Entrepreneurship : Featured Stories

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: A wild chalkboard mural full of literary allusions enlivens the SubText bookstore's subterranean Saint Paul space.

"The ingredients for a successful startup and a successful city are remarkably similar," wrote Jon Bischke, a guest blogger on TechCrunch. A group of urban leaders recently met in Cincinnati to explore the implications of that statement--and came up with a cluster of surprising ideas for urban vitality.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: Watch the local entries in the 48-Hour Film Project--and quaff a microbrew or two.

Every organization that wants to make a buck wants a social-media presence. But do you have any idea what the Facebook fan page, the Twitter feed, the Foursquare ID really imply for your business? Pioneer social-media onsultant Jennifer Kane knows, and she compares it to parenthood.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: Online tools for zeroing in on mobile eats.

The debut of a new market in Minneapolis' Linden Hills neighborhood underlines the exciting upsides--and a few lesser-known downsides--of the farmers' market boom.

They show up in unlikely places around town--scores of yoga practitioners practicing their poses and tossing charitable contributions into a kitty. It's rogue yoga and grassroots philanthropy, and as it grows in popularity, the three women who started it want to keep it unpredictable.

We check in with the literate, stylistically adventurous singer, rapper, writer, and Doomtree hip-hop collective member to get her take on the Twin Cities as a creative community and a nurturer of bold DIY music.

Need a kicky pair of high heels or an affordable, eco-friendly coffin? Two shops sharing a building on Saint Paul's evolving Smith Avenue are ready to help with fashion or funerals.

They've all ditched a "regular" job to work with their hands, creating beautiful and useful things. Their stories show what it takes: a vision, courage, a willingness to watch your pennies, and a lot of love.

The teeshirts bearing the brand Forgotten are articles of faith as well as articles of clothing. The fledgling company was created to help the Ugandan farmers and cotton spinners who create the shirts and the inner-city Minneapolis teens who screen-print them. Now a major rock tour is set to take Forgotten gear to a new level.

Minnebar, our annual, semi-structured geek get-together, is becoming a tradition and a real force in the local tech community. This year's conference happened on Saturday, April 7--and two experienced tech bloggers gave their views of the confab soon after. Here are some excerpts.

Fueled by ice cream, pizza, and rivers of Red Bull, hundreds of nerds recently gathered at the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus to help “good nonprofits with not-so-good websites.”

What do you do when the urban garden you've struggled to create gets sold out from under you? At the recent Community Garden Spring Resource Fair, New York gardening advocate Karen Washington told local growers that if they want their gardens to be really sustainable--i.e., permanent--they'd better get savvy about the political system.

German-born Katharina (Katie) Eggers has studied politics in Paris, taught in Thailand, and worked as a UN-EU liaison in Brussels. Now this young, internationally connected overachiever is preparing to launch a print magazine that will highlight the Twin Cities' connections to the nation and the world. And she has some pointed things to say about what it's like to be a newcomer in our towns.