Startups & Developers

Magnet 360 Acquires Reside, Rebrands as ‘Social Enterprise Agency’

April 4, 2012 By Graeme Thickins

Magnet 360, a Minneapolis-based marketing and technology consultancy, today announced it has acquired Reside, a Minneapolis-based cloud solutions firm, to establish a single entity that will provide a comprehensive set of social business services. The new business will operate under the name Magnet 360, with a Minneapolis headquarters and an office in New York City.

“We’re coming into this space early, and already we are seeing amazing traction,” said Scott
Litman, Magnet 360 founder and managing partner (photo), in the company’s news release. “Our clients – executive leaders – are recognizing that social is the next big thing that will transform the way we do business and engage with customers and other audiences. They are looking to us to help build and manage programs that will deliver meaningful and measurable outcomes.”

The news release said the new entity’s offerings will include CRM, social, mobile, user experience, agile application development, insights and analytics, marketing automation, and channel marketing – “all key components of an enterprise social strategy.”

The company said its social focus, paired with its deep technical capabilities, is “what will make Magnet 360 unique among agencies.” It quoted Jim Schroer, Magnet 360 investor and former EVP Global Sales, Marketing, and Service for Chrysler: “The demand for this kind of integrated offering is huge. Companies need to embrace social to stay competitive. That doesn’t mean that existing marketing programs go away – but it does mean that they need to integrate to an overall social strategy. Today’s big agencies were built for a TV-centric marketing world; Magnet 360 is shaping itself around the new integrated, social world.”

The company said the combined forces of Magnet 360 and Reside are already working with several leading brands to plan and implement social business programs. Active clients include General Mills, Ecolab, Medtronic, 3M, Honeywell, Toro, AMC Theaters, and Carnival Cruise Lines. It said the new Magnet 360 organization is planning for market expansion and rapid growth.

“We’ve worked with hundreds of clients to help them implement cloud solutions with social elements,” said Matt Meents (photo), Reside founder and now Magnet 360 Managing Partner, in the news announcement. “But that was just the tip of the iceberg. This combination allows us to enable the social business holistically, with total integration between marketing and IT and with exponentially greater bandwidth. It’s a very opportunistic time for our clients – both B2B and B2C – and we’re excited to help them gain huge competitive advantage in this space.”

Update 4/5/12: The “new” Magnet 360 has more than 60 employees in total, the majority in Minneapolis. It also has a New York office. The company said “all Reside and Magnet 360 employees have been retained in this transaction.” It also stated it is currently on a $15M annual run rate, with plans to grow revenue to $20M total in 2012.

Minnesota Cup Entry Starts Today

March 26, 2012 By Steve Borsch

The 8th annual Minnesota Cup has officially launched!

This is Minnesota’s premiere entrepreneural event and past ones have seen stiff competition in every category since there are so many great startups here in our State. To familiarize yourself with this year’s competition, please find several resources below in the embedded document (we compiled the press release, “fast facts” and a good article on the MN Cup for you to review in one place which, if you want, you can also download using the download button in the toolbar below).

Use the “Full Screen” button for the best way to view this embedded doc:

My Experience with the Minnesota R&D Tax Credit

February 14, 2012 By Lief Larson

In 2011, as part of our tax filings for fiscal year 2010, we evaluated the federal and Minnesota R&D Tax Credit. In 2010 the State of Minnesota significantly enhanced the state R&D tax credit, effectively doubling the size of the credit while also providing coverage for more types of businesses, including S corps and LLC’s. We didn’t know what we were in for, but figured we’d give it a try.

Kathy Laney, who serves as the operations director at Arthur Ventures, recommended me to Scott Schmidt at Black Line Group. Black Line specializes in helping companies understand the qualification and procedural process to file for the R&D tax credit program, and calculates and documents the R&D tax credits being claimed. After a few phone calls and emails, we hired Black Line Group as our vendor for the filing.

The Pre-Filing Process
The first thing we accomplished was an internal audit of our research and development processes and resources. We took inventory of our R&D team, the work they had performed in research and development, and the amount of time spent working in areas that qualified under the definitions of R&D. This was in preparation for the 4-part tax credit test. We loaded all of this in a format for evaluation by Black Line Group.  Next, Black Line Group helped us by coordinating our documentation, the necessary filing paperwork, and the filing plan. This came back to us in the form of a well-organized filing book which could be used as a resource for audits. There were man-hours invested in getting prepared, but the offset was that it did help us with internal organization which benefited the company above and beyond the filing.

… [Read More…]

Robert Stephens Rocks the #DefragCon Crowd

November 13, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

The 5th Annual Defrag Conference was held November 8-10. 2011, in Denver, and I was there once again reporting on all the action during this much heralded meeting of the Internet’s big minds. One of the highlights this time for me was the keynote on the final day by Robert Stephens, CTO of Best Buy and founder of Geek Squad. Robert was a huge hit, as I’d been telling all my Defrag friends for years that he would be. (A selection of the scores of tweets during his talk is shown below — screenshots I grabbed from my Defrag 2011 Live-Blog archive. The hashtag #defragcon was lighting up the web over the three days of the event, and still is with the afterglow. One of my favorite tweets, not shown below, was someone quoting Robert saying, “Everything at Best Buy is an accessory to your mobile phone – including your car.” Hmmm, and maybe even your electric motorcyle, a product category that’s been expected to show up in Best Buy stores, and may finally be coming soon — the first hint: there are actually reviews for one already posted on BestBuy.com — but Robert didn’t touch on this topic.)

In a 10-minute video interview I did with Robert while we were having coffee and rolls before the general session started Thursday morning, we covered a range of topics — including the recent announcement that Best Buy is acquiring managed services provider MindShift for $167 million. I also got a sneak preview of other topics Robert was going to talk about in his opening keynote:

… [Read More…]

Cloud Providers Spread Their Reach Across Minnesota

November 1, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

And what better place to start than, uh, St. Cloud? Actually, the company I’m about to alert you to, Vaultas, is a data center company that’s based in nearby Alexandria, Minnesota. But it just announced plans to expand into the much larger St. Cloud market, increasing its footprint in Central Minnesota. Vaultas develops, owns, and operates vendor-neutral data centers and business continuity/disaster recovery complexes. It has built a secure, high-speed fiber optic network along 1-94 from Minneapolis to Fargo, and plans to build multiple locations along that route. It’s all part of an overall growth strategy, they say, “to empower the state’s business community with affordable, collaborative cloud computing solutions and data center collocation services. ” The company recently completed its Alexandria, Minnesota data center.

Companies of all sizes are increasing choosing to have their IT systems hosted elsewhere on dedicated servers, or in private or hybrid clouds. So, it’s not surprising to see new data centers popping up in out-state Minnesota. Several well established data center firms in the Twin Cities area have offered a variety of managed IT services and cloud services for years — including Atomic Data, Visi.com, ipHouse, and others — and these firms also serve many out-state customers. But there will always be companies that prefer working with data centers closer to their own locations.

Here’s the press release on the latest announcement from Vaultas: … [Read More…]

Workface Integrates Real-Time Engagement with Facebook

November 1, 2011 By Steve Borsch

Our pals at Workface have rolled out yet another great innovation: their chat platform now boasts an integration with Facebook that ensures that your Facebook Page is connected directly with those in your company you want customers and prospects to have access to in an instant. (disclosure: Workface was a client of my Innov8Press group).

One of the keys to Facebook engagement with customers is being there for them. Since the social media “community management” discipline is typically focused on watching, listening and waiting for a customer to post, send a tweet or otherwise go out of their way to connect, often prospects and customers don’t take the time to reach out. Since the Workface platform is embedded directly in your Facebook Page and with one click the engagement happens.

Take a look at the press release below and, especially, the companies who have already jumped on this platform to ensure they receive meaningful results from their Facebook efforts.

… [Read More…]

#Minnedemo Turns Up the Heat in Downtown Minneapolis

October 7, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

Several hundred tech lovers crammed into Schulze Hall at the University of St. Thomas last night and challenged the air conditioning on another day of near-record highs in the state, for the latest edition of the quasi-quarterly Minnedemo event. Luckily, there was plenty of cold beer — thank you, sponsors — and a damn nice appetizer buffet as well. Nothing brings out a crowd more than free beer and food… oh, and a chance to sit in a large, crowded auditorium and listen to startup pitches for half the evening, while you overhear others in the lobby having fun and drinking beer. I decided to join the outliers after only one demo, exiting the auditorium for what I thought would be a just a while — but then I never made it back in. Oh, well, I’d heard enough startup pitches in recent days and weeks to make my head explode, anyway (including some of those on the evening’s agenda), so opting for schmoozing in the lobby seemed like the sane thing to do.

And it did prove to be a better bet for me, and for several of the folks I did said schmoozing with. Wow, there were so many great conversations and introductions brokered, my head was spinning. Or was that the beer? No matter, a good tech time was had by all. And you can read all about those startups that pitched in the auditorium here. A brief stop at the after-party (on the outdoor patio on the second-floor of nearby Brit’s Pub) put a nice capper for me on a very pleasant — warm! — evening, blabbing with so many of the key players in our awesome Minnesota startup community. Thank you, Minnedemo organizers and sponsors, for another great get-together!

Minnesota EduTech Startup KidBlog Now Reaching One Million Users

October 7, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

On Wednesday, I stopped into the EduTech Minnesota conference at the U of M. I wanted to catch up with my friends Matt Hardy and Dan Flies, cofounders of Kidblog.org, and hear about the latest with their startup.

It turns out, of the 10 startups that were selected to present at the event, none even comes close to the level of adoption these guys have achieved to date, which they announced in their presentation at #EduTechMN: 1,000,000 students using the platform, in more than 80,000 classrooms. And all that from a startup that began as just a sideline for Matt to use in his own classroom!

Here’s my interview:

The founders describe their creation this way: Kidblog is a platform that provides students with an authentic, engaging, and interactive learning experience. It’s designed for elementary and middle school teachers who want to provide each student with his or her own, unique blog. It has simple but powerful tools that allow students to publish posts and participate in discussions within a secure classroom blogging community. Teachers maintain complete control over their students’ blogs. And a teacher can set up a class with no student email addresses.

Matt likes to say it’s “built by a teacher, for teachers, so students can get the most out of the blogging process.” He also points out that teachers who’ve tried other blogging platforms (perhaps with limited success), such as Blogger, Edublogs, or WordPress.com, “will notice the Kidblog difference immediately.”

Best of luck to this emerging, homegrown Minnesota edutech company!

[This post first appeared yesterday on Tech~Surf~Blog.]

Tech Cocktail Mixes It Up In Minneapolis

October 5, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

We were really honored to have Tech Cocktail in town last night hosting its first startup and entrepreneurial mixer in Minnesota. The event was held at CoCo Minneapolis (on the floor of the historic Grain Exchange in downtown Minneapolis). I’m here to tell you it was a blockbuster success! More than 200 people were in attendance.

I’ve been *so* wanting these folks to come to our town, and was delighted to represent Minnov8 at the event, along with my colleague Steve Borsch. Tech Cocktail’s events have the stated purpose of “helping connect, amplify, and showcase the local technology scene” — and it’s now held such events in more than 20 cities, founder Frank Gruber told me. The local sponsors who made this one happen were W3i and Ovative Group — kudos to them! (And a special shout-out to our friend Kim Garretson.)

It was a really fun evening, with a group of technologists, investors, bloggers, and entrepreneurs as diverse as I’ve seen at a local tech event, mingling and learning about a great group of local startups that were selected by the TechCocktail folks to show their stuff:

Best Attendance – Take attendance, manage event schedules, and update membership rosters online.

BookBottles – Reserve VIP service at the hottest clubs in the world.

ByME – A digital community that is powered through user connections and location to provide an easier way to navigate and interact.

Fantools (Four51) – Connects businesses and customers so businesses can deliver relevant deals to active consumers.

fitparel – Find correct size apparel no matter the brand – just enter a brand that fits you, and they will recommend other brands.

Proliphiq and Shopntella (Echidna Inc.) – Proliphiq delivers credible people, topics, and content to you, while Shopntella lets you shop with the wisdom of crowds.

My Gluten Free Deals – Deep discounts at gluten free-friendly restaurants and on gluten free products.

ServerCyde – Build web apps for most platforms, in the least amount of time, with only one language and zero server configuration

TelemetryWeb – Their AgSphere tool helps manufacturers of agriculture technology build solutions that harvest data from the farm.

Toovio Software – A real-time decision-making solution that is focused on centralized orchestration of each customer marketing interaction across every channel.

Zingstring – An intuitive, web-based interface for non-technical folks (marketers, customer service people, etc) to create pre-programmed conversations that are triggered by keywords in incoming messages, on Twitter, Facebook, SMS, and other messaging platforms.

I shot some pix during the event and posted a Flickr set. Thanks again to Frank Gruber and his great team at Tech Cocktail! We’d love to have you folks back soon — how about twice a year? : – )

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