisit Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) through Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s experiences talking about the new iPhone 4 and his reliance on the iPad and HTC EVO 4G on his trip. Many other related subjects are explored to their logical conclusions.

Show Hosts: Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson (Steve Borsch was away this week).

Music by AjT “Apple Chunk Guitar” from Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 53:42 — 31.0MB)

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Discussed during the podcast:

Events:

Day-Long Conference Highlights Mobile’s March

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What organizers hope will be the first of an annual event dedicated to Mobile technology and it’s application, Mobile March is scheduled for March 27th at the Hilton Garden Inn in Minneapolis.

The two track conference will offer sessions that appeal to active software developers as well as mobile users including marketers, advertisers and enthusiasts. Attendees can choose a single track of learning and information or pick and choose from either track to maximize their experience.

According to event founder and organizer, Justin Grammens, “There are plenty of meetings focused on mobile development or mobile marketing and use. We wanted to bring the two groups together to better understand the overall mobile platform.” Grammens, President of mobile development firm Recursive Awesome and founder of Mobile Twin Cities noted, “We have assembled an agenda of mobile experts and users that will offer unique perspectives on the opportunities with the local, national and global mobile community.”

The agenda, available online at www.mobilemarchtc.com, includes technical sessions addressing the development of applications for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry mobile devices. These sessions will be presented by local developers Aaron Kardell, Robert Green and Shawn Butler respectively. The technical track also includes Beyond the Code: User Experience, Testing, and Support presented by Breon Nagy.

The non-technical mobile users track includes What Do They Want, providing results from a consumer study presented by Carlson Marketing’s Doug Rozen and On the Air and In the Papers, featuring a panel of representatives from local TV, Radio and Newspaper companies. Other sessions slated are Show Me the Money, discussing the future of mobile commerce with Farhan Muhammed, and Mobile Marketing: Watch That Step presented by a panel of marketers highlighting the process of initiating a mobile strategy.

Other agenda items including a keynote to start the day will be announced in the near future.

Registration is now open for Mobile March, Saturday July 27th at the Hilton Garden Inn in Downtown Minneapolis via the Mobile March website or directly through Eventbrite. The cost is $20 and includes lunch.

Minnov8 is pleased to be a sponsor of this event* and joins other event sponsors including: Verizon Wireless, Fusion Room, Best Buy, The Nerdery, Recursive Awesome, Focus Business Development, and RemainComm Media Strategies.

*Minnov8 contributor Phil Wilson is a Mobile March organizer and is the founder of sponsor RemainComm.

Soltrite: HD Videoconferencing

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soltriteWhether you call it video teleconference, video telepresence, webcamming, or just video chat – Soltrite does it. Soltrite is a Minneapolis based startup company founded by Scott Colesworthy, a Minnesota native and man of many hats with a track record of wins in the communication systems integration space.  His first company, SPC Communications, originated in the 90’s and focused on voicemail. From there the company branched out into call center technologies under the name Soltris. At the peak in 2000 there were 42 employees and $7 million in annual sales before ultimately, both companies were sold to Avtex in 2003 for an undisclosed amount. Avtex, in turn, was acquired by the Pohlad Family of Companies in 2008 where it remains to this day within their IT portfolio (Marquette Technology Group).

After the sale of SPC/Soltris, Scott took a startup hiatus but his entrepreneurial spirit remained restless and decided to get back into the game, starting where any seasoned entrepreneur would: research.  After hunting down the best identifiable opportunity with respect to his domain expertise, interest, and background, he found Vidyo – a small New Jersey based co with a patented video conferencing solution (that just so happens to power Google chat).  He narrowed in on the specs and did his diligence, noting “Vidyo fits to a ‘T’ the principals Clayton Christenson lays out in his classic book titled “The Innovators Dilemma“”. In August 2009 he inked a license agreement with Vidyo to repackage the technology and deliver it to the mass market under the trade name Soltrite.

Soltrite delivers high quality multi party video conferencing over the ubiquitous public internet and provided the hardware device already has a webcam installed, there is no additional equipment to buy although a quality USB headset is recommended.   Videoconferencing has been around since the invention of the television via two-way closed circuit, spanned into radio frequency with the help of NASA, struggled through early stage telephony experiments, and matured in the 90’s manifesting itself into mainstream apps like Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, et.al.. …  [Read More…]

Redliner: Document Collaboration Made Easy

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redlinerlogo_175x40After a long bout of scheduling conflicts and Swine Flu, we finally caught up with David Womeldorf, VP for Redliner.com.  Redliner is led by CEO Jerry Grabowski, and brought to life by a small team of experienced developers.  With a decade of previous web/tech startup experience, David joined the Redliner team approx. a year ago, back when this technology was still in concept form.

Plain and simple, Redliner is a document collaboration, group editing and approval solution.  There’s only so many ways to make this space sexy, but after experiencing it and playing around for a while, I’m not going to lie – I’m a little turned on. And this baby is still in beta!

Let’s start with the dashboard:

RedlinerDashboard …  [Read More…]

GiveMN: Charitable Fundraising Meets Social Networking

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GiveMN logoThis morning my Twitter stream was filled with tweets about GiveMN an online charitable donation site which launched today. The idea is simple; provide an online resource for the more than 36,000 Minnesota charitable and religious organizations to raise money for their programs. GiveMN.org is built with Razoo, an online platform optimized for charitable giving based in Washington, DC. This platform not only makes it easy for charitable organizations to publicize their programs to attract donors and accept contributions but also is fully integrated with existing social networks Facebook and Twitter extending their promotional reach.

Online fundraising costs about a third of what traditional direct marketing does which makes GiveMN a much more efficient way to raise funds. The foundation that administers GiveMN plans to cover much of the 4.75% credit card transaction cost from corporate and private donations so that 100% of the contributions will go to the designated charity.  Their partners and funders page lists a number of well known organizations such as The Saint Paul Foundation, Greater Twin Cities United Way, The Minneapolis Foundation, The Bush Foundation and The Minnesota Council of Nonprofits along with corporate and media sponsors.

To kick things off, GiveMN has designated November 17th as “Give to the Max Day” where several of their donors have pledged up to $500,000 in matching contributions to fund programs and cover the transaction costs. More details will be posted on the GiveMN site in coming days about this event as well as on their Facebook page and Twitter account.

GiveMN looks to revolutionize charitable giving here in Minnesota but also might inspire other such efforts in other states. You never know where Minnesota innovation will strike next.

Best Buy’s mIQ Beats Microsoft’s MyPhone At It’s Own Game

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As mobile phones have become more powerful the need to access and backup information on them has increased. One way to do this is to mesh your phone’s operating system on a central server as pioneered by Danger’s Sidekick and emulated by Google’s Android and Palm’s WebOS. If something happens on the phone, it’s automatically synced to your account in the cloud and this, in theory, prevents data loss (that company is called ‘Danger’ for a reason).

mIQ logoI have been using a Windows Mobile phone for the past 18 months and have been looking for a way to sync my data wirelessly for some time. A while back I installed the beta of Microsoft’s MyPhone service but never got it working correctly. Not sure if it was something I was doing wrong but such services should just work without a lot of user intervention and MyPhone never got there despite repeated effort in it’s beta form (it sort of worked for me once launched; read on for details).

Last week Best Buy launched their mIQ service which I noticed supported Windows Mobile so I signed up and a couple days ago was sent my account invitation. After a somewhat complex setup process that involved both the handset and computer browser, I was ready to sync. And after quite a while it seemed to be about the same as MyPhone; not really working. So I rebooted my phone, started again and this time let it sync overnight in it’s charging stand. The next morning when I checked the phone had fully synced and after a logout and login all my photos, contacts, calendar entries, text messages and other data was backed up in the mIQ service online, as advertised. My one suggestion is that the status screens on the phone be a bit more clear that something is happening since I think the sync would have worked the first time without my reboot (just a more animated status bar would work here).

Both mIQ and MyPhone are linked to popular social sites. MyPhone supports Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr while mIQ links to Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and Flickr. On the phone the mIQ service lets you update status on these services from their client, a nice touch. mIQ integrates all the communications for each contact in it’s web app so you can see all the text messages and phone calls linked to each contact. It also lets you send SMS messages from the web and easily make Skype calls to your contacts if you have a Skype out account on your computer. mIQ easily allows you to share photos and videos from the web app and seems to be automatically set to push these as they are taken from your phone by default. mIQ also has helpful stats on your phone memory usage that cleverly links to memory cards available at Best Buy making it easy to buy what you need for your phone. Overall, mIQ is very complete, stable and useful for a first release service. Along with Windows Mobile, mIQ also currently supports Blackberry and Symbian (mostly Nokia) smartphones….  [Read More…]

Adaptive Avenue’s Next Generation Ad Technology

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header_1 Adaptive Avenue is a twice-patented online advertising technology that takes the concept of a display advertisement to the next level through a uniquely engaging experience. Such ’smart’ ad technologies represent the forefront of online advertising — they strive to improve relevance, consumer engagement, click-through, and conversion rates. In the case of Adaptive Avenue, the format is achieving a 2-4X (multiplier, not percent) increase in click-through rates — with better qualified prospects for conversion – relative to increasingly ineffective static display ads.

Traditional display advertisements constantly seek the ultimate hook — designed to be catchy, relevant, and timely. Their sole objective is to capture the attention and imagination of a (publishing) website’s visitors long enough to prompt a click on the graphical ad that steers traffic to another, completely independent (advertising) website — which, ideally, is a targeted landing page. At this point, there are numerous desired outcomes depending on the objectives of the advertising campaign, not limited to:

  • conduct a transaction/purchase
  • provide personal data in the form of a “lead”
  • offer feedback or take a survey

However, the reality here is that, more often than not, display advertisements under-deliver. Why? Because they don’t authentically engage users or offer them any real value. If viewers aren’t simply ignoring ads, they’re blocking them or defrauding them — thus the believably low click-through/conversion rates (based on the standard measure of clicks per one thousand impressions). It’s no wonder that most web surfers report an increasing aversion to online ads or have conditioned their viewing habits to ignore them. True, there have been notable improvements to the display ad model over the years — specifically Cost-Per-Action (CPA) pricing, contextual ads, and niche networks — but there’s still a long way to go before display ads become as effective as they can (and should) be!

So — what’s the Adaptive Avenue advantage? …  [Read More…]

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Buy the Change and Local Tweeps

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buylocalBuythechange.com & Localtweeps.com are two websites created and co-founded by local tech startup Monkey Island Inc. entrepreneur Zack Steven. While these initiatives are miles apart in their application and scope, they share the same DNA: hyperlocal, community-driven services focused on generating both financial and social capital.

Buythechange.com, which launched around 3.5 years ago, is a localized social commerce network that helps people buy and sell products/services with their community friends and next door neighbors. It also aims to promote local businesses – as opposed to faceless corporate enterprise – say for example, one owned & operated by an out of area central office. Hyperlocal is the mom and pop shop down the street, the independent contractor neighbor, or the local food shelf. When products or services are posted “for sale” on the site, a specific geographical network (neighborhood/community) is alerted, which fosters more personalized connections than a craigslist model by simply removing the anonymity factor. This form of commerce enhances social bonds which lends itself to more meaningful long term relationships, commercial and otherwise.

There are three membership levels: a free Basic membership which allows people to post goods and events, a $24/year Personal membership which allows people to post services (as well as goods and events), and a $120/year Business membership which includes a business profile and posting of unlimited goods, services, jobs and events. The social cause comes into play when a portion of the membership fee (33-50%) is donated to a local non-profit of the members choice, and then(optionally) the cause is added into the member’s profile, further shaping the identities and intentions of each individual member. Simply put, Buythechange.com is “classifieds with a conscience”. …  [Read More…]

Podcast: Download (31.8MB)

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