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.

Tag: Barcamp Minnesota

It Was Another Great ‘Minnedemo’ on Thursday Night

December 9, 2007 / / 0 Comments

On a brisk Minnesota evening in early December, what better to do than get together to drink beer and watch demos with 200+ of your closest tech friends and talk code, startups, business models, and all that good stuff?
Minnedemo1207crowd Thursday night, the scene for Minnedemo again was O’Gara’s Garage in St.Paul, and the joint was a-jumpin’! We didn’t need a band — we were all our own entertainment!
Minnedemo1207ogaras

Thanks to our sponsors, we not only got two free beers (or sodas) each, but we also could trade canned food donations for even more beer tickets, so we could then play big shot and buy beer for our friends. Trading canned food for beer….does_it_get_any_better_’n_that? It was a hoot….lots of great conversation and new friends made. You have to be at one of these things to really appreciate the energy of the Minnesota tech community! If you haven’t caught one yet, make sure you get to the next one in April (date to be announced). Hey, it’s FREE — whadya want?!? 🙂 That one will be the full-day-Saturday version we call “Minnebar.” It all part of Minnesota’s answer to the worldwide phenomenon called Barcamp — and we are definitely one of the most active locales outside the Valley.

Here’s a rundown on Thursday night’s great presenters, including some detail about the very cool new products they were demoing:

Ntractive LLC (Dale Jensen, Cofounder/CEO) – This startup, based in Grand Forks, is a winner of the “InnovateND” award, and is receiving its first-round funding from St. Paul-based RAIN Source Capital. Ntractive has developed a “hybrid” app for small business management called “Elements SBM.” This app, initially for the MacOS, provides web application flexibility with unprecedented ease of use not generally found outside of the traditional desktop application. The result is a visually elegant and technically innovative solution that allows small business users to quickly become more productive. Minnedemo1207dalejensen The company officially launches at MacWorld in San Francisco in mid-January, but chose Minnedemo (yay!) as the venue its first public demonstration. Till now, small businesses had to choose a desktop app or a web app, but, said Jensen, “With our hybrid app, we’ve made it possible for the first time to really have the best of both of those worlds.”

Zencoder Video Transcoding System (Jon Dahl, cofounder of Slantwise Design) – Zencoder provides “bulletproof video transcoding.” Minnedemo1207jondahl It’s described as a full-featured video transcoding platform that handles every aspect of video processing, from queuing to transcoding to storage. Video transcoding systems are complex and difficult to get right, Dahl said. Zencoder claims its platform is reliable and scalable, costs far less than a custom-built solution, and yet is highly customizable. To be notified when it’s released, enter your email address at the site.

Valtira (Morgan Catlin, Product Director) – The Valtira Online Marketing Platform is a complete online solution for marketing professionals. It’s “software as a service” — all you need is a web browser. Valtira manages the IT infrastructure, operations, and upgrades from its Tier 1 data center. The platform empowers the marketing team to manage online initiatives without the need for IT support. Components include Content Management, Campaign Management, Blogging and Forums, Prospect Management, Email Marketing, Sales Portals, Social Networking, Online Surveys, Real-time Analytics, and Support & Training. Valtira just announced a new, free campaign tracking solution that lets you track up to 15 marketing campaigns.

JRuby (Charles Nutter) – JRuby is a 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. The JRuby community recently announced the release of JRuby 1.1 beta 1, the first release toward their goal of JRuby 1.1. JRuby 1.1 represents a concerted focus on speed and refinement. Ruby code can completely compile in an Ahead Of Time (AOT) or Just In Time (JIT) mode, yielding a faster Ruby! It uses less memory than previous releases. The community wants people to download JRuby 1.1b1 and provide feedback: “test your applications and help us make JRuby 1.1 a great release.”

Grapheety (Gavin Quinn) – A map-based social exploration site. All stories and pictures are tagged onto the map by users. For a part-time effort by a bunch of fulltime employed guys, it’s quite an effort. Read more about the latest release here on the Grapheety blog.

All in all, it was another super Minnedemo, and I’m very glad I was there! If you missed it and want more info on the presenting firms, please visit their sites and make contact with them directly. They’ve love to hear from you! Once again, many thanks to co-organizers Dan Grigsby and Luke Francl for another great job, and also to our illustrious sponsors. They’re awesome.

Rock on, Minnesota tech!

Big Week for Tech in Minnesota

October 8, 2007 / / 3 Comments

UPDATE (10/11, 10:00 am): To add links to news about two of the companies pitching at Minnedemo tonight. Be there or be square, dudes! (and dudettes, of course). Here’s some lowdown on FanChatter and Pokeware….and four other startups are presenting as well, as you can see at the Minnedemo web page.

——

Lots of things happening here in the Twin Cities technology community this second week in October. The IPO of local tech darling Compellent Technologies is expected to price tomorrow and start trading on Wednesday. I caught the news as soon as the Wall Street Journal hit my front step at 6 a.m. this morning (page C7): Offerings Rejuvenate IPO Market – Compellent Technologies, Virgin Mobile Will Debut; Heavy Buzz, But Any Pop? (subscription required, but soon Rupert Murdoch may change all that!). Compellentlogo
For those who can’t click through to the story, here are a couple of excerpts:

A computer-network-storage company and a provider of
cellular-phone service will be the focus of the market for initial
public offerings this week.

The market for such deals still is coming back to life
after its late-summer break, with six offerings that together could
raise as much as $1.39 billion scheduled to debut over the next five
days. If all actually make it that far, they will top the
companies that went public in all of September. ….

Compellent Technologies Inc., an unprofitable but
fast-growing computer-network-storage company, is getting much of the
buzz. It is scheduled to begin trading Wednesday on the NYSE Arca under
the symbol CML. Research firm Gartner Inc. named Compellent the world’s
fastest-growing disk-storage company last year, just four years after
it was formed …. Compellent…revenue
doubled in the first six months to $20.9 million, compared with a year
earlier. The company is selling 12 million shares between $10 and $12.

That’s a big IPO, folks — but 12 million shares is a typo. [I love it when I can catch typos in the venerable Wall Street Journal 🙂 ] An accompanying chart (not in the online version) says 6.9 million, which sounds more like it. That will still put the amount raised somewhere in the range of $69-83 million, which makes it the largest tech IPO in this town in quite some time.  Compellent has raised more than $50 million in venture capital, beginning in 2002 with investments by Crescendo Ventures and El Dorado Ventures, both Silicon Valley firms populated by former Minneapolitans I know. [Watch for more from me on Compellent on Wednesday.]

The MN Startup Schmoozin’ Event of the Season
The day after watching the big IPO pop or not, we switch our emphasis to the new, upcoming success stories in the MN startup community! The long-awaited periodic gathering of our local tech entrepreneurs and developers, playfully called Minnedemo, fires up at 6:30 pm on Thursday. Minnedemo
It’s a free event, and is at St.Paul’s legendary Irish bar and restaurant, O’Gara’s (actually, we’ll be in the large, attached venue called O’Gara’s Garage.) This organization is part of the very popular grass-roots BarCamp phenomenon, which is international in scope. The last event we had for our local group, an all-day Saturday event in the spring (see my coverage), was the largest Barcamp event to that date ever in the U.S., with close to 400 in attendance! So, don’t let anyone tell you the Twin Cities isn’t a hot tech market!!  I’m betting this event will pull close to 300, and the first 200 to show up get two free beers or sodas — can you beat that?  That’s courtesy of our illustrious sponsors (see site).  And I’m betting there’ll be some good munchies, too. After an hour of networking, six local startups will demo their offerings [note: no Powerpoint allowed — yeah!]:  Adaptive Avenue, FanChatter, Pokeware, PROserver Virtual Appliance, SOTAcomm, and Wonderfile. (See Minnedemo site for more info and links to those demoing companies.)

The Company That Started It All
I owe a lot to Control Data. I may have been only a mere neophyte when I worked there, but, wow, did they put a lot of trust in me, and did I ever learn a lot.  They actually gave me some rope to do stuff, and they just kept promoting me!  How cool is that?  And I kept stepping up to the challenge. It was a fun, fun ride, and I will forever be grateful to this technology pioneer, this unbelievable cauldron of innovation and entrepreneurship to which our entire state’s IT community owes a huge debt of gratitude — if not its very existence. Cdc50yrceleb_2
Do you realize how many thousands of companies were spawned by Control Data?
I cannot miss this event on Friday, and I invite anyone who’s involved in the local information technology to attend. You’ll be in some very great company! It’s the Control Data 50 Year Celebration at the Minneapolis Convention Center on Friday afternoon, and it’s even free. One of my favorite all-time entrepreneurs will be speaking, a guy I admire tremendously: Larry Jodsaas.  He was a Control Data executive who later risked it all to lead VTC Inc., a Control Data semiconductor spinout, which was a huge success and became a 15-year client relationship for me before it was acquired by Lucent (Agere) in 1999. It’s a great story.  There’s a cocktail reception following this event and, for those who sign up separately, a dinner after that, with U.S. Senator Norm Coleman speaking. I’m really excited about this event, and I hope you’ll join me!

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