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: Graeme Thickins (Page 45 of 55)

GetGoMN Gets Goin’ – and I’m In!

March 4, 2007 / / 2 Comments

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.

Entrepreneurs: Work on Your Conceptual Metaphors!

February 28, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Being smack in the middle of Entrepreneurship Week, I can’t think of a better link to point my startup readers to today than this blog post by Will Price, which he published yesterday. Will is a VC at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. In this very thoughtful piece, he nails one of the most important, yet little talked about, aspects of preparing to pitch VCs. Okay, it’s somewhat academic — yes, we’re talking here about “conceptual metaphors,” people. But this is great stuff! And, after all, conceptual metaphors is really what mathematics is all about, right? So, startup founders out there who are programmers and engineers can especially relate. [There’s a reason, I’ve come to learn, that so many successful entrepreneurs and VCs were math majors, or had a heavy dose of it in engineering school. This piece kind of brings this reality home.]

I now have this post on my Recommended Must-Read List for anyone even thinking about ever approaching VCs for money. Save this link, friends, and learn and practice what it’s telling you. You will need it!

While we’re at it, there’s another great piece you should check out today on Startup Journal: Young Entrepreneurs Face Higher Hurdles — worth reading even if you’re not so young.

We Celebrate Entrepreneurs This Week – Hugged One Lately?

February 26, 2007 / / 5 Comments

You should, because they’re what makes our world go ’round — well, our economy, that’s for sure. I saw a stat this morning in a Flickr post of Steve Jurvetson’s from his talk at Stanford this weekend. More than 70% of college students today will start a company some time in their life. A remarkable stat, but it comes from the Kaufmann Foundation, so it must be true. [I guess I feel sorry for the other 30%.]

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Here’s the lowdown on Entrepreneurship Week, which has Kaufmann all over it. [What an amazing organization, and right here in the Midwest, too, just down I-35 a piece in KC.] And here’s where you can see what’s going on in Minnesota relating to this week’s celebration. [Click the arrow under “Activities” to scroll through everything.]

I’m for sure going to catch the Angel Investing Panel on Wednesday afternoon (after all, I now write for The Angel Journal, so, I’d better). And an event on Tuesday afternoon in St.Paul, featuring Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, should be great.

Then, I’m also planning to drop in on a talk at the Carlson School by Scott Litman over lunchtime on Thursday, which will look at several things relating to Entrepreneurship in Minnesota. No doubt Scott will talk about the new web site for Minnesota entrepreneurs and small businesses being launched on Wednesday: GetGoMN, which I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with a bit. The StarTribune gave that a nice boost this morning, with a piece on the front page of the business section called Website Calling Business Angels.

Hope to see you at some of these events this week!

Split Rock Coughs Up Big Bucks for Local Firm (Do Tell)

February 23, 2007 / / 2 Comments

But don’t get too excited — it’s just another late-stage deal. Why are we not surprised? Gearworks, as reported by the Pioneer Press, just closed on yet another $21 million in VC, of which our local Split Rock Partners contributed $7.5 million. Pilesofcash The partner on the deal is, of course, Michael Gorman. Yes, that’s a lot of money in a single round for a MN tech firm. And it now means that Gearworks has raised — are you ready? — a total of $59 million since its founding back in 1999. Of course, they blew threw a lot of that cash in a model since adandoned, but they seem to be onto a real market now for location-based services. Gearworkslogo It must be a good market, because for this much money to be invested, and now the conservative late-stage guys coming in, there has to be a big payback seen just over the horizon. [IPO?] Well, less so of a payback for the late-stage money, I guess…

But all this big-bucks stuff has little meaning to people in the early-stage investment world, where I know most of us live. For a strange juxtaposition to the above news, check out this video of the latest panel that Guy Kawasaki moderated. It’s amazing how companies today can get launched with so little capital — at least when the Internet is central to what they do. Many of ’em all but thumb their noses at VCs — I hear it all the time. One guy I heard it from recently was Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, chatting with him last month at CES/Bloghaus. What some of these guys are able to do, with such minimal startup funding, is amazing. More power to ’em!

Shut Down by Google, They’re Baack – with ‘iReader’

February 20, 2007 / / 0 Comments

A Minneapolis-based tech firm, almost put out of business by Google last year with for scraping its site with its ePrecis technology, is back today as Syntactica. [As Syntactica president Henry Neils said to me last week, “Like they don’t scrape everything out there.” Hah!] Under this new company name, they’re introducing the iReader Web Previewer tool. Ireaderlogo So, take that Google! It previews the content of a web link without clicking on it — by studying the language, the linguistics, behind it. Pretty heavy stuff, but this team of developers has been working on perfecting this technology for years, so this is certainly no upstart. Perhaps they’re onto an application of it now that will stick, and that the powers-that-be will allow to happen. User acceptance will tell the story, of course, and that’s why reaction in the blogosphere will be big for these guys. Smartly, they’re opening the technology up via open source XML web services, I learned last week.

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Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has already done a great post called iReader Previews The Content Behind Links. It tells the story well, so I won’t repeat it. It’s also worth taking a look back to see what he blogged about ePrecis in October 2005 on ZDnet, calling it “next generation search.” [By the way, the old ePrecis site, which, interestingly, still shows up in a Google search(!), won’t seem to come up today. Must be getting hit too hard.]

The beta they just launched is an easy plug-in install for IE or Firefox (Mac or PC), and it’s sure to create a lot of conversation out there. Try it out on some of your favorite news sites, like the NY Times, CNN, MSN, etc. Seems to work great on the story links down near the bottom of the NY Times page, for example, where stories are grouped into categories. Let me know what you think. Or better yet, tell the company: they’re about to launch their blog, too, where you can do that.

Note one VERY KEY thing: you can turn the iReader plug-in on or off! So, if it’s bothersome to have these little “preview windows” showing up for you on some sites, just right-click your mouse to toggle it on and off. Not sure how you do it on a Mac yet, though, in Firefox. I think they’re adding some notes on the downloading page…

[Disclaimer: I have a consulting relationship with Syntactica.]

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