Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Wired for 2020: Mentoring Our Youth

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wiredIn a world that is shifting from serial and linear processes (which can be easily outsourced) to one rapidly moving toward higher value being created by those people who can deal with the flood of information and ideas coming at us in parallel by making new associations, any of us who care about our kids and the next generation of workers and leaders intuitively understands the value of mentoring. This past weekend’s Wired for 2020 event was solely dedicated to mentoring and I was delighted to have had a small involvement in this worthwhile venture.

Wired for 2020 is the Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota’s year long engagement campaign to get more mentors involved with youth in the state of Minnesota. Their mission is to interest caring adults in becoming mentors to youth. Caring adults who are willing to help young people spark their future career interests and expand their possibilities.

Sponsors included names such as General Electric, Best Buy, Target, Federated Insurance, MN Dept of Education, Minnesota Interactive Media Association, Qwest, Science Museum of Minnesota, 3M, Thomson Reuters and many more.

With a daughter in college and a son in high school, you bet I care deeply about the future of education and work, the world they’ll inherit from us, and the value we can add to kids if we can help them locate their own, personal spark within and help them to see possibilites and opportunities that match their dreams.

In a world where high paying, yet low value jobs can be done elsewhere at a fraction of the cost of labor onshore, the challenge is in coaching our youth on how they can each strive and focus on higher value work and that they can, in fact, invent the future. It won’t be easy as global competition continues to grow. …  [Read More…]

Panel to Discuss the ROI of Digital Marketing

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A special event for senior executives and marketing professionals has been announced by long-standing Minneapolis web marketing firm Ciceron.  Entitled Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace, the half-day panel will be held Monday, May 11, 2009, from 8:00 to 11:00 am at the Midland Hills Country Club in St. Paul.  radicalroiforum

The event offers attendees a chance to hear how a panel of local business leaders have transformed their organizations to thrive in the digital marketplace — and I am privileged to be one of those panelists:

• Paul Douglas: CEO, Weather Nation (and former chief meteorologist, WCCO TV)

• Jan McDaniel: CEO, JTM Vision (and former CEO, American Red Cross Twin Cities)

• Phil Hotchkiss: Founder, BigCharts.com

• Joel Kramer: Founder, MinnPost.com (and former Publisher, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
[Note: Minnov8 syndicates some of its content to MinnPost.]

• Graeme Thickins: Founder, GT&A Strategic Marketing

• Andrew Eklund: CEO, Ciceron Digital Marketing

A special reduced rate of $195 per person is available till May 3 at this registration page, with a group rate of only $395 for up to five people from the same organization.

Ciceron is a web marketing and consulting agency based in Minneapolis. It offers full-service solutions from professional search engine optimization and email marketing programs to in-depth metrics and performance tracking. Its clients have included such major brands as Home Depot, Nascar, USBank, Andersen Windows, Best Buy, Target, and Pepsi. For more about Cicero, check out their about page, their full client list, and here are their management bios.

I hope to see you at “Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace” on May 11.  Again, use this registration page before May 3 to get those preferential rates.

MinneWebCon

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Yesterday’s MinneWebCon was a surprisingly packed event at my rough estimate of 400-450 people. The event was a full-day, three-track, continuing education conference for web professionals with the express intent of providing a venue to deliver “…technical and creative information from industry practitioners and educators directly to University of Minnesota staff, students, and web professionals from ad and design agencies, corporations, non-profit organizations, and other higher education institutions.“

The event was led off with a keynote by a key technology thought leader, Doc Searls, who famously was one of the authors of the seminal work, “The Cluetrain Manifesto“, required reading for anyone interested in the essence of conversational marketing, social media, and the shifts that were just beginning to occur when this thing called the Web was fairly new and the object of unrealistic expectations by too many chasing “eyeballs” instead of people.

At a high level, Doc discussed the progression from Cluetrain to today, telling stories which highlighted what many of us know as obvious truths when it comes to being a web participant. He spent time on a very interesting initiative, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as a much needed, power balance between we “customers” (managed within CRM or Customer Relationship Management software) and the vendors who’d like to sell us their stuff.

Sessions on tools, design, technologies, social media and much more were delivered to an audience of people who primarily make their living creating and building Web sites, assets and applications.

The second keynote, Web Culture & Privacy, was by security expert Bruce Schneier. With such quotable gems as, “Security does not equal privacy. Ephemeral is dead” and “Eventually we will have a president who sends LOLcats to other world leaders,” he really brought significantly more awareness to the audience about privacy and was clear that the only way to ensure privacy “…is to legislate it,” making the point that we need to become aware, pressure lawmakers, and drive legislation that makes it possible to retain privacy in an age where digital bits of ourselves are everywhere.

Hats off to Kris Layon and the team at the University of Minnesota for pulling off such a successful event and for opening it up to outside-the-university attendees.

What’s All This About ‘Moving to the Cloud’? One Minnesota Entrepreneur Can Tell You How

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If you’re in an IT professional or follow developments at all in this field, you’ve undoubtedly been noticing an almost endless amount of media coverage and online discussion lately about “cloud computing”  — one example being a front page story in The Wall Street Journal yesterday.  But, even if you’re just an Internet consumer, you too are hearing your share of the hype.  After all, many consumer Internet applications are also now accessed “in the cloud,” as opposed to being software you install on your own computer — Google’s Gmail probably being the best example.

georgereese-headshot Well, one local entrepreneur, George Reese, is right smack in the middle of all this buzz, and is in a position to help clear up a lot of the confusion about it — especially for enterprises looking to take advantage of the economic benefits of this form of computing.  georgereese-book-200w1 His new book on the subject is scheduled to be released by O’Reilly on April 10.  It’s entitled “Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud.” (And here’s the Amazon link.)  George is a Minneapolis-based technologist and startup founder.  I’ve known him since late 2006 and thought it would be interesting to get his thoughts on this very hot topic, and hear the story behind his book.  This is an interview I conducted with George earlier this week, which first appeared on the cloud computing site Cloud Ave. …  [Read More…]

Standouts and Serendipity at SXSW Interactive

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Last week was a busy one for many in the interactive community here in Minnesota. As chronicled by Minnov8, South By Southwest (SXSW), a name long associated with independent and breaking music and has grown to include Film and Interactive, attracted many of Minnesota’s best and brightest for five days of workshops, events, and parties.

From March 13th-17th the Austin Convention Center, as well as the very Streets of Austin, became a hotbed for computer code, social media, and interactive business. And right there in the middle of it stood the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
…  [Read More…]

Unsummit Leader Interviews

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On March 7th was the Unsummit. Phil Wilson, with Brian Stemmler on camera, interviewed the leaders of the Unsummit. Brian carved out time to do a great job on the video editing of this piece and we bring that to you now:

Zeus Jones & Sierra Bravo Win Phizzpop Final

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Kudos to the teams at Zeus Jones & Sierra Bravo for taking the finals at Phizzpop at South by Southwest (SXSW). Stiff competition from top designers in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Austin (TX) and San Francisco…but they nailed it.

The PhizzPop Design Challenge is a web design and development competition. This year PhizzPop expanded from in-person agency challenges to include an online competition for web professionals.

The PhizzPop Tour stopped in seven cities across the U.S. This is the design event of the year — a prestigious design competition combined with a social gathering for top web professionals, brands, designers and developers. You can learn more at the PhizzPop site here.

Two videos below: the Zeus Jones/Sierra Bravo winning pitch…and an interview Minnov8’s Phil Wilson did with Christian Erickson, partner in Zeus Jones and the guy that was on stage pitching the combined team’s work to win the event.

Unsummit: But First, Real People on Social Media

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As part of Minnov8’s coverage of the Unsummit on Saturday, March 7th, we thought it would be interesting (and more than a bit fun) to ask people on the streets around the Hennepin County Library (site of the Unsummit) how they use social media. Join videographer Brian Stemmler and myself for a little “people on the street” fun. (Please note that no Canadians in bunny ears were harmed in the making of this video.)

Check back here soon for more video interviews and information from the Unsummit.