Calhoun - Isles : Innovation + Job News

Even if you’ve never been to the Big Apple, you’ve probably heard of Humans of New York — the wildly successful, ongoing photo essay that’s touched more than 20 countries and earned millions of social shares.
 
New York City has more than eight million inhabitants from all over the world, but it’s not the only place with a multitude of human-scale stories worth sharing. MSP has its very own analog: Humans of Minneapolis, Minneapolis-based photographer Stephanie Glaros’ often poignant look at the joys, sorrows and oddities of life in the urban North.
 
Glaros started Humans of Minneapolis as an occasional tumblr blog — a useful vehicle for her ample interactive talents. She’s since added a Facebook page and Instagram feed to bring her subjects to a wider audience. Last month, the Minneapolis Parks Foundation announced that Glaros would conduct a “summer-long portrait series profiling visitors to Minneapolis neighborhood parks,” showcased in Humans of Minneapolis’ digital ecosystem and the Park Foundation’s own social properties.
 
According to the Parks Foundation, Glaros will profile 15 park visitors in all. The portrait series aims to draw attention to Minneapolis’ 160-plus parks, which (per the Parks Foundation) attracted more than six million visitors last year. Shortly after the portrait series’ announcement, the Trust for Public Land announced that Minneapolis had once again earned the top spot in its closely watched urban U.S. park system rankings, continuing a dominant run that dates back to the early 2010s.
 
“Stephanie’s series will help us begin to tell the stories of the people who use our parks every day and show the multitude of ways people use and love our Minneapolis parks,” the Parks Foundation said in a release.
 
Some of the stories Glaros captures on the Humans of Minneapolis blog are challenging, to put it mildly. Interviews conducted immediately following Prince’s death were heartbreaking. More recently, she spoke with a young man whose ex-girlfriend’s brother had died violently the previous week; in the interview, he talked openly about his own mortality and agonized about carrying a firearm for protection.
 
It’s not yet clear whether Glaros’ park stories will hew toward the weighty, or whether they’ll focus on the lighter side of summer in MSP. No matter what the next few months bring, Glaros is excited to explore her beloved, snow-less home city and forge new connections with her fellow Minneapolitans.
 
“People are reserved here and they don’t want attention, so it can be a bit of a challenge to draw people out,” she told the Star Tribune in April. “I look at that as a challenge to get real and get outside of our shells and make a connection…[t]here’s something magical about connecting with a complete stranger.”
 
 

MSP’s edgiest marketing agency is growing — fast. Back in 2012, when The Line first caught up with SixSpeed Agency, the irreverent “brand experience” outfit had just over 20 employees. Today, it’s topped 50, with more hires planned for this year.
 
And that’s just the human headcount. SixSpeed has three canine helpers: Samson, the office dog; Hank, the shop dog; and Frannie, the office princess. (She clearly runs the show.)
 
SixSpeed occupies an unusual niche in MSP’s busy creative landscape. The agency has an internal creative/design team staffed with graphic artists, digital gurus, copywriters, editors: fairly standard. But SixSpeed also has a “production” team responsible for putting on singular events and experiences — the “experience” in “brand experiences” — for clients like Red Bull and Polaris. The agency has a heavy hand in Red Bull’s Crashed Ice series; in 2013, SixSpeed put on an off-road extravaganza tour to promote Polaris’s new RZR vehicle line.
 
SixSpeed also has an in-house “build” team, housed in an 8,000-square-foot shop at the agency’s headquarters. The build team is responsible for turning SixSpeed’s offbeat ideas into tangible things. Its most recent creation is a “mobile speakeasy” cart dubbed Thunderbuss, or ‘Buss for short: a “custom chopped” vintage motorbike attached to a monstrous wood-paneled cart with taps, holders and all the supplies needed to make a killer cocktail.
 
According to principal Andi Dickson, it’s rare for an agency to have in-house creative design and build capabilities under the same roof. In fact, Dickson isn’t aware of any MSP agencies that fit the bill. Rather than invest in an internal build team, most agencies work with external contractors as needed. That might help control costs, but at what cost?
 
SixSpeed’s blue-chip clients hold the agency to high standards, notes Dickson. They expect projects to be completed quickly, on spec, and with a level of quality and consistency that’s difficult to find on the freelance market.
 
Aside from being good for business, keeping everything in-house is great for employee morale. SixSpeed’s design team can walk across the office and actually touch the fruits of their labor, gaining a sense of pride and ownership that’s out of reach for creatives at less hands-on agencies.
 
“Creative people like nothing more than watching their ideas come to life,” says Dickson. “SixSpeed’s creative and build sides are really like two halves of the same brain.”
 

On June 26, for the second year in a row, five Twin Cities’ artists gathered at the Walker Art Center’s ArtPrize Pitch Night to share their ideas for a highly visible installation at Grand Rapids, Michigan’s annual ArtPrize extravaganza – and compete for a $5,000 prize. Each had five minutes to pitch to five jurors.

The winner, Bjorn Sparrman, will construct a “faux border crossing” on the Gillett Bridge, a heavily trafficked pedestrian bridge in downtown Grand Rapids. The installation will stand for the duration of the festival, from September 24 to October 12. Along with work from thousands of other participating artists, Sparrman’s project will contend for one of two $200,000 grand prizes.

The project, which will straddle the dividing line between the east and west sides of Grand Rapids, is a tongue-in-cheek take on an international border crossing. According to Sparrman’s pitch, it will feature “border guards,” a fake customs booth with awning, and signs indicating the “political” barrier.

“[The] jurors were impressed with Bjorn’s awareness of the bridge as a passage,” says Jehra Patrick, one of the five Pitch Night jurors, in an interview with ArtPrize. “We were interested in his ability to create a point of engagement and an obstacle, making people stop and consider the work.”

The four Walker Pitch Night runners-up have impressive CVs: Aaron Dysart is a City Collaboratory Fellow with the City of St. Paul; Alison Hiltner is a prominent Minneapolis-based installation artist; Bill Mullaney is a performance artist and one half of the popular performance duo Fire Drill; and Aaron Squadroni recently served as Grand Rapids, Michigan’s Artist-in-Residence.

The jury included Melinda Childs, Director of Artist Services at Forecast Public Art; John Hock, founder of Franconia Sculpture Park; Mia Lopez, a current Walker Art Center fellow; Jehra Patrick, program director for mnartists.org; and Piotr Szyhalski, professor of media arts at Minneapolis College of Art & Design.

ArtPrize is in its sixth year, but last year’s Walker event – put on in collaboration with Delta Air Lines, mnartists.org, and Open Systems Technologies – was the first organized opportunity for non-Michigan artists to earn funding for more ambitious projects. Pitch Night has since expanded to Cincinnati.

ArtPrize itself is wildly popular with artists. Billed as “a radically open, independently organized international art competition,” ArtPrize turns “three square miles of downtown Grand Rapids [into] an open playing field where anyone can find a voice in the conversation about what is art and why it matters.”

Anyone can participate and any space within the designated district can host installations. In addition to the $400,000 in grand prizes, participants can win eight category prizes of $20,000 each. This year’s event will feature more than 1,500 individual entries.

 

Got big plans for April 26? Lu Lippold, the local producer for One Day on Earth’s “One Day in the Twin Cities,” has a suggestion: Grab whatever video recording device you can—cameraphones included—and record the audio-visual pulse of your neighborhood.

On the final Saturday of April, the Twin Cities and 10 other U.S. metros will host the fourth installment of One Day on Earth’s celebration of film, culture, and all-around placemaking. Founded by Los Angeles-based film producers Kyle Ruddick and Brandon Litman, One Day on Earth (ODOE) has a “goal of creating a unique worldwide media event where thousands of participants would simultaneously film over a 24-hour period,” according to its website.

The first event took place on October 10, 2010 (10-10-10); 11-11-11 and 12-12-12 followed. ODOE skipped 2013, but its organizers weren’t about to wait until 2101 for their next shot. Instead, they selected a spring Saturday—both to accommodate amateur filmmakers with 9-to-5 jobs, and to give participants in the Northern Hemisphere longer daylight hours to work with—for a bigger, bolder, slightly revamped version of the event.

For the first time, participants get 10 questions to inspire their creativity and guide their storytelling, from “What is the best thing happening in your city today?” to “Who is your city not serving?” The goal is to create a multi-frame snapshot of “cities in progress,” one that doesn’t simply answer the who-what-where of the places it covers.

As One Day in the Twin Cities’ point person, Lippold supervises local filmmakers and pitched the project to dozens of partner organizations, including the Science Museum of Minnesota and Springboard for the Arts to visual media companies like Cinequipt and Vimeo. (The McKnight Foundation and the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative are the largest local sponsors.)

The upside? “[The event] is a great way to shine a light on all the hard work that our nonprofit community does,” says Lippold.

Lippold also works with a handful of local ambassadors, some of whom enjoy national acclaim. These include noted cinematographer Jeff Stonehouse, veteran documentarian Matt Ehling, and community-focused filmmaker D.A. Bullock. They’ll be contributing their talents—and stature—to One Day in the Twin Cities’ promotion and execution.

One Day in the Twin Cities could be seen well beyond Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Along with their counterparts from other participating cities, local filmmakers may see their work incorporated into a condensed, three-part series that Litman and Lichtbau will market to PBS affiliates around the country. No word on whether TPT will air the special, but TPT Rewire has agreed to publicize the event in the coming weeks.

The real stars of One Day in the Twin Cities, though, are its filmmakers. Even if you’ve never filmed anything in your life, says Lippold, you can contribute meaningful work. Thanks to an interactive map feature on ODOE’s main site, the work will visible to anyone who visits.

“If I were just starting out in video, I would see this as a huge opportunity,” says Lippold. Since all contributions are credited by name and location, each participant “instantly becomes a documentary filmmaker,” she adds.

Source: Lu Lippold
Writer: Brian Martucci

After a long, successful career in the technology industry, Swedish-American entrepreneur Carl-Johan Torarp is bringing reliable wireless broadband to small towns and farmsteads in southwestern Minnesota and beyond. His firm, Minneapolis-based LocaLoop, is “an economically viable 4G business solution for operators providing fixed and mobile broadband Internet service and web applications for consumer, business, and government users,” according to its website. Put another way, it’s a “complete 4G business-in-a-box.”

As a (primarily) B2B firm that markets to smaller communication service providers—rural telephone companies, communications/electric cooperatives, local public utilities, and entrepreneurs who see a money-making opportunity in bringing fast, reliable mobile and fixed Internet service to previously underserved areas—LocaLoop doesn’t deal directly with individual subscribers.

It does, however, offer a complementary, consumer-facing brand called synKro, which is enabled by LocaLoop’s four-patent cloud technology. SynKro allows operators to immediately deploy this “brand-in-a-box” and leverage LocaLoop’s existing marketing infrastructure, salesforce, and client-facing services.

On top of the cachet of an increasingly recognizable brand, synKro offers benefits like on-demand support, automatic payment collection and mobile compatibility—“data roaming,” as LocaLoop describes it—with other synKro-enabled providers across the country. Subscribers who want to use their mobile devices outside their regular provider’s service area can be confident that they’ll enjoy access to consistent, high-quality broadband Internet.

If this sounds novel, it should. According to Torarp, LocaLoop’s solution is a superior—and innovatively disruptive—alternative to the three main categories of service providers that currently operate in LocaLoop’s target markets. These are larger telecom firms with huge “legacy” investments in fixed (aka landline) broadband systems that require government subsidies to remain profitable; smaller firms that rely on wireless LANs or early-generation (and thus uncompetitive) broadband technology; and wireless carriers (AT&T, Verizon, and others) whose 4G coverage is designed for high-density markets and isn’t profitable or consistent in rural areas, if it’s available at all.

Each type of provider has its own shortcomings. The legacy operators “don’t know of any other way [to profitability] than relying on subsidies,” says Torarp, and the LAN/first-generation wireless broadband operators can’t afford to scale or maintain the technology at sufficient densities. It’s possible that mobile carriers could one day build out profitable, tower-based 4G networks in rural areas, but that’s still a decade away, at best.

By then, a new technology may have usurped 4G broadband anyway—a problem that LocaLoop’s continuously updated Software-as-a-Service/Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SaaS/IaaS) avoids by adapting its “cloud service platform” to newer generations of wireless broadband hardware as they emerge.

In fact, LocaLoop’s technology is the first rural wireless broadband service that offers a speedy path to profitability for operators. According to Torarp, a new client with access to an existing tower and 180 subscribers needs less than $30,000—or $1,000 per month, if its equipment is leased—to get started.

All things being equal, the technology’s break-even point is around 100 subscribers per tower location, and an operator that adds 50 subscribers per month should recoup its investment in less than six months. When compared to the multimillion-dollar deployment costs of existing rural broadband technologies, LocaLoop’s solution looks like a steal.

Aside from local operators and entrepreneurs, LocaLoop serves vertically integrated customers like energy firms that maintain labor-intensive operations in remote areas. Its solutions are also cost-effective for prosperous farmers and ranchers who wish to set up their own towers and act as their own operators.

What’s next for LocaLoop? Growth—and plenty of it. “From a technology or business point of view, nothing prevents us from becoming a billion-dollar company [over the next decade],” says Torarp. “From now on, it’s about effective business plan execution and access to enough expansion capital.”

Sounds like a plan.

Source: Carl-Johan Torarp
Writer: Brian Martucci

“And Nick helps make the dough…only now he makes a lot more of it.”

With those words, spoken by President Barack Obama during last week’s State of the Union (SOTU) address, Nick Chute became the Twin Cities’ most famous pizza maker. Moreover, Chute enjoyed those moments of fame while seated with Punch Pizza co-owner John Sorrano behind the First Lady during the joint session of Congress.

Why did President Obama showcase Chute, and his bosses Sorrano and John Puckett, during the State of the Union? Because in a notoriously low-margin industry, Punch’s owners have taken a bold risk, raising the company’s “wage floor” to $10 per hour.

The President devoted several minutes of last week’s address to “honoring the dignity of work,” as he put it, noting that the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is about 20 percent lower than the wage floor during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

In a recent press release, Punch’s owners characterized their decision to raise workers’ wages as a simple business calculation. “As we continue to grow Punch,” Sorrano stated in the release, “we recognize that only the most dedicated employees will position us to compete and maintain the highest quality food and the best service in the market.”

Puckett also underscores the importance of investing in the things that matter most to a business, regardless of how those investments might affect margins in the short-term. Punch has been around for 18 years, he notes, “and we aim to get 10 percent better each year. We’ve invested in real prosciutto, authentic marble for our customer areas…and now we’re investing in our people.”

Previously, the company started most entry-level employees at $8 per hour, so a bump to $10 represents a 25 percent hike across the board. Puckett isn’t sure how long it will take for this “investment” to pay off, but he does know how much it’ll cost: $3 million over the next decade, assuming Punch stays at its current size—which it won’t.

Although there aren’t any plans to franchise the business or mount an aggressive expansion, Punch’s co-owners plan to open one new store per year for the foreseeable future. With nearly 300 current employees across eight stores, that translates to roughly 30 new hires per year.

As a private company, Punch isn’t required to make detailed financial disclosures, but the wage raise “will result in a significant hit to our profit in the short to medium term,” says Puckett. “Ultimately, we’d rather be higher-quality and less profitable than lower-quality and more profitable.”

By making work worthwhile for entry-level employees, Punch’s co-owners hope to make their managers’ jobs easier. Well-compensated cooks and servers are more likely to prioritize work over other obligations, the thinking goes, increasing the chances that bosses can put schedules together without too much arm-twisting.  

And employees who earn a living wage tend to stick around for longer, learning valuable skills that improve the customer experience and create a deeper talent pool from which to draw management candidates. Over time, the whole enterprise runs more smoothly and boosts its reputation among diners, who may even feel comfortable paying a little more for Punch’s irresistible Neapolitan pies.

It’s too early to tell whether other business leaders in traditionally low-wage sectors will follow Punch’s example. While political handicappers are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of a federal minimum wage hike—Obama’s goal is $10.10 per hour—not every SOTU attendee was as thrilled as Chute. Any legislation would have to make it past Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who has always been cool to the idea.

Sources: Punch Pizza release, John Puckett
Writer: Brian Martucci

"The best burger I've had in quite a long time" is usually a good recommendation, especially when it comes from a local restaurateur with several lauded restaurants and counting.

The source is Kim Bartmann, owner of Barbette, Red Stag Supper Club and Bryant Lake Bowl, and the subject is the grass-fed, "limousine beef" burger at Bread and Pickle, Bartmann's new incarnation of the concession stand near the Lake Harriet bandshell. After a soft opening last week, the reborn refectory is poised to serve the summertime crowds at the lake.

It's pretty busy down there," says Bartmann. "We are thinking of it as a [Bastille Day] block party a few times a week. We feel like we've done it before, just not in a fixed, night-after-night setting."

Bread and Pickle will sell "simple offerings," says Bartmann � burgers, fries, sandwiches, pasta salads, potato salads, as well as breakfast foods like espresso, egg sandwiches, granola and yogurt from 7��11 a.m. And of course there is still ice cream, from local favorites Sonny's and Izzy's.

Like at her other restaurants, the fare will be "focused on as much organic, local product as possible," says Bartmann.

One thing that won't be available at Bread and Pickle: waste. "Everything that comes out is compostable," she says, in new compost stations installed by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (Park Board), an effort Bartmann called a "beta-test for zero-waste in the Park Board system."

The composting was in response to the Park Board's request for proposals, which called for sustainability practices that Bartmann new would give her a leg up on the competition. "We do that at all the other restaurants, and at the [Bastille Day] block party," she says.

Even water comes in a sustainable container: stainless-steel water bottles at plastic-bottle prices. Visitors can refill them at a water-filling station, installed by the Park Board, which have counters to see how may times it gets used.

Bread and Pickle will be open until 9 p.m. in the evening, possibly later for busier concerts, says Bartmann.

The refectory is not her only recent project, however. She is planning a remodel and revamped menu at Gigi's, near 36th Street South and Bryant Avenue, which Bartmann took over last November. Prep kitchens and extra cooler space there as support the Bread and Pickle operation.

In the early summer, Bartmann expects to unveil Pat's Tap at the old Casey's location on 35th Street South and Nicollet Avenue. She described the LEED-targeted project as "a little gastro-pub with a few skee ball machines."