Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Innovation (Page 3 of 77)

I’ll Be Live-Blogging the ‘Pioneer Summit’ Again Next Week

September 9, 2016 / / 0 Comments

pioneersummit-logodatesI’m heading out to the Bay Area in a few days to once again cover a great tech conference called the Pioneer Summit, put on by GSV Labs in Redwood City, CA. I loved reporting on it last year — as evidenced by my extensive liveblog. (They moved it up from October to September this year.)

I’m looking forward to the program, which is jam-packed. Is this enough speakers for you? Here’s one my data geek friends would like. And hearing what this Silicon Valley legend has to say will be pretty awesome as well.

What is GSV Labs, you ask? It’s “a campus of innovation” — I like that description! A very cool place indeed. It’s focused on accelerating high-growth, high-impact verticals in the areas of EdTech, Sustainability, Big Data, and Mobility. Utilizingpioneersummit-celebrate GSV Labs’ resources, founders and entrepreneurs join a global network of ecosystem partners, including corporations, international agencies, mentors, universities, investors, thought leaders, and non-profits. From its Silicon Valley campus, GSV Labs houses about 100 startups, provides acceleration programs, and hosts events.

My connection to GSV Labs is through my colleague Mark Moe (who lives here in the Twin Cities) — he’s VP of Global Business Development. Look forward to seeing you there, Mark, and I’m sure some other Minnesotans who’ll be in attendance, as there were last year.

I guess I’d better start getting my live-blogging fingers loosened up — which means not just providing commentary, but shooting a whole lot of iPhone pics to go along with it. This will be fun!

TruScribe Summons Kickstarter to Get You ‘Talking’

April 12, 2016 / / 0 Comments

TruScribe-crowdsourcingThought you’d heard it all on Kickstarter? Well, how many times have you run into a project there that’s about launching a language? You read that right. Get your credit cards out, startup and crowdfunding lovers: here’s your chance to say you were there back in ’16 when history was made.

But here’s the deal: you gotta tell a lot of your friends, because the folks at TruScribe have set a pretty hefty goal for this one: it’s $100k.  Of course, that’s befitting the ginormous implications here — I mean, how often do you get to impact the entire freaking global community, with that single audacious goal to allow everyone on the planet to communicate visually? This is big stuff, people!! What’s a lousy little 100 Grover Clevelands?

TruScribe, as you’ll recall, is a whiteboard video animation company that was cofounded in Minnesota. (I TruGlyph-logowrote about them here on Minnov8.com back in 2014.) A large part of its staff is in Madison WI, but Minneapolis became its headquarters a while back, with great new digs at International Market Square. It was named the 253rd fastest-growing company on the Inc. 5000 list in 2015, which was understandably touted far and wide. (As a point of reference, crazy-fast-growing LeadPages of Minneapolis was #220.) In February 2016, TruScribe announced the first part of its new initiative to transform into a full-fledged software business, with a new iOS app called TruGlyph. (You can download the app here.)

What’s coming next you can see in their new (and very first) Kickstarter project. Here’s an excerpt from that page on what it’s all about: Continue reading

Quantifying the Hype: A Data Analysis of #CES2015

January 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

cesThink of it as the morning after. Actually, it was the Monday following the week when 2015 International CES ended, on a Friday. I was scrolling through my email, trying to decompress — feeling some pride in surviving multiple weeks of being blasted with hundreds (thousands?) of PR pitches from an absolutely cuh-razy variety of exhibiting companies, from all over the globe. The blisters on my feet weren’t hurting so bad anymore. Whew! Things were finally starting to… slow… down.

Part of this decompression process is always trying to form in my head my overall opinion of the show — this after writing a couple of posts (and shooting a ton of photos), but no one person can ever really write enough posts to describe their entire experience at this thing. Which begs the question, how the hell do I summarize yet another year of this massive tech-product sensory overload? It is not easy netting it out!

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Darn You, #CES2015 – You Made Me Buy a Pono Music Player

January 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

ponoI didn’t go to the CES show looking to buy anything. I was already spending enough money getting there… and, um, making cabbies rich once I arrived. But the chance to listen to Neil Young’s Pono music player at the Showstoppers press event at CES on Tuesday evening last week convinced me to open my wallet. The experience was just so amazing.

Understand, now, I’m no audiophile or crazy-geeky music connoisseur. But I do know when I hear something that’s like nothing else. So I decided pretty instantly — yep, I’m a buyer! At $399, it’s a bargain to be able to have on-demand music experiences that rise above anything else, as Pono does. And as I considered the cost, I figured, hey, how many people paid this much and more for iPods back in the day? (Even though I admit I didn’t.) So, price is especially relative in this case.

Compare your iPod to the Pono sometime, if you can find someone who owns one, or if you can find a demo unit in a store. You will be convinced. Or compare it to the sound quality of any of the various modern smartphones out there today — those sure haven’t improved music listening much at all since the iPod, in any way I’m aware of.

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I Crashed the Volkswagen Press Conference at #CES2015

January 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

vwpavilioinWell, actually, I didn’t crash it (I had a press pass), but I did stumble in late… 🙁 Would you believe, just as it was wrapping up? Damn long cab rides! But there were still lots of people milling about on stage, and both the vehicles were still there. So, I grabbed some photos, and the press kit on my way out.

The red car is the Golf R Touch, which was attracting the most attention, and the white car is an e-Golf, their electric car, which looked lonely in comparison. (But who needs that now with cheap gas, right?!) They showed a “Connected Golf” version of that car, which is a set of features that seems to be their major focus at CES.

As a big VW guy myself — I’ve owned or leased six or seven of them in my lifetime, and I’ve been driving them exclusively for 10 years now — I just had to find out what was new.

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