Emerging Technology : Innovation + Job News

The Minneapolis Downtown Council recently announced that Aimia, a consumer loyalty and engagement management firm, would move its U.S. headquarters, along with more than 300 employees, to a 50,000-square-foot space in the North Loop’s Butler Square building. Aimia previously occupied space in a Plymouth office park near I-494.
 
Aimia is the latest company to relocate, expand or retain space in downtown Minneapolis since the launch of the Minneapolis Downtown 2025 Plan. Other notable companies include CenterPoint Energy, Valspar, XCel Energy, Olson and Be the Match. Three years into the Downtown 2025 Plan, the momentum is palpable.
 
“Aimia saw the merits of moving downtown...and all the opportunities and progress on display here right now,” says Steve Cramer, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council & Downtown Improvement District. “Our mission is to create an extraordinary downtown.”
 
One of the core goals of the Downtown 2025 Plan is to create a more vibrant, energetic downtown for workers, businesses and residents. Another goal is to accelerate economic and cultural progress by eliminating the either/or distinctions between those three categories. The plan recognizes that a truly world-class downtown core needs a diverse mix of uses, and a high density of people, ideas and economic activity.
 
“Cities with a strong central business district thrive because they have companies, big and small, working in close proximity [and collaborating] with clients and partners,” Cramer says. “When the area as a whole succeeds, it creates new opportunities for everyone involved.”
 
The addition of thousands of new residents has raised downtown Minneapolis’s profile, too. With a broader, more creative pool of potential recruits within walking or biking distance, talent-driven companies like Aimia find it much easier to justify the temporary cost of moving downtown.
 
“Our population has risen to more than 37,000 people,” Cramer says, “and we’re seeing apartments and condos under construction across the area.” The increasing density of creatives downtown dovetails with other Downtown 2025 Plan initiatives, including the recently announced Minneapolis Idea eXchange and a street beautification partnership with the University of Minnesota’s College of Design.
 
Aimia’s move is just another sign of how far downtown Minneapolis has come. “For the first time in decades, we’re seeing an incredible trend of people moving in toward the downtown area,” Cramer adds.
 
“Downtown Minneapolis is a leader for the [Twin Cities] region,” he adds. “If it thrives, the region as a whole thrives.”
 
Aimia Jobs in Minneapolis
 
Director of Business Development - CPG, Retail, Finance
 
IT Sales Engineer
 
Mobile Delivery Manager
 

The Foundation is moving its 20+ employees from a small office shared with Atomic Data into a bigger space in the recently renovated Ford Center, near the heart of the North Loop. The “single source IT provider,” which serves as a one-stop help desk for design, architecture and nonprofit firms that use Apple systems, is also opening a new office in Co-Merge, a coworking space in San Diego, in what could be the first phase of a multi-city expansion.

A rapid expansion and a shift into mobile device support for national retail chains “caused us to run out of physical space” for housing employees and “storing pallets of iPads and iPhones,” says Matt Woestehoff, director of operations and business development. “Meanwhile, Atomic Data”—a data center operator co-owned by Jim Wolford, sole owner and CEO of The Foundation—“was growing rapidly and basically kicked us out of their office,” Woestehoff says with a laugh.

The new digs are “definitely an upgrade,” he adds. The Foundation shares one floor of the Ford Center with Seed, a small startup incubator that focuses on biotechnology and other high-tech ideas. Seed uses an old chemistry lab on one side of the building.

The Foundation’s new space belonged to a boutique soap manufacturer, a longtime client of The Foundation’s, which moved its operations to Milwaukee after a buyout by Johnson & Johnson. The space has a 32-desk bullpen and easy access to a highly secure storage area for valuable electronics. The Foundation has access to a guest parking lot, a huge perk for the 300-odd local clients that had to use meter parking at its old location.

Though The Foundation is growing rapidly, the Ford Center space should be fine for the foreseeable future. Unlike many IT companies, The Foundation lacks an office-based salesforce. “We’re not salesy people,” says Woestehoff. Instead, the company relies on referrals and search traffic to generate new business. The company’s engineer-heavy workforce spends “40 to 45 hours per week, per person” on site at local clients’ offices, freeing up space at the Ford Center.

The flexible work model first led Woestehoff and the team to explore the possibility of a second office last year. Two employees, an engineer and operations specialist, expressed interest in moving to southern California and remaining part of the team. Woestehoff investigated and found that San Diego’s business culture is remarkably like the Twin Cities’, “very forward-looking in terms of technology, but laid back and supportive too,” he says, without the competitiveness of tech hubs like San Francisco and New York.

Using The Foundation’s experience with CoCo, “a valued partner” that the company has worked with for years, Woestehoff found Co-Merge and set the two employees up there. It’s still early going, but initial business development efforts have been successful. He’s confident the move will pay off, noting that other cities with similarly forward-looking yet supportive cultures could be ripe for additional offices for The Foundation.

But not too fast. In today’s fast-paced IT world, The Foundation, now in its 15th year, prides itself on patience and strategic thinking. “A lot of our friends have gone out of business because they’ve acted fast and made mistakes,” he says. “If it takes another 15 years to open a third office, so be it.”
 

Hundreds of entrepreneurs, investors and corporate executives gathered at the Depot Hotel in Minneapolis on October 27 and 28 for the Midwest Innovation Summit, an annual gathering that showcases what’s next in technology and manufacturing across the region. About 75 exhibitors were on hand, including promising Minnesota startups like 75F—winner of this year’s Minnesota Cup— and Water Meter Solutions, which operates out of CoCo Minneapolis.
 
“The Midwest Innovation Summit is about attracting entrepreneurs and business leaders from all across the region to display any solution that uses natural resources more efficiently,” says Justin Kaster, executive director of Midwest CleanTech Open, the summit’s sponsor. “Many of the exhibitors here are committed to sustainability for ethical and environmental reasons, but [Midwest Innovation Summit] really shows that clean technology is a great business opportunity as well.”
 
In innovation capitals like the Twin Cities, Kaster adds, entrepreneurs and investors have “started to respond to that value proposition” over the last decade. “Everyone realizes that clean technology is a win-win situation now,” he says. “You don’t have work overtime to convince people of that anymore.”
 
Several Twin Cities companies have clearly bought in. Water Meter Solutions makes two water-saving technologies. Floo-id is a “smart toilet monitoring device” that allows property managers and homeowners to monitor their toilets’ water use in real time, quickly identifying leaks and other issues that could affect their water bills. Floo-id is powered by flowing water, making it energy neutral. Water Meter Solutions’ other technology, H2O Pro, performs a similar function for entire buildings’ water systems, offering value to multi-unit landlords.
 
Nearby, Minneapolis-based Irri-Green’s exhibitor booth showed off the Genius irrigation system, a patent pending lawn-watering setup that analyzes landscape contours and other factors to deliver water as efficiently as possible. Each Genius irrigator’s range overlaps precisely with that of the next, “eliminating the wasteful, overlapping arcs of water that conventional irrigation systems” produce, says Irri-Green.
 
Garden Fresh Farms, a Minneapolis startup and 2013 Minnesota Cup division winner with an aquaculture facility in the city, was on hand as well. The fish in the company’s growing tanks continuously fertilize the plants suspended above them, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem that produces plant and animal products for harvest.
 
These local companies are part of what Kaster calls “a regional ecosystem of innovation.” He urges entrepreneurs, investors, nonprofits and government entities across the Midwest to “think bigger than the city or county level” and “move past the state versus state competition” that can hinder the exchange of ideas, people and investment. The Northeast, Kaster says, is a great example of a region where innovators have banded together to create sustainable, big-picture solutions, like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
 
“We have a tremendous amount of intellectual and creative capital here in the Twin Cities,” he says. “Events like the Midwest Innovation Summit are conduits for ideas and investment from nearby areas” that ultimately raise the profiles and prospects of local innovators.
 

In less than a year, a partnership between Advance IT Minnesota and Metropolitan State University has produced Fusion, an “IT residency” program that will officially launch during the 2014-15 academic year. Fusion places students in various technology degree programs with local employers—ranging from cutting-edge startups to Fortune 500 firms—that need flexible, entry-level IT labor. The program has already accepted applications for the coming year’s roster and is in the process of vetting applicants.

Unlike a traditional internship, which typically runs a single academic semester, each participant’s residency lasts 18 to 24 months—roughly tracking their last two years of college. Students are paid for their time, typically less than 20 hours per week, with projects assigned by their employers and paychecks issued by their school.

Fusion currently has 40 open spots, but Bruce Lindberg, executive director of Advance IT Minnesota, hopes to grow the program significantly in time for the 2015-16 academic year by expanding the program’s enrollment at Metro State and creating an identical residency program at Mankato State. By next year, enrollment could increase twofold, with further growth possible.

“If employer demand and participation grow beyond the capacity of those two partners,” says Lindberg, “we will look to expand by involving other academic partners” around the Twin Cities and outstate areas.

With a projected deficit of nearly 10,000 tech workers in the state by 2020, Fusion aims to accelerate the development of Minneapolis-St. Paul’s high-tech workforce while making it easier—and less risky— for employers and prospective employees to find one another. Currently, the rapidly growing and changing industry suffers from “skill mismatch,” where employers struggle to find candidates who can keep pace with changing job requirements and competencies.

“Many graduates face the frustrating reality of employers asking new grads for two to three years of experience…which they usually don't have,” says John Fairbanks, a third-year Metro State student who applied to the program this spring. “[T]hrough the Fusion program, I will graduate with a degree and have substantial experience to back it…allowing me to enter the job market more quickly and with real-world experience to solve real-world problems.”

The idea for Fusion developed out of conversations between Lindberg and Marty Hebig, Maverick Software Consulting’s founder and president, in January 2013. Lindberg and Hebig, whose company helps firms avoid offshoring by hiring low-cost, U.S.-based student IT workers for special projects and ongoing work, helped recruit other local business leaders to the cause. He also helped them build a compelling case for an IT residency program. In January 2014, Metro State approved the program and began publicizing it to students.

Employers and managers who wish to learn more about Fusion can attend an information session, hosted by Advance IT Minnesota, at MCTC’s campus on June 17 between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. RSVP through Bruce Lindberg at [email protected] or 612-659-7228.


 

Earlier this year, Google selected the University of Minnesota’s MARS Lab as its primary academic partner for Project Tango, a high-profile indoor mapping initiative that has been compared to Google Maps. The selection came with a $1.35 million grant and a directive to explore—and expand on—the possibilities of a prototype smartphone capable of creating 3D maps of indoor spaces. Google’s only other academic partner on the project, Washington, D.C.’s George Washington University, has a much smaller role.

According to Google, the current prototype device is a “5 inch Android phone containing highly customized hardware and software designed to track the full 3D motion of the device as you hold it while simultaneously creating a map of the environment.”

The phone can take up to 250,000 spatial measurements per second to create an intricate map of its surroundings.  While this technology isn’t yet available as an app on regular smartphones, part of MARS Lab’s charge is to create apps and APIs—mobile development platforms—that enable the app to be scaled down and included with non-specialized devices. Within a few years, some form of the technology will be available for download like any other Android app. The U of M lab will have played a central role in making that possible.

A major challenge will involve surmounting the technology’s requirement for two independent cameras. It’s unclear whether future versions will be able to work with a single smartphone camera, or whether devices that use it will need to have at least two vision sensors. A strict non-disclosure agreement, breach of which could jeopardize the lab’s funding, prevents MARS Lab director Stergios I. Roumeliotis from getting into such specifics about Project Tango.

A video released last month by the MARS Lab team shows the prototype’s capabilities. Although the current version produces a somewhat slow, abstract representation of its surroundings, future iterations will create near-lifelike interior maps. Google and MARS envision three broad areas in which 3D mapping can play a role: virtual/augmented reality video games, internal navigation in unfamiliar buildings (rendering directions in malls and corporate edifices all but obsolete), and navigation aids for the visually impaired. But innovation probably won’t stop there: In a recent interview, Roumeliotis argued that “the list of potential future applications is endless.”

In addition to Roumeliotis, two MARS Lab alums who have since taken positions with Google—Joel Hesch and Esha Nerurkar—are leading the development charge. The building blocks for the project were actually laid about a decade ago, when the MARS Lab team helped create the internal navigation system, known as VINS, for NASA’s Mars landers. A loss of NASA funding for the project proved to be a blessing in disguise, as Roumeliotis’s team found that the system worked just as well for earthbound mapping and navigation.

The Minnesota Inventors Congress’ Invention Expo just wrapped up its first session in the Minneapolis Convention Center, after nearly 60 years of meeting in the small town of Redwood Falls. On May 2 and 3, hundreds of exhibiting inventors, investors and business leaders crowded into the center’s main hall to peruse the latest ideas and designs from the country’s brightest tinkerers, hardware whizzes and gearheads.

The continent’s “oldest annual invention convention,” according to its website, moved to the Twin Cities to take advantage of the local infrastructure. For Zachary Crockett, co-founder of Minneapolis-based Spark and an Invention Expo keynote speaker, the move was about connecting tech-savvy hardware and software experts, who tend to be younger and urban, with practical-minded tinkerers, engineers and designers who come from a “broader demographic” and often live in rural areas.

The exchanges of ideas, partnerships, and capital that result can be game-changing. Early on, Invention Expo’s participants often focused on clever, useful products that made discrete tasks easier—think late-night infomercials. Today’s attendees leverage cutting-edge technology to create products with far broader applications, from Bondhus Arms’ credit card-sized pistol (perfect for a post-“conceal and carry” world) to the Powerizer toolbox, which features a battery-powered charging station, USB outlet and three adapter connections to help users stay connected outdoors. Crockett’s Spark Core, meanwhile, is a node that connects everyday items and systems to the Internet via WiFi.

“Building hardware used to be hard,” says Crockett, “but the process has been democratized. You don’t need a $1 billion factory to make things anymore.” Open-source software (and, increasingly, hardware), coupled with coworking and other efficiency-enhancing trends, are making it easier for teams of three or four to develop, build, market and profit from innovative products.

Trevor Lambert, a University of St. Thomas grad who founded Lambert & Lambert (an IP and product-licensing firm) and Enhance Product Development (which turns invention ideas into marketable products), sees two value propositions for Innovation Expo participants.

First, the expo’s workshops and presentations educate novice inventors about the various aspects of product licensing and development, from pitch support with the “Pitch the Experts” panel (on which Lambert sat this year) to Crockett’s “Inventing Success” address, which discussed the potentially revolutionary impact of always-online devices.

Invention Expo, and events like it, also provides inventors with access to markets, whether through product-development experts like Lambert or direct contact with potential investors. With so many good ideas floating around, competition requires inventors to network relentlessly—something that many are less than comfortable with.

For Lambert and his team, that creates an opportunity. “We’re paid to know people,” he says.

 

In early April, Docalytics and Kidizen, two startups in the Twin Cities that utilize CoCo’s coworking facilities, headed to California to deliver pitches at the first annual Google for Entrepreneurs Demo Day. The event is a gathering for 10 early-stage tech startups from the seven cities in Google’s North American Tech Hub Network.

Both companies networked with tech industry heavier hitters. Both received funding commitments worth $100,000 from Revolution Ventures, a venture capital firm run by former AOL boss Steve Case.

According to those in attendance, Case was so impressed with the quality of the pitches—and the ideas behind them—that he made an on-the-spot decision to evenly divide $1 million of Revolution’s early-stage funding pool among the 10 entrants. At a frenetic post-pitch networking round, the other 60 or so investors in attendance connected with the startups’ principals on an individual basis about potential investments or partnerships.

“How cool is it that two startups out of Minneapolis-Saint Paul were part of this?” remarks Dug Nichols, CEO of Kidizen, an online marketplace for used children’s clothing, accessories, and knickknacks. “I have never been a part of such a truly talented group of startups at an event, and I've done a lot of these types of events.”

After the pitch round, he and Kidizen co-founder Dori Graff (Mary Fallon is the other principal) attended the hour-long networking event with investors. They spent the entire session “in constant conversation with a number of different VC firms,” says Nichols, “and we've had additional firms reach out to us after the event.”

Evan Carothers, one of Docalytics’ three founders, had a similar experience. Case’s investment was merely the most public of the company’s Demo Day wins: For Carothers, “getting up in front of a huge group of our peers, investors, and prospects…and tell[ing] them all about the solution Docalytics provides” was equally important, as was securing “the needed capital to really grow our team and product.”

Although it was widely known that prominent VCs would attend, Demo Day’s organizers framed the event more as an opportunity for entrepreneurs to pitch to industry experts and create connections that could lead to funding commitments, either at the event itself or down the line. No one expected Case to commit $100,000, and in such public fashion, to all 10 entrants.

Not that anyone is complaining. As Kidizen continues to gain users and increase its cash flow, Nichols is feeling the momentum. He plans to hire additional developers and marketing staff to grow the six-person firm.

On top of the Revolution investment, which got a wave of national press, Kidizen’s selection as “best new app” in the iTunes App Store’s lifestyle category has dramatically boosted its visibility.

Brian Martucci

Docalytics, an ambitious tech company that operates out of CoCo’s Saint Paul coworking space, will be debuting its next-generation document viewing technology at this year’s Google Demo Day. Thanks to a partnership between Google and CoCo, Docalytics’ founders—Evan Carothers, Ryan Morlok, and Steve Peck—are heading to Silicon Valley on April 1 and 2 to show off their cloud-based solution, absorb the wisdom of Google’s top product specialists, and rub shoulders with some of the technology industry’s leading lights.

Not bad for three guys with a startlingly simple idea. According to its website, Docalytics helps marketers “bridge the gap between sales and marketing communication,” boosting lead generation and conversion rates for businesses that utilize online content marketing—which, these days, is just about every business.

The key? “Smart” PDF documents that enable the B2B marketers responsible for putting in-depth marketing materials in the hands of executives, purchasing managers, and other decision-makers to track each prospect’s engagement with their content. Companies that use Docalytics’ application can track, measure, and analyze what potential clients do with key marketing content. That capability generates a treasure trove of relevant data, which marketers didn’t have access to before.

According to Carothers, the idea for Docalytics arose from a simple observation: Few prospects bother to fill out the contact forms on the “gated” landing pages that many companies use to track readers’ engagement with ebooks, white papers, and other marketing materials. These landing pages have “terrible conversion rates,” as Carothers puts it, both because they require effort to get past and because they can seem invasive. This is a classic catch-22: With a lack of viable alternatives, marketers are forced to employ a lead-tracking strategy that actively discourages lead generation. One could argue that they’d be better off not tracking their leads at all.

Unless they had a viable, non-invasive, flexible alternative, that is. Docalytics’ elegant solution removes artificial barriers to prospects’ engagement with high-level pieces of content marketing while dramatically enhancing their ability to analyze each viewer’s experience with the material.

This second bit is particularly important: It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Docalytics is doing for content marketing analysis what Google Analytics has already done for website analysis. Used properly, the solution could result in far more relevant, personalized, and—perhaps most importantly—authentic-seeming marketing materials. “This tracking provides marketers with data to produce better, more effective content,” says Carothers, “and helps salespeople understand [and cater to] the interests and needs of specific prospects.”

So what do Carothers, Morlok, and Peck stand to gain from Demo Days? First of all, they’ll be pitching directly to a panel that includes some of biggest players in the venture capital space. “This group has the potential to help introduce us to new customers, markets, and growth capital to help us take our company to the next level faster than we could using conventional growth strategies,” says Carothers.

They’ll also get some valuable advice from Google’s product whizzes, who certainly know how to spot and improve game-changing technologies.

Back in Saint Paul, the future looks bright for Docalytics. “We have certainly found a pain point in the market,” says Carothers. “We are already starting to experience great growth and traction and have no plans to slow down.”

If things continue to go Docalytics’ way, the definition of “we” will expand. “[We’ll] be looking for great talent in the Midwest to help us expand and capitalize on the opportunity in the marketplace,” he says.

Source: Evan Carothers
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

Saint Paul-based ThisClicks, a mobile technology company in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood that specializes in “workforce solutions” apps, recently received $4 million in new funding from three venture capital firms. In its sixth year of operations, ThisClicks is hitting its stride.

Founder and CEO Chad Halvorson aims to boost the company’s sales force and press ahead with the rollout of its time-clock app, WageBase. He’s also planning to move to a larger office in Saint Paul, and double the company’s employee headcount from 15 to 30 by December.

WageBase is ThisClicks’s second product. WageBase is a startlingly simple concept: a remote time-clock app that lets hourly employees clock into and out of work from anywhere. (A GPS tracker ensures that they’re doing so from the workplace, not bed.) The app is especially useful for big diffuse workplaces, such as construction sites.

The building blocks of Halvorson’s company have been in place for a decade and a half. As a part-time grocery jockey in the late 1990s, Halvorson grew sick of making extra trips to the store to check his weekly schedule. He dreamed up an online employee-scheduling program—WhenIWork—that would eliminate this problem. He shopped a prototype version of the app with a contact at the Mall of America, but it didn’t pan out.

“There were just too many barriers,” he says. “Many people still lacked high-speed Internet and the mobile space didn’t really exist yet.”

Halvorson bided his time with other projects. He founded a Web consulting firm in college. In 2005 he partnered with a video design company to found Meditech, a “full-service development and marketing agency for the medical device industry.” Meditech eventually acquired Boston Scientific, St. Jude’s, and Medtronic as clients.

In 2008, with the mobile revolution in full swing, Halvorson gave his teenage dream another shot. He built a new version of WhenIWork—he’d registered its Internet domain back in 1998—and used his own funds to build an organic business-development campaign driven largely by content marketing and word of mouth. He describes this approach as “consumerized B2B marketing.”

“We don’t want to market directly to the guy in the suit,” says Halvorson. Instead, ThisClicks focuses on scheduling managers and supervisors at small- to medium-size companies, counting on WhenIWork’s obvious benefits to impress upper management and engender long-term contracts.

In fact, WhenIWork has taken off—the app now counts recognizable businesses like 1-800-GOT-JUNK? as clients—without a traditional sales force or seed funding. Halvorson hired his first business development staffers in late 2013, and the recent capital infusion represents ThisClicks’s first debt tranche.

This was deliberate. “Before we could consider raising money, we needed to figure out how to make money,” says Halvorson. “When you raise money first, it’s easier to learn how to spend money.” To ensure that his company would survive if it couldn’t find decent financing terms, he vowed not to raise outside funds until ThisClicks was taking in at least $1 million in annual revenues.

It helps that, unlike many tech entrepreneurs, the Minnesota-raised Halvorson took a low-key approach to success. “We weren’t interested in breakneck growth” to start, he says. Figuring out how to appeal to hourly workers and schedulers was far more important.

What’s the endgame for ThisClicks? On this point, Halvorson sounds a lot more ambitious. “We want our apps to be the most important tools in employees’ and managers’ pockets,” he says. “We’re focused on being the premier provider of cloud-based workforce solutions.”

 

Last month, a team from Twin Cities Maker, a nonprofit organization that runs a community workshop known as the Hack Factory, snagged the $10,000 grand prize in the Ultimate Maker Vehicle Challenge. Ford Motor Company and Make Magazine sponsored the contest. 

The challenge was to reinvent the Ford Transit Connect commercial vehicle to equip makers on the go. Ten teams around the country participated in the contest, by invitation from Ford. 

“Makers were given an imaginary budget and certain build constraints, while being encouraged to define what is 'ultimate' to them as a blueprint for a potential vehicle,” the Ford website reads. 

The public voted for standout designs in an online platform during the first round, which lasted nearly a month. From there, judges from Ford and Make evaluated several finalists. The Twin Cities Maker’s Hackmobile, as the group calls it, rose to the top.  

Now, Ford plans to build the vehicle that came from team members Jon Atkinson, Becca Steffen, Riley Harrison, and Michael Freiert, according to Twin Cities Maker materials.

The Minneapolis-based team created a vehicle that “centered around the idea of a maker or artist being able to fabricate anything they needed out of the back of a vehicle,” a statement from the group reads. 

In some ways, the Hackmobile builds on an idea the group already had for a trailer, which it could bring to events, Freiert says. “When Ford invited us to participate, it seemed like a good opportunity to create what we’d been dreaming about over a beer,” he adds.  

When the Twin Cities Maker team members put their heads together, they decided that everything within the vehicle should perform multiple functions. It wasn’t about cramming things into the vehicle. “It wasn’t [like the game] Tetris, with components in it. It was a more unique storage and work surface solution all in one,” he says. 

The resulting vehicle combines a woodshop, welding, and electronic studio. It also has 3D printing capabilities along with storage for supplies. 

The work surface folds away like a Murphy bed while a single tool has several heads that allow for different uses. “I don’t think anyone else had the deep multi-purpose” aspect, he says. In the mobile workshop, someone could “knock together an Adirondack chair,” as just one example, he adds.

However, the Hackmobile is aimed more at coarse work than finishing work. “The Hackmobile isn’t an artist’s studio on wheels,” he says. 

Now, the group is deciding how to put the cash prize to best use. That could mean creating a Hackmobile-like trailer for the group or starting a tool lending library, among other possibilities. “We need to look into what’s viable. We’ve got a lot of projects we haven’t been able to get off the ground yet,” he says.  


Source: Michael Freiert, founding member, TC Maker 
Writer: Anna Pratt 

Smart Factory, a new school for mobile app development located in Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood, is on a mission to deepen the tech talent pool in Minnesota. 

Jeff Lin of Bust Out Solutions, and Mike Bollinger of TechdotMN and Livefront, who are friends and colleagues, founded Smart Factory, which held its inaugural classes in October.   

The need for Smart Factory rose out of rapid changes in the web and mobile industry, Lin says. “Formal academic training can’t keep up” with the changes, he says, adding that some developers find it difficult to stay on the cutting-edge while working a full-time job. 

The tech scene is “already being pushed forward by market forces and people’s desires and interests. We hope to help that cause by training people directly,” he says.

Smart Factory's program is aimed at experienced designers and engineers who want to expand their skills, especially those related to web and mobile app technology. Companies can also send employees to the school to gain software development skills, as opposed to having to outsource those skills.     

Six-week classes, led by leaders in the field, cover Mobile UI Design, Ruby on Rails, Web Production, iOS Development, and Android Development. Students follow along with the lessons on their laptops. 

Class sizes are no more than 16 people, to ensure everyone gets plenty of individual attention, Lin says. Two mentor-teachers lead the classes, as well. “In programming and design courses, there’s a lot of hands-on activity, so it’s always good to have one-on-one time with teachers,” he says. 

Additionally, students are expected to spend another 10 to 15 hours on their studies outside of the classroom, according to Smart Factory materials.  

Lin hopes the school fosters collaboration within the local tech community. “We want to educate people about what we’re passionate about," he says. "It’s less of a competition and more of a collaboration. Collaborative competition is good too."

Although schools like Smart Factory are popping up around the country, few exist in the Twin Cities. With the opening of Smart Factory, Lin expects other schools to will launch within the next couple of years. 

Source: Jeff Lin, co-founder, Smart Factory
Writer: Anna Pratt 

When a large company opens a regional office, sometimes it becomes a remote outpost, with a small staff and limited growth. But sometimes, it turns into an example of how a new office can thrive where it's planted.
 
Open Systems Technologies (OST)--which is a sponsor of The Line--definitely falls into the latter category, growing from three employees when it opened in 2010 to 20 employees today. David Gerrity, Executive Director of OST's Minneapolis office, says the company brings on a new hire every couple months, and he anticipates a steady pace for that growth in the future.
 
Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, OST employs 120 direct employees and 70 full-time contractors, and focuses on business process solutions, data center services, application development, and other IT tasks.
 
The Minneapolis office is nestled inside the historic TractorWorks building in the North Loop, where technology professionals serve clients like Target, United Health Group, and Thomson Reuters.
 
"We anticipate about 35 percent annual growth," says Gerrity. "While we grow, we want to do so in a way that honors and maintains the culture we have. We put a great deal of emphasis on employee retention, and we think that makes a major difference."
 
Although hiring is done constantly, the process is also thorough, Gerrity adds. At OST, they want that professional to stay around for a long time — something of a rarity in the technology arena, where job-hopping is common. But focusing so heavily on employee retention allows OST to gain more credibility with clients, Gerrity believes.
 
Drawing good employees is easier with the office's location, he adds. "Minneapolis-St. Paul is the biggest small town in the country, it has a great culture," he says. "That makes for a very good match between the cities and the company."
 
Source: David Gerrity, OST
Writer: Elizabeth Millard

Minnesota will have yet another technology and business resource on Sept. 18th, when the Minnesota High Tech Association (MHTA) and Minneapolis-based awareness firm Innovosource partner to provide a new monthly innovation series.
 
Dubbed "A Break for Breakthroughs," the series takes the form of free webinars for MHTA members, with the first event covering the latest breakthroughs in flexible electronics, from films and displays to touch sensor integration.

To kick off the series, the first webinar will be shown both online and at CoCo Minneapolis in the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Speakers have just been announced, and Innovosource's founder will moderate.
 
According to Andrew Wittenborg, MHTA's director of outreach, upcoming sessions will cover emerging areas that affect Minnesota's technology landscape most directly. For example, wearable devices and robotics are booming here, so they'll get coverage, as will nanotech, biotech, and stem cells.  Advancements in image processing and analysis are also slated to be discussed.
 
"We are particularly excited by this new partnership because it represents a key aspect of MHTA's mission to fuel Minnesota's prosperity through innovation and technology," Wittenborg notes.
 
He adds that the mission of the series is to help business leaders, R&D teams, investors, entrepreneurs, and others to learn more about emerging technologies and to build stronger relationships among the top players locally. "We will provide a greater level of awareness beyond the widely accessible information already available," says Wittenborg.
 
MHTA will also provide programming for Innovosource's Pardon the Disruption program, which connects high technology companies and investors to research universities and laboratories.
 
Source: Andrew Wittenborg, MHTA
Writer: Elizabeth Millard

The entrepreneurs vying for the grand prize in the heated competition for the Minnesota Cup just passed one more milestone, as 18 finalists were announced in preparation for the Sept. 11th award ceremony.
 
Now in its ninth year, the Minnesota Cup will award $40,000 to a grand prize winner who displays the most innovative idea in the state. The top three ideas in each of the six divisions (energy/clean tech, general, high tech, life science/health IT, social entrepreneur, and student) will advance to the finalist round, and compete for a share of prize money.
 
Finalists range in terms of innovation, and include aquaponics company Garden Fresh Farms, teacher-centered tech tool Kidblog, and medical device firm RxFunction. A list of finalists can be found here.
 
The competition is designed to bring out the best and brightest minds in Minnesota, and to help budding entrepreneurs to make connections within the business community.
 
Co-founder Scott Litman notes that the competition grows tremendously every year, and this spring, almost 1,100 people entered. More than 8,000 Minnesotans have participated in the Minnesota Cup since the competition began in 2005.
 
"We're proud to point to our successes, including last year's Grand Prize winner, PreciouStatus, which has raised more than $1.5 million in capital to date," Litman says, adding that other finalists have gone on to raise more than $60 million in capital, to support the development of their ideas, create jobs, and broker numerous business partnerships, collaborations, and distribution agreements.
 
Source: Scott Litman, Minnesota Cup
Writer: Elizabeth Millard