The origins of The Wire can be traced to a huddle with WCCO Brand Director Casey Kespohl nearly two years ago. “We had been thinking about creating some sort of environment to engage people more in not only news gathering but local news and information.” says John. “We didn’t know what it was.” (To see what it is right now, take a look at this screencast and commentary by John. Note: There is also a list view of The Wire in the offing.)

The launch date for The Wire, built in collaboration with the Nerdery at SierraBravo, was originally slated for November 1st, but that obviously will be pushed back as they continue to secure funds to develop it.

At the mention of funds I realized that my conversation with John sounded more like one I might have with a start-up rather than one I’d have with a Director of a department for a large media organization. Admittedly, funding for these sorts of projects, even at the corporate level, is tricky. As a former employee of CBS myself, on the radio side, I can speak from experience, and I’m sure it’s true at many companies, securing a budget for a project that deviates from “traditional” business development is almost more difficult than getting funding from complete strangers.

John points out that balancing the time and resources that will be spent on what WCCO traditionally does versus developing new avenues is a constant challenge. “My boss says we’re like scouts on a pony that rides ahead on the road to find new things…coming back and reporting what is a good road and what is not.” noted John. “The Wire is a road we’re riding down.”

This securing of funds continues to strike me and John makes no bones that WCCO is open to outside money to complete the building and launch of The Wire. “We are actively seeking a sponsor to help build and launch The Wire. If you’re XYZ telecom, you’re not just looking to throw money around. You spend very carefully and strategically, especially right now.” He continues, “We believe we are going to find a company that believes something like this will benefit our community — and benefit the sponsor financially.”

Funding will also be determined by the return…the monetization of The Wire. Beyond the more traditional advertising and ability to purchase an event on the timeline, John and his team have considered other opportunities. In fact, when I threw out the concept of selling a white label version to other media outlets it was obviously not a new idea inside the building. John noted that other CBS owned stations that have heard about this have expressed interest. “When can I have it?” is how John describes their excitement. He goes on to say “My visceral response is ‘How much money do you have to help me build it?’ Within CBS it’s all the same pot…Getting money from other stations within our family is not really worth it. Now outside…we haven’t really gone down that business model yet.”

Even though they haven’t acted on that new business model, it’s quite refreshing for a media fan like me to hear a company looking beyond their safety zone to examine the core vs. growth strategy. “I think it’s a great reflection of our leadership. I’m proud to be part of that.” says John.

An equally exciting statement that John made along this ’start-up vibe’ was that of dealing with competition. “This past Tuesday (at the Bloginar) I was asked why I was showing this, now somebody could steal it.” He goes on to say, “We have to worry about what is best for us and good for users and do it in a way that we think is best, as quickly as we can.” In fact, in regards to The Wire, WCCO plans on welcoming input from who most would consider competitors. In our walk-through he even notes posting items to the timeline from (gasp) other TV stations. Imagine a story from KARE11 being posted on WCCO’s Wire.

Start-up thinking and collaborating with competitors…from a traditional media outlet? Now that is innovation.

Online fundraising costs about a third of what traditional direct marketing does which makes GiveMN a much more efficient way to raise funds. The foundation that administers GiveMN plans to cover much of the 4.75% credit card transaction cost from corporate and private donations so that 100% of the contributions will go to the designated charity.  Their partners and funders page lists a number of well known organizations such as The Saint Paul Foundation, Greater Twin Cities United Way, The Minneapolis Foundation, The Bush Foundation and The Minnesota Council of Nonprofits along with corporate and media sponsors.

To kick things off, GiveMN has designated November 17th as “Give to the Max Day” where several of their donors have pledged up to $500,000 in matching contributions to fund programs and cover the transaction costs. More details will be posted on the GiveMN site in coming days about this event as well as on their Facebook page and Twitter account.

GiveMN looks to revolutionize charitable giving here in Minnesota but also might inspire other such efforts in other states. You never know where Minnesota innovation will strike next.

Note to the FTC: I’m not keeping the phone, guys — it’s a loaner! Of course, I don’t need it, anyway, since I’m now into my third year of unmitigated iPhone bliss, having upgraded to a new 3GS a couple months ago. Well, I should say bliss with Apple, not necessarily with AT&T.  The latter is, of course, the only carrier choice in the U.S. for the iPhone — unless you want to jail-break your phone and void the warranty.  People tell me they do that on T-Mobile and the phone works fine.  But for those locked into a Verizon contract, or those convinced they can’t live without the better 3G network that Verizon claims it has – you know, the superior coverage they keep beating us over the head with in their ads? — then the Droid would seem to be the closest you’re going to get to the iPhone experience on Verizon.

The Experience

So, okay, let’s start with that — at least the initial experience.  (And no company, hands down, does that better than Apple.)  Which of the above phones would you rather have? It all starts with the home screen, I guess. Now, granted — on the Droid, if you touch the arrow on the tab at the bottom and slide up, you get a much better looking screen on with all your little app icons — and without the mottled gray background (what’s with that?) – but, overall, I have to say that the visual experience with the Droid doesn’t compare well with the iPhone.  And I say that even knowing that the screen is supposed to be higher resolution than the iPhone (personally, I didn’t notice that much).  I guess it’s really the “brand experience” I’m talking about here.  And that applies to the box, the packaging, too.  Motorola (or is it Verizon?) tried to come up with something here as good as the iPhone, but to me they missed the mark. Something about the darkness of the whole thing — the black, the gray, and then that goofy little glowing red ball on the screen (on both the package and all over Verizon’s promotional materials). Inside the package, though, the little “Getting Started” booklet is very nicely done — love the fanfold, and it tells you everything you need to know, quickly.

(NOTE: See the “Update” at the bottom of this post.)

The Feel

The Droid feels good in my hand — solid, a little heavier than the iPhone. But that seems to be because it has more metal. And, heck, it does have a slide-open keyboard, so it should be heavier.  But that slight additional weight didn’t bother me.  It’s also a little thicker than the iPhone, as you would expect — but that’s hardly even noticeable.  It’s a teeny bit narrower as well.  To be quite honest with you, though, that actually feels a little more natural in my hand than the iPhone does.

A Look at How the Droid Is Billed

So, here’s how Verizon presents the new Droid phone on its web site — including a big fat poke at the iPhone in a commercial they run at the front of this web page (hit “Skip Intro” if you’ve seen it).  Funny how every new smart phone out there has to go after the leader.  And Motorola, the manufacturer of the Droid with whom Verizon partnered, describes the phone thusly on its media center page for media and bloggers:

Introducing DROID by Motorola, a Smartphone powered by Android 2.0 developed in partnership with Google and Verizon Wireless, the nation’s largest 3G network. DROID delivers high-speed Web, voice-activated search, a super large touch screen and thousands of customizable apps and widgets from Android Market^™. With the thinnest full QWERTY slider available on the market, it’s a no-compromise supergenius in your pocket, multitasking at break-neck pace to get things done.

High-Speed Mobile Browsing

• See the Web at break-neck speed on the largest high-resolution display with a Flash 10 ready HTML browser.

• Look up favorite sites, video and music fast with a high-speed, cortex A8 processor and lightning-fast connections.

•View it all on the 3.7” display with more than 400,000 total pixels, which is twice that of the leading competitor.

• Work faster on the Web with double tap to zoom in and out.

Google Searches Beyond the Web

• Type your search to deliver results such as contacts and music offering a complete search experience on a mobile device.

• Use voice-activated search to serve up both your contacts and Google search results, based on your location.

• Find your way with free spoken turn-by-turn directions with Google Maps^TM Navigation (Beta), with Street View and Latitude^TM. View geographic information, such as My Maps, Wikipedia entries and transit lines, right on the map.

How It Worked for Me

I must say the Droid itself, and Verizon’s service, worked pretty darn well, in the few hours I spent playing with the phone. The hardware is solid, and the service is fast — whether accessing the web, the “Android Market” to download apps, sending emails and texts… it all was quite speedy. I downloaded about four apps, one at a time, and they were all on my home screen fast.  I’ve never used the Android Market before to get apps (this is the first time I’ve ever even used an Android phone), and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it worked.  (I hear about 10,000 apps are available there now, versus 85,000 for the iPhone on the App Store.)  I downloaded a few apps from Minneapolis-based DoApp Inc. (which already has 75 in the Android Market) — I grabbed “MyLite,” our local “WCCO-TV Mobile Local News,” and a similar one for San Diego called “SD 6 News.”  I also searched the Android Market for the app I use most — “Tweetie” — but no dice.  Also couldn’t find “Twitterific,” another one I’ve used.  But there were tons of Twitter apps in the Market, most of which I’d never heard of, or they were specialized apps for certain kinds of tweet content. The one general Twitter app that looked to be the most highly rated, in the five-star icons that appear with each app, was “Twidroid” — but I didn’t take the time to try it (I know how Twitter apps work).

I also tried the camera yesterday, and found it works okay, though it took me a while to figure out how to best use the skinny little camera button on the side.  And I really didn’t notice the camera’s auto-focus function.  I did email photos successfully.  They must be big files, because it’s a 5-megapixel camera.

Built-in apps like YouTube worked great.  Again, quick access — and I searched on my name, and up came all my videos very quickly, in a nice interface, and even some I had favorited (all mixed together with my vids).  The Maps app was awesome. Very impressive, and the GPS function was pretty darn accurate in instantly finding my location. There’s a new “Layers” aspect to the Maps that I didn’t really understand, but I clicked on “Traffic” and got a different view.  Then I drilled in via the “Satellite” menu option and got a scary-good overhead view of my neighborhood — up close and personal.  Maybe that higher-res screen is what made the Maps look so darn good on the Droid.

The slide-open keyboard worked okay for me, but my fingers (which really aren’t very big) were fat-fingering that thing bigtime.  I honestly would have no idea how anyone could double-thumb that keyboard — except maybe someone with thumbs the size of a three-year old.  I much preferred using the “virtual keyboard,” which comes up automatically when doing searches, emailing, etc.  But the keys are much smaller for that in portrait mode than the iPhone’s virtual keyboard — making it horribly hard to use!  So, flip it to landscape mode, and you get much bigger keys. That option worked way better for me.

So, What’s My Net-Net?

Okay, those are some of good things.  I try hard to be a positive guy!  But now how do I really feel?   Let me try to give my overall, bottom-line assessment…

Some things that really bugged me were the lack of the nice big, round home switch which I’m so used to at the bottom front of the iPhone.  Man, I really missed that on the Droid!  Having to go to the top of the phone, and find that little tiny switch at the upper right was a real pain. I swear it takes two hands, or a real contortion of one hand, to press that thing!  That is a major user-experience mistake in my book.  I also found a lot of other things that just weren’t intuitive about the phone’s operation, or the navigation within apps, including email and texting. For example, I could not figure out how a text became a Draft when I was trying to send it, nor could I figure out how to retrieve that Draft so I could send it.  Couldn’t figure out how to delete some private messages I’d sent, either, before I turn in the phone.  And, right now, I can’t even get back to the home screen, no matter how many times I press the little home icon on the front of the phone.  Regarding the touchscreen:  I couldn’t get the “pinch” feature to work, to enlarge or reduce a screen, though the “double-tap” feature did.  Another weirdity: I have yet to see where I go for “Settings” — there’s no icon I can see for that, as there is on my iPhone.  So I could not, for example, shut off the damn machine-language guy saying “Dro-o-o-id” in a low, bass drone every time an email came in.  Puh-lease. Also, it just never really seemed natural to use this phone — which way to hold it… straight up,  sideways, or slide it open… or what. And that home button way up top, then the camera button way down low.

So, okay, my net-net … and you knew this was coming: it ain’t no iPhone. Now, if you really can’t leave Verizon, and you really want to pay the same price as an iPhone ($199 with a two-year contract), just to stay with Verizon — then, yes, it’s a close experience.  But close is what you get, not the cigar.

Then again, if you really like Verizon all that much, why not just wait?  All us fanboys in the know predict Apple is sure to add Verizon as a carrier for the iPhone here in the U.S., just as soon as the AT&T exclusive expires.

What do you think?  Lock yourself in for two more years with Verizon now, or wait for the iPhone?  What would you do?

UPDATE 11/6/09:

Wanted to cite an earlier, very comprehensive Droid review by Engadget, which appeared prior to mine.  (Amazing how being a paid blogger let’s you go to the lengths this guy did.)  Also wanted to give this local shout-out: Garrick Van Buren’s Droid review.  Finally, I point you to what I think is the best review of all — by the master himself, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, on November 3rd: Motorola’s Droid Is Smart Success for Verizon Users.

In addition, here are some more local tie-ins: a growing, grass-roots local organization called Mobile Twin Cities, and their Google Group.  They’re focused on all things mobile, including marketing, and all mobile OSes, including both Android and iPhone, of course.  And, on top of that, we even have a burgeoning Minnesota Android Developers Google Group as well.

As part of said quest I called the folks at Best Buy to check on the health and/or success of Twelpforce.

For the sake of transparency I count many at Best Buy as friends. That said, my first of impression of the name of this initiative and it’s marketing campaign around the Twelpforce didn’t rank high on my cool-o-meter. To me social media is all about one-to-one contact and I didn’t necessarily think a TV add depicting a stadium of Blue Shirts (Best Buy employees) yelling out answers as the best way to showcase a concept and effort that is so darned positive and forward thinking…just sayin’.

I was curious and anxious to have the conversation. John Bernier, a Social Media Manager at Best Buy, and the one overseeing the Twelpforce initiative was happy to spend some time talking about it. This in itself is a good sign that a level of success is being attained.  

For those of you not familiar with Twelpforce, the concept is quite simple…enlist a legion of customer service representatives from the ranks of Best Buy’s employees to respond to questions and concerns about Best Buy products and services that arise in the Twitter stream. Twelpforce, as John noted is a “tool to talk with as well as talk to” the Best Buy customer or potential customer. He goes on to say that it’s in keeping with the overall focus of the Best Buy to deliver “dream support.” Whatever that means. Ultimately, of course one has to assume that the goal is to increase business and customer loyalty.

John outlined a bit of history as well as some numbers to demonstrate where Twelpforce is today. After three months (the “hard launch” with marketing via TV started on July 19th, 2009.) the original size of the Twelpforce has grown from 400 members (Best Buy and Geek Squad reps) to 2,200. They have responded to over 13,000 very public questions, concerns, and opinions. @twelpforce counts over 10,000 followers (13,404 followers and 2,059 following as of this writing), with about a 50/50 split between addressing actual break/fix issues and opinions. “We have made people realize that a year ago there was one voice (of Best Buy), and now they know that there are thousands of voices.”

So, how are they measuring the response to Twelpforce as they seek to deliver a tool that provides value for Best Buy? John noted, as do so many when you start talking metrics, “There is nothing that we can buy into that measures success.” This facilitated the need to build their own dashboard to at least assemble measurable pieces of the puzzle. That dashboard of course includes monitoring the number of followers but goes beyond that. The volume, or the pace and number of questions, now numbering between 100 and 125 per day according to John, the number of active Best Buy reps per week, the number of new reps, keyword sentiment, retweets and “follow Friday” posts are also monitored. Other tools include Twitter StreamGraphs and TweetStats (many are pictured) that will “Create a way for the business team to see trends.”

So how are those thousands of voices answering those questions? When Twelpforce rolled out and I made a point of following the questions and answers, I noted that many answers were of the “Stop into our store and we can help you with that.” type answers. John deftly answered that he couldn’t say how “many” answers there were like that, he did note that “Some answers will require a store visit.” He also noted that “the 140 character format of Twitter doesn’t always allow for a complete answer.” In fact, Twelpforce has developed some logical extensions to better respond without asking the customer to come to a store. “We’ll link to the Best Buy Forum to facilitate a more extensive answer and we’ll also link to a brand page and sometimes other info sources (like Engadget). We are the facilitator.” moving people form channel to channel. According to John, “You know what we know as fast as we know it.”

So, just who is answering these questions and concerns? What does it take for a Blue Shirt or Geek to be part of the TwelpForce? Are there restrictions or criteria to become a more audible voice of Best Buy? According to John, “There’s no real restrictions.” The fact that those that want to be part of the ‘force’ are employees means “they have been vetted by HR. We provide some training as well as a wiki that helps TwelpForce members best provide service.” He goes on to say, “We expect to be very good, not perfect.” at addressing customer needs. “There will be varying degrees of success.”

Moving forward John highlighted where TwelpForce will be going. In the short-term there will be more engagement, especially over the holiday season and much of that will be driven by another round of TV advertising. In the longer term the hope will be to move it beyond just Twitter. “We’d like it to be platform agnostic.” Of course when I asked how that might impact the name TwelpForce it was pretty obvious that it was a topic of much discussion at Best Buy. (FelpForce on Facebook? YelpForce for YouTube?) John also hopes to use initiatives like this to accelerate the adoption of social media by both employees and customers. “It’s provides us with the ability to prove ourselves every day. It’s not a campaign, it’s a commitment.” says John.

So can this be considered a social media success story? One that might rival that maternal pain reliever or pizza purveyor dust up? Without having an associated video it’s probably not as sexy, but anything that enables the conversation between brand and customer, as this clearly has, must be considered a success. John adds, “We’ve been able to meet our customers at the crossroads of need and time…Being there when and where they need us.”  I’d say that qualifies…

Panel members:

• Jason DeRusha (@DeRushaJ), investigative reporter, WCCO-TV
• David Brauer (@dbrauer), media reporter, MinnPost.com
• Gene Rebeck (@generebeck), senior editor, Twin Cities Business Magazine
• Julia Schrenkler (@juliaschrenkler), interactive producer, Minnesota Public Radio
• Dirk DeYoung (@ddeyoung), editor, Business Journal

We were fortunate that the SMBMSP facility host, Summit Brewing Company, provided us with a boardroom to record in after the panel discussion and, though the room had a bit of an echo, we were able to get in a solid podcast with Julio and David Brauer joining us for a continuation of the discussion about journalism and social media.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

As someone engaged in PR, marketing and product management, Lisa has impressed the Gang with her knowledge and passion for the shift in social and human communication at the heart of the social media phenomena, so we actively sought her out when we discovered she was heading out to Blogworld and asked if she’d be willing to recap it for Minnov8 upon her return. Our hope? To get a fresh viewpoint from a Minnesotan directly in the demographic sweet spot for social media and in full-scale seek mode learning all she can about all of its moving parts. The result? Exactly that (and much more) from a woman with the confidence and intelligence to soak it all in, make the connections shaping her opinions, fully engage with the Blogworld speakers, thought leaders as well as key attendees at this event (plus we got to interview her before she becomes famous).

We also discovered something about Ms. Grimm and gambling. Did she help the economy of Las Vegas and the consumer confidence of gaming industry personnel?

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch and Phil Wilson (Tim Elliott and Graeme Thickins were not available midday on a weekday).

Show Notes:

+ Blogworld

+ Chris Brogan and his book

+ Jay Rosen

+ Perhaps this is one reason why Ms. Grimm has the opinion she does about gambling.

The seminar featured talks by Mike Sowada, CEO of Visi, shown here on stage. (Photo courtesy of Charles Robinson.) Visi is the state’s largest Internet services and hosting firm, with data centers in both St. Paul and Eden Prairie.  A talk followed entitled ”Cloud Computing as a Business Advantage” by Chris Howard, a VP at analyst/research firm Burton Group.  Jason Baker, CTO of Visi, wrapped up the event by presenting the first details of his firm’s new ReliaCloud offering, which included a live, online demo by product manager Johnny Hatch that came off flawlessly. I captured a few of the key slides for you…

The suite of ReliaCloud services starts with the obvious one called “Cloud Server,”and Visi tells me they have already signed up more than 100 qualified beta testers for the public beta of this service, now underway. There is no cost to be a beta tester, and you can sign up here. The demo made it very clear that no special knowledge is required to quickly “spin up up a server” in the cloud. Visi’s cloud service is clearly being positioned not just for IT professionals, but for business users as well. And the firm is targeting organizations of all sizes — large enterprises, midsized companies (Visi’s sweet spot), and certainly startups as well.  Cloud computing is, of course, especially a favored choice of the latter, with their minimal IT budgets.

So, Why Would a Company Choose a Regional Player Like Visi as Its Cloud Computing Provider?

The obvious advantage for Visi that I heard attendees discussing following the presentations — as compared to the large cloud players such as Amazon EC2 and Rackspace — is the peace of mind that many firms will have in knowing where their servers and data are actually located. That is, the “comfort factor” that it’s all nearby — not in some unknown location that could be on the other side of the world. Also, more responsive, local customer support — including live, 24/7 online chat that Visi will offer — will have appeal to many firms, as opposed to the big national or global players, which have support that’s largely self-service or provided only by email.

CTO Jason Baker said that the second service to be offered in the ReliaCloud suite will be “Cloud Storage,” and that pricing for that would be by Gigabyte, and highly competitive. Watch for that announcement soon — in November, I gathered.  I also learned, after the event, that the ReliaCloud service is not even officially public yet on the Visi.com web site.  But a new site — www.ReliaCloud.com — will be going live on November 1. In the meantime, you can start reading more at Visi’s blog, including a brief recap of the October 21st seminar, complete with PDF downloads of the slide presentations.  You can also check out other blog posts there that chronicle the ongoing construction process at Visi’s new data center in Eden Prairie — including some cool time-lapse photography — a facility that CEO Mike Sowada told me he expects to be fully up and running in December. Financing for the project took well over a year, Sowada said — “a process that would have taken three days in previous years.”

A final note: to get ongoing updates on Visi’s new ReliaCloud services, you can start following along at special new Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as a new ReliaCloud blog.

Along with the demo and pitch Visi featured a presentation on Cloud Computing as a Business Advantage by Burton Group VP, Chris Howard. Chris took some time to talk about opportunities, concerns, and even the multiple definitions of “the cloud.”

The slide deck of the presentation is available now from Visi.

Apparently our Governor has decided not to publicly release the communication issued by a state agency to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) relative to the Administration’s funding priorities for federal broadband stimulus projects, specifically the Minnesota-focused NTIA/RUS broadband stimulus applications stating in comments to the aggregator of public broadband information, StimulusBroadband.com, that, ”…the communication issued by a state agency to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) relative to the Administration’s funding priorities for federal broadband stimulus projects in Minnesota is not considered a “public document.”

Thankfully I follow Blandin on Broadband’s Ann Treacy and was alerted to this gubernatorial non-release. She had this to say about it:

It’s frustrating. The Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force has been so transparent with their information. I’ve gotten spoiled. Also I think the NTIA/RUS has made strides to be transparent with their processes so it seems against the spirit of the stimulus ideals not to maintain transparency. There are a lot of applicants in Minnesota waiting to hear about what their chances are for funding. Should they be getting ready to hit the ground running with the money; should they be coming up with a contingency plan?

Ms. Treacy ends with speculation in an attempt to understand:

Lots of folks are wondering why the list is closed. As the article indicates, Minnesota maybe trying to avoid criticism for their choices. The article says, “the decision to treat the NTIA response as non-public fuels a growing debate over whether States preferred public and government projects over private ones. It would appear that Minnesota could be shielding its rankings from the same type of criticisms other states are facing.” An underlying factor, may be the criticism they received for endorsing the Connection Nation mapping proposal. (I’m not making excuses, just trying to understand.)

Hopefully this is simply a delay before becoming public and not an obvious ploy to block Federal broadband stimulus funds due to the recently released Federal Communication Commissioner’s rules on net neutrality and the GOP’s anti-net neutrality stance and moves to block it.

Governor, lay this data out on the table under the light of public scrutiny.

Libraries used to be places to go solely to find information and knowledge in containers called “books” that were comprised of “atoms” and organized by Melvil Dewey’s cool Decimal System, but increasingly library systems are morphing in to places to get connected online where patrons can find their information and knowledge in “bits” while interacting with the library in an increasingly virtual and — most intriguingly in today’s participation culture — in an online and interactively social way.

The Gang had a chance to invite Meg Canada on the podcast to talk about the 21st century library, what our biggest Minnesota library system is doing (and what she’s driving within it) to embrace new realities that are internet-centric and deliver a surprising array of services you may not know even exist. Meg has long impressed us with how much she “gets it” with respect to new media and social technologies, but have been quite delighted to see how much of her energy is invested in the social and internet community in Minnesota and the role she plays in nurturing it along with good humor and an eagerness to serve others.

Meg is a senior librarian for Web Services and Training at Hennepin County Library and currently coordinates public training and social media efforts for the library. She volunteers helping with the Unsummit, recently presented at MinneWebCon, and is a regular contributor to Social Media Breakfast. Had we known beforehand that she also sings regularly with the Twin Cities chapter of TechKaraoke, we would’ve had her croak out an Etta James tune or something. We’ll get her on another podcast soon and have her sing.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Opening & closing music is “38 Special” by Charlie Musselwhite (iTunes link) from Music Alley, purveyor of podsafe tunes.

Discussed during the show:

+ Wired article, “YouTube’s Bandwidth Bill Is Zero. Welcome to the New Net”

+ Libraries & Broadband by Ann Treacy on the Blandin on Broadband blog

+ Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) on Twitter

+ Hennepin County Library (HCL) and their services; Bookspace, a social site for HCL book lovers; eBooks and downloadable audio books and videos; and a remarkably easy to use, searchable database of all events and classes in the HCL system; HCL on Twitter.

Well, throughout 2009, DoApp has been busy on another front:  its “Mobile Local News” app, which is an ad-supported iPhone app it co-developed with partner Inergize Digital Media of Minneapolis.  The latter is also helping DoApp market the app, primarily signing up TV stations initially, which brand the app for their own use in their local market.  And each of those branded versions of the app is distributed via the App Store to consumers, who download them for free.  DoApp also has the app available for the Android mobile platform, with Blackberry and Palm Pre versions coming soon.  (By the way, DoApp’s first customer for the iPhone mobile news app was our own WCCO-TV, Channel 4.)

Now, however, I learned from the DoApp folks at the recent MIMA Summit (where they did a demo), that they and their partner Inergize are spreading their wings even further — now offering to build and publish branded versions for newspapers and other publications, as well as online news sites.

As you might expect, DoApp is touting its Mobile Local News as a tool for “citizen journalism.”  Get this:  it says 50% of internet users will be generating content by 2010, and that 100 million Americans now get their news from a mobile device. They don’t cite a source for those numbers, but they square with what I’m hearing elsewhere.

In a newsletter DoApp just distributed, it says this:

“Now it’s easy for readers (and writers) to create user-generated content with Mobile Local News. With our app, you can connect with a television station or newspaper and be part of the news-making process. No press credentials required! DoApp’s Mobile Local News is the first and only local news platform to provide user-generated content. You can easily upload video, photos, and text from your mobile device. Report the news as it’s happening!”

To get more perspective on these recent developments, I asked DoApp founder (and early Google employee) Joe Sriver if he’d answer some questions, and he was kind enough to agree. Here is that email interview:

Minnov8:  Joe, you mentioned, for your news outlet customers, once they have your app set up, that activating the user-generated content (citizen-journalism) feature is as simple as flipping a switch in their browser. How many of your existing stations have enabled or actually now use this feature?

DoApp/Sriver: Well, 38 stations added it in the last few days, and the rest — I think we’re getting up to a total of some 78 — should have it available once they turn it on over the next week.

Minnov8: Do you expect this feature will cause even more stations to sign up for your Mobile Local News app?  That is, did you find there was a big demand in the marketplace for this type of citizen journalism functionality?

DoApp/Sriver: Demand, yes. We did some qualitative interviews on what users wanted to see in an upgrade of our app, and it came up in the top 3.  We also looked at the success of Facebook’s integration of video and photo sharing and sensed it made for a smart play to give easy access for uploading to the stations.

Minnov8: What’s a typical scenario for how your stations and news outlets would benefit from viewers in their area having this app on their phone?

DoApp/Sriver: Well, for example, let’s take the case of high school football. A single station or newspaper can’t report on every game that’s played on a Friday night — they don’t have the resources. But with our user-generated upload feature, they now have the ability to receive information on all the games. This is just one of the many features Mobile Local News offers. Our stations and papers love it.

Minnov8: But how will stations “curate” incoming submissions?  Will they assign a specific person who has to monitor all incoming uploads throughout a shift?

DoApp/Sriver: The stations and newspapers specify an email address that will “collect” the photos, videos, and stories. A station employee determines if the submission is worthy of placement on their mobile app, their web site, or even on television.

DoApp/Sriver: The news entity chooses the email address(es) the submissions go to, so it will vary by station

Minnov8:  What financial arrangement do you have with individual TV stations – is it a licensing agreement, or do they buy it outright?  How do you get paid?

DoApp/Sriver: We have two models: a small set up fee with an advertising rev-share, or a small monthly subscription fee. In the case of the ad revenue-share, we get paid a percentage of the ad revenue. In the case of the subscription, it’s a monthly fee only, no ad rev-share.

DoApp/Sriver: We have 70+ news apps in both the iTunes App Store and the Android Market.  These include TV news stations as well as newspapers around the U.S.  We are signing more newspapers, magazines, and publications every day.

DoApp/Sriver: Adagogo is a geo-located advertising platform that is built into our Mobile Local News platform.  Media outlets love Adagogo because they can easily target relevant ads to their readers.

Thanks, Joe.  And here’s a link to your still-stealthy Adagogo page for our readers, so they can enter their email address and get info sent to them whenever you decide to go wild with it!   And for more information on the Mobile Local News app, readers should check out the DoApp web site “News” page, where there’s some media coverage going back to when the DoApp-Inergize partnership was first announced in May.

[Disclaimer: Graeme Thickins was an advisor to DoApp from its planning and launch stages, through most of 2008.  And he still holds a teeny-tiny equity stake.]

I have been using a Windows Mobile phone for the past 18 months and have been looking for a way to sync my data wirelessly for some time. A while back I installed the beta of Microsoft’s MyPhone service but never got it working correctly. Not sure if it was something I was doing wrong but such services should just work without a lot of user intervention and MyPhone never got there despite repeated effort in it’s beta form (it sort of worked for me once launched; read on for details).

Last week Best Buy launched their mIQ service which I noticed supported Windows Mobile so I signed up and a couple days ago was sent my account invitation. After a somewhat complex setup process that involved both the handset and computer browser, I was ready to sync. And after quite a while it seemed to be about the same as MyPhone; not really working. So I rebooted my phone, started again and this time let it sync overnight in it’s charging stand. The next morning when I checked the phone had fully synced and after a logout and login all my photos, contacts, calendar entries, text messages and other data was backed up in the mIQ service online, as advertised. My one suggestion is that the status screens on the phone be a bit more clear that something is happening since I think the sync would have worked the first time without my reboot (just a more animated status bar would work here).

Both mIQ and MyPhone are linked to popular social sites. MyPhone supports Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr while mIQ links to Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and Flickr. On the phone the mIQ service lets you update status on these services from their client, a nice touch. mIQ integrates all the communications for each contact in it’s web app so you can see all the text messages and phone calls linked to each contact. It also lets you send SMS messages from the web and easily make Skype calls to your contacts if you have a Skype out account on your computer. mIQ easily allows you to share photos and videos from the web app and seems to be automatically set to push these as they are taken from your phone by default. mIQ also has helpful stats on your phone memory usage that cleverly links to memory cards available at Best Buy making it easy to buy what you need for your phone. Overall, mIQ is very complete, stable and useful for a first release service. Along with Windows Mobile, mIQ also currently supports Blackberry and Symbian (mostly Nokia) smartphones.

MyPhone is a basic backup service with one killer feature in it’s freemium mode. Like mIQ, MyPhone backs up contacts, calendar, text messages, call history, videos, music and tasks but adds the Apple MobileMe-like ability to find your lost phone. For an additional fee, MyPhone will allow you to ring your lost phone remotely (presumably to find it in the cushions or antagonize whoever has it), lock or remotely erase it. This feature alone will be enough to sway many people to use MyPhone but in my testing I found issues that outweighed this advantage over mIQ. The first annoyance was all the photos in my web browser cache were synced and then for no apparent reason replicated back to the internal memory of the phone. Not only did this take a long time but it completely filled the internal memory of the phone causing all sorts of problems. The next issue I had with MyPhone was that contacts, tasks and calendar entries are not backed up if they are linked to Exchange servers. Since I use Exchange sync with my Google account, MyPhone did not back up any of this information. mIQ, on the other hand, had no problems backing up all this data. Lastly, MyPhone’s free service limits you to 200MB while Best Buy’s mIQ gives you 1 GB of storage.

Overall, both MyPhone and mIQ will backup data from your Windows Mobile phone and make media more accessible and sharable. But for me Best Buy’s mIQ service was easier to use and more useful than Microsoft’s MyPhone. If you have one of the supported smartphones, I encourage you to check out mIQ here.

OK, there is one comment I heard; “It’s not really an unconference.” True, the ‘un’ in ‘unconference’ might denote that there is no set agenda, that the space is provided and the topics are decided upon by those who show up. This style of meeting has spawned many a BarCamp like event, our own Minnebar to comes to mind.

However, as it pertains to UnSummit, the ‘un’ is a hold over from the inaugural event last year. Don Ball, not able to secure a ticket to the always popular MIMA Summit, decided to host a gathering of those interested in Interactive and Marketing who, like him, either couldn’t get a ticket or didn’t want to pay the relatively spendy ticket price. Hence, being held at the very same, the UnSummit was born.

It should be noted that, at it’s even loftier price, MIMA attracted 1000 folks to it’s recent 2009 Summit…and despite a few exceptions was well worth the price. It should also be noted that what little competition between the MIMA Summit and the UnSummit that might have existed in the very beginning, or perception of such, has long since disappeared. At least it should have. So while the UnSummit does borrow from the unconference concept in it’s presentation, it is really ‘un’ in name only.

OK, so next time perhaps there can be a few more open times and rooms to build some sessions on the fly.

No matter the format, the UnSummit was about bringing together close to 200 hundred interactive enthusiasts on a Saturday to learn from each other and discuss the future of the interactive and online world in a relaxed environment. From my standpoint, at the end of that day, that’s what everyone walked away with. But don’t just take my word for it…

Traditional display advertisements constantly seek the ultimate hook — designed to be catchy, relevant, and timely. Their sole objective is to capture the attention and imagination of a (publishing) website’s visitors long enough to prompt a click on the graphical ad that steers traffic to another, completely independent (advertising) website — which, ideally, is a targeted landing page. At this point, there are numerous desired outcomes depending on the objectives of the advertising campaign, not limited to:

• conduct a transaction/purchase
• provide personal data in the form of a “lead”
• offer feedback or take a survey

However, the reality here is that, more often than not, display advertisements under-deliver. Why? Because they don’t authentically engage users or offer them any real value. If viewers aren’t simply ignoring ads, they’re blocking them or defrauding them — thus the believably low click-through/conversion rates (based on the standard measure of clicks per one thousand impressions). It’s no wonder that most web surfers report an increasing aversion to online ads or have conditioned their viewing habits to ignore them. True, there have been notable improvements to the display ad model over the years — specifically Cost-Per-Action (CPA) pricing, contextual ads, and niche networks — but there’s still a long way to go before display ads become as effective as they can (and should) be!

So — what’s the Adaptive Avenue advantage?

Adaptive Avenue yields measurably improved results while delivering an interactive ad format that coordinates seamlessly with the advertiser’s existing distribution system. Of course, interactive ads are not new – but here we’re talking about an embedded product catalog — or “mini storefront” — with broad and deep selection and user-defined control. For the visitor, this format simulates essential aspects of an actual shopping experience without leaving the publisher’s page — by providing category/product navigation search and discovery before redirecting them to the advertiser’s site/page. Users are directed to a specific page within the e-commerce site only after they have focused on / committed to a specific item that they choose to purchase or research further. Simply put, fewer steps = increased brand engagement.

Another compelling advantage of the Adaptive Avenue formula is the linkage of site-based product inventory, details, and specifications with the ad in real time. Want to change a price or run a promotion? Simply change it in one place, on your database, and the price(s) within the network will simultaneously reflect any adjustments to your site. Did you move the bulk of your inventory overnight or did you just sell out? Not to worry — again, your ads are communicating with your database autonomously. The technology is ideally suited for products with volatile and perishable inventory such as retail promotions.

In addition to the obvious time-saving benefit to the advertiser resulting from decreased complexity and cycle time, this approach provides a more positive interaction for the visitor/shopper. Even short of actual purchase, user interaction with the ad provides the advertiser with an unprecedented source of consumer insight — such as brand, category, or product interests.

Recognizing that advertisers have gained greater control and influence over their ad spend, Adaptive Avenue has adopted a performance-driven revenue model. Additionally, the technology has the operational agility, scalability, and light footprint that enables any advertiser, large or small, to build a data-driven ad in minutes — without creative or technical intervention.

Adaptive Avenue founder David Quimby, knows that traditional display advertising is a broken model — yet, he sees tremendous opportunity in techniques that can deliver noticeable improvements in ad ROI. Hence, the creation of his solution. David’s background includes user experience / user centric design. He worked at Stanford Research Institute, where he collaborated with Doug Engelbart — inventor of the computer mouse / GUI and developer of the first operational hypertext system. His education includes a BA in economics from UCLA and an MBA from UC-Berkeley.

Listen to an interview with David Quimby here.

There’s an old idiom to describe a person who is living beyond their means as someone with, “champagne taste on a beer budget.” But what if you could have a “champagne presence on a beer budget” and cut your costs while maintaining, or more likely exceeding, your current professional presence?

If you haven’t taken a serious look at every single one of your fixed and variable costs in the past six months to a year, you need to do so right now since you’re probably paying far more than you should for many of the services you use and feel are simply “table stakes to be in the game” and a must-have to project a professional presence. In this post, I’ll point out some ways that you can save money, meet or exceed your current professional presence and position yourself for an increasingly virtual future. All of us need to run our businesses as fiscally responsible as we can. At the recent Unsummit ‘09, Don Ball held a session entitled, “Cheap Tools & Tawdry Tricks for Consultants, Freelancers & Accidental Entrepreneurs” which engaged the attendees in a discussion about preferred and key tools we use for running our businesses. Don referred to this post where he’d outlined the “free agent” and “virtual” theme (”Everyone is a startup” and “Cheap biz tools are everywhere”) with links to tools.

Using his post as a conversation starter in that Unsummit session, many of us in attendance added our favorites to his list and I realized that what was needed was a follow-on post to Don’s that gave some examples of some inexpensive tools that, if chosen carefully, could not only save money but increase ones professional presence while enabling virtual work to occur seamlessly!

With the two examples below, I’ll try to illustrate how carefully chosen tools can save money, increase your professional presence and virtuality, and I’ll end with links and descriptions to quite comprehensive lists so you can discover tools you can use yourself. I’ll assume you have a broadband internet connection in your office, and you or any of your associates do at home if you’re completely a virtual company or startup.

In our business we have one main phone line, two rollover lines, and one fax line. Our overall expenditure equals $225 per month until I discovered Toktumi, a virtual PBX (i.e., private branch exchange…a corporate system installed to run all phones in a company) that costs a laughingly low $14.95 per month.

Here’s how it works: You can keep your primary number and have it ported over to Toktumi. With the virtual assistant capability (”Welcome to Acme Company. To talk to Sue, press 1. To talk with Joe, press 2.”) when a caller presses “2″ to talk to Joe, for example, it rings Joe’s phone. But doesn’t that mean Joe needs a phone?

While Joe could have it ring his mobile phone, that’s not optimal nor inexpensive. One great option is using Skype as those phone lines Toktumi would route the call to (you obviously need a broadband internet connection in your office, however). With a hypothetical five people in your office (or virtual!!) a $3/month all-you-can-talk in North America account as well as a “Skype-In” phone number for each account for $60/year does the trick.

The way it works is like this: If someone dials your main business phone number and they press whatever number corresponds to the person they want to talk to, the Skype account on that computer rings! This Skype-In phone number would be the one within Toktumi to route the call to the correct person (Note: Rather than one of the many cheap USB computer headsets for $9-$100, you could go a step further and, depending on the person’s preference, purchase a headset, a USB-based phone or a “PC-free”, standalone Skype-capable phone like the $109 Philips VoIP 841, which works regardless if their computer is on or off).

Toktumi also offers a fax line for $9.95 (using the solid eFax service but for less money).

Bottom line? In our case, one year of Qwest three lines + fax line = $2,700.00. One year of Toktumi & fax, five Skype accounts w/SkypeIn = $778.80 for a savings of: $1,921.20 (though first year outlay for outfitting five people with headsets/USB-phone/VoIP841 is $460 reducing that savings to a still considerable $1,461.20).

The best part is an enhanced presence and one that is virtual. Since all of your customers or clients call one, main number and press the corresponding number for the person they want to talk to, that person could be anywhere: in their home office, on the road, anywhere. With the fax capability, routing faxes is simple.

There are limitations however. Nine people are the maximum under one account and a shared eFax account is problematic, especially if you want to send or receive personal or secure documents. But with the overwhelming cost savings, I can’t think of a better option for an independent company, startup or even an individual, especially as more of us are involved in virtual work.

This might be obvious, but the free and open source Wordpress is such a flexible tool that the capabilities of it to enhance your presence with clients and customers are many. With the hosted Wordpress.com, training videos available on Wordpress.tv and one of the best and least expensive options on the market — the $59/year, HD quality, no-worries-about-bandwidth-use Videopress — as well as plugins for just about everything you can imagine (but mainly for self-hosted Wordpress installations vs. the hosted Wordpress.com), the sky is the limit on what you can accomplish with this tool.

Here’s one way we use it that many don’t: password protected pages for clients, a task that used to cost much more with the higher end hosted services we used to use. With the Exclude Pages plugin (which lets me check or uncheck a box to either place or not place a link to the page in the navigation bar), the page password protected (and password provided to the client) and comments enabled, a “custom page” is created just for that client. With files uploaded and more, it’s a highly professional way to deliver custom content that is client or customer specific.

Since any employee or associate with an internet connection can be setup to create content (or even use the Wordpress iPhone application), it’s trivial to be virtual and use Wordpress as a delivery platform for your website, blog, custom pages and more.

As Wordpress continues to morph in to a social publishing platform — with plugins like Twitter Tools that automatically ‘tweet’ a new post — there are a multitude of ways that this platform can enhance your professional presence, enable you to work and communicate virtually, and do so inexpensively.

Internet hosting companies abound, so I’ll just describe my own experience having used many of them. Media Temple is my preferred host ($20/month + I spend another $20/month for protected database access due to my needs) and I currently have 20 domains hosted there (you can host up to 100 domains/account). They offer a “one click install” for Wordpress that automatically sets it all up in the domain, subdomain or directory-within-a-domain that you desire and then you can customize it to your heart’s content.

If you ask 10 people about what content management/blogging system to use, where to host or what best meets your needs, you’ll undoubtedly get 10 different opinions. Suffice to say though, Wordpress is one of the most popular platforms out there and it’s only getting better and more robust with each release and will ensure that you have a robust and flexible publishing platform that is accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection, provides a professional presence, and is free (though hosting does cost if you want to self-publish and maximize what you can do with the platform).

SOLUTIONS

I could write a book on the sheer number of web applications that have emerged which let us do formerly difficult or slow processes, expensive and challenging-to-get-to outcomes in a better, cheaper and faster way.

Though the term “Web 2.0” is somewhat out of favor, it still describes hosted web applications (many which enable that better, cheaper, faster paradigm) and one of my favorite directories listing these sorts of solutions is Go2Web20.net.

I often head over to this site to simply poke around and see what’s out there since new stuff is added weekly. I highly recommend it as a first stoop if you’re looking for something in a specific category.

Another favorite directory is Emily Chang’s eHub. Ms. Chang is Emily Chang is an award-winning web and interaction designer, technology strategist and co-founder of Ideacodes, a design and web consultancy in San Francisco, and she is a frequent publisher of web application reviews and often personally talks to startup and company leaders about their value propositions.

Some other directories I’ve frequented include:

• eConsultant: A directory of over 1,200 web hosted applications in 50+ categories
• AllThingsWeb20
• ListIO
• FeedMyApp: A “daily dose” of Web 2.0 apps.

Regardless of what you’re trying to do — from better communication, collaboration, customer relationship management, ecommerce, video or more — there are multiple web hosted applications that can meet your needs and give you a “champagne presence on a beer budget.”

The Minnov8 Gang was delighted to report on, and be a part of, the UnSummit ‘09 unconference, held today at the incredible facility at the Hennepin County Central Library in downtown Minneapolis. Hats off to Meg Canada, Don Ball and Mykl Roventine — as well as all of the sponsors — who made it such a great event. We did some light liveblogging which you can see on this page.

We were pleased to have a slot to record our first live version of the Minnov8 Gang podcast. Hosts today were Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson (Graeme Thickins is up north searching for colder weather, we presume).

Vendors like Apple and Google recognize that the cloud is central to the mobile experience. Without the ability to access ones data, sync to the desktop, laptop netbook (and soon, a tablet?) with our mobile smartphones whether we’re stationary or mobile, our digital life is fraught with nothing but frustration.

The center of the action in communication and being social surrounds mobile devices as does an increasing amount of our consumption of music, video, news and information (and if you head in to a typical retail outlet selling CD’s or DVD’s, you’ll notice a continual downtrending of floor space devoted to merchandising them because, quite frankly, sales in these categories continue to drop in bricks and mortar stores). With smartphones sporting GPS and applications that allow providers (and the marketers who work for them) to have a HUGE amount of data about usage, consumption, social, demographic and location patterns, if you were Best Buy with only stores and a website with typically limited connection to customers, what would you do?

Get in the game, of course. To that end, Best Buy has announced mIQ, a free, cloud-based service with 1GB of storage that you can sign up and use with smartphones (except the iPhone…go figure). What is mIQ?

mIQ from Best Buy Mobile helps users sync their contacts, text messages, calendar events, calls, photos, videos, and internet favorites from their mobile phones to their private web-based mIQ account. Once in sync, the user can backup and interact with their information, share their experiences with friends and social sites, discover the top solutions available for their phones, and restore their content when moving from one phone to the next.

The four key areas they pitch are: Backup your phone; Access and interact on the web; Share your experiences; Restore your phone content; which are very Apple MobileMe-like (except for Apple’s nifty Find-my-iPhone feature).

Developed by Dashwire, a privately held company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA who says about themselves, “The company is backed by investors who built the wireless and technology industries at McCaw Cellular, Western Wireless, Voicestream, Nextel, China Unicom, and Microsoft; and by Best Buy Capital.”

No question this beta mIQ offering has been in development for some time and Best Buy management is planning for the continual shift away from people buying media and interacting by walking in to a store and, instead, to interact online via a smartphone or other mobile device. Having a cloud-based service is table stakes for a retailer like Best Buy to even get in the game…let alone win it.

Want to sign up and give it a whirl? You can make a request by doing so here and submitting your email.