Minnov8 Posts — Page 22

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…]

Minnesota, the Arts and Innovation

November 1, 2011 By Steve Borsch

All the talk about Steve Jobs passing has included much discussion about the essence of his innovative genius: that it was due to him living at the “intersection of technology and humanism” or technology and the arts. As a consequence, in the last week or so there have been numerous articles out examining the imperative that any company interested in innovation better have one foot in tech and the other in the arts…and ensure artists and technologists collaborate as equals.

The Walker Art Center blog, one I recommend you follow if interested in any aspect of art and design, had this post which pointed to a highly interesting factoid about Minnesota:

“A new National Endowment for the Arts survey finds there are 2.1 million Americans employed as artists, including more than 42,000 right here in the Land o’ Lakes. Minnesota ranks fairly well: We’re among the top 14 states that have the highest percentage of the workforce employed in the arts: 1.5 percent, compared to the nation-leading New York, where 2.3 percent of the labor force is involved in arts industries. Minnesota leads the nation in the concentration of jobs in book publishing, with eight times more publishing jobs — largely in the Twin Cities — than the national average. Minneapolis’ concentration of theater jobs is twice the national average.“

Why should you care? If you are a technologist, startup or entrepreneur in tech than you know how great you are at engineering but (hopefully) are aware that your artistic and design skills most likely suck. If you want to ensure your products are embraced by the masses, then make certain you are engaged and collaborating with people whose artistic and design sense is equal to your engineering abilities.

You have A LOT of talent to choose from in our State.

“Thank You” for the Books for Thai School

October 25, 2011 By Steve Borsch

Back in September I wrote a post called, “English Books for Thai School – Can You Help?” and was so pleased people jumped in to help. We collected well over 250 books for the school and delivered them when the students and teachers arrived at the Mall of America at the outset of their time here in Minnesota.

I cannot express enough my thanks for all who helped out:

Lerner Publishing: Kathleen Clarke responded to a blind email request of mine and she put together a big box of brand new, amazingly high quality books, perfect for the English program at Strisuksa school

Meg Knodl

Meg Knodl: As senior librarian in Communications and Community Engagement with Hennepin County (Minn.) Library, Meg had great suggestions on buying surplus books from the library system (a sale was just ending and she connected me with the right folks).

Paul Schroeder

To show the power of social media, I’d placed a plea and link to that Minnov8 post mentioned above on my Facebook wall. Two people responded immediately with a third who joined in:

Paul Schroeder: A fraternity brother of mine who read about my plea on Facebook responded by collecting several dozen books and even cajoled a friend of his in participating with some novels. These novels, while not perfectly targeted to the students, surprisingly were very welcomed by the teachers!

Sherry Collins: She had several ideas I took advantage of and then recommended a site I’d never heard of, FreeCycle, a kind of “Craigslist for free stuff” and I placed a post in the Minneapolis Group

The very generous donation by Beth Sullivan, volunteer for The Women's Prison Book Project

Beth Sullivan: She responded with 75 classic (and new!) books that were extras from a non-profit she volunteers for, The Women’s Prison Book Project.

As these great volunteers were putting forth such kind efforts to gather books, I’d been interacting with my contact at the school, Lynn Brown. Mentioning the phenomenal work of Project Gutenberg, I asked her to go through the books there and make recommendations and we’d download the books for her (since their internet connections are pretty minimal at the school).

What happened next surprised even me and set me on a course I hadn’t expected. … [Read More…]

Minnov8 at MIMA Summit 2011

October 12, 2011 By Steve Borsch

The Minnov8 Gang covered the MIMASummit live as well as bringing in tweets with the hashtag #mimasummit.

Click the “more” link to view the post with the embedded liveblog archive within it.
… [Read More…]

MIMA Summit 2011: Interview With Tim Brunelle and Ed Boches

October 11, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

The president of MIMA, Tim Brunelle, and his team have put together an amazing 10th annual MIMA Summit event. MIMA, as the oldest and largest interactive marketing association in the U.S., with more than 1300 members, never fails to disappoint in drawing excellent, in-demand speakers to its annual event. I had the pleasure of running into Tim chatting with one of those speakers, Ed Boches, who was a founder of the famed Mullen agency in Boston, and is now its chief innovation officer. Tomorrow, Ed will team with a colleague of his, Dave Armano, EVP-global innovation & integration at Edelman Digital, to do a talk they call “Group Therapy for Would-Be Innovators.” It is sure to be a highlight of the event, and I will be there!

#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!

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