Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Latest Kidblog Buzz: Summering in Silicon Valley

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Minnesota startup Kidblog has been on a roll, but they’re hardly taking the summer off. If you know the cofounders, Matt Hardy and Dan Flies, you’ve likely heard by now that they were invited by their latest investor, 500 Startups, to spend the summer working in its offices in Mountain View (which I’m told has the best view in town from the 12th floor).  The reason: to continue building out their platform and getting great advice and counsel from the 500 Startups ecosystem.

Matt Hardy & Dan Flies

Matt Hardy & Dan Flies

Kidblog has grown from modest beginnings here in the Twin Cities some years ago — first as a non-profit at a dot-org domain — to nothing less than “the world’s largest education blogging platform.”  Now graduated to a full-on business, the founders have already raised a seed round of something close to $400,000 from a handful of savvy angels in the Valley, including 500 Startups’ Dave McClure.  Kidblog is officially now a portfolio company in 500 Startups’ “Family Tech/Education” category, and will be listed on that page of its web site soon with the new Kidblog logo (above).

The story of this startup all began because Matt Hardy, a grade-school teacher in Eden Prairie and an experienced developer, had a passion — he decided he had to build something better than what he’d found at the time was available to teachers to help their students learn to write through blogging.  Soon joined by his college buddy Dan Flies, also a crackerjack developer, they began finding that more and more teachers, all over, started hearing about the Kidblog platform and were loving what the two had built!  Growth in users started to take off like mad a year or so ago. (See chart – and that’s just up until March of 2012.) Fast forward to today, Kidblog now has something like 1.5 million users and close to 150,000 classrooms worldwide using the platform. And those users are across all fifty states and many foreign countries.

I’m sure the work hours for Matt and Dan have been very long this summer at their temporary new home — undoubtedly building new features and plotting revenue models going forward.  But I trust they are also having fun and meeting tons of great, new contacts — and raising more money to fuel their growth.  A bit of news came this week that they had just launched a new Kidblog Facebook page.  So, all you Minnesota techies out there, “Like” ’em here! — and watch the ongoing updates.  I’m also hearing that a brand-spanking-new web site is about to go live — this time, sporting a dot-com domain.  The non-profit days are in the rear-view mirror!

We wish Matt and Dan all the best as they get an intense education themselves — namely, in how to build a real business from a technology platform that simply and effectively filled a legitimate market need and thus became very well loved. Kidblog is fortunate to be a rising star in one of the hottest startup spaces going right now: “edu-tech.”

I look forward to seeing Matt and Dan again soon, either back here in Minnesota or on a visit to the Valley. And we’ll be sure to get them on as podcast guests after their summer adventure.

Marissa Mayer’s Minnesota Connections

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Unless you were totally off the grid in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for the past few days, you surely know by now that Yahoo! has named former Google exec Marissa Mayer as its new CEO.

But what you may not know is that two of our fellow MInnesota techies have ties to her, going back years — they’re both friends of mine, and both have been startup clients of my consulting business.

One is Lief Larson (right), founder of Workface Inc., a venture-backed firm doing cool things to humanize business on the web.  The other is Joe Sriver, who in 2008 founded the highly successful mobile app development firm DoApp Inc. (where, in addition to serving as an advisor, I was interim VP of marketing for a time).

Lief went all through school with Marissa in Wausau, Wisconsin, where both of them showed an early interest in programming. He gave me this reaction to the news:

“Yahoo! is ripe for reinvention, and I think Marissa is just the woman for the job. The one piece of news that came as a bit of a surprise is that she’s pregnant and will be taking maternity leave in October, just three months after taking the helm.  I look forward to seeing what the next several months will hold for Yahoo!”

Joe’s connection to Marissa came later — he was hired by her in 2001 as Google employee #198. (She was Google employee #20, its first female engineer.)  Joe was Google’s first UI designer and worked for Marissa for some years, directly involved in such early products as AdSense and AdWords.  Here’s what Joe had to say when I asked for his reaction to Marissa’s new role:

“I was surprised by the announcement, as it sounds many others were. A pleasant surprise, that is. I feel she’s the best person in the Valley to bring Yahoo back — the best pick Yahoo could make. She has a great technical background, superb at driving products, and has a great marketing sense. She’s not an outsider, she knows the space well…exactly what Yahoo needs at the top. She will create a buzz around Yahoo. The analysts will be watching her moves closely, but she’s prepared.”

Of course, the tech community is almost universally supportive of this decision by the Yahoo! board — why wouldn’t they like the choice of a technology exec to lead the turnaround? Anything but an exec from the screwed-up media industry, huh?

I’m with Lief and Joe — I think Marissa is bound to bring some mojo back to $YHOO!  What do you think?

(This post originally appeared today on Tech~Surf~Blog.)

Datuit Connects Consumers to Healthcare Providers

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Last November our colleague, Kurt Roots, wrote this post about Datuit entitled, Big Healthcare Data. In it he discussed how the company is “…an innovative software company that is developing a new platform for creating, storing, and managing healthcare data. The firm is taking advantage of federal regulations to drive demand for this technology which will allow patients, clinicians, and even patients to securely integrate and analyze healthcare information.”

While that post was quite comprehensive, in journalistic terms it “buried the lead” to the story. What’s the headline? Datuit Connects Consumers to Healthcare Providers. What’s the story/value proposition? To give we consumers access to our data when we want it, on the device we happen to be using at the moment, all while ensuring we are empowered to make smart, informed decisions about our own healthcare.

Datuit is developing technology to connect consumers to all of their healthcare providers as well as their friends and family. The technology is built on the SafeIX platform that stores health information in a vendor-agnostic way, allowing apps from many developers to access and contribute to an individual’s health information. They are also developing technology to allow consumers to manage the sharing of their information.

Their pitch?:

SafeIX is patent pending technology that utilizes vendor-agnostic Structured Documents and NoSQL to bring clinicians and patients together.

While I was aware of Datuit from Kurt’s post and had some understanding of the overall “big healthcare data” space, it wasn’t until I attended The Collaborative’s tech.2012 event that this space was validated by none other than UnitedHealth Group, Inc.

At that event Andy Slavitt, Group Executive Vice President of UnitedHealth’s Optum group, described how they were already selectively inviting in developers to access their enormous repository of clinical, prescription and other data, and offering that up to developers. He further indicated that they would be exposing more and more of this data with an API so developers could access it!

I recently spoke at length with the Datuit founders, Gordon and Sandra Raup, to discuss their approach and what they’ve built to date, and why I think their approach is key to killing the “copay culture” that exists with most consumers. …  [Read More…]

The Singularity & Schools

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John W. Moravec, PhD

John W. Moravec, PhD

Even a casual observer can’t help but notice that the pace of change is accelerating, especially when it comes to technology. As we’ve joked here on the Minnov8 Gang in many previous shows, summers used to be pretty dead as far as topics were concerned and we had to pull ones out of our $^&% in order to have stuff to talk about every week.

But no more. Everything is moving faster and faster and, if Ray Kurzweil is right and The Singularity is Near, we need to listen to those who understand it and how it will impact us all — especially when it comes to our children and how they’re being educated to deal with exponential change.

One of the smart folks I read consistently is John Moravec, PhD, who is a, “…co-initiator of the Invisible Learning project; a co-founder of the Horizon Forum, a roundtable on the future of education at all levels; and am the editor of Education Futures (ISSN 1940-0934, http://www.educationfutures.com). I am also a faculty member in the Innovation Studies/Master of Liberal Studies graduate programs at the University of Minnesota.”

Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge

Dr. Moravec just wrote this post on his blog and embedded the audio below about his interview with Vernor Vinge [Wikipedia | website], a retired San Diego State University professor of mathematics. Vinge is better known as a five-time Hugo Award-winning science fiction author. His works include True Names, Fast Times at Fairmont High, and Rainbows End. Most importantly, his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity,” argues that accelerating technological change will bring about the end of the human era as we know it, and that the world will become so complex and foreign to human observers, it will be impossible to predict what will happen next.

[media url=”http://www.educationfutures.com/res/educationfutures_vernor_vinge_interview.mp3″ width=”400″ height=”25″ jwplayer=”controlbar=bottom”]

Cities and the rise of the consuming class

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Gaining insight is one of the most important things you can do when identifying trends, especially now that the biggest one is an accelerating, global economic shift toward Asia. It’s one of the reasons why we stay close to what is delivered by McKinsey & Company, a firm founded in 1926 that has grown into a global partnership serving two-thirds of the Fortune 1000.

Their think-tank arm, the McKinsey Global Institute, has just released a new report entitled, “Urban world: Cities and the rise of the consuming class” and is definitely worth a read if you have any interest in what’s going on in the world, the possible success of your business, and how you may-or-may-not be in a position to compete in the future.

The report overview starts out with this, “Cities have long been the world’s economic dynamos, but today the speed and scale of their expansion are unprecedented. Through a combination of consumption and investment in physical capital, growing cities could inject up to $30 trillion a year into the world economy by 2025. Understanding cities and their shifting demographics is critical to reaching urban consumers and to preparing for the challenges that will arise from increasing demand for natural resources (such as water and energy) and for capital to invest in new housing, office buildings, and port capacity.”

But it gets better as it discusses how this new report finds that, “…the 600 cities making the largest contribution to a higher global GDP—the City 600—will generate nearly 65 percent of world economic growth by 2025. However, the most dramatic story within the City 600 involves just over 440 cities in emerging economies; by 2025, the Emerging 440 will account for close to half of overall growth. One billion people will enter the global consuming class by 2025. They will have incomes high enough to classify them as significant consumers of goods and services, and around 600 million of them will live in the Emerging 440.”

Amazingly this report is free and they have made it available in variety of formats: an executive summary PDF; the full report as a PDF; a Kindle MOBI version of the full report; and an EPUB version for the Apple iPad, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader, and other devices. All available here.

CoCo to Launch Skillshare School

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Whatever you call it — learning, education or training — it is undeniable that gaining skills in this time of accelerating change is critical for each-and-every one of us. Especially as the world undergoes continued and profound global economic and job disruption.

The question is, however, where do you go to gain the skills you need now instead of at the end of some multi-week course delivered via traditional teaching methods? CoCoMSP has engineered a way to get what you need now (my emphasis):

Working with Skillshare.com, CoCo is setting up a community-powered school that focuses on big ideas…and the tools that make those ideas reality.

Beginning in July, CoCo will open its doors on weekday evenings to host classes that are created and taught by experts in the Twin Cities community. Depending on participation, classes will most likely revolve around business, entrepreneurship, technology and creativity.

Skillshare is a unique, crowdsourcing platform that leverages the skill-sets that exist in a community and provides suggested ways instructors can get paid for their efforts. Though classes can be sponsored (e.g., a company like Adobe could sponsor courses on digital publishing) the suggested fee is $50 per 2-hour session.

CoCo says that they are, “...kicking things off all proper-like with Skillshare Fair on Saturday, June 23, a free, day-long unconference that will give everyone a chance to teach, learn and share ideas on business, entrepreneurship, tech, marketing or whatever! Oh, and there will be beer.” Read all about this initiative and their plans here.

Though there have been many attempts at community education in the past by others, they’ve been geared for a wider audience of ‘consumers’ vs. the intent of this new venture between CoCo and Skillshare: a focus on technology, creative and other innovation skills that entrepreneurs, creatives, technologists and visionaries need right now to address today’s needs and, most critically, what’s coming next.

Project Skyway Accelerator Graduates Four

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Justin Kaufenberg, CEO of TST Media

Minnesota tech accelerator Project Skyway held its “Demo Day” on Wednesday May 30 at the New Century Theater in downtown Minneapolis. It was the culmination of its 2012 spring program. After opening remarks by Project Skyway officials, Justin Kaufenberg, CEO of TST Media, took the stage to tell his company’s story (photo). It is one of the state’s most successful Internet startups, now with close to 100 employees.

Founders of the four startups that participated in the program then took the stage to explain their businesses and their progress to date.

HypeSpark offers consumers exclusive deals for the links they’re already sharing. The founder was introduced by the general manager of Toby Keith’s nightclub and restaurant in West End, a business that’s using its service.
YumZing is a service to let you share your food experiences with friends, family, and the world. It’s launching soon.
Political Harmony was described by its founder as “Match.com for politicians.” It’s aimed at college students to help them find political candidates most compatible with their views.
The final startup of the class to present, QuadROI, is an information service for utilities that “transforms compliance documentation into industry intelligence.” It aggregates data on clean energy resource investments to create a single, searchable repository and enable data discovery and visualization.

U of MN Paying Professors $500 to Review Open Textbooks

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The University of Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and it’s just been revealed that the University will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books, according to this article on Inside HigherEd. Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500, with all of the money coming from donor funds.

This is a brilliant move on the part of the University, especially when you consider the accelerating cost of a higher education as well as the increasing demand to for students to have textbooks they can view on multiple digital devices. With this payment motivator for professors, the University is clearly working to align the incentives of professors with those of a concerted effort on the part of higher education institutions to move toward an open textbook and open courseware.

Below is an infographic from OnlineSchools.org that will give you a glimpse in to the drivers behind the open textbook and open source books movement.

…  [Read More…]

Minnesota: A Great Place to Be for SaaS Companies

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I had the pleasure of attending a workshop event held this past Saturday at the awesome CoCo coworking space at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. It was called SaaSCamp 2012. Note the year is part of that title, because it fully intends to be a recurring event. If you’re part of an early-stage software-as-a-service business, or planning one, and you missed this workshop — well, you missed a great one, and I would make sure you get to the next one when it happens!

The event was conceived and conducted completely by Lief Larson, CEO and founder of Workface Inc., with assistance from a couple of his team members. Workface is a growing startup in Minneapolis that itself developed a SaaS offering it now markets widely, which it calls a “customer engagement platform.” I was extremely impressed with the breadth and depth of the content Lief pulled together for this event. It included a extensive look at market data for SaaS in the U.S. and globally, monetization strategies and practices, selling to the enterprise, negotiating contracts, increasing adoption and retention of your app, marketing your app, creating a channel to sell your app, financing and funding a SaaS business, training your SaaS customer, and ongoing monitoring of your SaaS business. On top of all this, Lief related some really excellent stories throughout the workshop about his journey in funding and building Workface.

I had a chance to follow up with Lief afterwards to get some further perspective on the story behind SaaSCamp… 

Q: Lief, why did you decide to do the event? 

Lief:  I’ve had a great group of mentors who have helped me during my entrepreneurial journey and I try to pay it forward by helping other young businesses and entrepreneurs to find success.  A few of my “mentees” are building applications that are software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings and asked that I consider putting on an event.  That’s why I created SaaSCamp 2012 — to bring together like-minded people working on SaaS.  I think the event is already bigger than me, and I’m hoping the community will take it and run with it. …  [Read More…]

The War for Talent: Are Minnesota Tech Companies and Startups Ready?

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Question: What do Google, Facebook, Groupon and Amazon have in common?

Answer: All have formally or through their employees been recruiting in Minnesota in the past year. There are at least another half dozen well funded Silicon Valley startups doing the same.

(hold on… I am waiting for that to sink in for a moment)

With IT unemployment less than 2%, companies of all sizes from the Fortune 500 to the smallest of startups are recognizing that recruiting in Minnesota has been challenging.

For some the challenge has been a nuisance but not an impossible task.

For others… not having appropriate staff levels is costing business.

To set the stage a little bit, it is important to know that for many in IT, the “Great Recession” was a non-event. …  [Read More…]