Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Newsbytes for Tuesday, May 4, 2010

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Newsbytes graphicNewsbytes is a collection of links to articles and posts from around the ‘net of interest to Minnov8 readers:

  • Governor Pawlenty says Minnesota needs to be more competitive. Healthy state economies will play a critical role in future job creation, but Minnesota does not rank among the nation’s top 10 “growth performers,” according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study rolled out Monday by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Minnesota iPhone App Developers Talk iPad and OS 4

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I’m having so much freaking fun with my iPad, I almost forgot to post this week.  I started asking my developer friends about it almost as soon as I got mine last Saturday, so I’ve had this post brewing for days now.  Then, I’m finally about ready to post it, and Apple goes and holds its “sneak-peek” media event yesterday.  So, natch, I had to ask some of them for their reaction to that, too.

Here we go, then — five experienced Minnesota mobile app developers tell me, straight up, what’s up with iPad as relates to them.  And, after that,  I include some great insights from a couple of them about iPhone OS 4 — coming this summer for the iPhone, and soon after for the iPad. (Bring it on, Uncle Stevie!)

Joe Sriver, Founder, DoApp Inc. Joe, will your company be developing iPad apps?

“Yes, we do have plans for the iPad, first for our real estate product, then our other products. No ‘made for iPad’ apps are in the store from DoApp on day one, though.  But I did preorder an iPad for the team.”  In a story our friend Julio Ojeda-Zapata wrote in the PioneerPress on April 2, we learned that DoApp was frantically at work on the iPad version of it’s “Home Kenex” app, which is for home buyers and real estate agents.  Maps can be positioned alongside lists or photos of homes to make navigation easier and more intuitive than the cramped iPhone screen allows, said the story, facilitating better house comparisons.  iPad becomes “a coffee table-type of thing, with people in their agents’ offices cruising for properties on the device,” said the story, quoting DoApp’s Wade Beavers.  GPS capability will be added in an upcoming version of the iPad, so home buyers or agents will be able to pull up listings in their vicinity and “drive effortlessly towards them using satellite navigation.”

Bill Heyman, Founder and Lead Developer, CodeMorphic. Bill, what apps are you doing for iPad?  Redoing any of your existing ones?

“No existing apps.  What we’re doing are new ones for various clients.  Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to say what they are.  I’m also working on a new game app I’m publishing myself, but I’m not ready to submit it yet. I’ll let you know when it’s getting close.”

I assume you now have an iPad in your possession? “Yes, I had one delivered to me while on vacation in Arizona this week.”

What are you finding in regard to how well your iPhone apps work on iPad? “They seem to work fine.
”

What about landscape mode?  Are you concerned that apps should work either way on iPad? “Apple has basically told developers that they MUST support rotation in their iPad apps.  Unfortunately, it can be a major PITA to support it well, but developers are going to have to bite the bullet now.
”

Any other comment? “I think iBooks is the killer feature of the iPad.  There’s been talk about the iPad developer gold rush, but no discussion about the author and independent content provider gold rush.  It’s going to happen — and I think it could be every bit as exciting as some of the apps.” …  [Read More…]

Minnov8 Gang 69: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”

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Opportunity and growth is all around us and glimmers of it are appearing in the web, mobile and other tech spaces. But are you willing to take the risks, explore and deal with all the obstacles in the way of you seeking riches?

In the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart’s character Dobbs, and two other gringos, embark in to Mexico to find gold in the Sierra Madres, an area in great flux and riddled with banditos, but policed by the Federales. In one of the signature lines in the movie the banditos, trying to convince Dobbs and his cronies that they’re Federales, say, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” (usually misquoted as “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!“). There are several moral and philosophical questions in the movie and Dobbs dies, the banditos are killed by the Federales, the gold is lost and thus the analogy might as clear as mud: chasing opportunities won’t be easy but they’re out there; barriers and obstacles (and bandits) stand in your way; but we thought exploring opportunistic thoughts in this podcast was worthwhile.

Special Guest: For part of the podcast, Meg Canada joins us to talk about libraries, the iPad and more. Meg is a senior librarian for Web Services and Training at Hennepin County Library and currently coordinates public training and  social media efforts for the library. She volunteers helping with the Unsummit, recently presented at MinneWebCon, and is a regular contributor to Social Media Breakfast.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: “Santa Maria” by Will Kriski from Music Alley, purveyor of podsafe tunes.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 56:44 — 32.9MB)

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Discussed during the show:

+ Past Events: CloudCampMSP (see Minnov8’s coverage here); IgniteMPLS; Social Media Breakfast;

+ Upcoming Events: Mobile March; MIMA; DEMO; SxSWi; MinneWebCon

+ Mobile: MixMobi; WordPress mobile plugins (Mobile Edition; WPTouch); Square (mobile commerce)

+ Devices: Apple iPad; Microsoft Courier; Dell Slate

+ Other: Google pagerank to require speedier websites?; Hacker News.

Minnesota Startup Launches ‘Spark Radio’ iPhone App

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Is it possible to design a radio app that delivers the ultimate radio experience, complete with visually stunning graphics and social media capabilities, too?  Minneapolis’ own Handcast Media Labs LLC thought so, set out to prove it, and just launched the result on the iTunes App Store a couple of days ago.  It’s called Spark Radio (press release), and works on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s available for $5.99 at this link at the App Store.

I grabbed it the day it came out and have used it multiple times since, in a variety of situations — at home, on a road trip, even in a foreign country (Iowa) — and I must say I’m impressed.  Right now, I’m listening to a great station that’s all Grateful Dead all the time, which I discovered via the app. It’s called RadioIO Dead, and “Big Boss Man” has been my favorite track so far.  I’m on wifi in my motel room at the moment, and the sound is perfect — and I’m not even using an external speaker.  On the way down here to Des Moines, I used the app via my iPhone on AT&T’s 3G network (note: I was in the passenger seat!) to tune in multiple stations, including WSL in Chicago, and the sound was way better than any station I could tune in on the car radio.

Spark Radio not only gives you tons of station choices and social media features designed to make radio listening more interactive, but it also features visually stunning animations. Far out, huh? Its robust, visual radio tuner uses the guide from a company called RadioTime.com to give you access to more than 10,000 terrestrial and Internet-only radio stations worldwide.  Handcast says it’s adding new stations to Spark Radio daily, and will support more than 30,000 stations by April.  You can listen to precisely what you want to at any given time — music, talk radio, sports events, public radio, or special programming from around the world.  Its elegant interface lets you search for stations or programs by keyword, location, or the station URL, and you can browse programming by genre or location. (I’m still looking for two of my fav genres: rockabilly and surf.)  A GPS component lets you find local stations in any given city based on current GPS coordinates.

I took the opportunity to dial up the founder of Handcast Media Labs, Terry Anderson, whom I’d met in 2008, to ask if he’d be up for an interview. That follows. …  [Read More…]

MN Tech Rocks – Last Night Was Proof

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If you weren’t at Minnedemo last night, well, you ain’t….  Seriously, for those few of you players in our Internet/IT community who weren’t there, you missed a damn good one.  I tweeted as I left about 10:30 pm (okay, I admit I tweet from my car) that I thought it was the best ever.  There was an energy that was not to be denied!  I’m including a few pix here — admittedly blurry as I swung a beer in my other hand. (Most are after the jump.)  It was some 300 people shoulder-to-shoulder in an art gallery talking about tech, great new startups coming on in Minnesota, with lots of new relationships being formed, old friendships and contacts being renewed, partnerships being discussed — and, yes, investment opportunities, too.  And that was just the schmoozing part! 

There were lots of live demos going on in the theater adjoining, if you could squeeze yourself in there:

1. ArtsApp – like Monster.com for artists to submit multimedia (Dejen Tesfagiorgis)
2. ReliaCloud – a cloud computing platform that allows people to build scalable computing infrastructure on demand (Jason Baker, VISI)
3. Pedal Brain – advanced cycle computer based on the iPhone platform combined with web-based data analysis (Matt Bauer)
…  [Read More…]

Minnesota Apple Watchers React to Steve Jobs’ Rant

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So, if you haven’t seen the news Wired broke late Saturday (updated Sunday afternoon) about Steve Jobs going off on Google and Adobe at the Apple all-employee meeting, here it is:  Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra is ‘Bullshit,’ Adobe Is Lazy: Apple’s Steve Jobs.

Here’s an excerpt:

“After a big public announcement of the sort Apple had this week for the iPad, CEO Steve Jobs often takes time in the day or two afterwards to have a Town Hall at One Infinite Loop, making himself available for questions from employees bold enough to stand up and take one right between the eyes.

This time, the big topics included Google and Adobe — no surprises there… And the absence of Adobe Flash support on the iPhone for three years and counting, and now on the iPad, is either celebrated by users as a poke in the eye of one of the web’s most dextrous tools, or the most over-rated and overused crutch for decent design.

Jobs, characteristically, did not mince words as he spoke to the assembled, according to a person who was there who could not be named because this person is not authorized by Apple to speak with the press.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.”

I decided to ask three local observers with a special perspective on Apple for their reaction. Two of them are former Apple employees, the other a 26-year user of both Apple and Adobe technologies. …  [Read More…]

A Demo-licious Evening at Mobile Twin Cities

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mobiletwincitiesThe relatively new mobile group Mobile Twin Cities, self described as “a group of technology enthusiasts…meeting to discuss trends and software on all mobile platforms.”gathered last night at the Refactr offices in Minneapolis. This group founded and organized by local developer Justin Grammens of Recursive Awesome (Full disclosure; Justin and I are also partners at Localtone Systems) hosted a night of mobile platform demos which was dubbed “Demo-licious”. Judging by the larger than normal crowd, that included developers, designers, marketers and mobile enthusiasts  it was a great success. The mantra that Justin continues to chant “No programming experience needed! Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile enthusiasts are all welcome.” seems to be working.

The evening was chocked full of demos of apps and projects that leaves little doubt that mobile development in the Twin Cities is more than warm, if not downright HOT! I would like to have seen more apps that reach more phones and platforms than just iPhone and Android, but the evening didn’t disappoint in highlighting some useful or potentially useful tools.

Following Breon Nagy’s demo of the latest Android device, the Motorola Droid (which I finally got to play with…nice phone, slide out keyboard ain’t great.), from the evening’s sponsor Verizon. Here’s the run down of demos...

mixmobi_logoMixMobi-Lisa Foote and developer Kelly Heikkila presented this DIY mobile couponing application. You can see a complete Minnov8 walk-through in our earlier post about MixMobi.

logoSudden Deals-Julian Reytel walked the group through this SMS based discount service. Based on geographical location a user can be alerted about special discounts from participating businesses. It’s currently limited to restaurant and bar businesses. I would suggest there is much more potential opportunity awaiting Sudden Deals beyond these two verticals. Perhaps malls, shopping areas or even shopping circulars offer a more diverse number of consumers.

bpg_logo3D Light Racer-Robert Green the group’s gamer extraordinaire and owner of Battery Powered Games (fun t-shirt as well) showed off just one of his latest game apps. Think Tron for you Android device. I heard many hushed comments behind me about how addictive this game is….  [Read More…]

Minnov8 Gang 58: Defragging Defrag & Other ‘Net Stuff

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DeFrag-n-stuff After our week hiatus, the Minnov8 Gang is back at it with a podcast covering Graeme Thickins’ trip to the DeFrag conference and his liveblogging of it. After that we discuss local events (e.g., Minnebar), WCCO, WordPress and much more.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music by blues singer Candy Kayne and the tune is, “I’m a bad, bad girl.”

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:09 — 33.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

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Discussed during the show notes:

+ WCCO‘s “The Wire” & their iPhone app by DoApp and Inergize Digital (iTunes link; search in Android store for “WCCO”; or use mobile website at m.wcco.com)

+ WordPress Users Group meeting on December 3rd at 6:30pm

+ Minnebar at Best Buy HQ (sold out) and the sessions

+ Google buys Gizmo5; Toktumi; Google page speed article; Newsy

+ Android and GoogleChromeOS which, by the way, rumor has it will launch within a week.