Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Hiring with Hyier

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Hyier logo and image of job candidate using webcamIf you’re looking for a job, you know how tough it is to get the interview and to get some kind of communication back from a company where you’ve applied.

Imagine you were a hiring manager or HR person in a company in need of one or more people for key jobs. Companies that post jobs today are absolutely inundated with resumes. Finding qualified candidates, vs. those just desperate for a job, is harder than ever.

Consider the recent announcement by McDonalds that they would be filling roughly 50,000 positions. They ended up with nearly 1 million people applying for those jobs! While that is an extreme case, it is indicative of the hiring challenges companies face trying to fill positions that require people actually matched to the job requirements.

Enter a new Minnesota startup, still in beta, called Hyier (pronounced “Hire”). This online web application is perfectly suited toward organizations needing to qualify their candidate pool in a fast, easy, and cost-effective way.

The way it works is like this: The companies create questions each candidate will be asked and the applicants will have a set time to answer. The twist is that these candidates respond to job specific questions by recording online videos using a webcam.

Wondering how Hyier differentiated itself from a company just using YouTube or some other video platform for candidate interviews, I talked with founder Derek Buschow (LinkedIn; Twitter) about how and why he started his company, what their competitive differentiators are and where they’re headed.

…  [Read More…]

Minnesota Cup Deadline Fast Approaching

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Got a great business idea? Minnesota entrepreneurs, inventors and anyone else with one are encouraged to enter the 2011 Minnesota Cup competition but you’d better hurry…the deadline is approaching fast!

The entry deadline of 11:59pm on May 20th is fast approaching so begin your entry ASAP. At last year’s event, co-founder Scott Litman joked that numerous entries came in just before midnight on the last day several years in a row! Don’t procrastinate and make Scott stay up late…this competition is just too valuable to ignore and you’ve got your value proposition nailed down anyway, right?

The best part is the chance to win big money to fund your idea, right? Well get this: the competition’s total prize money just increased to $185,000. But it’s just not the dough: prizes include a bunch of other valuable awards, access to mentors and other entrepreneurial resources.

The Minnesota Cup is once again looking to support and develop the next generation of breakthrough ideas and yours could be one of them.  Entries may be submitted in the following divisions: Clean Tech & Renewable Energy, BioSciences, High Tech, General and Student.  More information and entry instructions can be found at www.minnesotacup.org.

CoCo Expanding to Minneapolis

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CoCo, the co-working firm with a great space in St. Paul, is a heartbeat away from signing a lease on a new space in Minneapolis. What sets this particular space apart is that CoCo is teaming with Project Skyway to create a new kind of “creative incubation” space for business.

Positioned as an “historic space” (perhaps RiverPlace/St. Anthony Main?) they’re holding back on revealing its exact location because they, “…want to give Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak first shot at announcing the location. His office was instrumental in making the space work out for us, but more importantly, he helped bring CoCo and Project Skyway together.”

The expectation is that the mayor will be hosting a press conference in the next couple weeks, at which point CoCo will stop being all coy about the space’s location and will post video and pictures.

Whether you’re up on the trend in co-working or not, spend some time with Don Ball and you’ll get a knowledge dump on how everyone from Steelcase to Target Commercial Interiors is all over it. With more workers easily able to leverage technology and their “always on, always connected” devices, demand for a place to co-work with others is accelerating worldwide.

In fact, Steelcase and Target Commercial Interiors are working with CoCo and Project Skyway to design the space to include distinct zones for different activities (e.g., socializing, collaboration, heads-down focus, meetings, workgroups, etc.). They are also working with Vôo Creative to develop unique art and experiences within the space.

More info can be found in this CoCo post.

George Reese on “The Cloud’s Shining Moment,” Four Days Later

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(Note: This post first appeared earlier today on the writer’s personal blog, Tech~Surf~Blog.)

The major Amazon Web Services outage that began this past Thursday morning was unlike anything before it.  Countless AWS customers, big and small, went down, many for days. Surprisingly, other biggies like Netflix, SmugMug, and Twilio had little or no disruption.  One hungers to know why…

Over the weekend, George Reese, a cloud expert and author (and CTO of cloud-management tools company enStratus), wrote a fascinating post on O’Reilly about what some would call a cloud disaster — entitling it, ironically enough, “The Cloud’s Shining Moment.” George has a unique perspective on the cloud, and a large following. His post got huge play, and that continues — so I decided to message him on Twitter and set up a coffee so I could interview him Monday morning. I was anxious for him to elaborate on his post and share more of his thoughts, now that the outage is (mostly) behind us. 

Click on the link below to hear the whole chat. What follows here are some snippets from that 30-minute conversation (it was recorded in a busy coffee shop, so there’s background noise, but you can hear us fine):

• Thursday at 3:00 am: “We knew something significant was going down.”
• What happened, who was affected, and why.
• What about SLAs? “They’re not an insurance policy, they’re a refund policy… SLAs are a joke.”
• The “Design for Failure” approach vs. traditional application architecture gives you “control over your own destiny.”
• Why the AWS outage was a shining moment: it’s about learning what you can do in the face of an event like this. “So many survived.”
• The “cloud haters” came out after the O’Reilly post. Flame wars erupted in the comments. George pre-empted what they thought was, ahem, their shining moment!
• In large corporations, the “Department of No” is the real problem.
• George guarantees that CIOs who say their companies are not in the cloud actually are, and just don’t know it. Many others realize the cloud “genie is out of the bottle,” and are now coming to his firm, to be their window into what’s really going on in the cloud.
• George’s company now makes it possible to do “cross-cloud” backup and disaster recovery. Not only can customers do automated DR, but automated DR testing, too.
• He says his company is at “the most important point” in its life and the evolution of the cloud. In the last six months, “enterprise has gotten it.” He noted that he’s never spoken to so many Fortune 100 companies as he has in the past week.

• Download or listen to my interview of George Reese, CTO of enStratus … (MP3)

Two other excellent blog posts we touched on that came out over the weekend:
• “How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse,” by Don MacAskill, Cofounder & Chief Geek
• “Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage,” by Phil Wainewright, ZDnet

(Here’s more about my interview subject: George Reese has been delivering software as a service since 2003 when he founded Valtira, a suite of web-based marketing tools. Prior to Valtira, George held a variety of technology leadership roles with J. Walter Thompson, Carlson Marketing Group, and startups Ancept and Imaginet. George is the author of several O’Reilly books on Internet and enterprise technologies, including Java Database Best Practices and Managing and Using MySQL and the recently released Cloud Application Architectures. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, ME. Follow him on Twitter @georgereese.)

Full Disclosure: As mentioned during the recorded interview, the writer had a consulting relationship with enStratus in 2009.

Minnov8 Gang 115 – Mobile March Marchers Marching

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Due to the overwhelming success of the Mobile March Twin Cities event this past Saturday with 250 attendees—and the surprisingly excellent previous evening’s Mobile 3D event—very strong evidence now exists that Minnesota has both world-class mobile developers and business users embracing mobile development and mobile use. (Note: photo on the right was modified from this TwitPic taken at the event by Stewy1000).

That old black and white photo above of the woman holding some sort of portable videophone is from this surprisingly prescient Modern Mechanix article from 1956 that starts out with this:

“ON SOME night in the future a young man walking along Market Street in San Francisco may suddenly think of a friend in Rome. Reaching into his pocket, he will pull out a watch-size disc with a set of buttons on one side. He will punch ten times. Turning the device over, he will hear his friend’s voice and see his face on a tiny screen, in color and 3-D. At the same moment his friend in Rome will see and hear him.“

We can now laugh at how quaint this seems coming from a 1956 perspective, but when you think of the collision of technologies available to us today (e.g., GPS; fast wireless networks; Wifi; voice apps w/video; tools to develop and create apps) and the huge numbers of people rapidly acquiring mobile devices that are ‘always on and always connected’, you can understand why so many ‘marchers’ were marching forward at Mobile March. See the full 1956 Modern Mechanix article, scanned and on their blog, here.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: David Bennett Cohen is the artist & the song is “Blues for a Summer’s Dream” via the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 36:24 — 20.9MB)

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Discussed during the show:

Minnesota ‘Brand Storyteller’ Changes Name to Brandpoint

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Hopkins-based ARAcontent, which has been a leader in content-based marketing solutions for more than 15 years, announced today it has changed its name to Brandpoint, underscoring the organization’s evolution from a provider of traditional PR brand storytelling into a comprehensive, content-based digital marketing platform.

Brandpoint offers three core product channels, each enhanced by accurate, real-time reporting of results:

• Media creation and distribution: Consumer-focused feature articles help clients tell their brand stories, and provide high-quality content to a network of online publishers. Brandpoint guarantees clients online placement of their articles through its powerful, cost-effective media creation and distribution service.

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Brandpoint provides full SEO consulting services that range from website audits to keyword analysis. Placement of quality content on trusted media websites is an effective way for brands to increase their SEO relevancy.

• Social media: Brandpoint supports clients’ social media strategies with outreach tools and writing services that help brands maintain and grow their social media presence.

“Changing our name to Brandpoint reflects how our business has evolved from a heritage of print article distribution into a comprehensive content-based digital marketing platform,” said David Olson, SVP and general manager of Brandpoint, in the company’s news announcemnet.  “As the online marketing landscape becomes more dynamic, consumers are connecting with each other and the companies they patronize in new and exciting ways. By following consumer trends and continually integrating new services such as social media and SEO, Brandpoint is nicely positioned to serve as our clients’ strategic partner today and in the future.”

The parent company of Brandpoint, and another product called Adfusion, is ARAnet. It is an article-based digital media company that educates consumers, builds brands, and drives sales through product offerings that focus on digital advertising, SEO, and public relations, and leverage content and technology to achieve clients’ specific campaign goals. The company began life 15 years ago as Article Resource Association, providing copyright-free content to print media across the country. As the digital marketing world evolved, the company maintained its front-runner position by developing new content-based marketing tools and utilizing emerging technologies for a broad portfolio of public relations industry, corporate, and interactive agency clients.

Today, Brandpoint is recognized as a pioneer in content-based digital marketing and real-time reporting of measurable, effective results. For more information, call (866) 287-9168 or visit the company’s web site at www.brandpoint.com, where you can also click on an online demo.

Workface DEMOs New Platform

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If you’ve ever gone to a website to research, buy or otherwise engage online with a company, you know how frustrating it is to either have to call them on the phone or click “Live Chat” and wait around until someone becomes free to ‘talk’ with you. That’s all about to change.

Local entrepreneur Lief Larson‘s company Workface today announced it is demonstrating it’s new “Customer-initiated Engagement Platform” at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference. As they state in their press release, “The Workface® Platform lets businesses empower their professionals to digitally engage anonymously, directly, and in real-time with customer prospects on corporate andthird-party web sites, search engines, and mobile devices.”

While I’ve always been enamored by the BusinessCard2 aspect of Workface’ business, it wasn’t until I saw this MAJOR extension and platform wrapped around it that it made complete sense. For any company interested in engaging with the accelerating number of always-on and always-connected prospects or customers, you must find richer and more engaging ways to connect with folks…and this Workface platform is it.

Take a peek at the video below to learn more:

Contour Innovations Made GPS Magic in a Basement

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Two entrepreneur’s, Mike Lauenstein and Matt Johnson of Contour Innovations, have spent the last two years in stealth mode (building in Mike’s basement offices) inventing a patent pending technology that provides a unique sonar recorder Platform with a wide range of applications for recreational fishermen, research groups, fishing guides, and other geospatial technologies. When we grabbed coffee a few days ago so Mike and Matt could give me an overview, I tossed out ideas and thoughts that were possibilities that were obviously a Phase 2 or 3 for a startup…

…but to my surprise these guys have nailed every single one and then some.

The "CI Device"

The premise and “magic” is this: by building what they call a “CI Device” that connects between any existing depth finder and its transducer to “sniff” and record raw sonar files, they can match those files with their corresponding GPS locations. This data is then uploaded to their servers where it is processed and rendered in various online interactive media and coupled with weather data and other conditions. The processed lake data is accessible by the user’s account and displayed in lake shape files (on smartphones, computers, etc.).

The cool thing? If you’re a guide you can now map a lake, put in your preferred fishing holes and sell the “package” of data. A fisherman could then go to that lake and essentially be guided to great fishing holes by top guides.  …  [Read More…]

Minnedemo Screams Diverse Developer Community

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The folks at Minne* put on another solid showcase of Minnesota innovation at the latest Minnedemo on Thursday night. Ben Edwards, Luke Francl and the latest addition to the team, Adrienne Peirce, kicked off the event with the promise of  “a Minnedemo in the spring and another couple Minnedemos” this year. There was even talk of moving beyond the friendly confines of the Twin Cities and staging an event in St. Cloud. For my part, I would have loved to hear more about the goals of both Minnedemo and Minne*. While I and many familiar faces in the room know what they are, I hate to see anyone miss an opportunity to really showcase the noble efforts of the organization.

As for the presenters and demos at the event, the evening highlighted applications, services, and hardware that catered to a wide range of interests. From gamers to writers, security to slap shots the evening moved along at a brisk pace leaving plenty of time for socializing and networking out side the presentation space at the St. Thomas’ Schultz Hall.

Some of the standouts included…

Inveni-I’ve followed the development of Aaron Weber’s discovery and recommendation engine for quite some time and it didn’t fail to impress. Entertainment (Movies, TV) is the sweet spot for Inveni right now and offers the ability to share your highly personalized Inveni picks with your network. Now if Aaron could only get Netflix to secure a better class of streaming selections…

Zipnosis-With the promise of a diagnosis in minutes for just $25, Zipnosis was perhaps the most polished demo of the evening. We’ve showcased Zipnosis and are big fans. I also found the theme of the demo, providing low-cost healthcare, interesting. Zipnosis clearly wants to move past the tech and on to the benefits….  [Read More…]

Apply for the Minnesota Angel Tax Credit for 2011

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If you are raising capital for your tech startup, get certified for the Minnesota Angel Tax Credit as early as possible this year. The Angel Tax Credit is a huge incentive for investors. It helps them manage the risk associated with new ventures, and it may also indicate that your company is a safer bet than an uncertified company.

The Minnesota Angel Tax Credit is an income tax refund equal to 25% of all eligible investments. There is over $12 million per year available to investors for 2011 through 2014, but less than $2.5 million was allocated to 19 companies in 2010, so there is plenty of room for more companies and investors to participate in the Angel Tax Credit program this year.

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