Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Code 42 Gets a Dose of Awesome

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During our podcast from Minnebar with Code 42‘s CEO Matthew Dornquast a few weeks back we talked at length about the coming together of Code 42 and Recursive Awesome. Well it’s official.

While the press release indicates both an acquisition and a merger, Recursive Awesome co-founder, Justin Grammens (and, in the interest of full disclosure, partner with yours truly on projects including Mobile March) addressed the deal simply, “This isn’t about one company acquiring the assets and client list of another company. It’s about two very talented teams, coming together to build awesome products.” Code 42’s Dornquast echoed that sentiment by saying, “It became obvious we had familial business DNA – products, customers, values – all nearly identical.”

In conversations with Grammens, who along with RA Co-founder Sam , the goal was always to develop products. He noted “You can spend years working to get your own products off of the ground, or you can partner with a successful product company”.

According to the company, “The entire Recursive Awesome team will join Code 42 Software in their newly expanded headquarters at 1 Main St in Northeast Minneapolis.”

The goals of two companies met, jobs all around, and an exciting future ahead for all. In a word…Awesome!

CoCoMSP Adds the “M”

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CoCoMSP's new space at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange CoCoMSP, the premiere coworking space in the Twin Cities, announced yesterday that they will open a Minneapolis coworking space on July 5, 2011, on the historic Trading Floor of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (see more photos here). This adventure is being done along with Project Skyway, Minnesota’s first tech accelerator program for motivated entrepreneurs.

Don Ball

I talked this morning with CoCoMSP’s Don Ball about this fabulous new facility which, I mentioned at the outset of our discussion, made my jaw drop when I first heard about this 16,000 square foot space.

“You won’t believe it until you see it,” Don said. “We’re actively doing construction now in order to be ready for our July opening.” He described in some detail the new space and what they’re doing with it. It sounds fantastic and I can’t wait to get a tour.

One thing that struck my eye as I read through the press release was this paragraph, “CoCo will also host educational and social events for the region’s creative, technical and business communities. Later in the year, CoCo will begin to offer hosted and facilitated meetings geared toward innovation breakthroughs.” With previous events held at the St. Paul facility (e.g., UnSummit and these events) that have been resoundingly successful, I’m really looking forward to the ones that will be possible in this new space.

Joining CoCoMSP and Project Skyway on this adventure are two innovative companies: CoCo Minneapolis is being designed by Target Commercial Interiors and will feature collaborative work and meeting settings from Steelcase.

The reason these two matter is what’s come out of previous conversations I’ve had with Don. Both Steelcase and Target Commercial Interiors are clearly pushing-the-envelope with coworking as they see the huge trend and obviously it will materially impact their respective businesses. For the City of Minneapolis it promises to bring a lot of new people to the downtown area, and arguably when a Project Skyway startup reaches critical mass, they might be so inclined to stay in the downtown area looking for bigger digs.

The bottom line? None of this matters if there wasn’t a groundswell of people working for themselves, in small startups or businesses, or working for a large company ,who are all eager to pay to have an office at a coworking facility. Working out of a coffee shop is fine for an hour or two but unless you buy that next muffin they’re unlikely to want you to camp out there all day. Working from home means you don’t network or collaborate with other humans and it gets pretty lonely. These are just a few of the drivers making coworking such a great alternative.

So this new facility not only finally makes the “M” in “CoCoMSP” meaningful, there sure seems to be a lot of obvious wins for everyone involved.

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.

TST Media Takes Top Honors at Web Challenge

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After 24 hours of meeting, planning coding, creating, and general all around geeky fun, TST Media was selected as the winner of the Nerdery’s annual Overnight Website Challenge. Built on their NGIN platform, currently finding great success with organizations big and small, the Bloomington United for Youth (BUY) site is already live.

We’re also happy to report that our very own Tim Elliott and his band of WordPress fanatics on the Full Court WordPress team brought in a site that made it to the final four. The site for Project 515 should be live later this week.

The judges for the event, represented by their obvious well-rested appearance in a see of sleepy, were Christine Durand, communication director, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, Christian Erickson, principal, Zeus Jones, Dan Grigsby, founder, Drivetrain, and Dana Nelson, executive director, GiveMN.org

As noted by the Nerdery, “No team lost anything but sleep while 18 nonprofit organizations won free websites that will better carry their mission forward.” We’re sure that none of the teams in the multiple rooms that house the now ginormous Challenge, would disagree.

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…]