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: Governor Tim Pawlenty

GetGoMN Gets Goin’ – and I’m In!

A new web site for Minnesota entrepreneurs, investors, and the people who support them was unveiled this week at a press conference hosted by Governor Tim Pawlenty at the Capitol. I was invited, and did manage to get one good photo of the festivites in the very grand and impressive Governor’s Reception Room. [It was an interesting juxtaposition, talking about a new web site in the midst of all the historic surroundings.] I also got to meet the Gov, and I’ll tell you why I was there in a bit.

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GetGoMN is a free service and aims to be nothing less than a MySpace for the state’s entrepreneurs and angel investors. It’s been in the planning stages for more than a year and is a unique collaboration of nine of Minnesota’s leading institutions in education, government, and business. I like the goal of GetGo — it’s simply this: “To make Minnesota a better place to conceive, build, launch, and grow new businesses.”

See how the Star-Tribune covered the news: Website Calling Business Angels. Other local media outlets ran items as well, including The Business Journal. And here’s how my friend and fellow MN blogger, Garrick Van Buren, wrote about it at MNteractive.

GetGo is a great new tool that will help Minnesota entrepreneurs, investors, and supporting organizations find and keep track of one another. But it goes beyond just connecting — it provides a way to share and manage all the documents and information relating to those connections (securely!).

The one-liner is this: “GetGo is where Minnesota’s entrepreneurs get connected, get resources, and get going.” Love that!

Now, more about why I was at the press event, and what this has to do with me: I’m very proud to say I’ve been tapped to be GetGo’s “chief evangelist”! [I’ve always wanted to have a title like that — thank you, Guy Kawasaki, for inventing it… 🙂 ] What does it mean? What will I be doing? Well, I’ll be launching a blog at GetGoMN.org, for one thing — where I’ll now do all my Minnesota-related blog posts. [I’ll reserve Tech-Surf-Blog for things of a more general, national, or global interest. Well, maybe an occasional Minnesota item…] I’ll still be doing my consulting, or course, since this is only a part-time gig. But I’m extremely excited about the potential of GetGo, and really look forward to working with the three founders of this great new site: Tom Kieffer, Scott Litman, and Dan Mallin. They’re really the “chiefs”… 🙂 But I very much share their vision for the site, and I look forward now to working even closer with Minnesota entrepreneurs (if that’s possible!)….

I ask all of you for your support, and keep in mind that the site is just out of beta, so there are still kinks to work out, and lots more good things are yet to come. I’m excited, too, that membership at GetGo, after only a few days, is already exceeding expectations. In the last few days, I’ve invited several of you into my first network at GetGo (which is for my consulting company, GT&A Strategic Marketing), and will be happy to get more of you into that as we get started on GetGo. I’ll have a blog there, too! Many networks are being created as we speak. Start one of your own!

It’s official: entrepreneurship in Minnesota just took one great, big step forward.

Minne-GOOG?

Google has Minnesota in its future — or certainly should. So says my neighbor Ed Kohler, who blogs at TechnologyEvangelist.com. (He’s literally just a couple miles from my place in Bloomington, MN.) He just put up a spectacular pitch for why Google should buy the soon-to-close Ford plant property in St. Paul for a data center site. Ed, you are the man! Talk about a compelling case. Wow, would this ever put Minnesota back on the map as a major computing center. [It really was once. Seriously.]

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The University of Minnesota even brought the “Gopher” search and retrieval protocol to the Internet in 1991. How many of you remember that? I’ll bet Larry, Sergey, and Eric do…

Other states are, of course, all over Google to locate facilities inside their borders. But we can surely make a better case than North Carolina, with all the recent flap going on there regarding the outrageous tax incentives secretly offered to Google. We wouldn’t need to bribe them — we actually have something they could really, really want.

Last year, Larry Page threw a bone to Ann Arbor, Michigan — where he went to undergraduate school — by opening an ad sales office there. I learned about that when I discovered the Ann Arbor SPARK blog suddenly started running me as a “guest blog” one day last year. [Thanks, guys. Never even been there, but happy to help!] Landing that Google office was a coup — well, a morale booster, anyway — for a state that’s in dire need to create jobs to get their economy back on track. But it’s small potatoes compared to what a data center on this jewel of a property on the Mississippi could mean in economic terms, for both Google and Minnesota.

This piece of land is literally a one of a kind. Ford’s been there 83 years! Henry himself purportedly chose the place. I mean, Google — your own hydroelectric dam??? The possibilities for this property, to so many varied interests, are mind boggling. One of those eventual outcomes, of course, would be more high-rise condos. But who the hell wants those? The neighboring residents of Highland Park surely don’t! The battles between forces opposing potential developers for that property are just starting to heat up. And, unfortunately, that could drag on for years. How nice it would be for a big monster player like Google to come in and shorten that process considerably… 🙂

Why, as Ed so eloquently argues, shouldn’t Google take a serious look at the state that brought us such Internet legends as Gopher and the Allaire brothers? [In fact, I’m gonna ping my friends Jeremy and JJ right now and send them this link, so they can weigh in on this, too!]

So, the gauntlet has been tossed. Are you listening, Governor Pawlenty? …and whoever else is actually taking leadership in this state for real economic development. Ed’s laid out the case for the “Minne-GOOG” data center. Now let’s see if our guys have the cajones to pick up the ball and take a run at selling it to Larry, Sergey, and Eric….

Go, Gopher(s)!