Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Powerful Document Collaboration with Redliner

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If you collaborate with others on contracts, agreements, leases, press releases, copy for your website, or any other activity where multiple people have to touch an electronic document, you know all too well the incredible frustration that results from trying to track changes to any of it! Redliner is a new offering, still in beta, that not only eliminates that frustration but does so with enough unique aspects that you’ll likely stop using Google Docs, emailed Word .docs or other means to collaborate with clients or colleagues.

Jerry Grabowski, Redliner’s CEO, carved out time last week to sit down with me and talk about Redliner, their target markets and a bit about the features of the product they’re delivering as software-as-a-service (SaaS). To say that they’ve got a unique opportunity is an understatement.

All the things you’d expect in an online collaboration space are here and then some you wouldn’t expect: Document editing like we’ve all come to know; an audit trail of who has edited the document and when; and even simultaneous editing by multiple users. What I haven’t seen as well executed as Redliner has done it is: The ability to accept or reject changes and (probably my favorite feature) is the ability to make private comments about a proposed change to someone else. I can’t tell you how often I could’ve used this when I was managing dozens of contracts simultaneously while running strategic alliances at Lawson Software and how it would have been enormously useful to be able to coach one of my alliance managers on some salient point within the agreement before our company would propose a change. …  [Read More…]

Minnesota Cup Semifinal Kickoff

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Last night’s turnout at the James J. Hill Library for the Minnesota Cup Semifinalist kickoff was impressive and quite large for an event of its kind. In attendance were 125-140 entrepreneurs, investors, sponsors, MN Cup judges and those of us covering the event (Minnov8 and tech.mn) as well as the people who were the entire reason for the kickoff itself: the semifinalists.

If you don’t already know about the Minnesota Cup, it is an annual, statewide competition that seeks out aspiring entrepreneurs and their breakthrough ideas and is open to 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 already been actively building your venture for some time.

James J. Hill

After some initial networking and refreshments, the evening festivities were kicked off by Anne Rasmussen, JJHill Library CFO/COO. She dropped some factoids on us about the Hill Library being one of the top business libraries in the nation, is fully self-supporting, and she ended her remarks by referring to how fitting it was that the entrepreneurs in attendance were sitting beneath a portrait of James Jerome Hill himself.

As you are undoubtedly aware living here in Minnesota, Hill was an incredibly successful entrepreneur who began his railroad empire in the 19th century and whose heirs established the library we were sitting in last night. (One factoid she didn’t mention–and one I’ve always found intriguing–was the supposed inspiration Hill’s life and empire building gave Ayn Rand for her character Nathaniel Taggart in her novel Atlas Shrugged).

Next up was Scott Litman, co-founder of the MN Cup (along with his business partner, Dan Mallin). Scott walked through the particulars of participating in the competition, what it took to deliver on it successfully as a competitor, a bit about the prize money, and gave the semifinalists the information they required to complete their business plans and make sure they submitted them by the deadline of July 23rd at 11:59pm (on a humorous note, Scott mentioned that historically something like 1/3rd of the plans are submitted within the final six hours!).
…  [Read More…]

OnCorps Reports: A MN Success Story

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While running strategic alliances at Lawson Software back in 2005, I met a woman named Catherine Settanni who was actively involved in digital literacy and a true advocate for ensuring that as many people as possible had access to the internet. Her leadership in the AmeriCorps Community Techology Empowerment Project (C-CAN) and its focused community outreach effort (the Digital Access Project) led her to a deep involvement in the Wireless Minneapolis effort to saturate the city with Wifi, bringing about one aspect to the internet access the other programs were intent on delivering.

But Catherine was frustrated. She saw that the required AmeriCorps reporting was excruciatingly difficult for a program director to create and deliver so, like any good entrepreneur, she set about leveraging her background and abilities as a filmmaker, database design, technologist and advocate to pull together a team, obtain funding and set about writing her own software as a service (SaaS)!

Other State programs caught wind of what she was up to and climbed on board as initial customer/funders. The result of her efforts has evolved in to OnCorps Reports™ which provides web-based reporting and communication tools for National and Community Service programs, including AmeriCorps, VISTA, Senior Corps and Learn & Serve programs. Designed specifically to support service programs, the application framework is easily modified for use by any Non-Profit organizations to manage volunteers or staff, monitor program progress, and utilize financial reporting tools.

When we had coffee this week, I was at first delightfully surprised at how powerful and robust OnCorps Reports was and how it had a very well executed user interface, but at the same time I thought, “What the hell!?! Why isn’t Catherine involved with the minne* crowd, showing at Minnedemo or leading sessions at Minnebar? Connected to the startup community here in Minnesota?” So we spent some time having her walk me through the software and me thinking out loud about how to connect her immediately within our tech community and get her more attention from those of us keenly interested in discovering MN startup success stories. …  [Read More…]

Lost in Minneapolis Skyways? FrypanDigital Has Your Lifeline

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FryPanDigital, a startup that intends to create “tasty apps” was founded by, “…two dudes who know nothing about application development, but wanted to try super hard to kick out an iPhone app.” These two have succeeded in “kicking out an app” and have released their new, free Minneapolis Skyway app for iPhone (their blog; iTunes link).

I met co-founder John Haddad at the Mobile March event a couple of months ago. He said that he’d keep in touch on the apps release and, true to his word, did so today and I thought I’d write a post immediately so you all could go and download this free app.

If you’ve ever spent any time hiking through the 8+ miles of skyway in the Minneapolis system, you know how challenging it is to find your way, locate that favorite deli or coffee shop you’ve been thinking about, or are heading toward to meet a friend for lunch and if you’re like me — a guy who detests pausing for several minutes to locate my destination on a skyway directory and then orient myself in the skyway labyrinth over-n-over again — this app will be a godsend and make it significantly simpler to ensure you and I don’t get lost in the skyway system.

For retailers and merchants who struggle to get the attention of potential skyway-walking customers (and face restrictions on placing signage in the walkways) this app promises to give them a new avenue to connect with customers as well as prospective ones. This is a struggle I know all too well since a few college buddies of mine once had a video rental store on the skyway system and every day multiple people would stop in and express surprise and delight that, “Oh good! There’s a video rental store in the skyway. How long have you been here?” even though they’d been in business at that location for several years. This app holds the promise of being both a fabulous tool for people to discover merchants and retailers but will also enable those retailers and merchants to deliver specials, deals and other focused advertisements through the app….  [Read More…]

ReliaCloud Releases Partner Program

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ReliaCloud, our own local (but national) cloud computing infrastructure company, has launched a full fledged channel program centered on their enterprise-class infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing offering.

According to Reliacloud, the five year growth outlook for IT cloud services revenue from 2009 to 2013 remains strong, with an annual growth rate of 26% – over six times the rate of traditional IT offerings (IDC, September 2009).

If you’re paying attention to cloud computing at all, then you can’t help but see that enterprise and small business IT spending is moving more and more to the cloud due to its easier set up, scalability, flexibility, built-in maintenance and support, and reduced costs for hardware and software maintenance.

ReliaCloud is focusing on making the reseller process as easy as possible, by providing a suite of tools that supports their resale process. ReliaCloud has developed a series of programs that maximize the use of their Cloud Storage and Cloud Servers for each of their customer profiles and, according to Brian Stevenson, Vice President of Sales for ReliaCloud, “We expect IT consulting firms and managed service providers to be the driving force of cloud adoption.”

I couldn’t agree more. Isn’t aligning incentives of others to leverage what you offer the basis of building an ecosystem? Great partnering is what made Microsoft so dominant for so many years and it’s obvious that ReliaCloud understands that making it easy for providers to build a business atop, around and with them will gain significant momentum for what they’re offering, and if the growth in cloud computing continues like IDC states (and which I believe is true) then striving to build and deliver — through as many channels as possible — an infrastructure layer upon which people can build toward that growing future, the more likely it is ReliaCloud will become a significant player in the space.

During a session at the recent Cloudcamp George Reese, CTO of cloud computing firm enStratus, laid out the layers of the cloud: SaaS; PaaS and IaaS. Think of SaaS as the layer where Salesforce.com plays (i.e., application layer); PaaS as the layer where companies expose their application programming interfaces to functionality others can use (e.g., AppEngine from Google and Force.com from SalesForce); and IaaS as the layer of hardware and administrative, policy-based services, internet connectivity and stuff that allows the other two to run (IaaS is sometimes known as Hardware as a Service or HaaS).

Nothing is more important than the IaaS layer since without speed, rock solid storage and a robust platform, the other two layers can’t function. With this new partner program at ReliaCloud, they’ll have a good shot at differentiating themselves from other providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Rackspace due to their focus on customer service which they’re carrying over from Visi and the learning they’ve gained from their direct client interactions at ReliaCloud.

Startups–Lean or Not–Beware Online Legal Forms

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"Fail Whale" photo by binxitron

You can find anything online, including legal documents. But that doesn’t mean you should use them. Two local lawyers recently put LegalZoom and LawDepot, two popular online legal forms providers, to the test.

LawDepot calls itself a “trusted, do-it-yourself legal” website. LegalZoom says “we put the law on your side,” and features favorable quotations from the Wall Street Journal and a lawyer on its front page.

It remains true, however, that you get what you pay for. For example, employment lawyer Karen Lundquist recently took a good, hard look at LawDepot’s $15 employment agreement. She found that it actually contained a provision that was illegal under federal law. In other words, there is no state in the country where the term would be legal. In every state, a company that tries to cut costs by using LawDepot’s employment agreement is just begging to get sued.

Another local lawyer, Greg Luce, took a look at LegalZoom’s $69 will package. Luce tried to put a positive light on what he got, calling it “a good start.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

There is an old saying: “only a fool has himself for a lawyer.” Downloading online legal forms is like playing Russian Roulette with your business. Unless you have the expertise to spot the problems Lundquist and Luce ran into, you probably shouldn’t use them. Of course, if you had that expertise, you probably wouldn’t need the forms, anyway.

Cheap legal forms may be tempting, but sometimes the cheaper path costs a bit more up front. You will have trouble keeping your startup lean while you are defending yourself from an employment discrimination lawsuit. Pay a lawyer for the right document, and you can avoid that ugly scenario.

Skip the online legal forms unless you know what you are doing.

Sam Glover is a Minneapolis business lawyer for geeks. He also edits the law firm marketing and practice blog Lawyerist, Lawyerist, and Caveat Emptor, a consumer law blog, and speaks frequently on law practice and lawyering. We’re pleased to have Sam as a new contributor to Minnov8.

MN Mobile Developers Clocking Millions of Downloads

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Local developers of apps for mobile devices, especially those designed for Apple’s platform, are quietly amassing large numbers of users for their creations, I’ve been learning.

This past week, I thought it would be an interesting little project for me to do a survey of sorts as the basis for this blog post. What I did (totally unscientific, I admit) was ask all the Twin Cities-area mobile developers I happened to know just how many apps they have on the two major platforms, Apple and Android, and how many users have downloaded their apps to date.  It turned into a bigger project than I thought!  It required a lot of back-and-forth emails to clarify all their current offerings.  But I’ve sorted it all out as best I can, and you’ll see the results of that survey in the second half of this post.

The two most-experienced mobile app development firms in Minnesota I have known quite well for some time, having been a consultant to both in the past: DoApp and CodeMorphic.  These two firms began developing for the iPhone platform as soon as Apple released the SDK in March 2008, and had their first creations in the App Store from the get-go, in the case of DoApp (July 2008), and CodeMorphic soon after. So, it was no surprise to me, then, that these two have the largest numbers of downloads locally. But many more Minnesota developers jumped in after them, and still are jumping in. In fact, I learn about a new one almost weekly. Some publish apps in their own name, some only for clients, and some do both. (For apps developed for-hire for client companies, developers cannot track ongoing download numbers in real time — only their clients know, unless they tell them or otherwise publicize the numbers. But the developers can certainly make educated guesses, which some of them did for me for my survey.) What triggered this idea for a post was a news announcement one of the two big local development firms just put out …

DoApp Inc. Announces One Million Downloads of Its “Mobile Local News” App

Actually, it’s not one app; there are more than 100 of these DoApp “MLN” apps out there, because that’s how many customers (media outlets) have signed up with DoApp to date to use what is really an “app platform.”  It allows DoApp’s customers — TV news stations, newspapers, online publications, and radio stations — to easily brand the app for themselves and deliver their content via smart phones and other mobile devices, including the Apple iPad.  (DoApp has not yet submitted to Apple an app designed specifically for the iPad, though its many iPhone apps do work on that new device.) In its recent announcement, DoApp counted downloads for all its locally-branded Mobile Local News apps, including both Apple and Android downloads, in saying they have surpassed the one million number. The company first made the Mobile Local News app available in April 2009. For more about all of DoApp’s products, see the company’s web site.   (In the photo: Joe Sriver, center, Founder; Wade Beavers, left, CEO; and Dave Borrillo, VP-Software Development.) I conducted an email interview with DoApp founder Joe Sriver to learn more about the current status of his company’s Mobile Local News app business, which follows…. …  [Read More…]

Angel-backed Startups 30-50% More Likely To Be Successful

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A landmark study was just released by two professors, one from Harvard Business School and the other MIT, which reveals that, for the most part, angel-backed companies enjoy performance gains of 30-50% when compared to other non-funded startups.

From the executive summary:

What difference do angel investors make for the success and growth of new ventures? William R. Kerr and Josh Lerner of HBS and Antoinette Schoar of MIT provide fresh evidence to address this crucial question in entrepreneurial finance, quantifying the positive impact that angel investors make to the companies they fund.

Angel investors as research subjects have received much less attention than venture capitalists, even though some estimates suggest that these investors are as significant a force for high-potential start-up investments as venture capitalists, and are even more significant as investors elsewhere. This study demonstrates the importance of angel investments to the success and survival of entrepreneurial firms. It also offers an empirical foothold for analyzing many other important questions in entrepreneurial finance.

Key concepts include:

  • Angel-funded firms are significantly more likely to survive at least four years (or until 2010) and to raise additional financing outside the angel group.
  • Angel-funded firms are also more likely to show improved venture performance and growth as measured through growth in Web site traffic and Web site rankings. The improvement gains typically range between 30 and 50 percent.
  • Investment success is highly predicated by the interest level of angels during the entrepreneur’s initial presentation and by the angels’ subsequent due diligence.
  • Access to capital per se may not be the most important value-added that angel groups bring. Some of the “softer” features, such as angels’ mentoring or business contacts, may help new ventures the most.

I came across this post from the excellent blog of David B. Lerner, a guy who describes himself as, “a Serial Entrepreneur, Director of Columbia University Venture Lab/Spin-Offs Program, Angel Investor, and Golfer-in-Exile” but who is, most importantly, someone who tracks this space and has this series on angel investing if you’d like to know more.

Workface Presents at AlwaysOn

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For more than two years, Minnov8 has monitored the progress of Workface and founder/CEO Lief Larson. Especially the continued evolution of BusinessCard2, a technology which you can see a part of if you click on the tab on the right side of your browser.

Besides being a good guy and friend of Minnov8, Lief is someone who is cut from the proverbial entrepreneur’s cloth: highly focused; persistent; always seeking; and someone who will make his offerings successful no matter what (disclaimer: Graeme Thickins has been assisting Workface as a client). It was with great delight that we saw Lief have an opportunity to present at the Always On/On Demand 2010 Conference this week and you can see him in action below.

DoApp Signs L.A. Newspaper Group to Mobile Local News Publishing Platform

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DoApp Inc., the Rochester-based mobile development company behind such apps as WCCO for iPhone, Mobile Local News, iKenex for Real Estate, Adagogo mobile advertising, and mRemedy, a partnership between The Mayo Clinic and DoApp, just nnounced their Mobile Local News publishing platform has signed the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG). LANG properties include: Los Angeles Daily News, Long Beach Press-Telegram, Los Angeles City Guide (LA.com) and seven more properties.

The key thing about the Mobile Local News publishing platform is that it integrates directly in to a publishing groups infrastructure and extends it into the mobile space and that “...publications can get up and running quickly with their own, branded mobile app. A Mobile Local News app can be ready within 30 days. The app is usually in the iPhone App Store or Android Market in less than 10 days if all news feeds are ready to go.”

Nice client. Congratulations to Wade Beavers, Joe Sriver, Dave Borillo and the team at DoApp.