Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Internet Providers Want Control Over Your TV

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broadbandEver watch video or TV shows over the Web? How would you feel if this became one of your preferred methods for doing so and your cable or internet provider said, “No…that’s not allowed?”

Even the most naive and casual observer can see that the threat from services like Hulu; both Apple’s TV and movie offerings within iTunes; Joost; and the accelerating number of media center software offerings (providing access to ANY video on the internet), pose a huge threat to the cable TV companies and other broadband providers increasingly positioning themselves to deliver multimedia services.

With recent strategic moves it’s clear they are trying to get out ahead of the user market (and the maturity of video provider business models as well as the open source media center software) and put caps on broadband use in place before wider adoption occurs and alternative providers gain a foothold in your home.

As a tail-end baby boomer with enough of a geek nature to be involved far too deeply in the ‘net, web and social media in my business, I realize I’m atypical within my demographic on how I, and as a result my family, use our Comcast broadband connection. With Comcast’s 50mbps down/10mbps up DOCSIS 3 setup in my office (Note: we were one of two companies in their Minnesota rollout of this new technology) and 16mbps down/2mbps up at home, I’m dealing daily in video, photos, moving around large Zip files, screensharing, personal publishing, and numerous other online activities. These activities are mission critical to our small business, my wife’s and my client interactions, as well as family activities and connecting with others.

Comcast, one of the largest providers in this space, directly affects all aspects of our digital lives. With my family and my current, and increasing, use of the internet for an ever expanding array of online activities (Skype calling; my son’s video gaming; Flickr and Vimeo for photo/video sharing; online backup of our computers; use of our new Mac mini media center), we are certain to end up violating Comcast’s draconian 250GB bandwidth caps (er, I mean, Network Management Policy).  …  [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.
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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.

Twouble in Twitterville?

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twoubleDo you use Twitter? If you’re one of the current base of Twitter users, now 8 million strong and growing, there’s no question you’re probably on the service and using it for chatting with your friends, connecting to others and widening your social circle, or someone who is viewing it as some sort of channel of messaging distribution for your business and sending out ‘tweets’ that are all about you and what you offer.

If you’re not yet on board and using it, you’d have to be in some remote cabin in the wilderness to not have heard of it and been aware of its use during the presidential campaign, on CNN, spoofed on the Daily Show or used by members of Congress on their Blackberries during President Obama’s recent speech to they and the nation.

At the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference going on this week — the place where Twitter first hit the scene in March of 2007 — Twitter has, once again, been one of the primary conduits of communication for festival-goers as well as those in the greater Twitterville user community. Even companies like PepsiCo, in an apparent desire to capitalize upon the in-crowd’s use of this fun service, paid for a “PepsiCo Zeitgeist” application that tracks tweets that people insert with the #sxsw “hashtag” (an identifier so the message can easily be found by others searching with that tag) and displays them in fun and unique ways.

But there’s twouble in Twitterville at SXSW and from that comes a note of caution and advice if you’re planning on leveraging Twitter personally, professionally or as an organization.  …  [Read More…]

Meet and Tweet at Twestival!

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logo_twestival-w-dateTwestival moved into Uptown on Thursday night attracting local tweeps looking to help bring clean water to the world. Organized by charity: water, the gathering at Moto-i was part of 200+ city effort world-wide. From Hamburg to Hong Kong, Dubai to Dublin, and Madrid to Minneapolis the organization’s goal was to raise $1 million dollars to aid in its mission to bring clean drinking water to the 1.1 billion people (one in six) who don’t have access to it.

As I entered last Thursday’s event I was pleasantly surprised to see many people I hadn’t seen before at the many social media industry gatherings in the Twin Cities. Wow, real people using Twitter! As I wound my way through the crowd to hang with the tweeps I knew, I noted many laptops open with their users either tweeting or live blogging the event. A video display showed Twitter activity regarding the Minneapolis gathering scrolling up the wall via spy and, in the corner. the hosts of SpaceVidcast hosted their weekly vidcast.

As the sake flowed and the sounds of Air Supply (really…Air Supply…no, really) wafted from the speakers, for the Twitter faithful who weren’t glued to their screens or phones, they mingled and got to meet the people that they had probably only tweeted to on line. There was no shortage of conversation as the 140 character limit used on Twitter had been lifted from the relationships.

As of this writing, the final numbers of money raised at the event were not available. According to Minneapolis Twestival organizer, Andrew Korf (@andrewkorf) nearly $700 in cash was raised at the event with more to come from online donations. On a more global level, charity: water, faced with the need to collect money from around the world and a Monday bank holiday, hopes to have final numbers by Tuesday or Wednesday. (Look for an update here.) According to charity: water Communication and Media representative Nicky Yates, “A million dollar donation would mean clean drinking water for 50,000 people for 20 years.”

Update 2/20/09: According to the Twestival website, $250,000 has been collected so far.

Beyond aiding fundraising efforts, Twestival is another example of what social media can do to raise the awareness of a cause or organization. The planning of Twestival, put together over a 3 month to 3 week period of time, depending on the city, brought new awareness to charity: water on a gobal scale. Yates says, “We’re very excited by this entirely volunteer organized event. There are now more than 50,000 people around the world who are aware of charity: water that weren’t before this event.”

Why You Need a Social Hub

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wdc1925

Any business today can’t function without technology like a telephone, fax machine or email. But when you think about how relatively unchanged office work was from the earliest part of the last century until the advent of personal computers in the late 1970’s, much of the technology used in offices evolved incrementally.

In less than fifteen years, however, there has been a leap. An acceleration of the global internet — and an increasing number of humans connected to it — has made the internet network effect one of the most profound shifts in how we currently connect with people, perform our work and even socialize.

The network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. The telephone is the best example: if you had a telephone but no one else did, the usefulness of that device would be zero. As more and more people obtain telephones and connect to the telephony network, you can call them, they can call you, both of you can call businesses, schools or the firehouse, and a dizzying array of uses are found to harness this connection and making the tool what it is today: indispensable.  …  [Read More…]

A New Chapter for MN Stories

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mnstories1Video, Video, Video. Open your browser and you open a world of video access….or is that excess? From in-depth news coverage to roller-skating parrots, the world offers an unlimited supply of video. That’s a lot of video! How could one possibly discover what’s being produced here in Minnesota, maybe right up the street? Enter MN Stories, a video sharing site founded by Chuck Olsen.

You might know Chuck from any number of video and web related projects in and around the Twin Cities. Most recently, the always in motion Mr. Olsen dedicates heart and soul to the Uptake, a nationally acclaimed citizen journalism outlet that was launched to cover the 2008 election process (One that has stretched into 2009 as we Minnesotans patiently(?), at least as of this writing, await the seating of our 2nd Senator.).

The first iteration of Chuck’s MN Stories, launched in 2005, more closely resembled a video blog showcasing mostly Chuck’s work. “I always had a vision of a video sharing site.” says Chuck. “The Uptake just took over so much time.” Now, as the election hustle and bustle fades, Chuck has time to relaunch his video community vision. A relaunch we happily herald here as part of his first interview on the topic.

The newly rethought and redesigned MN Stories offers easy access to Minnesota video as well as providing a community for the producers and viewers of that video. “I can post video on YouTube but who’s gonna find me?” was Chuck’s driving question. So, think YouTube for Minnesota.
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What Can We Learn from the Minneapolis Top 100 Twitterers List?

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For those of you not yet on Twitter — and aren’t you feeling so smug you’re not wasting as much time as the rest of us? — you’re likely not aware there’s a site called Twitterholic, which ranks the popularity of Twitter users by number of followers.  Actually, despite what non-Twitter users may think, this social-media “microblogging” tool is proving to be quite useful for many in business, media, and even government, if the list of Minneapolis’ Top 100 Twitterers is any indication.

To better understand who’s doing these rankings, here’s how Twitterholic cutely explains itself:

“A few times a day, we calculate individual statistics for each twittering twit in our database. In other words, WE”R IN UR TWTTR PAGES, READN UR STATZ.  This list is updated daily so you can find out who the most popular twitter users are. To participate, do what you normally do — twitter constantly — if you deserve to be on the list, we’ll find you.”
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Rise of the Community Manager

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As the world continues to get connected to the internet and the number of people participating online using social media to connect to one another accelerates, the role of Community Manager is becoming one that more companies and organizations realize is a critical hire and one they need to consider now.

When the majority of online participants are always-on and always-connected — be it with laptops connected via wifi in a coffee shop or with mobile or smartphones — more are connecting with one another in established social networks (e.g., Facebook, MySpace) or with micro-groups like those anyone can set up at providers like Ning; with micro-messaging platforms like Twitter and Identi.ca; using social bookmarking, photo, video and other offerings; and adjusting their attention and focus as they see fit in any number of possible places to do so online.

This Wikipedia article on social media sums up just some of the places this diffusion of attention can be placed: “Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking),  Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Youmeo (social network aggregation), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Avatars United (social networking), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging) and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.”  

If you haven’t poked around (or at least tried out) any of those areas or offerings in the social media category, even understanding the nomenclature and what each social media type enables is an incredible challenge. Where do you start? 

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Playing Tag at Social Media Breakfast

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Thursday morning (11/20) saw another gathering of Social Media Breakfast at Best Buy headquarters. This was a “special” event presented by Best Buy rather than the gathering those who attend the event each month have come to expect.

It was billed as “Breakfast with Jeff Pulver“. Jeff is considered a true VOIP pioneer and a very active enthusiast in social media or what he terms “Social Communications”…a term  more fitting to this movement since it focuses on the act of communicating rather than the medium through which we do it.  He hosts breakfasts around the world and, as it appears, he is using them to practice Personal Tagging.

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