MinneBar 2010 What’s New on the Minnesota Tech Scene
MinneBar 2010, an (un)conference aimed at getting Minnesota tech and design communities together, was held on May 22nd at Best Buy Headquarters. Here’s a short recap of the event and what’s new on the Minnesota tech scene:
Opening remarks were by MinneBar co-founders Luke Francl and Ben Edwards. They thanked sponsors, including W3i.
The first session I attended at MinneBar 2010 was “Legal Implications of Limewire on File-Sharing Business Models” by Ryan Miest of Robius Kaplan Miller Ciresi, which described how most of the copyright concerns involving file-sharing networks go back to the Sony BetaMax VCR law suit from 1984. No one thought Napster had a leg to stand on. Others like Grokster andLimewire were able to continue after learning not to be centralized like Napster. The Limewire decision is likely to be appealed with respect to the courts findings of personal liability of their CEO. I didn’t think they sufficiently covered veil piercing.
Graeme Thickins briefly introduced me to Rick Mahn founder of Social Media Breakfast Minneapolis and Myke Roventine. I joined about 75 others to hear Myke’s MinneBar session, “Social Web Design: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”. Myke pointed out what he felt were flawed design strategies by the market leading social media players like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo. Does everyone need to put their Twitter feeds on their blog? The Twitter feeds miss the context of the conversation, and aren’t making the web better when being on others’ blogs. He also commented that Facebook has changed functionality multiple times unnecessarily, such as moving the search box several times over the past couple of years. These unnecessary changes caused confusion for users. He also commented how Twitter’s “infinite scrolling” for tweets could be improved by adopting additional UI controls such as those found on BlipFM. He said the big guys are trying the changes instead of user testing. Phil Wilson remarked during the session how this was “try fast, fail fast.” Also during the session Steve Borsch announced that he just deleted his Facebook account due to privacy concerns.
Next I went to “Bowling for Market Share- How to Grow Your Startup by Narrowing its Focus” by Curt Prins. Curt provided very good start-up marketing advice. Curt laid out his very pragmatic approach to B2B marketing for tech start-ups, and the developers in the audience definitely seem to embrace his methods.
Over lunch, Robert Stephens who was so gracious to advocate for Best Buy to allow Minnesota techies to use their space, briefly remarked on Best Buy’s strategy around digital televisions, and his recent trip to Google IO.
Next at MinneBar, I caught Aaron Kardell’s iPhone app marketing session entitled, “Getting started with iPhone & iPad Development.” Aaron is the founder of Performant Design and developer of the popular iGarageSale app. Aaron shared his lessons learned in iPhone app marketing, such as the importance of getting on the top 100 lists, requesting app store reviews within your app, ideally after the user has been using it for about a week, some ideas on how to get noticed by Apple (such as taking out ads in Cupertino on Facebook), using roadblock ad campaigns at popular Apple/Mac blogs, using incentive app downloads to burst your downloads, and using vendors like Tapjoy and Flurry App Circle. After the business discussion, Aaron coded an Italian food finder iPhone app using Yelp’s API and Mapkit.
The next MinneBar 2010 session I attended was “How to Measure P&L When Your Price is Free” by W3i’s Product Manager, Kristin Oberhaus. With users wanting free apps on the Internet, you need to balance the demand gained for free app versus paid app promotion. Kristin pointed out various models to drive revenue for free applications, including cross-subsidy, three-party, freemium, and nonmonetary. When free is your model, your P&L must be based on the value driven by your free app and not the price.
Next I spoke on a panel of Minnesota tech thought leaders, and discussed “How Can Minnesota be Better”. Thank you to Jeff Pesek and Mike Bollinger for inviting me to participate. The session was largely centered on the culture of risk aversion in Minnesota, how Minnesota tech start-ups need to focus on home runs and not just niche singles and doubles, and funding. Jon Dahl, co-founder of YCombinator-backed, Zencoder said that if Minnesota was going to try an incubator concept like YCombinator or TechStars the incubator would need a lot more cash, given the lack of local angel funding and VC activity, and a mentorship program– both essential elements of YCombinator.
MinneBar 2010 proved to be a great place to network with top Minnesota tech experts. I spent a couple of hours after the sessions ended schmoozing with several new faces, including Derrick Shields & Dylan Petersson & of WebproLeads, Matt Bauer of Pedal Brain, and Thomas Grabowski, co-founder of LogLogic. I also listened in as the first ever Minnespark award winners were announced.
Further, it was refreshing to hear a lot of buzz about Minnesota tech jobs. I gathered that W3i is not the only company hiring right now. It seemed to be a common theme that Minnesota tech jobs are in abundance as many of the companies present indicated they have positions available. Minnesota Recruiters survey indicates that there is optimism for job growth in 2010 and an increase in personal job security. Minnesota’s tech scene has a large, highly skilled, and growing workforce demonstrated by the energy and attendance at MinneBar and the tech job buzz being generated there.
Thanks to the organizers and attendees, along with Best Buy for allowing us to use their campus (which is absolutely cool) to promote Minnesota tech and design. As evidenced by the increase in attendance over the 2009 event, MinneBar rocks.
Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.
Find Out More on How W3i Can Grow Your Consumer App Business
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May 27th, 2010 at 6:54 pm
[...] attending Minnebar 2010, I spoke on a panel of tech entrepreneurs and investors to an audience of about 200 to 250 to [...]