Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

CodeMorphic Is One of the First In Line with iPhone Apps

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It’s almost the end of the week and, being a site centered on tech and innovation, I believe we have been remiss in not including a picture of a 3G iPhone and a story having something to do with it. Well…when the iPhone AppStore opens in July, Minnesota startup CodeMorphic is all set with native applications for iPhones of all kinds.

Longtime friends Damon Allison and Bill Heyman launched the company in early March, coincidentally around the time as the Apple iPhone SDK release. There is a sense of serendipity about how they landed in the first group of iPhone developers among the two but they believe their focus and quality coding was the key to being noticed and landing at the front of the line. They feel their singular focus on just building native applications for the iPhone, and not moving into other mobile platforms, will prove to be the best business model.

Heyman noted there is tremendous opportunity for application development in the enterprise market. “There will be great growth in developing internal corporate applications.” Areas like work flow, communication are clearly opportunities.  Heyman continues “Right now that’s an area dominated by Blackberry so we see more needs for those types of applications for iPhone.” The consumer is the other opportunity. “Consumer focused applications that promote the brand, for example if General Mills were to target a younger consumer, where the iPhone or iPod Touch are really popular, they could develop an application or game that is tailored to them.”…  [Read More…]

Enleiten: A Social GTD

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If you have any interest in personal or group productivity, it’s likely that you’ve at least become aware of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system. It’s not only taken the corporate world by storm, it’s become the geek method/tool/approach of choice for moving far beyond a simple to-do list. The system has even spawned productivity sites like 43 Folders, an homage to one element of the GTD system, as well as its own blog and news site dedicated to GTD-centric productivity called GTD Times.

Due to the success of Allen’s GTD methodology and the sheer volume of software developers among the ranks of the faithful, tools abound for using the GTD method. From David Allen Co’s own Microsoft Outlook add-in to dozens of offerings for PC’s and Mac’s (as well as other types of tools), most work well but suffer from an increasingly evident fatal flaw: using GTD is a problem if all of your data is sitting on a single computer. More and more of us are on multiple devices and mobile…using a laptop, smartphone, desktop at home and the office (and even casually using computers in coffee shops, airports or at a friend’s house) and need to use GTD but be able to access it anywhere we have an internet connection.

In 2007 Eric Hedberg, an economics major from Carleton College, worked at Secure Computing and Stockwalk.com, the latter in financial sector software, and Hedberg became aware of the direction applications were taking by being delivered “in the cloud” (i.e., as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hosted and available to anyone with an internet connection) and started looking at ways to implement a SaaS data warehousing/workflow management application for the financial services industry.

After some prototyping and user feedback, he and his college friends who’d joined him (Doreen Hartzell, CEO, and Steve Bentley, in charge of interface design) realized that the best part of what they’d built was the project management piece, which delivered collaborative online workspaces using a GTD model. That revelation spawned the current company focus, Enleiten, which is a collaborative GTD application delivered in the cloud and available for single consumer users, small groups or businesses….  [Read More…]

Commercial Real Estate Search Made Efficient

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As the Internet increasingly becomes a platform upon which entrepreneurs and opportunists build disruptive and inefficiency crushing innovative Web applications, organizations like GoFishCommercial will emerge to do exactly that and make the inefficient, efficient.

After hearing about the company and taking the time to poke around the site, I had the chance to talk with Asher Silber, VP of Sales & Marketing for GoFishCommercial, in order to understand their current deliverable and a bit more about where they’re headed.

Kristi Oman (commercial real estate developer and property owner) and husband Zev, looked at the simplicity and effectiveness of Craigslist and knew they could build and deliver a site that would match that and add significant value to both the search process by buyers as well as to the owners of commercial real estate and their brokers.

What is particularly intriguing and innovative, however, is how GoFishCommercial has aligned the incentives of buyers, property owners and brokers, and done so in a disruptive and efficient way….  [Read More…]

Entire U of MN At-Your-Fingertips

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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…]

Zanby.com Relaunched: Groups for Groups

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After 2 years in development Zanby.com has relaunched with a different take on a community site. Rather than focusing on the individual profile with groups as an extension (how I think of Facebook). Zanby reverses it by putting groups at the core and extending them into a “group family” – a network of groups.

The simple example of this is a national professional organization with local chapters, or an organization with franchisees. Within Zanby, all those groups can communicate with each other while maintaining their distinct identity.

TheUptake.org, is moving their entire site off WordPress and onto a white-labeled Zanby to take advantage of all the social aspects of the platform.

Scribbls: A Big Draw with Little Doodles

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To stand out in a world that launches a new start-up company, application, or website almost hourly is not an easy task. Ask anyone who witnessed the demo at the latest Minnebar in the Twin Cities or has had the good fortune to discover the site that has been live for about three weeks and, after they stop laughing, they will tell you Scribbls is a standout.

The brain child of Watermelon Sauce* co-founders Zach Johnson and Paul Armstrong, Scribbls has been bubbling under the surface for the past few years. These chronic doodlers made the site public just three short weeks ago.

The basic premise of a scribbl is incredibly simple. Users are asked to create doodles by using existing ones and combining them. The formula, according to Zach, is a straightforward one: A+B=C. He also notes that the University of Minnesota is actually studying something similar as it applies to non-verbal communication. Scribbls on the forefront of science. Yeah, who knew?

These scribbls play on collaboration and can lead to hilarious results. They both enjoy the proliferation of people drawing and reusing bacon on the site in their doodles: “Everything is better with bacon!” they say in unison.

…  [Read More…]

Taking a Risk on Open Source

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Sit back and let me tell you a story about a game-changing open source ecommerce project, an emerging web development firm in Bloomington, and how they discovered this project and I, in turn, discovered them. It’s illustrative of how Internet and Web connections are changing everything from value discovery to customer satisfaction to how awareness of an emerging company can happen if they’re in-the-game and leveraging new social media tools.

Last year I was performing some due diligence for a client on ecommerce software. Stunned by how poorly executed most open source ecommerce projects were, I was delighted when happenstance brought me to this blog with a link to an open source ecommerce package called MagentoCommerce. After thirty minutes on the site, scanning posts in the forum and looking at the demos, I realized that the sheer scope of the energy, effort and enthusiasm the community was exhibiting around this open source project was going to raise the bar quite high for any other ecommerce offering…whether commercial or open source.

Local Bloomington firm, August Ash, Inc., also found MagentoCommerce in much the same way I had, though they came upon it in early 2007. Turns out they are the only known Minnesota firm to have already launched sites on this new open source package (which shipped the very first version on March 31, 2008) and you also might be surprised to learn why they took the risk on such unproven software, how doing so actually aligns with their focus on quality and customer satisfaction, and how I came to learn about August Ash in the first place through the use of social media….  [Read More…]

Your Business Card for the Web

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Throughout the last few centuries, people would meet and exchange trade, social, or what we now know as business cards, ensuring they could re-connect with one another if there was any interest or need in doing so again.

This ink on paper, manual handing out process was adequate in a day when contact information was relatively static and there were inherent limitations on the number of people whom we’d ever actually meet. In a time when 75% of adults are participating, communicating and engaging with others on the Web and meeting dozens, hundreds or in some cases thousands of others virtually, a static paper card is becoming much less useful. By the millions, we participating adults are engaged in numerous social networks and affinity groups, are blogging in record numbers, possess multiple email addresses and phone numbers, use Twitter, Skype and instant messaging accounts, and often have different identities with personal, business, or some other affiliation with required contact information that can often change frequently.

One Minneapolis company has created an innovative solution to meet those multiple identity needs with a digital equivalent of the trusty paper business card, one whose capabilities go far beyond what a static paper card could ever deliver….  [Read More…]

Nabbit Moves Beyond Tagging

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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…]