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 6 of 55)

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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Details of Minnesota Startup SMB:LIVE’s Acquisition by ReachLocal

SMBlive My local followers here in Minnesota may have heard about the acquisition of local startup SMB:LIVE this past week. The company was known more in these parts by the name of its service, CloudProfile, which had gotten some local buzz due to a test program it had going with Best Buy.  In fact, the day the acquisition was announced, the brand-new March issue of Twin Cities Business magazine landed on my desk, with a glowing piece on the company, under the headline Found in the CloudsCloudProfile So much for the timeliness of monthlies: just the day before, the company had ceased being an independent Minnesota firm, becoming part of a high-flying Southern California firm, which has filed for an IPO.

ReachLocal

And I now have the details of what the acquirer — ReachLocal — paid for the firm. I simply asked my friends at socalTECH.com, a great site that covers the tech community out there, where ReachLocal is based. And, thanks to my prodding late yesterday 🙂 they took another look — proceeding to discover just the data I was looking for, which was in a filing they hadn't checked till they saw my email.

So, here's the deal: the purchase price was $2.8M in cash, plus up to $5.7M dependent on milestones — for a total of $8.8M, including assumptions of some liabilities. That's according to Ben Kuo, editor at socalTECH.com, who told me ReachLocal had buried the information in an S-1 addendum, and had not announced it in their earlier news release.

Not a bad payday for a firm that had barely released their site into the wild. Congrats to founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson. (Read more about him and his small team here.)  For more on the deal, see socalTECH's coverage that was updated last night.  And here's another site in SoCal with a page that groups socalTECH's previous stories on ReachLocal, including their filing for an IPO in late December.


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I’m Liking This ‘Spark Radio’ App – and It’s from a MN Startup

Is it possible to design a radio app that delivers the ultimate radio experience, complete with visually stunning graphics and social media capabilities, too?  SparkRadio-200w Minneapolis’ own Handcast Media Labs LLC thought so, set out to prove it, and just launched the result on the iTunes App Store a couple of days ago.  It’s called Spark Radio (press release), and works on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s available for $5.99 at this link at the App Store.

I grabbed it the day it came out and have used it multiple times since, in a variety of situations — at home, on a road trip, even in a foreign country (Iowa) — and I must say I’m impressed.  Right now, I’m listening to a great station that’s all Grateful Dead all the time, which I discovered via the app. It’s called RadioIO Dead, and “Big Boss Man” has been my favorite track so far.  I’m on wifi in my motel room at the moment, and the sound is perfect — and I’m not even using an external speaker.  On the way down here to Des Moines, I used the app via my iPhone on AT&T’s 3G network (note: I was in the passenger seat!) to tune in multiple stations, including WSL in Chicago, and the sound was way better than any station I could tune in on the car radio.

Spark Radio not only gives you tons of station choices and social media features designed to make radio listening more interactive, but it also features visually stunning animations. Far out, huh?  Its robust, visual radio tuner uses the guide from a company called RadioTime.com to give you access to more than 10,000 terrestrial and Internet-only radio stations worldwide.  Handcast says it’s adding new stations to Spark Radio daily, and will support more than 30,000 stations by April.  You can listen to precisely what you want to at any given time — music, talk radio, sports events, public radio, or special programming from around the world.  Its elegant interface lets you search for stations or programs by keyword, location, or the station URL, and you can browse programming by genre or location. (I’m still looking for two of my fav genres: rockabilly and surf.)  A GPS component lets you find local stations in any given city based on current GPS coordinates.

I took the opportunity to dial up the founder of Handcast Media Labs, Terry Anderson, whom I’d met in 2008, to ask if he’d be up for an interview. That follows.

Graeme:  Terry, I know you’re no newcomer to interactive and Internet marketing here in Minnesota. Give us a synopsis of your background.

Terry Anderson:  Well, I’ve been involved in technology for almost 30 years now.  I founded e.Media group in 1995 and we were one of the early interactive agencies in the Twin Cities, with a lineup of really great national clients.  That was incredibly fun.  I sold that agency in 2004 (it's now known as Idea Park) and have been involved in entrepreneurial ventures since.  I got energized by the iPhone platform in 2008 and have been working in that sphere since then.

Graeme:  How did you come to start Tiny Wonder Studios, and then Handcast?  And tell us about the rest of your team.

Terry Anderson:  Tiny Wonder is a division of Popular Front, an incredible interactive agency here in the Twin Cities.  I’m involved as a consultant and helped form the new entity and create Pixi, their first iPhone app.  I’ve been close friends with Laurence Bricker of Popular Front since we were young. Laurence is a true visionary in the interactive world and it was great to collaborate with him once again.  HandCast Media Labs is my own startup, specializing in iPhone applications.  I needed a place to pursue my own ideas, so started HandCast in the spring of 2009. We’re trying to push the limits of technology and creativity.  There are a number of people involved, but the nucleus includes Greg Sharp, a visionary and longtime partner of mine, and Jesse Hemmingway, who is simply the best developer I’ve ever worked with.  It’s an incredible group and we’ve been collectively pushing the boundaries for a long time now.

Graeme:  I grabbed that first app from Tiny Wonder, the Pixi drawing app (see screenshot), right when it came out.  Refresh my memory — when did that hit the App Store?  And how has it done since then? PixiApp-200w

Terry Anderson:  Pixi was developed as an experiment and hit the iTunes store about a year ago. (It’s available for $1.99 at this link on the App Store.)  We wanted to learn the intricacies of iPhone development and start figuring out what it would take to successfully market an app on iTunes.  It’s a beautiful and highly creative application.  It continues to sell moderate amounts on the store, but we never really put enough marketing energy behind Pixi.  We get comments all the time that Pixi is the best app on the store and we know we have a significant audience if we can reach them.  Look for a Pixi re-launch in the upcoming months.  We have some very exciting things planned.  One thing we’ve learned is that iPhone apps need a formal marketing plan, just like any other consumer product.  There are simply so many applications available on iTunes that you need to find a way to become visisble.  We’re excited about the future of Pixi.

Graeme:  Did you develop any other apps after Pixi, either for the iPhone or other mobile platforms?

Terry Anderson:  Before we began work on Spark Radio, we began a prototype of what I’ll describe as a geo-spatial game.  That project has been put on a back-burner for now.  I believe if we can make it work, it could be a mega-hit.  But the scope is very substantial and we decided to focus on titles we could get completed in a reasonable period of time.  Stay tuned.

Graeme:  So, let’s talk now about the Spark Radio app. What made you decide to do a radio app? What did you think you could bring to this category that others weren’t doing already?  Aren’t there tons of streaming radio apps?

Terry Anderson:  When we launched Pixi, we were overwhelmed with the number of people who asked if the Pixi animations could possibly interact with music from the iPhone or iPod.  It turns out that Apple has made that impossible.  We began looking at other ways to make that happen and came up with the idea of streaming radio, where we have control over the audio stream.  We knew that including graphic visualizers would give us a point of difference from the competition.  We also got very excited about the idea of global radio, and decided to include some social features to support that idea.  I think it’s fascinating that someone in South Korea is listening to a hip-hop station out of Paris.  We’re in love with that idea.  The decision to do a radio app was fairly pragmatic.  My research showed that this was a very lively niche within iTunes and that people were looking for quality.  While there were a number of products out there already, we felt that nobody had really developed a robust product with an elegant user interface.  We knew that if we made the experience more fun for listeners, we could succeed.  We launched two days ago and are already #32 on the iTunes list of best sellers, so I think we called that one correctly.  We’re very proud of the product and have some great enhancements coming.

Graeme:  How long did take you to develop Spark?  And do you have plans to do versions of it for any other platforms?

Terry Anderson:  It took us eight months to develop Spark Radio.  That was complicated by the fact that our lead developer broke his collarbone somewhere in the middle of the project!  He took a bad fall on his bike one night and it was impossible to have someone take over his part of the project.  So, say seven months if you eliminate the injury.  That was a tense time, but it all turned out well.  We have always planned to do an Android version of Spark Radio.  We’re very excited about Android and hope to support it in parallel with iPhone.  We have some concerns about the graphics performance on Android, but we’ll figure that out as we go.

Graeme:  Being a longtime promotion guy, you have a pretty cool giveaway going on now for the Spark Radio app.  Tell us about that.

Terry Anderson:  I hate to call it a promotion.  We’re simply giving away 500 iTunes gift certificates ($10) to friends as a celebration of our launch, so they can download Spark Radio for free.  If your readers want to participate, they can email us their name & email address and we’ll send them the gift certificate.  It’s a way for us to show appreciation for all the great friends who have supported us over the years.  They can send their info to sparkgift (at) handcastmedia (dot) com.

[Blogger's note to the FTC: no freebie coupon here — I bought my own app!]

Graeme:  So, Terry, what’s next for Tiny Wonder and Handcast?  What growth plans do you have for your ventures?

Terry Anderson:  As I mentioned, we have great plans for Pixi, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on the bestseller list by summer.  The success of Spark Radio has been overwhelming, but we’ll keep working until we get to the top of our category.  HandCast will be developing a new title soon and we’re also pitching some ideas that are too large for us to execute on our own.  Given the success of Spark Radio, we’re being contacted for some very interesting contract work as well.  It’s all good.

———–

Thanks, Terry.  A company that develops apps “designed to entertain the senses” can’t be all bad.  And I like how Handcast further describes its vision as “empowering users to explore their own creativity by meeting their entertainment-on-the go needs.”

You can learn more at the Handcast Media Labs web site, and you can follow Spark Radio on Twitter and on Facebook.

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My Talk on Blogging and Social Media at ‘Club Entrepreneur’

I gave a presentation on blogging and social media recently to the monthly lunch meeting of our local "Club Entrepreneur," which was launched within the past year by Rick Brimacomb. ClubEntrepreneur-logo About 60 people attended, more than they'd had at previous meetings, so we got to meet in the larger, main dining room of the Minneapolis Club — which is just awesome (quick iPhone photo included here, which I shot afterwards).

What a treat to present in such an historic place!  MplsClub The date was February 4, 2010.  After the event, I uploaded a pdf of my 64-slide deck to SlideShare: I titled the talk, Why Launch a Company Blog and Use Social Media.

I originally created the presentation in Keynote on my Mac, with lots of nice transitions and builds, which you can't see on the SlideShare pdf, of course.  You can in the QuickTime movie of the Keynote file that I also created, but that's 238 megs, so I won't expect you to download that… 🙂

(Note: A shout-out to authors David Meerman Scott, Debbie Weil, Brian Solis, Ann Handley, and Tara Hunt, whose work I cited in parts of this presentation. They are all heroes of mine.)

Also, I audio-recorded myself making the presentation, with my little whiz-bang podcast machine — my Olympus LS-10. So, if you'd like to listen as you go through the SlideShare pdf, here's the MP3 file:

Download or listen to Graeme's presentation at the Minneapolis Club, "Why Launch a Company Blog and Use Social Media (MP3)".

The talk was 45 minutes, with about 12 minutes additional of Q&A at the end. You can't hear some of the audience questions very well but, overall, the recording turned out better than I thought it would — I just tried it as an experiment, setting the device on the projector table (mounted on a mini-tripod), about 12-15 feet away from me.  It worked well, though next time I'll get closer to the LS-10, so the volume level will be a little better.

If you'd like to have me give this presentation, or a variation of it, at your company, or as part of a workshop for a group of employees, please hit my email link at the top right. Thanks!

External Community Platform blueKiwi™ Announces Free Version

BlueKiwi-banner350 Marketers, community managers, and innovation teams, listen up. blueKiwi, which calls itself "the global conversation company," today announced the availability of a free version of its well-established Social Business Platform. The company, based in France, has raised $12M in two rounds of venture capital and just opened a San Francisco office. It touts as customers such leading global brands as Alcatel-Lucent, Allianz, BNP Paribas, Cap Gemini, Dassault Systemes, Nokia, Microsoft, and Rainmaker, and partners including Accenture and Logica. BlueKiwi-logo

The new, free version delivers all the social media tools necessary to create vibrant online communities with external audiences. That's the key difference to understand with blueKiwi, differentiating it from such offerings as Jive, Socialtext, and Yammer, which are all focused on the internal employees of an enterprise. 

blueKiwi lets you monitor and manage external voices and bring the best of those conversations inside the company to make better decisions about products, services, and business strategies. That latter point is another key difference with this platform, as Erica Lee, VP of marketing, told me: "It's much more than crowd-sourcing for customer service. It's about building great products."

The company positions its solution as one that takes conversations "from discussion to ideation to action." The blueKiwi platform combines collaboration, microblogging, document sharing, polling, widgets, and an ideation process into a single solution. Community managers can engage, listen, and leverage the intelligence of both internal and external community members, in an ongoing conversation, and take the best ideas and turn them into reality.

"Too many products cater to internal people. The real power of enterprise 2.0 is bridging between external audiences and internal groups. If you don't complete the loop from external to internal, you lose the value and can't take the social advantage," said Carlos Diaz, CEO of blueKiwi Software.

What do you get with the free version? You can have up to 10 internal members, and unlimited external members, though you are limited to one external community. That makes it ideal for smaller firms or nonprofits. Larger or midsized firms would choose the Premium Version, at $699 per month, which allows up to 50 internal members, unlimited external members, and five external communities. Big enterprises get unlimited everything, at special, negotiated pricing.

Yes, the Kiwi Is a Fruit, Therefore…

The company also announced today the launch of its "Fruitful Conversations Community." Love that name!  Accessed through the blueKiwi website or within the product, this online community is open to any blueKiwi customer, whether they're using the free, premium, or enterprise versions. In this community, clients and prospects can discuss critical success factors for community management, how to engage members, and measuring and leveraging conversations from the crowd.

"In today's business environment, everyone is managing a community of some sort, and their greatest challenge is finding new and innovative ways to engage those communities," said Erica Lee. "With the 'Fruitful Conversations Community', we're creating a space for people with the same challenges to discuss and overcome some of the hurdles of community management. And we'll invite some of the community gurus from around the globe to join us in these conversations as we all learn to listen and then leverage the crowd."

I'm on it! I signed up for my free account, and am joining Fruitful Conversations. Anything that can make managing a community easier is a good thing, because this function is becoming so important for any business today.  In the signup process, after getting my confirmation email (which took 6 or 7 hours to arrive, likely due to time-zone differences), I particularly liked the way the "Community Rules" were presented — very well written and explained.

Graeme_blueKiwi

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