Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

State of the State: Technology in Minnesota. A Minnebar Panel Discussion

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One of the highlights of Saturday’s Minnebar was a panel discussion entitled, State of the State: Technology in Minnesota. The panelists included: Douglas Olson (Microsoft), Jamie Thinglestad (formerly of Dow Jones), Michael Gorman (Split Rock Partners), Robert Stephens (Geek Squad), Dan Grigsby (Unpossible), Matthew Dornquast (code42).

Ed Kohler at Technology Evangelist has a post with highlights here. You can also listen or download the one hour podcast below.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:00:08 — 74.8MB)

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Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs – June 4-5

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This looks like an interesting venue and am glad to see a Minnesota recognition of the shift in media taking place as alternatives-to-traditional media flourish. Complete details are here. Registration and meals is $139.

Online News Community, Editors, Entrepreneurs and

other “Placebloggers” to Convene June 4-5 in Landmark Conference

MINNEAPOLIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Entrepreneurs, editors and operators of local online news and community websites — placebloggers — will gather June 4-5 in one of the first convenings of its kind, to share the trials and tribulations of a news source growing without paper or printing press. “New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs,” will take place at the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota, immediately before the fourth National Conference on Media Reform, also in Minneapolis on June 6-8.

“America’s new online citizen-journalists are inventing a new business and a new passion — the business of building local, literate, digital domains on the web where community and commerce flourish,” said Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “But efforts — and structure — to share best practices are only just emerging.”

The program will pull together experts for discussions on the business, marketing, legal, advertising, journalistic, technical and fund-raising skills that are needed in order for local online news and community-building websites to approach success….  [Read More…]

Loudclick: Build Web Sites Together

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Loudclick\'s Alex HuffLoudclick has created a platform for collaborative web site creation that allows anyone — from newbie to designer — to quickly deliver a great looking web site for sports teams, homeowners associations, small businesses, or any group. I met with Alex Huff at a local Caribou Coffee to learn more about him and hear the Loudclick story.

Loudclick’s core value proposition is a hosted application which enables building these web sites together (i.e., multi-user, multi-admin, and/or multi-author). Inline content editing capability allows an approved user to log in and edit any “element” (block on the page) that they have permission to change. It’s an editing method that’s gaining acceptance in the marketplace and the Loudclick solution delivers in an elegant way.

As many of us know from the emerging acceptance of wiki‘s in business and organizations, inline content editing is powerful but often new or less tech-savvy users struggle with the wiki paradigm and require training. Editing a wiki page changes it from a page laid out nicely to a bunch of text with tags…and many users I’ve dealt with on wiki’s freeze up and think they’re looking at code and just don’t understand what to do next, making the use of wiki’s problematic in casual group situations where easy publishing and communicating is what’s important.

As we talked, I mentioned that, although it’s positioned as a web site/page builder, “this seems like it could be positioned as a wiki with no learning curve“. Alex didn’t disagree, but is clearly focused on their core market: groups of people who want to communicate and connect by building great looking web sites created with minimal muss-n-fuss.

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‘Minnebar’ Becoming Top Event for State’s Internet/Software Developers and Entrepreneurs

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An annual Minnesota event, playfully named Minnebar — which grew out of a grass-roots tech industry initiative called Barcamp — is happening for the third year in a row here in the Twin Cities this coming Saturday, May 10, at the U of M’s Coffman Union.
Minnebar logo By 8:00 am, somewhere between 300 and 400 software developers, startup founders (and hopefuls), web designers, interactive marketers, local media reporters, angels, VCs, and other investors will start converging in one place as they seldom do in any venue in these parts, at any other time throughout the year.

Coffman Union They come to talk shop, learn, share tips, listen to presentations on the latest tech developments and tools, share war stories, listen to startup pitches, and (of course) take notes, blog, and Twitter about all the proceedings on the laptops and smart phones they never seem to have far from their sides. …  [Read More…]

An Interview with CotterWeb’s Daren Cotter

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darencotter.jpgAt the age of 15, Daren Cotter was presented with the opportunity to get a birthday present every soon-to-be-a-licensed-driver kid covets: a car. Instead, he asked for what he really wanted, a computer, and so young Cotter began his adventure in computing and software development.

Within a year he started to program, creating educational games and other software to teach himself how to create in bits what was in his head, and ended up submitting it to shareware sites. Over a couple of years he pocketed somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,ooo and realized that putting his value in software was something others would pay for and a light bulb went on.

After graduating high school in 1999, he entered Minnesota State University in Mankato and was suddenly faced with a something he hadn’t expected that was life-changing: a very fast broadband connection (he’d had slow dial-up at home) and ended up investing significant amounts of time online.

Exploring, he came across AllAdvantage and joined, becoming enamored with the advertising space and the concept of receiving some sort of value in exchange for his attention and time surfing the ‘net.

He tore apart their model, their approach, and worked hard at understanding how it was delivered in an attempt to figure out how to improve upon what they’d put together (and this before AllAdvantage’s spectacular flame-out during the dotcom meltdown in the early 2,000’s).

The result of this effort was his own creation, InboxDollars, which Cotter delivered the summer after his freshman year and was the start of his company (CotterWeb, located in Mendota Heights, MN) which grossed over $12M in 2007.
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The Latest on U of M Technology Innovation and Commercialization

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The University of Minnesota is among the top patent producers in the world, ranking #4 on Scientist Magazine’s list of “Patent Powerhouses,” behind only three other major American universities. Yet, quantity of patents hardly paints the entire picture. What about helping to start up companies to commercialize those patents?

U of MN logo

According to the U’s own business development people (see link to Powerpoint presentation at bottom), the 20-year success record of the U’s technology company spinoffs is only half the university average nationally — and less than one-fourth the success record of the nation’s premier schools. What’s more, in one recent year (2004), for example, the U of MN spun off only one company compared to 14 at the University of Michigan and 16 at the University of Illinois. Why I am focusing here on spinoffs? Well, because, according the U’s own business development people, creating university spinoffs is “much more profitable than licensing (revenues)” to the school. …  [Read More…]

Tumblon.com – Parenting Site Focused on Child Development

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Tumblon.com – the new project from Jonathan Dahl of Hopkins-based web application development shop Slantwise Design – quietly opened it’s doors earlier this month. Unlike other parenting-oriented websites or general-purpose weblog engines, Tumblon focuses on child development milestones as the structure for sharing.

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Emerging Digerati Showcase at U of MN

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Today was the Emerging Digerati Showcase at the University of Minnesota, Weisman Art Museum. The focus was a College of Liberal Arts, new media festival featuring digital technology, art and research.

It was inspiring to see the innovation and boundary pushing being done in this market and the passion people are bringing to digital technologies.

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  • Starting off was artist Lynn Fellman, who merges art and science with her beautiful DNA inspired digital, vector art. Ms. Fellman has been in the interactive space since the early 1990’s.
  • Minnov8’s own Garrick Van Buren showcased his creation, Cullect, a collaborative feed reader with amazing capabilities
  • Brad Hosack and David Ernst from the Academic & Information Technology, College of Education & Human Development department showed Video ANT, an innovative way of moving video beyond just content delivery through a tool they’ve developed to allow easy annotating of video
  • Justin Grammens and Minnov8’s own Phil Wilson showcased Localtone Radio, an innovative site for local bands to showcase their songs and for music lovers to discover (and vote upon favorite) bands and music. Their buzzphrase? Listen, Share, Learn
  • Terry Schubring demonstrated an internal UofMN engine called “MediaMill”, which facilitates transcoding of video and its display on to any web page

…  [Read More…]

Twin Cities is First with New Comcast ‘Wideband’ Internet

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comcast.jpgWhen given the chance to be among the first couple of companies in the Twin Cities to receive an install of Comcast’s new DOCSIS 3.0-driven high speed service (50 megabits per second download speed and 5 megabits per second upload!), do you think they had to ask twice!?!

If you haven’t heard of DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) and don’t know why this is important, it’s the next generation of cable standards for delivering data over cable with theoretical speeds between 170mbps and 340mbps download with uploads speeds of 120mbps.

Comcast indicated that the Twin Cities is their first market to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 technology and is a clear demonstration of how the company is evolving from broadband to wideband. It’s also just the beginning of even faster speeds to come, they claim, but my 50/5 internet speed isn’t any demo….it’s real, working and fast.

My experiences thus far have been amazing. When we first started to use it after the install, I broke into a huge grin as pages loaded instantly and I ran a 345MB update which hit my downloads folder and completed in what seemed like two minutes (it actually downloaded so quickly I forgot to watch it and time it). I’ve been achieving ~40mbps down and 3.4 to 4.1 upload speeds on average (which, of course, are dependent upon so many variables like internet traffic, server load and so on).

Our business (and yours too, I’ll wager) now depends on the internet in the same way 20th century business depended on the phone and then the fax machine. Speed is money and with more of our applications in the “cloud” (i.e., hosted Web applications), an accelerating number of us living an always-on and always-connected lifestyle, coupled with the need to move ever bigger digital files to one another over the ‘net, I’m delighted to have access to this kind of speed and am already fully utilizing it.

One thing most small business miss when they begin to use all of these new online services and applications: you run out of bandwidth very, very fast. Now that we’re delivering webinars, are using webcams, Skype, and Vonage in the office, we’ve been noticing that our need for bandwidth to satisfy all users of our connection has increased dramatically in the last six months. I believe that our ability to have sufficient bandwidth for all of these activities simultaneously has become a business imperative.

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Emerging Digerati Week at the UofMN

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emerging.jpgAll this week, the University of Minnesota Institute for New Media Studies is holding Emerging Digerati Week 2008 with multiple venues showcasing everything from digital vision and display technologies to virtual reality to new media.

Though it would’ve been nice to have time to cover the entire week-long event, Minnov8 will be covering the New Media Showcase on Friday, April 4th from 10am-4pm at the Weisman Art Museum and two of our founders, Garrick Van Buren and Phil Wilson, will be involved in showcasing their own startups at this event.

If you are interested in what’s happening right here in Minnesota when it comes to Internet and Web-centric new media innovation, carve out time from your busy schedule and head on over to the Weisman this Friday.