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: Web 2.0 (Page 3 of 9)

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!

Time for “Life 3.0” in the Valley?

May 23, 2007 / / 2 Comments

Back in late 2002, in the doldrum years after the Tech Crash, my friend Rich Karlgaard (the Publisher of FORBES) became compelled to start writing a book about a phenomenon he’d been observing in Silicon Valley. People were leaving in droves — entrepreneurs and other business people, tech workers of every stripe. Good people, successful people, and so many of them disallusioned. Life20cover They’d had it with the expensive living and the rat race up and down the 101, and they were determined to find a better life elsewhere. It’s a great book — called “Life 2.0” — and it’s on my recommended reading list in the right sidebar. He came to Minnesota to interview me when he first began writing it.

Well, hold on, but another book could be in the offing here, from somebody, based on what we read yesterday from two leading Valley-based technology bloggers. First, Michael Arrington launched this bomb on Tech Crunch: Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now…the most telling sentence of which was this: “Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks.” Here’s another excerpt, his concluding paragraph:

I left Silicon Valley at the peak of the insanity last time around, and I was pleasantly surprised when I returned in 2005 to see so much goodwill and community surrounding innovation. Now, it’s just like the old days again, and Silicon Valley is no longer any fun. In fact, it’s turned downright nasty. It may be time for some of us to leave for a while and watch the craziness from the outside again. In a few years, things will be beautiful again. The big money will be slumbering away, and the marketing departments will be a distant memory. We can focus, once again, on the technology. And the burgers and beer.

The post had 210 comments(!) at last count, so it’s obviously hitting a nerve. But, as if that wasn’t enough, Robert Scoble then chimes in essentially seconding the motion. I like Robert — he’s one of the nicest, most likeable, down-to-earth guys you will ever meet in this business. (And his wife, Maryam, is a real sweetheart, too.) So, when Robert talks, I listen. I respect what he says. Well, yesterday, he further enlightened all us unwashed masses of Valley outsiders with what it’s really like to be an insider there these days. And it does not sound particularly pleasant. His post was titled Why I’m in a malaise…, and here’s an excerpt:

I too look wistfully back at the days when we had almost the entire Social Software industry in one little coffee shop back in 2002 — none of whom were talking about making billions of dollars. Back then it was more like the Homebrew Computer Society, where geeks came to show off their stuff (and everyone was pretty much not getting paid anyway so of course we were doing it just for the love of it).

It seems to me that both Robert and Michael are tired of the grind — the relentless parade of me-too companies and legions of PR people and VCs trying to get their attention, and the hellish treadmill they’re on producing content day after day, night after night. You can only do that for so long before you get burned out — and it seems both of them have reached that point.

Then again, who knows, maybe they just need a vacation? What I do know is that I wouldn’t want either of their jobs. Sure, I’m a blogger, but these guys are hardly your typical bloggers anymore. They’re both part of serious, money-making publishing businesses (Robert also being a VP at PodTech), and both inextricably caught up in the big-money world of tech VC. Now it seems they’re both wondering, “Is this all there is?” And it begs the question: is this crazy Web 2.0 startup world getting closer and closer to a bubble burst?

Makes me glad I live in Minnesota, where things are a great deal more sane. And I know Rich Karlgaard would be the first to agree with me.

UPDATE: To add book link.

Web 2.0 Expo: My Recap on Read/Write Web

April 23, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Just saw the post up on Read/Write Web that includes my recap of the Web 2.0 Expo event last week in San Francisco. Web2expo Richard MacManus published his take earlier, then followed with this one that includes my thoughts and those of two other writers that contribute to R/WW and happened to be at the event.

By the way, congrats to Richard on the fourth anniversary of Read/Write Web! He’s come a very long way since those early days — from spare-time sideline to media property. Quite an entrepreneurial story, and one with a international component, too, since Richard has more of a global bent being based in New Zealand. Readwriteweblogo
Richard also used to blog for ZDnet, but now is fulltime on R/WW. What makes the blog so well followed is that it does analysis, not just news bursts about the latest deals and startup launches (though it covers its share of those, too). It’s been amazing to watch its growth.

Minnebar Rocked!

April 22, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Excellent speakers and panels, and a great crowd yesterday at our local BarCamp event. More proof that we have a vibrant tech community here in Minnesota! Major expertise, lots of energized developers and entrepreneurs, and some exciting, budding startups in the works.
Also more proof that online and offline community can be mashed up successfully…. Minnebarlogo

It was great to see a top VC firm in state, Split Rock Partners, as one of seven sponsors of Minnebar. I told partner Michael Gorman he blended right in wearing a tee shirt and shorts — love that! 🙂 And I saw him in the Ruby on Rails session that I also attended. (We have an outstanding group of “RonR” developers here, by the way.)

The turnout for the GetGoMN session was fantastic, with Scott Littman and George Reese telling the story behind the recently launched site to support entrepreneurs. Getgologo175w Lots of great questions and input from several people. I’m convinced that promoting Minnebar on the GetGo site contributed to the record attendance. The biggest turnout yet for a BarCamp in this country! Yeeeee-haww!!!

Minnebarrooftop_2 Photo: Beers on the roof with event sponsors John Roberts (left) and Harold Slawik (right) of New Counsel plc, and Bill McLeslie of ipHouse. The event wi-fi was awesome — Bill hooked us up with 7 megabits of bandwidth. Gorgeous day in the Twin Cities — the high hit 83 F!

Minnebarintraining My favorite photo at the event: We start ’em young here in MN. Matt Bauer, ace developer just recruited to MotionBox in NYC (but he didn’t have to move!), shows a developer-in-training how it’s done. Matt had just finished his session on Adobe Flex.

Lots more photos on my Minnebar Flickr set. Other photo sets are linked on the Minnebar site. I suspect you’ll also be able to read some more about the event at the Star-Tribune’s Vita.MN site and in the Pioneer Press, because they both had people covering the event.

Coolest thing I learned at Minnebar? I met a former Google employee (an early employee), who moved back here from the Valley his wife, who was also a Google employee, and he’s about to launch a cool new web app online. Stay tuned….

Kudos again to the three hardest working event organizers on the planet (volunteers, yet!): Dan Grigsby, Ben Edwards, and Luke Francl…and, especially, a great big thank you to the sponsors. This all-day event is an annual thing, but evening events are held throughout the year, too. So, watch for the next “MinneDemo” and come learn and celebrate Minnesota innovation with us!

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