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.

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.

Steve Bendt Interview: A Chat About Windows 7 Social Media and Life at Microsoft

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Two of the Minnov8 Gang took the opportunity this week to get together with former Twin Citian Steve Bendt.  As you’ll recall, Steve had been a senior social media manager at Best Buy, and a cofounder of its Blue Shirt Nation employee social network, but left earlier this year for a new opportunity with Microsoft in Redmond, WA.

Graeme Thickins and Tim Elliott sat down with Steve for coffee the morning after he arrived back in Minneapolis for a holiday family visit.  What ensued was a 30-minute+ discussion on a whole raft of topics related to Steve’s new role, the Windows 7 rollout, hints of future plans, other MS initiatives we asked Steve to weigh in on (though of course he couldn’t speak officially for the company), and Steve’s personal experiences in making his big career move.

Show notes:

Listen to, or download, the interview with Steve Bendt

Podcast: Download (23.2MB)

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Best Buy’s mIQ Beats Microsoft’s MyPhone At It’s Own Game

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As mobile phones have become more powerful the need to access and backup information on them has increased. One way to do this is to mesh your phone’s operating system on a central server as pioneered by Danger’s Sidekick and emulated by Google’s Android and Palm’s WebOS. If something happens on the phone, it’s automatically synced to your account in the cloud and this, in theory, prevents data loss (that company is called ‘Danger’ for a reason).

mIQ logoI have been using a Windows Mobile phone for the past 18 months and have been looking for a way to sync my data wirelessly for some time. A while back I installed the beta of Microsoft’s MyPhone service but never got it working correctly. Not sure if it was something I was doing wrong but such services should just work without a lot of user intervention and MyPhone never got there despite repeated effort in it’s beta form (it sort of worked for me once launched; read on for details).

Last week Best Buy launched their mIQ service which I noticed supported Windows Mobile so I signed up and a couple days ago was sent my account invitation. After a somewhat complex setup process that involved both the handset and computer browser, I was ready to sync. And after quite a while it seemed to be about the same as MyPhone; not really working. So I rebooted my phone, started again and this time let it sync overnight in it’s charging stand. The next morning when I checked the phone had fully synced and after a logout and login all my photos, contacts, calendar entries, text messages and other data was backed up in the mIQ service online, as advertised. My one suggestion is that the status screens on the phone be a bit more clear that something is happening since I think the sync would have worked the first time without my reboot (just a more animated status bar would work here).

Both mIQ and MyPhone are linked to popular social sites. MyPhone supports Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr while mIQ links to Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and Flickr. On the phone the mIQ service lets you update status on these services from their client, a nice touch. mIQ integrates all the communications for each contact in it’s web app so you can see all the text messages and phone calls linked to each contact. It also lets you send SMS messages from the web and easily make Skype calls to your contacts if you have a Skype out account on your computer. mIQ easily allows you to share photos and videos from the web app and seems to be automatically set to push these as they are taken from your phone by default. mIQ also has helpful stats on your phone memory usage that cleverly links to memory cards available at Best Buy making it easy to buy what you need for your phone. Overall, mIQ is very complete, stable and useful for a first release service. Along with Windows Mobile, mIQ also currently supports Blackberry and Symbian (mostly Nokia) smartphones….  [Read More…]

MIMA Summit Goes Gadget Happy

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geek2No doubt, the Minnov8 Gang is stoked about the upcoming MIMA Summit this Monday. We plan on our usual “no holds barred” live coverage complete with live blogging, video, and photos. A practice that’s…well…pretty geeky. However, we are not alone.

The MIMA folks and Jennifer Kane Consulting, the people that brought you “little Seth”, are giving the geek meter a workout by providing plenty of tech fun gadgets and mobile access. For those of you who thought that free wifi at a conference was the shizznit, prepared to be amazed…

Behold, courtesy of the M Group, the Wayfinding Station. Not to be confused with the Wayback Machine (Sorry Mr. Peabody), this little gem, built on Microsoft’s Surface technology, is, and I quote, “a multi-touch experience to deliver conference information and services to attendees”. Check this, “Users can navigate a map of the conference facility and related breakout sessions by grabbing digital information with their hands and interacting with content on-screen by touch and gesture – without using a mouse or keyboard.” Sweet!

MicrosoftSurfaceMGroupWait there’s more. MIMA created “conference personas,” each with a pre-configured schedule based on an area of interest. You can chose a “persona chip” and be Social Media Maggie, Suzy Search, Email Ian, Mobile Mack, Victor Video, or Brady Branding. (Sorry, no Pete Propeller-Head.) You’ll then get an itinerary of sessions related to that area of interest. “Because Surface sees and interacts with objects, guests will be able to place their conference persona chip onto the Surface screen to trigger different types of personalized digital responses, and then the transfer of digital content to their mobile devices,” explains the M Group’s Janessa Meyer.

ScottMonty200992517433No, wait! There’s even more. MIMA is even using  individual tags that are embedded with the URL to each of the conference speakers’ social networking site of choice. These tags are printed on the conference signage corresponding with that speaker’s session. Using the Microsoft Tag Reader application you just use your mobile device to connect with the speaker’s sites and social media outlets just by snapping a photo of the tag with their device. Shnikies!

If they only had an iPhone app…wait…they have one of those too! Geek metered…pegged!!!!

(Crap! I don’t have an iPhone. My coal burning Treo 650 probably will only buzz and click pittifully. But still…it’s pretty cool.)

Microsoft Launches Expression 3 & Sketchflow

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silverexpressSaw a tweet yesterday from my buddy, Microsoft’s Doug Olson, that said, “Getting ready for a very exciting day tomorrow — the culmination of why I am working at Microsoft.” He was either finally getting a free Zune, he’d completed that Redmond, WA to White Bear Lake, MN fun run, or his group was going to ship a major release. I suspected the latter so pinged him right away and he emailed me a bit ago since he’s in the midst of launching now.

douglaskolsonDoug is the Product Unit GM of the Expression group (who recently put in place a Microsoft engineering office in St. Paul), is today launching Silverlight and Expression 3 at a press event in San Francisco. It’s a big day for his main product, Expression Blend 3, which finally gets to the point where is it very competitive with Flash & Flex. Not only that, but Microsoft is including a major innovation with it called SketchFlow (here is a good overview of it) which is getting tons of buzz and changing the way folks think about conceptual design (prototyping).

One other note: SketchFlow, and another big-deal feature (fully enabled Photoshop file format support, apparently done better than even Adobe’s Flash CS4 does it) have both come out of the team based right here in St. Paul lead by Bob Pappas and Rick Keeney.

‘Phizzpop Tour’ Pops Into Town, Gets Coldest Day of the Year

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A design competition for interactive agencies, sponsored by Microsoft, breezed into town on January 15 and got a rude shock: the most brutal sub-zero temps and windchills in five years.  Nonetheless, about 300 brave souls huddled inside at downtown hotspot(!) Solera and saw five agencies compete for bragging rights and a free trip to the “South By Southwest” (SXSW) festival/conference in March for the final round of the competition. phizzpop-logo2

Microsoft had plastered us with messages like this one for months: “Join us on the PhizzPop Tour to watch the top agency talent as they show us their Expression Studio and Silverlight skills.”  Get the picture?  Uh-huh, yessiree, they’re trying to sell you software.  But at least they’re out to make it entertaining. And no industry in the world likes a competition more than the ad industry. These folks live for this stuff.  …  [Read More…]