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: The Web & Web 2.0 (Page 4 of 41)

Jason Kintzler of PitchEngine Speaking in Twin Cities July 13

According to ace conference organizer Jen Kane of Kane Consulting in Minneapolis, it's now a "brave new
world" in public relations. And to help managers of local businesses
and PR practitioners alike better understand how "new hybrid media
forms" are changing the game, she's flying in a
national speaker who's an expert on the subject. 

JasonKintzlerPitchEngine-logo Called "PR 2.0: The New Tools of the Trade," the event will be held Monday July 13 from 8:00 am till 4:00 pm at the Westin Galleria, 3201 Galleria, in Edina, MN 55435. Jason Kintzler, founder and CEO of
PitchEngine, is the keynote presenter.  PitchEngine, based in Casper, Wyoming, is "a social media release service" that enables PR
professionals to package stories and share them with journalists,
bloggers, and influencers via the social web. (By the way, if you want to follow Jason, here's his Twitter page, which tells us he's also a former journalist, a graphic designer, a fly fisherman, and a snowboarder.)

Said Jen JenKanein announcing the event (she's pictured below, and that's colleague Kary Delaria at right), KaryDelaria "If you’re
in the business of sharing facts, telling stories, starting
conversations, and monitoring dialogue about your company or client,
this is stuff you need to know."   

 The conference will also feature eight breakout sessions reflecting
the most cutting edge and innovative thinking on how to navigate this
rapidly changing industry. I know most all these folks and can attest they know their stuff. Kane-logo

The breakout sessions include:

•  "Using Social Media Behind the Firewall" – Gary Koelling, Best Buy, and Cameron Gross, GreaterThan Media, a consultant to Best Buy.
•  "Pitching Using New Media Tools" – Eva Keiser, Senior Vice President, Risdell McKinney Public Relations.
•  "Online Reputation Management" – Greg Swan, Digital Strategy Manager, Weber Shandwick Digital Communications.
•  "Incorporating Podcasts and Video Into Your Marketing and PR Mix" – Albert Maruggi, founder of Provident Partners and Producer of the Marketing Edge podcast.
•  "Self Publishing for PR" – Arik Hanson, ACH Communications/Chief Blogger, Communications Conversations.
•  "How to Monitor Your Brand Through Social Media Channels" – Connie Benson, Chief Community Officer, Techrigy.
•  "Optimizing Content of Press Releases and Beyond" – Jolina Pettice, Senior Account Manager, TopRank Online Marketing.
•  "Small Brands. Big Results" – Blois Olson, Executive Vice President, Tunheim Partners.

In addition, there will be open lab periods where attendees can
network with others and explore new online PR and marketing tools and
applications.

The organizers tell me that remaining space is limited, but
registration may still be available as you read this.  To register and
see the list of those attending to date, here's the PR 2.0 event registration page. You can also see the press release for the event here: a PitchEngine release, of course!

Can't make the event but still want to schmooze?

You're in luck. Kane Consulting also announced they're holding a
"TweetUp" after the conference from 6:00 to 9:00 pm at Tavern on
France!  You may have seen some buzz about this on our local Social Media Breakfast (SMBmsp) site
— well, now it’s official.  It's your chance to meet Jason Kintzler of
PitchEngine and hob-nob with the local PR digerati.  But you must RSVP here for the TweetUp.  It's open to all.  There’s no cost to attend this evening gathering, and you can simpy order food and drinks off the menu.

See ya there!

GlueCon 09: My Interviews with VCs Brad Feld and Seth Levine

While I was reporting from the first-year Glue Conference the past few days in Denver, I had the opportunity to interview two of the guys behind the scenes in launching and planning this great event: Brad Feld and Seth Levine, partners in VC firm Foundry Group, which is based in nearby Boulder, CO. (Actually, of the two, Seth was more involved in Glue, while Brad was the main guy behind launching a sister event called Defrag, which is held in the fall in Denver, the first one being in November 2007.) 

I had noticed in the days leading up to Glue that Foundry Group had announced a new investment (Gist, whose founder was at Glue), then I saw two more investments they announced on their blogs while the event was going on (Medialets and CloudEngines). So, I decided to see if I could interview both Brad and Seth during breaks on Day 2 of Glue to learn about these latest new portfolio companies of theirs.

Brad (left photo) and Seth typify what I’ve called before The New Face of Venture Investing — a post I actually did in December 2007, which specifically called out Brad. BradFeld   I’ve also written previously about Seth, in a post from June 2008 called The Best Advice I’ve Seen Lately on Using Startup Advisors. They are both really nice guys, wicked smart, and doing great work helping many entrepreneurs build successful startups in a place that…well, is not Silicon Valley.  Yes, they’ve proved in spades that it can be done. SethLevine And, unlike your typical VCs, they do believe in investing outside their own backyard — as is the case with all three of their latest investments.  Sure, many of their portfolio companies are in Colorado, where a lot of innovation is going on (which they’re involved in on a day-to-day basis — including the TechStars program, which they helped launch).  But they’re also smart enough to know great ideas and great teams can live anywhere. I love the way they get involved in these events of theirs — they’re right in the middle of it all, very much a part of the “community” that each of these events they’ve launched really has become. It doesn’t take long to realize that both these guys are “people persons” through and through.

I spoke with Brad first, about the Gist investment, which had been announced the week before, and in particular about the investment they had just announced early that morning, on Day 2 of Glue: CloudEngines.

Download the MP3 of my interview with Brad Feld.

Later the same morning, I spoke at greater length with Seth, primarily about Foundry Group leading a $4M Series A investment in Medialets, which had been announced on Day 1 of Glue.  We also spoke a bit about an earlier investment of Seth’s in the advertising space, AdMeld.

Download the MP3 of my interview with Seth Levine.

For more about the Glue Conference, see my Twitterstream for the past three days.  I must have tweeted darn-near a couple hundred times!  And I saw this morning after I was back in Minneapolis that conference organizer Eric Norlin said he’d just read through all the tweets on the event — 62 pages total!  You can find the whole shebang by going to search.twitter.com and entering “gluecon” in the search box. It was a very successful event by all accounts.  I’m really happy I was part of it, and have already said I’ll sign up for next year! 

How to Get Buzz for Your Startup Launch: Write a Book!

Okay, not everyone can pull this off.  But one experienced Minneapolis tech entrepreneur, George Reese, is doing it in a big way with a new book on "cloud computing."  What's cloud computing, you ask?  Did you just come out from under a rock?   If you're involved in any way in IT, even on the fringes of it, you've been blasted for months with an almost endless amount of media coverage and discussion about this topic — a recent example being on the front page of The Wall Street Journal the other day.  Even most casual Internet users are now aware that many of their consumer web apps are accessed "in the cloud," as opposed to being software they install on their own computers. Google's Gmail is probably the best known example of that.

George Reese is cofounder of a new Minneapolis startup, enStratus, GeorgeReese-headshotand is right smack in the middle of all the buzz. 
Thanks to his new book, which he worked on for six months, he's in a great position to help clear the air surrounding a lot of the cloud computing hype that's flying around out there now.  He's especially interested in helping enterprises that are looking to take advantage of the economic benefits of this form of corporate IT. 

GeorgeReese-book-200w
On April 10, George's new book will be released by O'Reilly Media:  "Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud."  And here's the Amazon link.  It's now available at both these links for pre-ordering. I've known George since 2006, in relation to his previous startup, Valtira (a SaaS marketing platform), from which enStratus is being spun out.  (I also know David Bagley, the CEO of Valtira, who's the other cofounder of enStratus.)  I thought it would be fun to get George's thoughts about this uber-hot topic of cloud computing, and hear the story behind his book.  This is an interview I conducted with him earlier this week, which first appeared on the cloud computing site Cloud Ave. and, later, on our own Minnesota tech news site, Minnov8.

Graeme:  How long have you been involved with cloud computing, and what made you decide to write this book?

George:  I suppose that depends on what you mean when you say "cloud computing." I've been developing SaaS systems for the past five years, but got into Amazon Web Services and Infrastructure as a Service in late 2007 when my company Valtira needed an alternate approach to a high-availability infrastructure. During this time, I've developed a body of experience in putting transactional database applications into the Amazon Cloud.  My editor at O'Reilly, with whom I've written several books in the past, heard I was doing cloud work and asked me to put together a book on the subject.

Graeme:  Why is cloud computing gaining adoption like it is?  What is its attraction?  We know Internet and IT startups love it, but do you think it will catch on in any significant way with larger enterprises?

George:  The primary attractions to cloud computing are cost and flexibility. Cloud computing enables you to build out a world-class IT infrastructure with no up-front capital investment and pay for the growth of your infrastructure as the business it is supporting grows.

I believe enterprise IT has a strong need for the benefits of cloud computing, but they have higher expectations with respect to reliability and scalability than startups. My company enStratus is all about dealing with these two concerns for enterprise IT, and I talk a lot about that in the book.

Graeme:  For what types of readers did you primarily write the book? What will they get from it that they can't get elsewhere?

George:  The book is for people tasked with making the move into the cloud and guiding them through that move. I start by establishing what the cloud means from my perspective and what its value is to an organization. The book covers how you evaluate what makes sense to move into the cloud and, once the decision is made, the security, availability, and disaster recovery planning necessary to operate at an enterprise level in the cloud.

Graeme:  Do you deal in the book with the issue of choosing a cloud computing provider? In not, why not?  Do you attempt to compare providers?

George:  No. Anything I might say in the way of a comparison would be out of date by the time the book hit the shelves. Jeff Barr from Amazon reviewed the book for technical accuracy, and E.J. Johnson from Rackspace and Randy Bias from GoGrid both provided appendices describing their offerings.

Graeme:  What are some of the other key issues you deal with in the book, such as security and reliability of the cloud?  And what does the book deliver that's not available elsewhere?

George:  Given my role at enStratus, cloud security and reliability are obviously key concerns of mine. I spend an entire chapter on security issues and cover how to architect your applications for maximum availability throughout the book. I have not seen much of this kind of talk available on the Internet; mostly warnings about how security and availability are things you should worry about.

Graeme:  Readers of the book will also learn about the management tools you have developed for use in your own company, Valtira, which offers a SaaS marketing platform. Please tell us how those tools led to the formation of a separate, spinoff company.

George:  Valtira was looking to build out a new service offering that required a high-availability infrastructure. We priced out a managed services infrastructure to support our needs, but that proved too costly for a new product offering. We then turned to the Amazon cloud to see if it would meet our needs. We ran into a number of obstacles along the way. Some of these obstacles have since been addressed by Amazon through new service offerings like Elastic Block Storage. For other obstacles, we built out tools to take care of things. It turns out that people who were not Valtira customers really wanted our tools, so we spun them out into enStratus.

Graeme:  You began working on the book many months ago. The release of the book seems now to be right at a time of intense focus on cloud computing, undoubtedly driven in part by current economic conditions.  What's your take on all the hype?

George:  Cloud computing is the most disruptive technology to hit business since the Web. It's not hype. Like any disruptive technology, however, there's a lot of misinformation flying around. To make matters worse, every person has a different internal definition of "the cloud" that frames their discussions on the subject. So, the hype is warranted, but everyone needs to pay particular attention to context and definitions in their discussions.

Graeme:  With the book's release, your speaking schedule is naturally heating up.  Please tell us where people can find you in coming weeks and months.

George:  Well, first, I'll be presenting at CloudCamp in New York City on April 1. Following that, O'Reilly has a webcast on "Getting Started with Amazon Web Services" scheduled for April 8.  In Minneapolis, I'll be speaking at the Minnesota High Tech Association's spring conference on April 15, and then at CloudCamp Minneapolis/St. Paul on April 18 at the U of MN.  Recently, my company enStratus was chosen as a presenting startup at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View, CA, on April 24.  The following month, I'll be speaking on the topic of information privacy and security in the cloud at the Glue Conference in Denver on May 12. Then it's off to London, where I'll be speak on May 15 at WebTech Exchange 2009 on the topic of hardening an EC2 infrastructure.

Graeme:  That definitely qualifies as a whirlwind, George! Thanks for taking some time to tell us about your book, and I look forward to seeing you at some of these upcoming events.

By the way, follow George on Twitter @GeorgeReese and his company's tweets @enStratus.

(Disclosure: the author has a consulting relationship with enStratus.)

DEMO 09 – A Closing Conversation With Some Buddies…

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~blog has an impromptu, rambling, fun discussion with Steve Larsen, Erik Haus, and Chris Gammill, on the Pavilion showfloor of the DEMO ’09 conference as it winds down. The event was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.

Talk about an impromptu podcast!  This is kind of a “DEMOgang” thing, as it were…with my longtime buddy Steve Larsen, a serial starup founder and former CEO of Krugle Inc. (just acquired), which he debuted at DEMO ’06 … Eric Haus, a product manager at Zuora … and another buddy, Chris Gammill, who’s a startup advisor in LA and had previously been with a DEMO presenting company, in ’07; he was attending DEMO this time with TechZulu.com, which did video coverage.  The four of us just happened to converge to the same table in the midst of some of the Pavilion stations to unwind with a glass of wine — and we ended up having a very fun, weird, rambling bull session on everything from startups, to chemistry experiments, to motorcycles — totally ad hoc stuff, and the discussion ended up being my longest podcast recording of the whole event!  Yikes — a 10-meg MP3!  At one point, one of the guys asked if I was going to edit it, and I said, hell no, I don’t have time for that.  So, here, friends, the full, uncut version…  (In the photo, left to right: Chris Gammill, Erik Haus, and Steve Larsen.)  What a way to end another great DEMO!

ChrisErikSteve-DEMO09

Download the MP3

DEMO 09 – Closing Interview With Chris Shipley

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~blog interviews Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO ’09 conference, which was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.
Before I called it another DEMO, I just had to grab a moment with longtime executive producer Chris Shipley. Chris had been struggling with a bit of hoarse voice for most of the event, but held up remarkably well through till the end, when she introduced the seven “DEMOgod Award” winners (Coveroo, Silverstone, PureWire, Gwabbit, Ontier/Pixetell, Skout, and Avaak/Vue), and the People’s Choice award winner (SmartyCard). I wanted to get her take as she wrapped up this second-to-the-last DEMO of her marvelous 13-year career with this event (she’s co-producing the DEMOfall ’09 event with Matt Marshall).

ChrisShipley-OnStage

Download the MP3

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