MinneBar 8 Session Schedule

Have you heard about the JOBS Act? Have you heard about crowdfunding? The Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups (JOBS) Act was signed into law on April 5, 2012 and has helped reduce the regulatory burden for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). With the advent of the JOBS Act, internet crowdfunding may revolutionize how financing is done for start-ups. This panel will take a look at the world of crowdfunding through the eyes of entrepreneurs, investors, and an attorney. Please submit questions for the panel ahead of time to http://cf.voicehive.com/.

Crowdfunding Panel:

• Moderator: Justin Porter, University of Minnesota - Venture Center
• Patrick Donohue, INVESTyR
• Ben Edwards, SmartThings
• Chris Smith, Coral Group
• Kevin Spreng, Fredrikson & Byron

Use http://cf.voicehive.com/ to ask questions before and during the panel.

We’ve been using MongoDB on EC2 for about a year now; our production deployment includes a 12-node cluster (4 shards x 3 replica sets) as well as several other non-sharded replica sets. (The sharded cluster used to be bigger, which, as it turns out, isn’t always better.)

Join us to benefit from our lessons learned, discuss what works and what doesn’t, and marvel at oddities we’ve encountered.

I'm an ops guy. I care about awesome monitoring. I'd like to show you how to build a complete monitoring suite from open source technologies and you can forget everything you knew about nagios, zabbix and ganglia. We'll build a highly scalable monitoring suite that can adapt to nodes being added and removed in large numbers. Oh yeah, it's also not painful at/to scale. I'll also give you insights into valuable things to monitor.

If you're a dev, your ops guys will love you. If you're an ops guy, your colleagues, devs, leadership, finance guy, librarian and mother will love you again. If you are both, give yourself a hug; you need it.

No way you say, but there are 101 and more ways. The publishing world is in transformation, the means of publishing content have become freemium solutions on the web, and the long tail of content gets longer every day. We’ll look at the forms, formats, media, channels, and rights available for content publishing. From creation to production, from targeting to consumption, there are opportunities to consider and choices to make.

Got a story, artwork, song, movie or idea to share? Wondering how feasible it is to get your content out to the world? Have you considered the whys and hows for managing and distributing your work? Perplexed by the explosion of genres and options available? Got content? Learn 101 ways to publish.

Being a web freelancer ain't always peaches and cream. Come to this session prepared to talk about the challenges (and successes) you're having in your freelance web business.

Things your fellow freelancers might want to hear from you about:

• How are you getting your clients?
• Are you doing anything to move beyond hourly billing (weekly? productized offerings?)
• How are you "scaling past your time"? Subcontractors? Virtual assistants? Cloning facility on Kamino?
• Have a killer billing or other administrative workflow/tool we should know about?
• What's frustrating you about your freelance business right now? Maybe others have had the same obstacle and overcome it.

Your contribution will make or break this session, so don't be bashful!

WARNING: A group hug MAY occur near the end of this session.

(We're not saying we'll instigate one, but we wouldn't stop one either).

PS - Aspiring web freelancers are totally invited.

STANDOUT GROW TRANSFORM THINK DIFFERENTLY -
At Minnebar last year I presented 'Start With Why', this year we'll discuss the purpose 'Why' delivers after you've defined yours. The cause and effect of a good 'WHY' is a catalyst of good culture and brand strategy. From start up to fortune 500, a "Why' culture, and brand, is one of the most important drivers that has to be set or adjusted to push long-term, sustainable success, good leadership and innovation. Long-term success is dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive. Culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death. And your ‘WHY’ is the glue that holds the culture together.

A 'Why' case study presented by Mark Brown COO of Accelerated Innovation, a local start up, will illustrate how developing their 'Why' lead to creating their culture and brand strategy.

If there's any doubt about the value of investing time in a good ‘WHY’, there are significant benefits that come from a vibrant and alive based why culture: • Focus: Aligns the entire company towards achieving its vision, mission, and goals. • Motivation: Builds higher employee motivation and loyalty. • Connection: Builds team cohesiveness among the company’s various departments and divisions. • Cohesion: Builds consistency and encourages coordination and control within the company. • Spirit: Shapes employee behavior at work, enabling the organization to be more efficient and alive. ‘WHY’ accomplished Corporate culture is a hot topic among businesses who want to attract the best talent, translate their values to their products and services, and show customers what they're all about. And it doesn't cost hardly a thing.

Use http://brown.voicehive.com/ to ask questions before and during the presentation. Interaction presentation technology provide by http://voicehive.com.

You can inspire a new code-savvy generation!

This session introduces several local initiatives ranging from the Twin Cities Coder Dojo (a free friendly environment where kids learn programming) to the Technovation Challenge (high school girls designing and building mobile apps.) It also discusses a wide range of online resources that can be used individually or in groups for kids and other newbies learning to code.

Why learn to code? You know the answers: It’s fun, profitable, useful, interesting – and a fundamental skill for learning how to solve problems, understand how the world works, and make things happen.

So why don’t more kids learn how to code?

• The number of all students participating in computer science training is less than 20% and is decreasing; girls and many minorities are hugely under-represented.

• Those who do show an interest in the field find that most schools simply do not offer an up-to-date, rigorous computer science curriculum. Minnesota is close to the bottom in K-12 computer science standards. Many schools teach kids about using computers, but not about programming them; it’s like learning to read but not how to write.

Minnebar, we can fix this. We need more and more diverse code-savvy kids, teens and adults as creative problem solvers to invent a better future. Come see what’s underway, then (if you can) join in and help.

Presenters include Rebecca Schatz, Catalyst of the non-profit organization Code Savvy, and Matt Gray, VP of Technology at Clockwork and Founder of the Twin Cities' CoderDojo.

Learn about OpenStreetMap, the Free wiki-style map of the world. In this session you'll learn how to improve the map in your area, see your changes show up in real time, and download the improved map to use in your own apps and tools.

Make sure to bring your laptop so you can follow along with the mapping portion!

How do I start writing unit tests for my app? Should I be writing Logic or Application tests? At what point do unit tests become valuable? What test framework should I use? How is testing Objective-C different than .NET, Java or Ruby? Can I create Mock objects? Can I integrate my tests with a Continuous Integration server?

These were my questions when I starting writing testable code on iOS. I'll share my experience writing tests for a large iOS app but really want to hear from others who've gone down the same path. Come prepared to share your successes, headaches and epic failures (or just listen in).

It's starting to become expected that you include tests in your open source projects. Is this really worth the effort?

Heck yes.

We'll look at why and how you can lead open source with tests. We'll cover the popular and free Travis CI automated testing service. We'll use it to setup testing for a Ruby on Rails application and test against 9 (9 = 3 language versions x 3 databases) different setups using,

Ruby 1.9.3
Ruby 2.0.0
JRuby

MySQL
Sqlite3
Postgresql

No Ruby or Rails experience required. The Ruby on Rails app is just a concrete example.

This is a talk to both introduce you to Unity and point out a few ways that Unity can be used outside of just for developing games.

Sure you are going to start using Evernote you have heard all about it but you really don't get it. With Evernote you can manage almost everything from you computer, iphone, Android, or tablet.

There is a place to put that little snippet of code where you can always find it and you will always have it handy. Collaborate with a friend and write a book. Always know what it on your todo list and confidently attend client meetings without a paper file. Do your research and use the web clipper to plan your next vacation and have everything with you when you get there. Take photographs of the things you see while on that vacation and where you ate and they will be geocoded so that they can be pulled up on a map. Lets not forget Penultimate for all of your wire frames and skitch for screen shots and notes.

There are so many things you can do with Evernote.

This session will provide an update on the continuing development of the minne✱ organization and our efforts to insure that great events like MinneBar and MinneDemo continue to catalyze the Twin Cities technical, design and startup communities. Half of this session will provide an update on these goals and the other half will serve as a forum to hear from the community.

Apple believes "Think Different." IBM says “We innovate in advanced technology to translate into value for our clients.” Coca-Cola believes in nothing less than "Happiness." When people who work at a company share a common belief about their brand all decisions come from and are judged in the market by that belief.

Products are inspired by belief. Innovation comes from belief.

From this belief a company goes to market with its "Narrative," an ongoing platform of communication that is driven by themes that explain the belief and product or service to customers.

Today the "narrative" is becoming more complex as customers interact, hack and hijack a brand any number of ways. Narrative is the platform for content strategy, social strategy, and advertising. Narrative uses story-telling as examples to prove the belief. It's this framework of narrative that explains how brands really work--and don't.

Narrative calls us together to do something great. Why do I pay $1,000 more for an Apple laptop than a Wintel? Because I believe in Steve Jobs, not Steve Ballmer.

This session is intended to provide a clear walk-through of this framework of brand narrative, and then move to a practical discussion of how to apply it to the work we do every day.

Building a financial model (budget, pro forma, etc.) is a pain point for entrepreneurs.

Join this session to discover time saving tactics to build a financial model for your business.

Bring your questions, stories and personal tips on what has saved time and energy on financial models. Points or questions ahead of time to: phil (@) investyr.com

Twitter: #agilefinance

Your Hosts:

Phil Pogge (estimated time nerding out in spreadsheets since 1994: 20,000+)

Patrick Donohue (estimated time nerding out in spreadsheets since 1996: 15,000+)

We will discuss the components of a VoIP solution and show you how you can eliminate the phone company with a $35 Raspberry Pi and open source software.

Topics will include:

A quick overview of Asterisk PBX software (The telephony software flavor we are using for this demo).

Locating resources on the web and locally, endpoint options, connectivity options..

Raising outside investment capital - whether seed, angel, or venture - can be a necessary ingredient of the startup lifecycle.

This session will open with a quantitative look at local investment activity over the past three years, follow with an entrepreneur + investor panel discussion, and conclude with a conversation about best practices.

Participants can expect to deepen their understanding of the current market conditions as well as learn how to increase the probability of success when fundraising in Minnesota.

Bluetooth LE is Bluetooth's low power, low latency companion with tons of potential, and it's built into your phone and laptop. Bluetooth LE is cheap, accessible, hackable, and powerful. I'll discuss the current state of Bluetooth LE, why it's awesome, and introduce Core Bluetooth on iOS. Learn how to use it to connect to Bluetooth LE accessories and iOS devices. We'll experiment with dev kits and code and discuss gotchas/limitations of the framework.

Presidential elections are fast, furious and full of innovation. Both Obama and Romney leveraged mobile to raise money, engage supporters and swing voters, and drive voters to the polls. And in turn, both made magic and mistakes with great transparency.

This session will break down how each campaign used apps, mobile web, SMS, and other tools--often in dramatically different directions. We'll analyze their successes and failures. And we'll focus on how to apply them to our mobile efforts today.

Join us for a lively and unconventional presentation on technology related agreements. Mike Cohen and Karen Wenzel, lawyers from Gray Plant Mooty, will perform a skit that highlights issues that are ubiquitous to technology deals. Mike and Karen are authors of A legal Guide to Technology Transactions published in collaboration with the Minnesota Department and Economic Development Small Business Assistance Office. Free copies of the publication will be distributed at this session.

More today than ever before, there are tons of communications agencies and professionals, self-described “social media experts” and the like in the market, who all have varying levels of success and true thought leadership in the arenas you wish to succeed. How do you evaluate communications professionals and agencies, and determine which one is truly the best fit to help you reach your objectives and goals? This session will cover the important items to consider before you start the interview/RFP process, and then during the process, to help you make the right decision for you. It will also cover how to best engage and onboard your chosen hire, so that they deliver the best/most appropriate value to you as quickly as possible after you make the decision.

SOA is supposed to decouple development and enable teams to work independently. But many times a developer want to run a development version of a service. Unfortunatlly running a development version of someone else's service requires bootstrapping their environment which becomes more painful as the infrastructure diverges. The real solution is to give consumers of your service the control they need without requiring them to learn your development configuration or become sysadmin specialists in your framework of choice.

Here's a discussion of how you can use virtualization to create that stability and control, and a quick example of how two developers can use vagrant to make it easier for people to develop with and test their code.

This will be a presentation by Jeff Beck and Robert Tomb

Design and UX in enterprise environments can be an exercise in heartache and pain. Lean UX is a set of principles to help Design, UX, and Engineering work better together, so that improved results can be delivered to the business, and more importantly, to the user.

This talk is about harnessing the "Maker" spirit to enable Lean UX, specifically with front end development. I'll talk about strategies we developed at Best Buy in 2012, approaches other companies are taking, and evolutions of those strategies that I am applying today in the healthcare industry.

PressBooks is a simple book publishing tool (freemium service and open source plugin): put your book content into PressBooks, choose a book design theme, and export into: ebooks format (for Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo and others), typeset PDF (for print-on-demand and other uses), more exotic XML formats. PressBooks is used by authors and publishers around the world.

WordPress is the world's most popular CMS and blogging tool.

Together they represent a new way to author, design, and produce books (electronic and print).

I'll cover (and attempt to live demo) how to install, configure, and customize the open source plugin. For those less adventurous, I'll briefly cover use of the freemium PressBooks.com.

I'll also briefly cover alternatives such as Anthologize.

In this session we'll discuss how nonprofits use technology to better achieve success with higher donations, lower costs, better marketing results and cause awareness. Six industry experts will participate in this Q&A session and we'll learn what works and what doesn't. We'll talk about what tools are the most successful, and which ones are the most painful.

This session will be a good warm up for the upcoming NTEN conference to also be held in Minneapolis one week after MinneBar.

If you have any questions you'd like asked of the panel tweet them to @softwareforgood.

Learn how Mozilla is killing the password and saving the open web.

Persona is an open, decentralized login system that works everywhere (IE! Android! iPhones!) and completely eliminates website passwords. Come learn how you can purge passwords from your database without handing your users to a third party.

This session explores the design of Persona, how you can add it to your own site, and how it differs from previous attempts at federated authentication like OpenID.

This session is about The Web, not Firefox.

Is the grass greener on the other side? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

For the consultants... is your pipeline full for the next year?

This will be the fifth conversation about job search, networking and career maintenance at MinneBar that I have done.

Likely you are getting calls from folks like me every week (day) to see if you are looking for a new job or consulting gig.

Frequent conversations I have had lately include (and bring what is on your mind):

• What the local job market is like right now
• How to compare salary, rates and compensation packages
• Doing a silent job search
• How to find decision makers
• If/how to work with search/consulting firms
• A few slides and a lot of Q&A and discussion.

Data science, a relatively new discipline, is a beautiful combination of technology, business and mathematics that increasingly impacts every facet of daily life. It has emerged as one of the most exciting fields in the recent times. It has had a huge effect on how we work, how we rest, how we play and even how we vote. Vast quantities of data are being generated from transactions, sensors, social networks, cellphones and other connected devices. Organizations from nonprofits to corporations see this data, and the science to leverage this data, as a key threat or enabler to generate new products and services.

In this talk, we’ll be sharing our experiences so far in building our first predictive engine at NativeX. A leader in monetization and user acquisition services for mobile and desktop apps, NativeX's mission is to create value for the app ecosystem. This project's goal is to achieve that mission by using data science to help mobile users find new apps they’re likely to be interested in.

In particular we present the stages we’ve gone through in this mobile app advertising case study along with some lessons learned on the way: starting with getting data science expertise; defining the problems to be solved; understanding and cleaning up data; data engineering; feature engineering; data modeling with R; and finally, deploying a solution, operationalizing, and measuring results.

Come one, come all to show off your project, product, or cool hack. Lightning talks are rapid-fire presentations (in reverse order of length) that aren't scheduled in advance. We'll keep the talks and demos flowing as long as there's interested presenters and time to spend.

Patrick Riley, a successful Twin Cities Fast 50 technology entrepreneur, and Laurel Van Matre, one of Minnesota’s best yoga instructors, elucidate the correlation between the work of the entrepreneur and the practice of the Yogi. They share their personal stories and expertise about how a committed yoga practice integrated with entrepreneurial discipline can create “more space” to build better businesses, better leadership, and better health.

You will learn the basics of patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law and also get to listen to classics from Roy Orbison, Vanilla Ice, David Bowie, the Beastie Boys, and others.

Fragmentation - a dirty word in the Android world. It exists, but can be dealt with using the right techniques. This talk will cover how to handle the different sizes of Android devices and backwards compatibility with previous versions of Android.

Julia is the new open source, high-level scientific, technical and numerical/data analysis computing language. With design goals of high-performance, numerical accuracy, syntax familiarity and distributed parallel execution, Juila is already being touted as both complimentary and competition to data analysis tools such as MatLab, R, and Python/NumPy/SciPy.

So come join this high-level introduction to Julia. We'll be looking at it's goals, features and interesting language constructs. We'll also be looking at how well it plays with other data analysis tools. And of course, there will be examples.

Just starting with BigData? Overwhelmed with acronyms? Seeking the big picture? Have basic questions? In this session, Brock will cover the basics of Hadoop and its ecosystem. He will discuss common use cases and solutions using the Hadoop ecosystem. This will be interactive session; questions and comments will be strongly encouraged.

Investors invest in startups they like. Startups they understand. Startups they believe in. Startups that have a great story. This session will cover the main elements of storytelling and how you can use them to quickly captivate, intrigue, and connect with your audience in your next pitch. In addition we will also address important hallmarks of what makes good storytelling in pitches from the perspective of some of Minnesota's top investors and influencers.

Accessories for your iDevices are on the rise. Wearable tech is all the rage and the popular ones will be targeting the iPhone (opinion). Learn what goes into making an accessory for iOS. The session will cover everything from Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering to Software Engineering (the complete stack of product development). You are guaranteed to learn at least one new acronym.

Preventative advice on what steps you can take to ensure a successful app store approval.

Start-ups and funding organizations (VCs, angels, etc) work every day to be profitable and build the next great product/service/interface/etc. This is well and good, and critical to their success, but there’s one more central factor to making the leap to an IPO, or selling your company, or whatever your goal is: a strong PR/communications strategy. Whether it’s having a strong brand, developing a set of key messages that resonate with your target audience, visibility in the marketplaces you do business or other strategic communications attributes, it’s no coincidence that these can and do make a difference between achieving your goals and not achieving your goals. This session will detail why this is such an important aspect of start-up business management, and what exactly a business can do to position itself in the best possible manner.

There are tons of great MVC web frameworks out in the wild, for most major compiled and dynamic languages. They're great tools to get projects prototyped and quickly into production, and many of them will be touched on at minnebar.

The Ambition MVC framework is a hobby that turned into a reasonable web framework. Written using Vala, the Ambition framework allows a developer or team of developers to create web applications or RESTful services using a static-typed object oriented language without relying on a VM or a garbage collection cycle. Plus, being compiled, it allows cloud deployment to be easy and inexpensive, as memory and CPU requirements can be a fraction of PHP, Ruby, Python, or Perl sites.

While it's not "officially" released, it's available on GitHub, and being actively developed. Patches, help, and end users are very welcome, and I'd like to show you more.

More information at ambitionframework.org, or more about Vala at gnome.org.

Civic Hacking is transforming the way citizens interact with cities across the country. Like E-Government and Gov 2.0, the idea is about using computing and the Internet to improve what governments do. To this, Civic Hacking adds the Open Source/Hacker ethic of "I want this to be better, so I'm going to make it better" to foster community and create citizen lead civic technologies. When paired with Open Data - the movement to make government data as accessible as possible - this results in innovative community technologies like sites that enable citizens to take care of hydrants and sirens, and services that allow citizens to text information to cities about what is happening in their neighborhoods.

This presentation will go over what Civic Hacking and Open Data are all about. After that, we'll talk about the great things that Civic Hacking and Open Data have led to in other cities around the country. Finally, we'll talk about what is happening here in the Twin Cities with a focus on Open Twin Cities - a new Code for America Brigade serving the Twin Cities - and CityCampMN - an unconference in Minnesota focused on the intersection of government, citizens, and technology.

Local WordPress (and basketball) superstar, Toby Cryns, will share tips and tricks about how he built online communities of all sorts over the last 6 years with nothing but little, old WordPress to support him. Plug-and-play! (Knee brace optional.)

More and more of our code is moving into the web; and into JavaScript. But we quickly find ourselves in a nested mess of jQuery callbacks, tangled dependencies, and global events. In this session we will transform, step-by-step, a "classic" JavaScript application into a tested, structured, and modular application using QUnit, Sinon, Backbone, and Require.js

Branded Utility is providing more brand value via a new breed of content, apps, networks, engagement platforms and digital tools. Interrupting people with overt sales messages is missing the larger opportunity which is the relationship via an experience to increase brand value. It's a change from building perception through storytelling to perception via providing experience. Branded utility is the brand promise and its delivery in a single instance.

It's one thing to create a great product, but it takes more than impressive technology to make working with it awesome. From answering emails to creating tools and libraries to improve the setup experience, providing exceptional tech support can make a big difference in the success of your product. We'll discuss effectively splitting time between development and support, picking the right support channels, how we apply customer questions to reduce support requests, and why having developers providing tech support is a good idea.

Everything has been gamified today; the leafy tree on your hybrid car, credit card points, electric bills, and the slew of retail rewards programs. Then there are games themselves, grandmas and toddlers are playing massively multi-player online games. Games are huge parts of our lives, even if we don’t realize it. In this session we will explore how game theory drives behavior. What are key gaming concepts that we can leverage in our business applications? How do we satisfy different gamer demographics when building actual games? The games industry is in a huge shift of both decline and growth. Where is gaming going? This session will strive to create a greater appreciation for the complexity of game theory and the behavior it drives. Scott will share actual conversion and monetization numbers from QONQR to show how mobile games can make money in freemium as well as some surprising statistics on how Windows Phone outperformed iPhone 10 to 1 on downloads.

Google Voice is an amazing tool for personal telecommunications. From a technical perspective, it might seem like black magic to secure a local phone number, send a text message, or make a voice call all from the browser. But using Rails and Twilio, you can build an application with the same features yourself (or integrate those features into an app you're building already).

In this presentation, we will demo and walk through an open source Ruby on Rails implementation of core features in Google Voice. Our Rails app will present a web UI (rich client, based on KnockoutJS) to purchase numbers, send texts, record voicemail, and make calls from the browser. Previous Rails or JavaScript experience will be useful to understand the code under discussion, but is not strictly necessary. The same features can be deployed in any web application.

In an attempt to conserve a precious business resource, this presentation will be 100% slide free.

Tips For Your First Time - Practical Considerations for developing and launching your first mobile application.

From this session, you will learn how to make some of the core business decisions that need to be made when launching a mobile application. These decision include platform choice, technology choice, building a product roadmap, considering pricing structures, and integration with server-based applications.

What do business owners really need to know to avoid legal trouble? This is a speed session covering relevant, practical considerations for your business to avoid common startup mistakes.

Topics include:

• starting a business
• intellectual property
• independent contractors
• noncompete agreements
• contracts with clients
• employees
• tax tips
• topics raised in your questions

Get answers to common questions:

• When do I need a business attorney and when don't I?
• How can I protect my intellectual property?
• What is the difference between copyright, trademark, and patent?
• What are the most common small business legal mistakes to avoid?
• How do I decided between a partnership, LLC, or S corp?
• Are noncompete agreements enforceable? When?
• Are there really tax loopholes? How do I use them?

Learn how to use this document:

• Audit Your Own Business: A Checklist to Avoid Common Legal Problems

Bring your business law questions!

The New Health Care Equation:

Consumer education + Professional grade products

= Improved outcomes and Reduced health care costs

There is a shift occurring in health care. Costs and responsibilities are shifting to the consumer. Yet the consumer lacks the knowledge and the education to find solutions and make choices. Technology can be at the apex of preparing the consumer for this new world of health care.

Join the panel in discussing: • How to get consumers to engage with technology to improve their health • How to build communities of consumers interested in a health topic • What are consumers looking for from health technology interactions • What are meaningful ways to interact with consumers through technology • What works / what doesn’t work

Ask questions during the discussion or submit the in advance to: sm@inspirationmedtech.com.

Panelists include: Stephen Miller - Moderator

Patrick Donohue, Inspiration Medical Technology

Eric Schaefer, North Memorial, AgileMedicine, Startupbootcamp

The extent to which our social networks are concentrated in certain areas, activities, or interests can dramatically limit our entrepreneurial social capital.

Rather than leaving it to chance, we can uncover the focus of our social networks to gauge our entrepreneurial social capital and determine how to expand it.

In this session, find out how to more effectively analyze your various social networks so you can grow your entrepreneurial social capital for greater success.

This session builds on four previous sessions at the last four minnebars (but NOT prerequisites):

• Percolate Your Trep Net—Expanding Your Entrepreneurial Social Capital
• Who Do You Know—Evaluating Your Entrepreneurial Social Capital
• Schumpeter’s Hive—Consciously Weaving Our Collaborative Innovation Networks
• Percolating TurboGeeks—Exploring Why Innovation Networks Form The Way They Do

Launching a startup is hard enough. But having the wrong kind of technical talent on your team will result in wasted time, money, effort, and customer goodwill. It can also result in complete disaster.

Spoiler alert: There's no perfect answer. I'll share some of the guidelines I use when people have asked me for advice, and I hope you'll share some of your war stories and hard-learned lessons, too.

This topic is aimed primarily at non-technical or business co-founders. But the conversation is useful to anyone who needs increase technical bandwidth to get something done.

• Do I need a technical co-founder? Should I hunt for a freelance nerd? Or should I engage a firm (on-shore or off-shore) to build my stuff?
• How do I know we've made the right technology decisions like programming language, platform, etc?
• How do I reduce the risk of being taken hostage by a co-founder/contractor/outsourcer?
• What kinds of missteps will require me to throw it all away and start over, and how do I avoid them?

If you've asked these kinds of questions, this session is for you.

SSH is awesome and exists everywhere in the *nix world. SSH is way more than a remote shell replacement. Lets talk about and try out what else we can do with it!

• Port forwarding.
• Socks proxy
• SFTP (SCP)
• X11 Forwarding
• Public/Private key management
• Agents
• Remote execution
• Aliasing
• configuration

From your router, server, workstation, laptop, phone - its everywhere.

How does that awesome person on Twitter or Facebook keep linking to all those valuable resources every freakin’ day?

Why is one friend your single source for design and development and another buddy your go-to startup and hardware dude?

And what the heck drives certain people to rock their physical and digital landscape with intentional filtering, simple organizing, and the instant ability to share what’s relevant to you?

It’s called curating, and this isn’t your grandma’s version like arranging museum artifacts.

“Content curation” has become a buzzword and is used in everything from clever marketing strategies to next-gen websites solving the Google search results crap trap. But why limit your curating to online content? And more importantly, how can you cultivate a curator’s mindset to turn your weaknesses into superpowers?

This interactive session will get you curating like a pro and dazzling your friends, family, and business peers like a magician with a turbocharged wand.

Find out the secret of people who filter their experiences with intention – while seamlessly archiving, categorizing, and adding context for the best stuff – and make those experiences accessible and sharable for their future benefit and the use of others. Develop new skills and add all these things to your personal toolkit in less time than it takes to eat lunch:

• What topics and experiences you could curate to become everyone’s best friend
• How to capture any moment and make it insanely valuable for years to come
• How to set up a curating system and the best practices in customizing one
• The practical and emotional benefits pulsing through the world’s best curators
• How providing context turns a “meh” interaction into an “oh yeah!” engagement
• Who can help burst the filter and algorithm bubble you don’t even know you’re in
• Why curating is beautiful self-expression…and builds sweet problem-solving skills
• How you’re already curating and why poor technique might be holding back your potential

If it happened or will happen, you can curate it. Yes folks, this is the thing that helps you with all the other important things.

It’s not about what you consume. It’s about how you experience the world and the value you generate from it. So if it’s health, money, amazing relationships, and overcoming being overwhelmed you seek, curating is your Swiss Army Knife. It’s about time that something so unsexy unlocked benefits that are so…frickin’…sizzling.

Problem: Agile methods are not well served by "waterfall' project methodologies. No matter how much you bend the rules, you're still struggling with a failed design if you insist on using traditional project management methods.
If you use Agile methods, you'll want to be here for a collaborative discussion as we add to this discovery.

Here's the whitepaper http://srkinc.com/dynamicscheduling.pdf

and the PowerPoint http://srkinc.com/kanbanscheduling.pptx

Join in a wide-ranging discussion of how tehcnology has changed the landscape of what is private/public, and consider the ethical and legal considerations of Big Data and our Smart-Device society. Even if you do not work in a regulated industry and do not routinely manage protected consumer information, privacy and security concerns may impact you when you are faced with data issues. What information is your application gathering? Why? Do you need it? What are the implications of geo-tagging in the long term? You probably aren't spilling company secrets on your company's social media, but are your employees spilling company secrets or sales leads through theirs?

Have you participated in open source or blogging? What happens when that code or content becomes popular? What should you do to leverage that traffic and influence instead of letting it create more demands on you?

This session is a discussion of what led to creating a blog with millions of visitors, popular open source code components, talks and workshops given around the world ...all for free. We'll look at the intense idealism of free and where that can get you...but also the power it has to enslave you with more work and demands on you.

We'll discuss: - gaining the right set of eyeballs and connections for what you are looking to do in life. - building a new community from the ground up with proper expectations in mind. - remaining independent without selling out when creating free content. - gaining the choice to give something away for free vs free being the only choice.

Join this session if you want to learn more about the power open source and blogging has to get you where you want to go in life, as well as it's pitfalls and how to avoid them.

This will not be a presentation, but a conversation and brainstorm based on the following :

Executive Summary

• One of the Twin Cities' greatest claims to fame is its 20 Fortune 500s
• Our best bet for startup growth is to build on this unique regional resource
• Why? Startup ideas coming out of corps have greater potential for scale and value creation
• How? By working with local corporations to...
• To encourage wannabe entrepreneurs to leave cubicle land.
• To tap into deep experts from within corporations as SMEs

Full-length diatribe

Consider some amazing facts about the Twin Cities. We have:

• The highest per-capita concentration of Fortune 500 companies (20).
• Businesses that are the undisputed leaders in their domains (retail, health care, financial services, banking, medical devices, manufacturing.)
• Arguably the most literate population of any metro area.
• One of the highest concentrations of undergraduate colleges.
• An environment, climate and culture encourages and rewards hard work, perseverance and authenticity (in other words, a meritocracy).

We have a rare set of strengths that any region would envy. Obviously, we are not New York, Chicago or San Francisco. But why would we want to be? Rather than chasing after the growth models of those regions, our growth must spring directly from our unique advantages. Our success should be dictated by our DNA.

The Internet, software and mobile technology have been the focus of entrepreneurial activity for nearly 20 years. The entrepreneurs who have led this charge have been young, digital natives who probably were not going to climb the corporate ladder anyway. Not surprisingly, startup culture has come to be dominated by people under 30 and it appears that the cities that can attract the greatest number of these young entrepreneurs (and the risk-tolerant VCs to prop them up) will win.

And thanks to the breathless media coverage of blockbuster successes like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook, many of us labor under the idea that entrepreneurship is only about young, impatient college dropouts who only need a good idea and an abundance of passion in order to be successful. If this were true, then the Twin Cities, with its stock of highly educated, risk-averse corporate employees, might as well hang it up. Game over. SFO 50, MSP 0.

Or...we could double-down on what makes us unique. We could take to take a cue from Donald Rumsfeld’s famous line about going to battle “with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.” And to be honest, in the Twin Cities we have nothing if not armies of corporate cube-dwellers. We’re awash in corporate casual.

This sea of suburban-dwelling, 9-to-5 working, 401(k)-saving employees...are our secret weapon.

We are sitting on a deep talent pool of people who are intimately familiar with many of the most complex and essential systems that run the world’s industries and fuel the global economy:

• How food is grown, processed and distributed across the globe.
• How consumer goods are designed, manufactured, marketed and retailed.
• How financial instruments are deployed to support businesses and families.
• How materials science is harnessed to prolong human life.
• How health care is delivered.

How do we tap into this great reserve of deep talent? First, let’s set aside the fantasy that inside every corporate employee is an entrepreneur trying to get out. Managers and directors don’t necessarily make great entrepreneurs. And that’s ok.

But there will definitely be some corporate malcontents who want to innovate. These are the people who, thanks to years in the game, have come to realize that there are untapped markets and better ways of doing things. They may have company support. They may not. Either way, we must help them develop their ideas and take them to the street.

There are also deep experts within corporations who have no intention of ever leaving. People who know the intricacies of products, services, industries and an infinite number of technologies. These experts must be connected with the startups that could benefit form their knowledge.

The advantage of catalyzing the deep talent within our corporate employees is a matter of scale and impact. Corporations by definition create and participate in large-scale, often global systems that have far reaching impact. These are systems (e.g. payments, healthcare, manufacturing, shipping, agriculture, etc.) where even the tiniest efficiencies can result in million- if not billion-dollar savings. Startups that address needs at this scale are inherently more valuable and more likely to hire at scale than, say, the next Groupon.

The vision I'd like to share is that in 10 years, we will witness an entrepreneurial explosion in the Twin Cities that will be remarkable because of:

• the great number of mature, seasoned founders who have come from previous careers in corporate environments.
• the sophistication of the products, services and solutions that these startups have introduced.
• the potential and actual scale that these startups are able to achieve.
• the revenue that these businesses are able to generate.
• the number of jobs that these businesses area able to create.

Although I have developed the following recipe for how to achieve this vision, I'd like to vet these ideas and gather more/different ideas from attendees.

• Understand the ecosystem more intimately - track startups, founders, supporters, funding sources, mentors, etc.
• Encourage coordination between enablers, such as MOJO MN, Project Skyway, MHTA, EO, CoCo, Carlson School, St. Thomas, The Collaborative, etc. (sorry if I missed anyone!)
• Create a plan for meeting corporate entrepreneurs at the door - help broker/offer transition plans, education, support, etc.
• Create an outlet for deep experts within corporations who want to contribute to startups
• Work with corporations to make this entrepreneurial explosion a win/win. This means creating a structure that minimizes risk of poaching and fears of spawning competitors (by giving corps first shot at supporting and nurturing their own entrepreneurs and also addressiong IP concerns).

It has been a big year in terms of major releases within the Ruby on Rails community!

Join us to learn what has changed in the latest versions of Ruby and Rails and why they are an awesome choice to build your next product or business with.

This presentation is brought to you by the wonderful community at Ruby.MN and Rails.MN

Switching your design and development methods over to agile can improve your software quality, but the transition is scary. It can be hard. But it can be done without sacrificing your company values or customer relationships. This is how we rewrote our codebase after a decade in the business and managed to rewrite our company, as well.

Each Event’s point(s) of view – before it happens.

Your productive events come to you from our accurate and complete predictions. Ours is a new way of thinking about the prediction process - new inference method. We have solved key big-data problems involving knowledge discovery, information assurance and information usage. Ultimately, it gives you unparalleled synchronized accuracy and depth of information to make each event happen.

First, new math starts with the desired event then brings it back to you.

Second, a adaptive algorithm engine. The engine creates a custom algorithm for each prediction - the human limitation is gone.

Finally, no fixed data models. A new one is created for each prediction. At last, the freedom to automatically explore the big data space is at your fingertips.

It’s like getting a chicken that keeps on giving - not just a single egg.

The most accurate prediction of events you WANT (desire) to create or mitigate in the next 30 to 90 days and how to unfold those events. Who? What? When? Why? How to?

When you're designing a website, you need high-quality, dynamic content to complement your design and keep visitors coming back for more. When you're promoting your business, you need to position yourself as a leader and give potential customers a way to become paying clients. Words matter, so where do you find content and what do you do with it once you've got it?

This presentation by writer, content strategist, PR and social media specialist Lynne Morioka will help you find your content gold and capitalize on it to design more effective websites and inspire action.

How well do Agile methods work for a group of system administrators and DBAs? We'll discuss one company's experience in determining what worked and what didn't.

A software company using the waterfall approach decided to quickly adopt Agile and Scrum practices. The infrastructure group watched this process and paired with software engineers, attended standups, and watched the culture change. After observing software engineering derive real benefits for a year, the infrastructure group decided to see what parts of Agile and Scrum would work well for them. Some practices had to be adjusted immediately and others evolved over time. This is their story.

You've heard the buzz words, you've drunk the Kool-Aid™, now you're ready to bring your existing web site kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruit Bat. Join Wolf Loescher and Bertine Buchan as they magically transform a clunky, hack ridden site into a standards compliant, SEO-friendly, accessible, cross-browser compatible, model web citizen...right before your very eyes!

Attendees should have a basic working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Brought to you by the number 5 and the letter W.

(or: 20,000 I/Os Under the Filesystem)

We usually deal with storage systems at their "top" level: files and databases. But there's a lot of complex behavior that goes on to translate file operations into blocks on disk or flash. This session will show some tools and techniques for analyzing storage behavior from "underneath" the file system, from the perspective of devices and storage arrays. How does file-level behavior manifest as real storage operations? And how can we distill "interesting" features from large storage systems?

Topics covered:

• Tracing input/output operations

• Visualizing storage: heatmaps and timelines

• Working backwards through the file system with a file system debugger

• Inferring high-level behavior from low-level measurements

Learn how QONQR created a floating equity model. What causes many startups to fail? Many times it is internal disagreements on who is pulling their weight. A startup with 7 partners, some full time, and some part time can be a monster to manage. See how QONQR hasn’t had a single argument over who is pulling their weight after 2.5 years of bootstrapping under a variety of different work schedules and cash contributions. Gamingfying the equity model not only eliminated the work/reward issues, but created incentivization for everyone to accelerate product development. We’ll cover the complicated member control agreement, tax implications, and operational necessities of managing such a model.

MediaWiki is well known as the wiki engine behind Wikipedia, but it is also an incredibly powerful platform to build a variety of services with. In this session we will explore advanced techniques for running MediaWiki, extending it's capabilities with amazing extensions, and building ridiculously advanced websites with it. We will use WikiApiary, a wiki I built, as an example of using a semantic data-driven wiki, robots to collect data and integrating a variety of libraries together into a cohesive solution. You'll leave with a better understanding of the robust power of this software stack, and excitement to go and build crazy stuff with it!

In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem (MAB; sometimes called the K- or N-armed bandit problem) is the problem a gambler faces at a row of slot machines, sometimes known as "one-armed bandits", when deciding which machines to play, how many times to play each machine and in which order to play them.[3] When played, each machine provides a random reward from a distribution specific to that machine. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls. MAB problems have been studied extensively in Machine Learning, Operations Research and Economics. In practice, multi-armed bandits have been used in many areas. This presentation will review their application in digital advertising while also introducing the keys concepts behind MABs.

Plumbing's important I'm sure you'll agree,
so let's learn 'bout the pipes and discuss HTTP.

Now Client and Server are things that you know,
but there in the middle—that's where middleware go!

Demos you'll see are in Ruby with Rack,
but the point of this story is to middleware hack.

Whatever your language, whatever your knack,
you too could be hacking your middleware stack.

There are hundreds and hundreds of middleware uses.
We'll even discuss a few naughty abuses.

Considered are Wordpress, Vagrant, NodeJS, Riak and Redis,
but you should not expect any middleware lettuce!

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
— Theodor Geisel (1904–1991)

There are parts of Emacs that aren't obvious - hey this is not a joke... There are features that are built into the default distribution of Emacs that enhance how you use and interact with Emacs:

Navigating file structures with: Dired. Organizing notes/documentation and todo lists/calendars with: Org Mode. Doing amazing math manipulations with symbolic algebra and calculus with: Calc. Emacs recently had a package manager added to easily install plugins with: package.

I'd like to share with you some parts of Emacs that aren't directly related to coding. And how you move from moving from the casual Emacs user to someone who starts their Journey with Emacs.

It's been my experience that side projects have the ability to elevate designer, developers and more to a different level. If you choose these wisely, they can sharpen existing skills and create new ones. This session will cover side projects that have helped me, why they've helped, and suggestions for what you could do.

Startups average 3-5 pivots before their find their groove. This session is design to be a forum for those of us in start ups, or considering a startup to talk through the art of Pivoting well. When should you pivot, and when should you stick to your game plan.

Our goal for the session is to lay some quick ground work for what qualifies as a Pivot. Then spend time the rest of the time looking at successful/lackluster pivots that have been made by us and other companies.

This is a high engagement session so come prepared to share, learn, and together we can continue to push the MN tech scene forward.

NativeX (formerly W3i) recently transitioned a large portion of their backend infrastructure from MS SQL Server to Apache Cassandra. Today, its Cassandra cluster backs its mobile advertising network supporting over 10 million daily active users producing over 10,000 transactions per second with an average database request latency of under 2 milliseconds. Going from relational to noSQL required NativeX's engineers to re-train, re-tool and re-think the way it architects applications and infrastructure. Learn why Cassandra was selected as a replacement, what challenges were encountered along the way, and what architecture and infrastructure were involved in the implementation.

Using python to build a web app browser automation and fronted testing stack using nose2, fabric and webdriver.

Or, write code to run a web browser (instead of typing, clicking, and dragging).

This in incredibly useful for testers/QA of web based applications but if you are developing web apps you should be testing too. Even if you are not explicitly "writing tests", as a developer you have a lot to gain from browser automation.

The examples will be in python but the knowledge and techniques can be used in almost any popular language.

2011 I spoke about how the War For Talent was under way in Silicon Valley with some skirmishes in Minneapolis/St Paul.

2012 I spoke about IT unemployment in MSP at <2% and the battle was on.

2013... it's only getting more difficult. Are you finding and hiring who you need?

We are going to do an audit of the recruiting process to include:

• Career/Jobs page
• Job posts
• Interview process
• Offers
• Sourcing, Recruiting and Closing candidates
• Employer Branding... do folks know you are hiring? Would you work for you?

I will have screen shots, links and resources for you take back to the office.

Have questions ahead of time? Send me an email and I will work them into the discussion paul@mnheadhunter.com

Game on! You've got a mind-blowing innovation, and a black hole in your wallet. Learn some key principles and fast-and-furious tips on how to get off the bench and into the game of securing your own ideas with some bad-ass patent protection--DIY style. 8-Time IP Super Lawyer and founder of Fantastic IP Consulting, Eduardo Drake---known for his wisdom, imagination, and enthusiasm-- delivers the goods and takes you on a guided tour of his own provisional patent application for the craziest, certified OMG idea you've ever heard.

The Obama 2012 presidential campaign was groundbreaking on many fronts, but it's Tech team has received lots of press for its role in bringing modern technology practices to the political campaign world in a powerful and effective way.

In this talk, you'll learn about the infrastructure, software, team, and ideas that helped elect the President to his second term.

You don't have to be a designer to make your WordPress site look good. In fact, no matter what theme you're using now there are lots of easy ways to make it look better. Mykl (who IS a designer BTW) will share tips and tricks to take your site design from acceptable to awesome.

Online education is nothing new. Many of the biggest and brightest schools offer online courses or even entire online degrees, and have been for years. Some even offer courses for free to the masses. With online delivery now commonplace, we'll look at some of the noteworthy innovations and areas for growth that exist in higher education.

Should online courses try to replicate their on-campus companions? Should the campus classroom experience function more like an online course? What can higher education learn from the world at large? Are the challenges that online education faces technological, pedagogical, social, or financial? How must all this function for students in the creative and technology disciplines?

This session will warmly welcome anecdotes and suggestions for improving the online education experience.

Ruby is a fantastic and fun language to program in, but is it ready for prime time? I will present ideas, tips, and tactics for scaling ruby applications to handle massive throughput based on real world examples. Enterprise architecture shouldn't fear ruby, they should embrace it.

What goes on at the most connected building in Minnesota where you can get Internet for less than $1 per meg & access to the MICE Internet Peering Exchange.

Summary
You want to start a company and need developers to help you build the technology. Your company isn't a pure technology company, and you have the domain expertise you need to get started…if only you could find that elusive technical co-founder. You've heard about hiring developers from India, and also the horror stories about projects that went sideways and cost people $10,000 or more with no results.

You can start a successful company working with a team in India, and this session can help you get there. During the session, we will discuss:

• A brief history of India's technology industry
• Fundamentals about outsourcing and offshoring
• Strategies and tactics for finding and working with offshore engineering teams
• How to grow the relationship with your offshore team over time

Session Manifesto
You can build a startup perfectly well without an engineering team in India. There are talented engineers in the United States, and thousands of companies have been started with an exclusively domestic workforce. The idea I would like you to consider is that you can build a better company by partnering with the enormous amount of talent in India using the methods in this talk and my upcoming Lean India book.

Talented software engineers are extremely difficult to find. As you might expect, they are also highly paid. The national average for software engineer salaries in 2012 was $92,648. Even if you do pay up and hire a few talented developers, they are difficult to retain when venture capital funding is flowing at the rate it is today.

There is simply not enough engineering talent domestically to capitalize on all the opportunities we have with technology. Mark Zuckerberg’s hiring policy at Facebook is a powerful example of just how acute the labor problem is within technology. In a recent video for Code.org, Zuckerberg stated, “Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. The whole limit in the system is that there just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.”

The United States and India have reciprocal labor problems. The United States has a major shortage of software engineers, along with a relative abundance of seed, angel, and venture capital investors that invest in new companies and spread the talent pool even more thin. On the contrary, India has the world’s largest technology workforce with over 300 million people working in technology and 650 million new graduates in the next few years. India needs to provide jobs to its growing population of information workers. Countries like the United States needs skilled engineers to solve a myriad of problems. The world needs great new companies now more than ever. India can help you get there.

As you may have guessed, the session and book gained their title based on inspiration from the lean movement and Eric Ries’s renowned book, The Lean Startup. This is a derivative work of sorts that makes the case for applying some of the principles and methodology from The Lean Startup towards building and managing engineering teams in India. This session will discuss how to apply it to your own companies and teams.

You may have heard of Minecraft from your friends or your kids. Minecraft is a creative adventure game where you must mine or harvest resources, build a place to live, craft tools and weapons to help you survive, and eventually...kill the dragon. Maybe you've tried it, maybe not...but once you give it a shot, you just might be hooked.

In this session, Charles Nutter and Oliver Nutter will give you a tour of Minecraft, showing how to craft items, build a house, and mine for resources. We'll also show what you can do with some of the many plugins and conversions out there, leading up to some basic Minecraft hacking in Ruby.