Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Minnov8 Gang 109 – This Mobile Thingy Will Be Big!

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It’s easy to chuckle at a vintage Radio Shack ad like this one on YouTube from 1990 that touted the “Affordable, Portable, Cellular Telephone” from Radio Shack (gee…do ya think that’s a Bill Gates-like character for the boy?). What most of us don’t know is that these ‘brick’ phones, with their six inch antennas, listed for $1,200 ($1,970 in 2011 dollars) and the average cellular phone call cost was $.40/minute!

We’ve come a loooong way since 1990 and it’s likely this mobile thingy is gonna be big.  😉

Joining us on this episode of the Minnov8 Gang is Justin Grammens, co-Founder at Recursive Awesome, LLC, owner of Localtone, LLC founder of the Mobile Twin Cities User’s Group, and co-founder of Mobile March. During the “Gang Mentality” segment we’re pleased to have been joined by Lisa Foote, co-founder of  MixMobi and a pragmatic expert in the mobile space overall. She also speaks at many industry events (e.g., the upcoming Mobile March) and is a strategist with a global perspective on the mobile space.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: Beyond the Pale is the artist & their song “Faral O’Garas” via the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:07:40 — 39.3MB)

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Discussed during the show:

Minnov8 Gang 105 – 2011 Tech Predictions

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The Gang once again discusses our predictions for the new year. If you listened to last year’s show, you’ll know that Phil predicted we’d see parachute pants make a comeback, but alas they did not and Phil still has to wear much tighter and more restrictive trousers than he’d prefer.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson
Music: Opening version of the New Year’s Eve favorite Auld Lang Syne was performed by J.E.L.L.i., and the closing version of the song was performed by Mario Ajero. Both made possible by the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 52:26 — 30.4MB)

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Discussed during the show:

Minnov8 Gang 104 – We Are All Virtual Now

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Joining us on this week’s show (a longer-than-usual one but we’re off next week returning 12/31/10) is Julio Ojeda Zapata to discuss his new book “iPad means business.” It documents how the touch-screen device is becoming a lifesaver anywhere people need to get a job done. The book tells the stories of tablet-wielding workers, companies, students and teachers. Joining us mid-show is Don Ball, co-founder of CoCoMSP, partner in PolymerStudios, and a guy who is a thought leader about coworking. We talk about the event he attended in San Francisco on this topic and more. Rounding out the show is our call to the mobile phone of Lisa Grimm (@lulugrimm) Digital Public Relations Specialist at Mall of America (@MallofAmerica), who was outside the mall with her colleagues (photo) running the Twitter-followers-only Big Secret Parking Party.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson
Music: Dom Duff & the song “March Azur” via the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:15:47 — 44.1MB)

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Discussed during the show:

Minnov8 Gang 102 – Mostly Soupy, Trivial Sales

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This week we’re delighted to have on Julio Ojeda Zapata from the Pioneer Press to talk about Verizon’s 4G wireless rollout as well as Johnee Bee, celebrating his 200th Mostly Trivial podcast and, though it didn’t come up on the podcast, we later discovered that Mostly Trivial has an iPhone app! (iTunes link).

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson (Graeme Thickins is off this week)
Music: LA Big Daddys & their song “Why I Sing the Blues” via the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 59:25 — 34.7MB)

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Discussed during the show:

Minnov8 Gang 88: Google Waves Goodbye

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The Gang has Julio Ojeda Zapata on this week to talk about a bunch of stuff…including Google’s killing of Google Wave.

Julio is the Pioneer Press’ consumer-tech reporter and writes a Tech Test Drive column about gadgets, apps and social media (among other things). He is the author of Twitter Means Business, one of the first books about Twitter (and his new one coming out tentatively titled, “iPad Means Business”). See his Posterous geekstream or contact him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: Big George Jackson Blues Band & song “Tell Me” via the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04:18 — 37.8MB)

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Discussed during the show:

W3i Lights Up the ‘Net with Its Latest App News

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Okay, so there’s this company named Apple that I hear makes phones.  And people tell me there’s been, uh, a bit of news lately about some new phone of theirs?  Well, that media firestorm didn’t stop Minnesota’s W3i LLC from deciding to jump in with some news of its own, which is actually related to the exploding ecosystem around Apple mobile devices.  That would be apps.

St. Cloud-based W3i is in the app distribution business — in a big, profitable way (33 successive quarters thereof).  But till now that business has been all about desktop apps, and Windows only. Well, mark down yesterday as the day they entered the world of mobile, with this bombshell: W3i Launches New Incented Mobile App Distribution Service for iOS App Developers.  A separate version of the release, for consumers, gets more to the benefit: Consumers Can Now Earn Rewards for Installing Apps.  Those rewards, my friends, would be cash — for consumers who register at a W3i site called Apperang.com.

Naturally, app fanboys and girls everywhere loved the news — after reading about it on some of the sites they frequent the most.  TechCrunch (MobileCrunch) ran this story: Apperang Pays You Cash to Download iPhone Apps… Ka-Ching! And VentureBeat (MobileBeat) ran concurrently — amazing how that happens — with their take: Get paid to install apps with W3i Mobile Solutions and Apperang.  Numerous other sites and blogs picked up on it immediately, and Twitter was going crazy on it (just search on hashtags #apperang and #w3i).  [Oh, sure, there was a story in the StarTrib last week, too, but that didn’t light up much of anything… <rimshot>]

I asked the CEO of a local app development company for his reaction to this W3i news, from a business perspective:  “The model and integration W3i has developed for desktop distribution has been a huge success in the past, so I wouldn’t bet against them on making their mobile version a success,” said Wade Beavers, CEO of DoApp Inc. “For developers wanting to get a core base of users fast, it makes sense to use this service. The key will be how long those users keep your app, because that’s where the return on investment is.”

I also asked one of Minnesota’s most experienced iPhone app developers for his reaction: “Will app publishers readily jump to use this type of service? Small developers, maybe,” said Bill Heyman of CodeMorphic. “But small developers may not have budget to support this type of promotion… Will it be enough to hit the tipping point for more organic sales because of a higher App Store ranking? Well, ultimately, it would depend on how much a company wants to spend to buy a ranking.”

But, actually, W3i signed on some pretty successful big developers for its private beta before the announcement yesterday (the service is now in public beta).  That list of launch advertisers — just those that let W3i use their names for PR purposes — includes these firms, with the name of their app in parentheses: Big Stack Studios (Sigma), Inert Soap (FingerZilla), Booyah (MyTown), Gist (Gist), Thinking Ape (Kingdoms at War), Flixster (Movies), Slacker Inc (Slacker Radio), xCube Labs (My Health Records – Health n Family), and infinidycorp (Zombies vs. Aliens).

I’m sure we’ll be hearing about a lot more, as W3i tells me they are crazy-busy now following up with other app companies who are inquiring.

(Disclosure: the author has had a consulting relationship with W3i for providing PR services.)

Minnov8 Gang Podcast 82: Vicarious WWDC

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We revisit Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) through Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s experiences talking about the new iPhone 4 and his reliance on the iPad and HTC EVO 4G on his trip. Many other related subjects are explored to their logical conclusions.

Show Hosts: Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson (Steve Borsch was away this week).

Music by AjT “Apple Chunk Guitar” from Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 53:42 — 31.0MB)

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Discussed during the podcast:

Events:

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.

MN Mobile Developers Clocking Millions of Downloads

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Local developers of apps for mobile devices, especially those designed for Apple’s platform, are quietly amassing large numbers of users for their creations, I’ve been learning.

This past week, I thought it would be an interesting little project for me to do a survey of sorts as the basis for this blog post. What I did (totally unscientific, I admit) was ask all the Twin Cities-area mobile developers I happened to know just how many apps they have on the two major platforms, Apple and Android, and how many users have downloaded their apps to date.  It turned into a bigger project than I thought!  It required a lot of back-and-forth emails to clarify all their current offerings.  But I’ve sorted it all out as best I can, and you’ll see the results of that survey in the second half of this post.

The two most-experienced mobile app development firms in Minnesota I have known quite well for some time, having been a consultant to both in the past: DoApp and CodeMorphic.  These two firms began developing for the iPhone platform as soon as Apple released the SDK in March 2008, and had their first creations in the App Store from the get-go, in the case of DoApp (July 2008), and CodeMorphic soon after. So, it was no surprise to me, then, that these two have the largest numbers of downloads locally. But many more Minnesota developers jumped in after them, and still are jumping in. In fact, I learn about a new one almost weekly. Some publish apps in their own name, some only for clients, and some do both. (For apps developed for-hire for client companies, developers cannot track ongoing download numbers in real time — only their clients know, unless they tell them or otherwise publicize the numbers. But the developers can certainly make educated guesses, which some of them did for me for my survey.) What triggered this idea for a post was a news announcement one of the two big local development firms just put out …

DoApp Inc. Announces One Million Downloads of Its “Mobile Local News” App

Actually, it’s not one app; there are more than 100 of these DoApp “MLN” apps out there, because that’s how many customers (media outlets) have signed up with DoApp to date to use what is really an “app platform.”  It allows DoApp’s customers — TV news stations, newspapers, online publications, and radio stations — to easily brand the app for themselves and deliver their content via smart phones and other mobile devices, including the Apple iPad.  (DoApp has not yet submitted to Apple an app designed specifically for the iPad, though its many iPhone apps do work on that new device.) In its recent announcement, DoApp counted downloads for all its locally-branded Mobile Local News apps, including both Apple and Android downloads, in saying they have surpassed the one million number. The company first made the Mobile Local News app available in April 2009. For more about all of DoApp’s products, see the company’s web site.   (In the photo: Joe Sriver, center, Founder; Wade Beavers, left, CEO; and Dave Borrillo, VP-Software Development.) I conducted an email interview with DoApp founder Joe Sriver to learn more about the current status of his company’s Mobile Local News app business, which follows…. …  [Read More…]

Minnov8 Gang 74: Innovation is Driving Passions

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The Gang recaps the week and has on Julio Ojeda Zapata as our special guest.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson
Music by George Fletcher’s Bourbon Renewal with the The Tequila Mockingbirds and the tune is “Rumble Groove“. Brought to you by Music Alley

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 52:54 — 30.8MB)

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DISCUSSED DURING THE SHOW NOTES:
+ FiRe: local iPhone audio app made by Audiofile Engineering in Minneapolis and used for last week’s podcast
+ Blue’s Mikey microphone for iPhone/iPod (Note that FiRe is available with this mic)
+ Comcast FCC ruling
+ Julio’s book called “Twitter Means Business”
+ MinneWebCon
+ Apple iPhone OS 4
+ Dan Grigsby @ Mobile Orchard shutting down
+ Adobe backlash (e.g., “Go screw yourself Apple“)
+ Quit Whining About The iPad Interface
+ Twitter Acquires Atebits, Maker of Tweetie
+ ComicTwit
+ Minneapolis CrowdPitch
+ BusinessCard2 @ AlwaysOn
+ Sh*t My Dad Says (started on Twitter, now with its own site, soon a TV show with William Shatner)