Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Sharpen Up Those Business Plans! The ‘Minnesota Cup’ Deadline Is May 22

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mncup-logo1Attention all Minnesota startups and would-be startups: only a short time remains to enter the statewide business-plan competition known as The Minnesota Cup — applications are due Friday, May 22, 2009.

Now in its fifth year, the competition is bigger and better in 2009, with more prizes and more opportunities to win.  The total amount of winnings this year was upped to more than $130,000.  And the competition was expanded to now include six divisions — Clean & Green, BioSciences, High Tech, Social Entrepreneur, General, and Student. The first-place winner stands to win as much as $40,000.  But I submit the money isn’t everything — the publicity and connections the winners get from this competition are worth far more.

The MN Cup, in more than doubling its prize money, stands in sharp contrast to a national study that recently reported angel investment dollars were down 26% in 2008.  Yes, Minnesota entrepreneurs should take heart — seed funding is actually on the rise in this case!  And many more founders can now participate in this competition with its newly added business categories.

Twin Cities Business magazine did a story on the 2008 MN Cup winners.  …  [Read More…]

Author of “Viral Spiral” in Minneapolis

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coverIf you’re interested in open source, public knowledge or observations on the power of the commons in a digital age, you’ll want to know about a new book, Viral Spiral: How commonors built a digital republic of their own, since the author, David Bollier, will be in Minneapolis next Wednesday May 13th discussing it.

From free and open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, Wikipedia, remix music and video mashups. peer production, open science, open education, and open business. the world of digital media has spawned a new “sharing economy” that increasingly competes with entrenched media giants.

Reporting from the heart of this “free culture” movement, journalist and activist David Bollier provides the first comprehensive history of the attempt by a global brigade of techies, lawyers, artists, musicians, scientists. businesspeople, innovators, and geeks of all stripes to create a digital republic committed to freedom and innovation. Viral Spiral—the term Bollier coins to describe the almost magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools-brilliantly interweaves the disparate strands of this eclectic movement. The story describes major technological developments and pivotal legal struggles, as well as fascinating profiles of hacker Richard Stallman, copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig, and other colorful figures.

Here are the deets:
Book event & reception
Wednesday, May 13th at 7:30 pm
Magers & Quinn Book Store
3038 Hennepin Av S, Minneapolis
RSVP office@onthecommons.org

Missouri School of Journalism Live Today

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mizzouIf 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.

kim-garretsonIf 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.

Compellent Sure Knows How to Throw a Customer/Partner Event

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I’m impressed. Compellent is hosting one helluva gig this week.  If you don’t know this company — well, you should. It’s one of our state’s best technology-industry success stories in recent years. compellent_c-drive09 Compellent is all about data storage, which is very much still a growth industry, despite the recession. Yes, your company should be so lucky to be in a sector like this.

Specifically, Compellent’s product is a simple SAN, or storage area network. The company, which IPOed in October 2007 (NYSE stock symbol: CML), turned in some pretty impressive numbers a few days ago. It announced record revenue in its first quarter of $28.1 million, up 53% from a year earlier, and $1.0 million in net income. The revenue figure was even up 4% from Q4 2008, and it was the company’s fourteenth consecutive quarterly revenue increase. If an emerging Minnesota tech company in this economic environment could be said to be on a tear, Compellent would be it.

The company’s annual business partner and customer event, called C-Drive, is being held this week at the Bloomington Sheraton, and this is clearly the biggest one yet. The business partner portion of the event is May 4-5 (agenda), followed by a networking reception Tuesday evening May 5 for both partners and customers, while the customer portion of the event runs May 6-7 (agenda).  Existing or potential business partners and existing or potential customers may still register for the event, which starts today.  (Media and analysts may also register at the same page.)  It’s obvious that a lot of planning went into this year’s version of the event, which draws attendees nationally and features speakers from partner firms, from Compellent itself, and from some major technology vendors. In addition, industry analysts are among the attendees, and members of the technology press are moderating two panels.

On Minnov8’s Radar…

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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.

It Was Cloud Week in Minneapolis, and All the Cool Kids (and Old Guys!) Were There

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[Note: This post first appeared earlier today on the CloudAve blog.]

What a gorgeous spring week it was in Minnesota last week: clear, sunny, even sneaking into the ’70s.  sunbehindcloud The only “clouds” in sight were the proponents and would-be adopters of the latest, new hotness in enterprise computing.  Two events, on Wednesday and Saturday, attracted a wide array of these IT professionals, some 350 all told, who were hungry to learn more about… well, “the orange that’s the new pink,” as Larry Ellison would say. It was beyond impressive that so many people would give up being outdoors last week after the winter we’ve had in these parts!  Goes to show how deep our IT roots run in this state. Geeks are everywhere here and, doggone it, we’re proud of it!  We still have many old-school enterprise IT folks who remember the days of time-sharing on mainframes, and way more than our per-capita share of Fortune 500 headquarters in this state, all with huge (well, getting leaner) IT departments. But, along with all that, Minnesota has a seemingly endless supply of boot-strapped Internet and software startup developers — folks that are finding they love what cloud computing is doing for them.

So, it was an eclectic bunch that gathered at these two Minnesota cloud events, and I was there to take it all in…. …  [Read More…]

Oracle Drinks Up Sun: MySQL Questions Remain…

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…Like is LAMP now LAMOP?

mysqlI’m personally aware of over 40 projects here in flyover country that are not only leveraging — but are wholly reliant on — MySQL. To make matters worse (and admittedly selfish on my part) our company uses MySQL across all our web properties. To see that megalith Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems today for $7.4 billion sent chills down my spine and left me with a nasty taste of cottonmouth.

Sure, there are a few of those Oracle fanboys out there that will say this deal means Java will get more technical attention than it’s been paid for years. Still, I liken this acquisition to a story I saw in a documentary called Flow: For the Love of Water. A segment in this movie shows corporate giant Nestle setting up a bottling plant in Michigan and stealing away millions of gallons of water from a stream running through that community, putting it in bottles, and then selling it back to local residents.

It no secret that I’m a capitalist, and that I believe that money is the root of all that is productive. My problem with what Nestle did is that they took what was already free and a universal right – clean and fresh water – and sold that under the auspices of having actually produced something. I too fear this will be the case with Oracle and MySQL.

MySQL has over 10 million installations around the world and it is the productive man’s database management system. MySQL occurs naturally and freely in nature. People take it and turn it into something meaningful. It was provided under GPL and its current form represents the untold contributions and real-world use cases of thousands and thousands of people. Now are we to expect Oracle to come, bottle it up, and sell it back to us?

This transaction only happened today, so I don’t want to be too quick to jump to conclusions. That said, you would sure think that a guy as smart as Larry Ellison would have made a community statement to appease me. I mean gosh, this guy has all the water he could ever dream of and now I find him standing over MY WATER holding a big-ass straw in his hand.

What do you think?

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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minnewebcon1

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.