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: content (Page 1 of 2)

DoApp Has Been Acquired by Newscycle Solutions

DoApp logoDoApp has gone and done it — and, yes, it’s cool.

The highly successful Minnesota mobile startup has been acquired by Newscycle Solutions, a 500-employee Bloomington MN-based firm that “develops and delivers software technology to empower the global news media industry.” DoApp has developed more than 1,500 mobile apps for the news publishing and broadcast industries.  All DoApp employees will join Newscycle. The acquisition closed on June 10, 2016; the price was not announced.

DoApp was founded in early 2008 by former Google employee Joe Sriver and a small team. It has been entirely self-funded and profitable for six years. Newscycle Solutions is made up four merged companies and is owned by Vista Equity Partners, based in San Francisco, which was the most active firm in the M&A business last year. (Within the past two weeks alone, it acquired Marketo and Ping Identity, deals valued collectively at $2.4 billion.) Continue reading

Stealth MN Startup CRAM is Thinking Big…Really Big: How About Disrupting the Whole World of Digital Home Entertainment?

Cram-logo You say you want unrivaled access to movies, music, television, and educational programming at a price you can afford?  Well, Twin Cities-based CRAM™ Worldwide is taking you up on that. I recently interviewed CEO and cofounder Daren Klum (see MP3 link below) to try to learn more about what he’s up to.  His new startup is out to prove it’s possible to unlock the largest content catalogs in the world so you get true, unlimited content anyplace, anytime — free of tethered connections.  Hey, does that get your juices flowing?

CRAM™ plans to do that with a next-generation digital content delivery device and platform that provides Cram_device consumers with a unique, simple, and interactive approach to accessing digital content. The company has been quietly developing its patent-pending technology and simultaneously planning the launch of a content network that will position it against some of the largest content distributors in the world, such as Comcast, Redbox, and even Netflix. The key is this: the CRAM™ device will provide content in real, actual HD.  My colleague Steve Borsch did an interview of Daren a couple of months ago on Minnov8.com that delves further into the company’s technology. 

Darenklum CRAM™ says its content delivery system not only gives customers a far better user experience, but it’s “a fun way to interact with content.”  And Daren tells me it will be available for a very affordable monthly subscription.  I sat down with him yesterday to talk about his background, how he came to cofound CRAM™, and what the current status is of his startup, as well as his plans for next few months. (For more on Daren and his team, check out the firm’s About page. It is one impressive assemblage of talent.)

Download or listen to my interview with Daren Klum, cofounder and CEO of CRAM™ Worldwide… (MP3 – about 18 minutes)

Podcast: A Chat with the Founders of MN Startup Lawyerist.com

Lawyerist-logo I had the pleasure today to sit down over coffee with the founders of a content site for attorneys called Lawyerist, based in downtown Minneapolis: Sam Glover (left in the photo) and Aaron Street. I met Aaron at a recent monthly lunch meeting of Club Entrepreneur, which is run by my colleague Rick Brimacomb. Lawyerist-founders And, today, I had the opportunity to meet Sam, whom I learned continues as a practicing attorney as well. What I find so interesting about this content site, in addition to it being founded by attorneys (whom you’d not normally think of as having a bent for publishing or content), is that it actually has a business model, with real revenues, based on a subscription offering it launched in January. It’s attracting some leading contributing writers, as well as a significant amount of traffic for such a early-stage business.

Listen in — it’s about a 20-25 minute conversation. Here’s the MP3 file:

Download or listen to Graeme’s interview with the founders of Lawyerist.com(MP3)”.

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Why I Haven’t Been Blogging Much Lately: Micro-Blogging!

So, here’s a chart that shows what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging here.  Yep, micro-blogging on Twitter. There’s a free service for us twitterers (or, as some call us, "tweeple") — it’s called TweetRush, and it lets us graph our recent Twitter activity. Pretty cool. Graemetwitterusage_2

So, for you blog readers out there that may have been wondering why I’m so quiet, I’m really not!  🙂  Heck, 232 tweets since July 19th is pretty darn active, wouldn’t you say?  And virtually none of these tweets is about what I’m eating for breakfast, or some lame thing like that, which is what a lot of Twitter detractors think people do there. Darn near all my tweets or "micro-posts" are news items or insights that I think my "followers" — approaching 400 now — would be interested in. Occasionally, some are replies to certain followers, too — though I prefer to do a lot of that privately via what Twitter calls "Direct Message" or DM.  Some people go nuts with Twitter replies, though — almost using it like group email or IM. Letting everyone sort of be voyeurs into their personal, one-on-one conversations. But I find that quite silly, actually, for the most part. I much prefer to use Twitter to publish useful tidbits and, especially, links that open people up to even more connected knowledge out there — and create conversations on the back channel, whether via DM or email. Twitter is having huge implications in marketing and PR. Game changing, as a matter of fact. I even have a friend — a reporter — who’s about to publish a book called "Twitter Means Business," which gets into a lot of that. (He interviewed me and people from about three dozen other companies.)

Do you use Twitter?  Are you following me there?  If not, please set up your own free account, and then click "follow" here: www.twitter.com/graemethickins. If you’ve already been using it, what do you think of it?  Is it changing your online life, as it is mine?

The Buildup to DEMO Intensifies

Well, it’s 24 hours and counting till the opening of DEMO ’07 tomorrow morning, and the bits are flying. (By the way, here’s the event schedule.) The blogs are lighting up, traffic tripled to yours truly yesterday, and the pre-announcement news releases are starting to hit my in-box. The first was from BUZ Interactive, which has designed a way to send personalized voicemails, mixed with music, to any mobile phone on the planet without having the phone ring. More news just arrived from ThePort.com, which has gone live with the download for its Blerts desktop RSS alerter (Windows only for now). [A quirk about some of the companies on the alphabetical DEMO presenters list — their service or product name is not what they’re listed under, so don’t look under “B”.]

Over at TechCrunch, I’m not surprised to see a post on Splashcast, a cool new Flash player to embed your channels on a website, since it’s where TechCrunch contributor Marshall Kirkpatrick has been working. (Though he, of course, did not write this post — Nick Gonzalez did.) Turns out Marshall has been blogging at the SplashCast web site for some time.

Meanwhile, Pete Cashmore at Mashable did a great post last night called Social Networking at DEMO – Standards Higher than Usual? It’s an excellent rundown of what we can expect in this category over the next two days at the conference.

Who will win the coveted DEMOgod awards? That we’ll learn at the closing media-panel dinner on Thursday evening. The panel will be moderated by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, and will include Victoria Barret, associate editor of Forbes, Larry Magid, tech columnist and CBS News contributor, and Laetitia Mailhes, correspondent for Les Échos. For some insight into the DEMOgod phenomenon, check out a blog post from my old Conferenza colleague, Gary Bolles, about the recent Churchill Club event in San Francisco. I also note that Conferenza is now running some breathless blogging by Sam Perry out in chilly NYC at the AlwaysOn Media conference, which overlaps with DEMO.

More from the desert soon….

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