Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Mashup Best Buy

By

Best Buy has released Remix at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, allowing anyone to create a mashup with Best Buy online catalog content. An application programming interface (API) — documented though light on code or examples — allows queries into Best Buy’s online catalog and results to be returned from those queries.

As they say on their site, “Remix is an API that gives you access to BestBuy.com’s product catalog data. What you do with it is up to you.”

Really? I’d assume that some sort of terms of service would be forthcoming. 

Joshua Michele Ross over at O’Reilly Radar (O’Reilly is the brain trust behind the Expo), has this excellent post about the import of Best Buy doing this:

“Best Buy is thinking much more strategically about the value of the Internet by allowing anyone to reinvent their entire online store. With “access to all the data that feeds Bestbuy.com” imagine the potential of creating your own, curated site on top of Best Buy’s catalog and supply chain. Imagine top Blue Shirts running their own online stores with select merchandise that they stand behind or imagine a thousand home-theater geeks and “go-to-guys” (and girls) extending their expertise and word-of-mouth via their own online stores.” 

I’ll throw in one more: imagine you run a price comparison site that allows an online shopper to instantly compare pricing to another (though this can be done with screen scraping, but this API makes it much easier).

I must say that with BlueShirtNation, their prediction markets, what we experienced over at the Social Media Breakfast (specifically with this video), I grow more impressed by the week with the calculated risk, openness and forward-thinking this retailer is pursuing. Kudos Best Buy.

Moodle Makes Its Mark

By

Moodle at the UofMN graphicToday’s accelerating adoption of open source software (OSS), and the shift from desktop to web applications increasingly built on top of OSS, is being embraced by individuals, the non-profit sector, small, midsize, and even enterprise businesses.

As more of us get connected via the internet and through web applications, seek ways to make our collaboration more powerful, shift our old serial and linear processes to ones that are parallel and associative, OSS is a key building block of internet and web technologies and applications. OSS is also gaining momentum globally and affecting all industries and institutions, even educational ones. 

That said, educational institutions often lag the private sector in adopting new technologies until proven, especially the Kindergarten through senior high school (K-12) levels. K-12 is often seen as risk-averse and needing clarity about the efficacy and pedagogy of using any particular technology. It must be proven and the benefits to learning and student achievement crystal clear before any technology is implemented, especially OSS. 

On the flip side, higher education is a hotbed of OSS use and many projects have origins in colleges and universities. One could argue that our public institutions taking risks, researching new possibilities, and pushing against the membrane of the future is at least as important as their educational mission and has contributed code and thought leadership in OSS. 

Though I’ve been aware of the OSS learning management system called “Moodle” (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) for some time, I was both delighted at what I discovered at the U of MN and surprised (stunned might be the better word) by its adoption within Eden Prairie schools where my son attends high school.

There are lessons in this story for all of us about how two very different educational organizations recognized that collaboration, human connection, and the move to parallel and associative learning is at the core of education going forward, and took calculated risk with the OSS Moodle to meet new needs.

…  [Read More…]

3M Unveils Handheld Projector

By

3M\'s new handheld projectorImagine you are expecting to present to an investor, a customer or a single client, and several people show up? You could have everyone crowd around your laptop and hope to see what you’re presenting, or instead you could pull this tiny 3M projector out of your briefcase or backpack and ensure everyone could see and make a much bigger impact.

I carry a small Panasonic Lumix camera with video capture capability with me at all times. Also in my briefcase is my M-Audio Microtrack recorder and I’ve frequently pulled it out for instant interviewing. Too often I’ve been in situations where a projector like this would’ve come in extremely handy and I’d definitely have one with me if something this small was available.

Popular Science (PopSci), having a pre-release version of this projector, agreed to wait until launch in the US, but 3M’s German subsidiary apparently beat their US counterparts to launch. PopSci does have the ‘official’ 3M press photograph on their site (the one above), and I’d encourage you to read their informative post here.

More intriguing to me, however, is that this projector appears to work in fairly bright ambient light. If you’d like to see a couple of videos of a pre-release prototype from January of this year (and it’s pretty tough to get a true feel for the quality with YouTube videos shot with a camcorder!), take a peek at this PopSci article.

At the stated price-point of $359, I predict this little gadget is going to sell like crazy.

Working Out While Working the ‘Net

By

Spending a little too much time either coding that web application or sitting on your duff using all of them as the number of online opportunities for time investment explodes on today’s internet and web?

Our friend, Paul DeBettignies of MNHeadhunter, included Minnov8’s Graeme Thickins on an email, and we thought our readers — many of whom invest significant “face time” with our butts in seats working, playing and interacting with others in front of computer screens — might like to know about this upcoming TV news show segment.

Oberon, LLC and its affiliates SALO, LLC and NumberWorks, LLC will be featured on ABC News’ 20/20 in a story about innovative workplace wellness programs.  As you may have heard, Oberon was invited by the Mayo Clinic to be the first corporate partner to test the impact of movement at work on weight and wellness. The story will appear this Friday, August 1st at 9 PM CST on ABC (Channel 5 (KSTP-TV) in Minneapolis/St. Paul).

For six months starting last September, 20/20 producers were in Oberon’s offices to monitor their movements and progress. And move they did. Oberon added treadmill desks to their workspace and conference rooms. Walking meetings became more the norm than the exception.

The company is very appreciative of the opportunity provided by Mayo and Dr. James Levine to include 18 volunteers from Oberon, SALO and NumberWorks in the study.  Oberon believes that the Mayo Clinic may really be on to something new in workplace wellness, and they hope you can tune in to the ABC News’ 20/20 broadcast to see the progress that they’ve made since then.

Thirty Semifinalists Named in ‘Minnesota Cup’ Business Plan Competition

By

I attended and Twittered a bit at a reception Wednesday evening, June 25, at the grand, old James J. Hill Library in downtown St. Paul. (You remember old J.J., don’t you, the Bill Gates of his era?) It was an event to honor the startups who made it to the next round of the Minnesota Cup, an annual, statewide competition that seeks out aspiring entrepreneurs and their breakthrough ideas. The 30 lucky semifinalists were selected from a record of 840 entries in this fourth and largest year of the competition, and will vie for prizes that include $50,000 in cash for the first-place winner. An interesting tidbit I picked up at the reception: about 10% of the 840 entrants were Web 2.0 related.

Scott Litman, cofounder of the event, told me the competition this year was the toughest ever, and that many plans that might have made the cut in previous years didn’t. He also told me that, unfortunately, many entrants may have had great business concepts, but they were not understandable — the submissions were either poorly written, or riddled with so many acronyms and buzzwords that the judges flat-out did not know what the heck the submitter was talking about. (So, take heart, rejectees. You may be great at selling your ideas verbally — now work on the written word.)

Here’s how the Minnesota Cup site states its mission: “We’re looking for the next great entrepreneurial success story in our state. This competition is for all entrepreneurs, whether your breakthrough idea is high tech or no tech, whether you are just putting your ideas into a business plan or if you’ve been out building your venture.” Well, I wonder if it’s possible that any who entered, and especially the chosen semifinalists, could really be “no tech” in this day and age? That would be hard to imagine. And, in looking over the list, there’s nary a one that would seem not to rely on technology in their businesses. (Although some without a website certainly have the aura of no-tech at this point, perhaps awaiting prize money to build? And what’s with all the student semifinalists being listed with no websites?) As for the lack of a requirement that the business be new, i.e., that older startups can also apply, I know at least two on the list are four to five years old and still chasing $50k. Ah, hope springs eternal. Here’s the full list:…  [Read More…]

BlueShirtNation: Success from Risking Failure

By

Connecting thousands of high turnover, twenty-something retail employees into some sort of cohesive and connected online network would seem worthy of senior executive leadership, strategy formation, funding, project managers and endless meetings to ensure that it was aligning with the goals and objectives set forth at the outset. None of that happened with one of the most visible employee social networks yet deployed, BlueShirtNation.com, which is Best Buy’s blue, polo-shirted retail employee online network for internal use only.

Instead Gary Koelling, now Senior Manager of Social Technology at Best Buy, was in the advertising department with his colleague, Steve Bendt (also now a Senior Manager of Social Technology). These two went ahead and built just such a network and did it on the cheap and outside the confines of the organization. As you’ll soon learn, they did so with great success, but this is a cautionary tale.

The BlueShirtNation adventure began because these two didn’t think their advertising was as effective as possible and they were wrestling with new methods to reach people in 2006 — especially how to reach those in the Millenials demographic — and had been doing so by going out to the stores and talking to retail employees. As they explored ways in which to connect people and have them be involved with input into messaging and advertising, they’d been playing around with podcasting and some other ideas but hadn’t hit on the right solution.

They knew that employees wouldn’t fill out surveys online or other online feedback mechanisms so Koelling, who had been using the open source content management system Drupal, cobbled together something with that platform in order to test out an idea: building some sort of destination site that employees could use to connect with one another, share content and information, and other typical uses of a social network, giving these ad guys and their department better visibility into what these customer-facing folks were thinking and experiencing in the stores daily….  [Read More…]

Budget Hero Arrives Compliments of American Public Media

By

Now that the two major parties have chosen their candidates both are weighing their choices for a running mate. Perhaps your work on the National budget could put you on the short list.

The recently released on-line game “Budget Hero” launched in May by American Public Media in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, may not get you spot at the cabinet table; it could give you valuable insight into the budget process.

According to Michael Skoler, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Journalism at American Public Media, “Budget Hero is a new type of journalism that gives people the big picture on the complex and fragmented federal budget process. We created this news game to help Americans feel they can understand and participate in the national debate over the election, the budget and the direction of our country.”

Skoler shared with me that the game was in the talking stages for over a year and a half. “We sometimes thought we were crazy to build something as ambitious as a game…something that was journalistically sound yet simple enough for all to understand and take part in.“ With the involvement of many firms, think tanks, the Budget Office, as well as help from game development consultant Ben Sawyer, Budget Hero soft launched in May.

“The saying ‘you can’t understand until you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’ best describes Budget Hero,” said David Rejeski, who heads the Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “The game empowers players to take on the role of our government officials and allows anyone to try out their solutions and ideas on how to manage the federal budget.”

So let’s play……  [Read More…]

Entire U of MN At-Your-Fingertips

By

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…]

Nabbit Moves Beyond Tagging

By

On May 13th a press release announced the new partnership between Eagan-based Jump Technologies’ Nabbit service and CBS Radio, Minneapolis (102.9 Lite FM, 104.1 Jack FM, 830 WCCO AM). This partnership will further move Nabbit from a relatively simple tagging application into a full blown marketing tool. On that day, the eve of the big rollout of said partnership, I sat down with Nabbit chief (“Chief Nabber” on the business card), John Freund, to talk about the Nabbit, where it started, where it is and where it’s going.

Nabbit was born some two years ago as Freund and his team at Jump Technologies were discussing the eBay purchase of Skype. “I remember saying how great it would be to have 50 million subscribers to anything.” The discussion included colleague (and radio fan) Norton Lam’s thoughts about tagging radio content. So was the birth of Nabbit. According to Freund, “The first year we dedicated about 10% of Jump Technologies resources to Nabbit.” That has clearly grown as Nabbit has evolved, indicating a great deal of confidence in the potential of the business.

At first, it truly was a “content play” offering listeners of radio the ability to tag songs and advertisements via internet enabled cell phones. Those tagged pieces of content are placed into the Nabbit user’s account for later action including purchase or artist and advertiser info.

“We found that while users were tagging music they were actually tagging more advertising and the calls to action that they provided.” This led to what Nabbit describes as the first service that allows marketers to combine broadcast, mobile, direct response, and online advertising into one integrated consumer marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works.…  [Read More…]

Minnesota’s Internet Tech Crowd Flexes Its Muscle

By

If one had any doubt about the intensity of our state’s information technology and Internet community, one only had to be anywhere inside the U’s Coffman Union on Saturday for the third annual Minnebar “unconference” (part of an international phenomenon called Barcamp). To say the joint was a-jumpin’ simply does not suffice. And numbers alone don’t tell the story (though attendance was an event record at 430). Rather, it was the intensity of energy through the entire day that could only impress one about this somewhat quiet, and definitely underrated, sector of Minnesota’s economy.

I was there for at least 12 hours of the event — yes, it went on that long, and no one was complaining — and I can surely say that even the most skeptical of attendees who sacrificed part of their spring weekend were impressed with what they experienced, and left beaming with an elevated sense of pride in the industry they’re a part of. One needs only to scan the voluminous talk that went on in real-time — thanks to the magic of Twitter, and all archived here — to see that something big was happening in the Gopher state on this rainy fishing-opener Saturday. (In fact, Minnebar was ranked during the day as one of the top-five conversations going on in the entire, global “Twitterverse.”)…  [Read More…]