Emerging Technology : Featured Stories

What can the Twin Cities learn from other communities' success with municipal broadband? For one thing, that "bright cable" has a bright future. For another, that every city's situation is different.

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: an infographic that makes some amusing and very fine distinctions between two closely related species.

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.”

"Coopetition"--cooperation among competitors or potential competitors--was a force to be reckoned with in the Twin Cities during 2011. Our politics may be gridlocked in partisanship, but the smartest entrepreneurs and civic officials locally are embracing a wider vision than the zero-sum game.

Vikas Narula learned early that informal networks of power and influence may be more important to a business than its official org chart. So he started a consultancy to help companies identify their unofficial movers and shakers.

It's been two years since the green roof on downtown Minneapolis' massive auditorium and sports venue was installed. The Line took a tour to see how things are going and growing.

For many observers, our high-tech sector is in crisis. There aren't enough angel investors and we've lost our edge. Dan Grigsby, one of the most successful software entrepreneurs in Minnesota, doesn't buy it. In a conversation with The Line, he explains why we don't need to be Silicon Prairie, create the next Facebook, or even worry about venture capital.

Lars Leafblad, a principal in the Minneapolis executive search firm KeyStone Search, was dubbed "the most networked man in the Twin Cities" by Minnesota Business magazine last year. In the second of our Big Picture conversations about the future of our city and state, Leafblad acknowledges that we're good at cooperation and connection--but adds that we need a compelling new image of what we want to be and where we want to go.