MinneBar 11 Session Schedule

What is happening, where is it happening, why is it happening, who is doing it?

Moderated by Jeff Pesek & Mike Bollinger // TECHdotMN

Panelists:

Glafira Marcon is the Lead Organizer of Healthcare.mn – Minneapolis’ home for healthcare innovation – where she organizes monthly events and strategic initiatives for over 1,100 members. Heatlhcare.mn believes that Minnesota is the best place to launch a healthcare start up. Working off of the foundation built by Healthcare.mn’s founders, she aims to catalyze and support the healthcare innovation community, and connect start ups with the resources needed for success such as mentorship, networking, and investment opportunities.

Ryan Broshar is the Managing Director of Techstars Retail Accelerator in partnership with Target and the Founder and Managing Director of Matchstick Ventures, an early-stage tech VC based in Minneapolis.

Dan Atkins is cofounder of MinneAnalytics, a MN nonprofit that is the nation's largest local Big Data, Analytics, & Data Science community with over 7100 participants. Industry & topical specific data science conferences draw near 1000. The organization deliberately blends the Domain professionals with the Technology folks -AND- the Decision Sciences professionals. By day Dan is a VP at Optum doing predictive analytics in medication adherence.

Justin Grammens co-founded IoTFuse, a non-profit to ignite the community on the Internet of Things. He co-founded Arduino.MN around open hardware and the Maker community and co-launched the first IoTHackday where teams compete to build IoT products in 12 hours. Justin helps kids bridge software and hardware at CoderDojoTC, is an adjunct professor at the University of Saint Thomas teaching a graduate level class on the Internet of Things, publishes IoT Weekly News and founded Recursive Awesome as a consultancy to help companies gain insights by building smart, connected devices.

Kevin Spanbauer possesses a track record of providing resources to technology companies with core competencies in business development and talent acquisition, but also acting as a business catalyst to connect clients to investor communities, customers, partners, and other technical resources. He acts as a “Trusted Adviser” to software companies at various stages of growth. Kevin has built some of the strongest relationships as anyone in Minnesota's software industry. This history led him to join forces with other leaders to form the Minnesota Emerging Software Advisory or MESA whose mission is to reinvigorate Minnesota's software community and elevate it to one of the top software corridors in the nation.

Mini Panel - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of being a minority entrepreneur in the Twin Cities. Founders, will discuss their successes, struggles and where they see the Twin Cities heading and how we can make this a land of opportunity for entrepreneurs of colors and professionals.

Moderating the panel will be: Alex 'A-Rod' Rodriguez - Code2040 Entrepreneur in Residence at COCO and Founder of WorkMand and Graveti.

Clarence Bethea: is the Founder and CEO of Upsie. Upsie, is a mobile warranty app, that is disrupting the 40 billion dollar warranty industry. Clarence, has raised a 1.3 million angel round. Prior to Upsie, he founded 2nd chance staffing and is also an active mentor for young people in entrepreneurship and business.

Caroline Karanja: is a maker and creator, a curious soul with a need to code. She recently launched, 26 letters. 26 letters is an e-learning saas solution for companies who want to create a diverse and inclusive workplace. She's consulted and worked with fortune 500 companies and startups.

Thompson Aderinkomi: Thompson is currently the founder and CEO of RetraceHealth a new model for primary care medicine. Governor Mark Dayton appointed Thompson to MNsure, the MN Health Insurance Exchange Board of Directors in April 2013. He also co-founded Healthcare.MN

A few minutes will be left for Q&A from the audience but if you specific questions you'd like to have asked, be sure to email us and we'll try and get it in during the panel. Email: Alex@graveti.com

Let's talk about how to build features fast, test them, and let them fail quickly! Even the most advanced developers learn that the only option is to double what they think it will really take..At InboxDollars, we moved to a "MVP" development process a year ago. The entire company has adopted a fail fast mentality. Build things small...less than a week (sometimes two), roll it, then split test and see if it wins. If it doesn't, move on! If it does well, then iterate!

Aimed at development managers, architects, senior/mid developers. More of an approach on writing code then anything.

Don't lose the "WOW" when you tell your story or make your pitch, you may never get what you're asking for.

Are you a persuasive or informative presenter? Sales is a human connection sport and if you're not persuasive the sale won't happen.

Entrepreneurs/innovators have a gift to see things differently. They take divergent pieces of information and combine them in an innovative fashion to achieve new business opportunities. They see the big picture and how it points to success. But they don't know how to pitch or tell their story. Consequently, the entrepreneur struggles to get support and or money to pursue the journey. The excitement of discovery begins to die. The enthusiasm dwindles, the profound emotional connection with the idea fades, what we call The Loss of "Wow".

If you understand this you need to attend this session. We will show how to never lose the "Wow". We will show you how to craft your communications so you will not struggle to get support for your vision, opportunity and idea. We will show you how to find investors as well as supporters.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, innovator or new product developer, our communication concepts will give your message a big impact, "WOW".

As much as you may disagree, sometimes the meteorologist is right when it comes to the weather forecast. We aren’t just making it up as we go. This session will hopefully help you understand how weather forecasts are made, and even give you the tools to make your own forecast.

We will go over Weather 101, a bit of the science and physics behind what drives the weather. Talk about low pressure, and jet streams, and moisture getting high. Then we will dive deep into the tools meteorologist use to make a good forecast. The models and radar and other fancy computer outputs that make a meteorologists life easier.

Hopefully by the end of the talk, you’ll have a better appreciation for what it takes to forecast the weather. And even what a 40% chance of rain really means!

Small businesses don't often have the resources to have an information security professional on staff. It can be daunting to know what to do, especially since it seems every day there is another threat on the news. With limited resources, is it even worth trying? And who is going to attack my little company anyway?

In this session we will discuss threats, both rational and sensationalized, and talk about what you really need to do to address your risk. We will also touch on physical security and social engineering, as technology can only protect your organization to a point.

You do not need to be a cyber security expert to attend this session!

Sample Topics:
*Prank calls resulting in broken windows and assaults
*Ransomed computer systems
*Training and awareness

We live in a new world of customer engagement where businesses need to scale their organizations and do more with less. This is often accomplished by improving processes or leveraging technology to service their customers. Regardless, we do need to keep in mind that at both ends of any technology solution or process are people.

Join us for a panel discussion on how to best drive forward with a service accessibility strategy that does not diminish the customer experience, but rather enhances it. Our panel will include business professionals with experience in knowledge management & self service, customer success & account management, operations leadership and recruiting.

Come ready not only to hear from our panelists, but to share your thoughts and questions on how to drive best practices in customer engagement in the technology driven world we live in. Whether your are a business of ten or ten thousand, delivering customer experience excellence is critical to success!

What is an octogenarian? An octogenarian is a person over the age of 80. Many octogenarians missed the computer revolution at home and work, and are now motivated to learn to use handheld technologies to stay independent, connected, and informed.

This talk provides insight into design issues and obstacles for iPad users over the age of 80. As market segments become saturated, and new consumers are sought, developers will begin to address the needs of persons 80 years or older—numbered 44.7 million in 2013 (the latest year for which data is available). They represented 14.1% of the U.S. population, about one in every seven Americans. By 2060, there will be about 98 million older persons, more than twice their number in 2013.Smart phones and handheld technologies are going to be an important part of elder care and helping older adults remain active and independent. This hands on presentation offers method, market analysis, and UX research from a current study taking place at the Mayo Clinic Charter House facility for the development of iPad software applications.

Many octogenarians are motivated to use handheld devices to remain independent, and connect to the world. This hands on presentation offers insights from recent fieldwork, offering practical development methods, market analysis, and UX research from a current study taking place at the Mayo Clinic Charter House facility for the development of iPad software applications. Learn best practice in design and development for octogenarians.

This session is a discussion of computer vision systems--intelligent systems that use cameras and make decisions based on what they see. Let's talk about these great systems, how we use them to solve problems, their strengths, their limitations, recent developments, issues we've encountered in our work, and where the field might be going. This is intended to be a discussion session, not a presentation, so make sure to bring questions and specific topics you want to talk about! There is no particular level intended for this session, just interest in computer vision: come if you have never used a computer vision before, if you live and breath vision algorithms at work, or if you are anywhere in between.

Let's discuss!

Android was built from the very beginning with multitasking in mind and this core idea directly shapes the lifecycle of an Android application. In this talk I’ll revisit some fundamental concepts of Android in order to provide a better understanding of how best to manage an app’s state during this process, focusing in particular on how to properly save and restore that state and why this is necessary.

Even with technology, awesome doesn’t need to be new. See how I am building fancy charts in beautiful reports, using near-real-time data … with decades-old software!

In this session we’ll walk through the ancient (yet immensely relevant) technologies that I am using to generate data-rich PDF reports — straight from the command line. We’ll pull smart data out of the Harvest API, dumb data out of Google Sheets API. We’ll combine, aggregate, sort, and analyze the data with R Project. Then we’ll pull it all together by typesetting it with LaTeX into a presentable and repeatable format.

Stop by and see how this family of software cooperates to build an admirable presentation.

Software: The Classy Elders: - LaTeX (31 years old, born in 1985) - Make (39 years old, born in 1977) - CSV (44 years old, born in 1972)

Software: The Responsible Adults: - R Project (23 years old, born in 1993) - PDF (22 years old, born in 1993) - Ruby (21 years old, born in 1995)

Software: The Babies & Toddlers: - Harvest (10 years old, born in 2006) - Google Sheets (10 years old, born in 2006) - Knitr (4 years old, born in 2012)

Do you have a basement full of computers? Are you holding on to some old piece of hardware because you might need this one day? Are you afraid of recycling electronics because it might end up in a waste reclamation facility in a remote part of the world? Do you have computers that still work but you have to dispose of because they are no longer under support?

Free Geek Twin Cities is a local non-profit that aims to provide Electronics Reuse, Recycling and Training. Free Geek Twin Cities will help you dispose of your e-waste in an environmentally friendly way and provides essential job training.

Learn more about FGTC in this session.

What works and what doesn't for a family activity club, why it's good for your kids, and why it's good for your company!

Young companies can have a lot of young families. I started Nerdling Action Squad four years ago as a group playdate with benefits. Interested families show up once a month to eat pizza, run around in circles, and do projects. Last month we planted seeds in fresh dirt, we've had kid-led tech demos (in Minecraft and RPG Maker), and we're coming up on the Fourth Annual Cardboard Construction-ganza in June. We've done sewing, launched a weather balloon, tried cake decoration and done origami. Last February, for Valentine's Day, we dissected cow hearts. We have a lot of fun, and secretly, it lets our kids see that curiosity and perseverance and fun are the foundations of engineering and science. It has helped bring me closer to my Nerdery colleagues, giving us a chance to bond over something besides code development or continuous improvement in project management processes.

This presentation will cover some lessons learned, best practices, as well as some big picture reasons that we keep doing this!

Want to learn how to encrypt your personal communications? Bring your phone, tablet, and/or laptop to this session to get secured!

3D PARS is a growing virtual company that facilitates collaborative teams to pioneer groundbreaking initiatives. The scope of 3D PARS is larger than any single discipline, project or idea. 3D PARS’ goal is to connect innovators, provide them with resources, and support these teams as they expand health and medical technology. Through bringing together groups of experts from different fields, problems can be solved, needs can be addressed and research can be advanced in unimaginable ways. 3D PARS can be considered as a Virtual Launch Pad (VLP).

The use of 3D printing and robotic concepts varies across disciplines. For example, the use of multi-axis robotics in manufacturing, translational robotics in transportation, medical robotics as seen in robotic limbs, automated surgical systems, life support devices, military robotics for surveillance and for successful mission completion, and educational tools are few of the applications of robotics. What makes each of the robotic system very unique is the way how modular machinery components and the artificial intelligence are interfaced and deployed. One of 3D PARS goal is to develop curriculums to promote technology cross over. To do this, Medi[Bot] categorizes and identifies key modular components of robotics across disciplines, and teach how combining key components can lead to future innovations that would address biomedical needs.To promote technology cross over in the field of robotics, 3D PARS seeded the Medi[Bot] initiative. The Medi[Bot] initiative aims to develop a kid friendly sensory and interactive robotic device companion that tracks and encourages healthy physical and mental development. It is anticipated, that this powerful robotic device would combine the benefits of popular health tracking programs with learning and development apps in one interactive robotic care provider. The Medi[Bot] initiative is at early stages and in the process of forming the diverse team to include wide range of expertise and in preparation to pursue fund raising that are crucial steps for launching this initiative.

3D PARS envision that Medi[Bot] will evolve into a Rapid Self Diagnostic (RSD) System for home based centralized health information monitoring. The said robotic system would promote and assist cognitive development over lifespan of the user. Finally, for establishing said technology would need sustaining a Cohesively Functional Society by sustainable partnerships with healthcare providers, parents, school systems & educators, research institutions, policy & law makers and industry & investors.

In Summary, 3D PARS is a fairly new concept on how technology may be developed based on a felt need via sustainable partnerships.

On-Site wellness programs are good for everyone. Investing in your employees leads to higher morale and helps your people perform better. We have provide chiropractic, massage therapy, acupuncture, wellness coaching and, office ergonomics to a variety of companies to help them treat their people the best way possible.

Hello Computer Friends, what if I told you there was a vibrant community of independent game developers in your very own state of Minnesota (and surrounding principalities) making seriously excellent video games?

You would demand PROOF, as is your right.

Mega Minne Multi Indie Mini Arcade is here to provide you so much proof that you are like "Okay, okay, I get it. Enough already."

We got:

💪 4 big screen TVs running a selection of locally made games

💪 The Donutron Cabinet

💪 This thing's going all day long

💪 In the main hallway area of Minnebar

HELP NEEDED

This is a little trickier than planning a one off session. There's a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous.

What we need for the day:

🙏 Volunteers to help staff this thing

🙏 YOUR GAME! Submit your game here to get it in the arcade

Probably more, see this exciting spreadsheet for logistic-type progress:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gxPFtuRN6M1lrnl9b0Uwl5RrI5xyGWp_U8lc699LAR4/edit?usp=sharing

If you can provide any of the above please email ianfitz@gmail.com.

Okay, see you at the Arcade.

Colleagues, bosses, significant others—they all need convincing sometimes. Think about a time when you failed to convince someone that your solution or proposal was the best way to go. Do you know what went wrong? What you could have done differently? I’d love to share a magical solution for how to create buy-in for ideas, but I don’t have it. I do have a very useful framework from the Theory of Constraints body of knowledge that has increased my success rate through preparing and reacting with the framework in mind. This session is designed to be interactive. I’ll present six steps (key concepts) that will maximize your chances of getting agreement, buy-in, or approval. Then we’ll practice using them. Questions and feedback encouraged throughout.

Three years ago the first question asked, "Why do recruiters suck so bad?"

The last two years it was the second question.

This is the 8th year of doing this kind of presentation... a few slides and a lot of Q&A and discussion.

Conversations I have had lately at MinneDemo, Midwest PHP and numerous user groups/meetups include (and bring what is on your mind):

• What the local job market is like right now
• Is this a good time to do a job search
• There have been a number of IT layoffs in the past year... how do I play defense
• Should I stay in the Twin Cities or go out to Silicon Valley
• Why is Recruiter Spam getting worse

ADDED I was asked and will bring some ideas on what an ideal profile on LinkedIn, Twitter and a web site looks like.

MN Game Developer microtalks are back!

Minnesota has a vibrant game development scene! In this session, local game developers will each take the podium for 5 to 10 minutes. They might be showing off their latest game, they might be talking about how they structure their business, they might show off some piece of interesting new technology, (so much new VR!) or rant about the state of the industry. If there is time left over, we'll do roundtable Q&A, talk about the game development events hosted by IGDA Twin Cities, and maybe play some locally made games!

This session description will continue to get updated as the individual speakers are confirmed/scheduled.

Confirmed Speakers

• Martin Grider - Local game developer Martin will talk about his Game Idea a Day project, or maybe his new VR game Puzzle Prison, or both.

• DevNAri - Throw out your junk! Lessons in eliminating seductive, yet extraneous, game design elements.

• Zach Johnson - Minneapolis-based creative developer Zachary Johnson (Zachstronaut) will talk about the current projects he's collaborating on, such as the party game Joggernauts, the indie arcade cabinet Donutron, and the mysterious NESpectre.

• Michael Migliacio - One half of the game development dynamic duo of Intropy Games, Michael will be discussing the good, bad, and ugly of console game development. Michael recently spearheaded the launch of Astral Breakers, an action puzzle game, on the Japanese Wii U eShop -- and learned a thing or two along the way.

Vehicle technology is advancing in ways that are truly electrifying. From electric cars and buses to self-driving vehicles to apps for driving, there are so many great reasons to geek out about driving or not driving the vehicle of the future.

Our panel of five future vehicle experts will present micro talks followed by a Q&A discussion on the future of transport.

• Plug-in Vehicles Market Developments by Jukka Kukkonen

• Fast Charging Powering Our Future Driving by Matthew Blackler

• Electric Transportation Impacting the Energy Sector by Ralph Jenson

• Connected Car Technologies by Colin Lee

• Driving the Self Driving Car by Dan Holtz

In this session we will give first-hand, data-driven guidance to founders on how to value their startup when raising money.

We will also cover how to determine how much capital to raise as well as some tips for running a successful raise.

In the visitor lot we will have several electric vehicles and their owners available for showing and telling.

Vehicles currently scheduled to be there.

Tesla Model S, BMW i3, Smart Electric, Chevy Volt 1st and 2nd generation and the Nissan Leaf. We are also trying to arrange for Tesla Model X, Tesla Roadster, BMW i8, eGolf and others.

Many of the owners have multiple years of experience with driving electric vehicles in Minnesota, so this is a great time to ask your real world questions and see the available Cars of Technology up close and personal.

What's the first thing someone on the coast says when you tell them you are from MN? How cold is it? Cold is the story that everyone else tells about us. It's time to start telling a different story.

Minnesota is the fastest growing tech community in the country. We are hard-working humble Minnesotans and we bring a lot to the world. A lot of it flies under the radar and the good folks on the coasts tend to think we are a cold flyover state. With all that we bring the world, we clearly need to do a better job of telling our story in order to attract more talent to continue to build out our tech community.

In this session we will walk through how DocuMNtary got started, where it is today, and where it will go next. We will discuss the elements of a story and some ways to bring that story to the world. See a sneak peak at new interviews, new ideas, and help generate ideas on ways to get our story out to the world.

Key Takeaways 1. Finding your anchor champions 2. Leveraging advisors 3. Scoring sponsorships (the pains of shaking tin cups) 4. Things to avoid 5. What I wish I knew a year ago

What happens when you get seasoned professionals from IT, Sales, Marketing, HR and Operations in a room? You a have a framework to share best practices in career development or perhaps even start a company! The business community is constantly evolving, and as a result of that many highly qualified IT and business professionals find themselves either wanting to grow professionally, needing a new challenge or in a period of transition.

Come join a panel discussion hosted by members of CareerFORWARD (http://www.careerforward.info). We will share the history of this group, and how it has helped its members to move forward with their career. Come ready to engage in discussion about identifying your top talents, networking and sharing best practices to help people along in their career journey.

Are you tired of building someone else’s product? Are you tired of building yet another business application? Are you itching to build something amazing? Join our panel conversation and Q&A with real developers who’ve started and built software businesses. Let’s talk about the failures and successes, the fears and arrogance in starting a business. Bring your questions and let’s startup.

Brandon Stirnaman

Founder of FluentAutomation. Entrepreneur building tools for developers. Software Developer with a focus on User Interfaces, User Experience and Enterprise software architecture. Very interested in open source projects, particularly ones based on the Microsoft stack.

Eric Brandes

Eric Brandes is an independent software consultant and one of the co-founders of TrackJS JavaScript Error Monitoring. He’s been doing full stack web application development for over a decade. He strongly believes in the simplest thing that could possibly work and failing fast.

J Wynia

J Wynia has been a self-employed software consultant since 2003 and is the Co-Founder of 7 Interruptions, which provides “internal apps as a service” to organizations looking to reduce interruption at work with tools that support better workflow, tailored to the unique needs of each client. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, 2 basset hounds and a house full of hobby paraphernalia and workspaces related to home brewing, woodworking, traditional Irish music, BBQ, etc, etc, etc.

Tommy Tompkins

Tommy Tompkins founded RedCart (www.redcart.com) in 2006 to help professional photographers proof and sell their photos online. 10 years later, RedCart is still the go-to solution for many photographers worldwide. Tommy has been in software development for the last 15 years and has had the opportunity to work on very large projects including Blockbuster.com before it's ultimate demise. Tommy is also a founding member of the local cover band Good for Gary.

Companies building product on a budget always struggle with what to get done first. Scope creep exists in projects for both startups and enterprises. In this session will talk about how to manage scope by applying it to your ARMS => Acquisition, Retention, Monetization, and Self-Preservation. If a feature does fit solidly in your ARMS, don't build it. No more discussions of "You know what would be cool?" "Cool" isn't a requirement good enough (even for a sexy new startup) to build a feature if it doesn't fit solidly one of the other categories. Bring your questions, we will attempt to leave the last half of the session for Q&A. Any question on management, startups, gaming, mobile, robots, aliens, soup, rocks, etc are welcome.

Or maybe that should say "Detecting just barcodes and faces." Come find out about the relatively new mobile vision API for Android. We'll cover its capabilities, drawbacks, some alternatives, and do a few demos. Some knowledge about Android is helpful, but is not required.

Are you satisfied with the current state of event engagement – or do you yearn for deeper / more relevant engagement?

Random collisions with like-minded participants are often productive – most of us have built large portions of our networks on random collisions.

But – conscious design can also be productive.

Can we use technology to enhance engagement and identify even more (and even more valuable) relationships?

What if we could use an event app to find participants in the crowd whom we can't possibly identify physically?

Imagine the possibilities of such visibility / transparency...

Join us for an interactive discussion / exploration of the current landscape as we identify available products and unserved needs.

We'll also offer a preview of an event app that we're prototyping and solicit your feedback.

In this session, we will discuss trends and market forces in the CRM, Customer Relation Management, industry. We will discuss:

• The Pillars of a CRM system: Contact Management, Segmentation, Sales activities, and Marketing Automation.
• Different CRM needs for B2C and B2B.
• The effect of social media and big data on existing sales and marketing tools. What new features and abilities are available and at what price range.
• What you as an entrepreneur, freelancer, IC, or SMB should expect and ask for.
• What tool chain you need to build a system that send personalized, tailored, relevant, and timely messages.
• How to automate, so you can scale up and out, without losing the personalization that customers expect.
• Website personalization.
• How to use automation to nurture leads and win back customers.

This will be a high collaboration session so come in ready with questions and stories of your own!

Looking forward to hear your stories

Ahmed Sorour Co-founder and CTO @RevampCRM link

The Nerdery is considering piloting some changes at the 2016 Overnight Website Challenge -- the 24-hour competition to build websites for non-profits. Perhaps teams will take on a larger-scale nonprofit organizations looking to do more than just build a new website. Or, maybe something completely different than that. It’ll still be about doing good – just more.

Help us identify opportunities to make the challenge more impactful for our communities and more engaging for the software developers participating. In this session, please share your thoughts on how the Challenge could evolve. We can do so much more with our nerdy powers; the “why” is because we should – but what should we do? With the power of the development community, what can we do now that we never could have done when the challenge was born? Ideas, please. Your thoughts can help more nonprofits level-up in new ways, and help nerds change the game in corporate philanthropy. Again.

Learn how research at the University of Minnesota is creating inventions for the Tech Sector that are leading the creation of new companies and adding significant new business opportunities to existing companies. See how entrepreneurs and companies can work with the University to commercialize advanced, disruptive inventions.

Back in 2009, my wife and I started researching our family history, after receiving an email from her second cousin. He already had researched a lot of their family tree in Ancestry.com. I started on my family tree and in a few years we both had traced our genealogy back about 8 generations to the 1500's.

Last year I visited Sweden and a town where my great great great grandfather lived in 1800. In January, a posting on a Swedish Facebook page prompted me to google his name and location. A link popped up to Geni.com, another ancestry site that has constructed a world family tree of over 100 million people. Following the link, I discovered a treasure trove.

I discovered links to the Vikings including Ragnar from the History channel TV series. I hit the royal line of kings which took me back 58 generations to the first recorded King of Sweden in the 3rd Century. Further investigation has taken me back over 150 generations in 5000 years to King Solomon, Rameses and many others including Adam.

Who knows if this is all true? We know the Internet never lies!? All it takes is one incorrect linkage which is easy to make with all the Scandinavian names with the suffixes - son or dotter. If there is no mistake in the first 25 generations, the royal records and archeology discoveries make the rest more believable. But it has been fun and given me a greater appreciation for history.

In this presentation I will discuss the online genealogy tools and Mac, iOS and Windows apps that I have used in my research. My workflow and exchange of data between the tools will be discussed. I plan to demo some of these tools and help you get started on a trip into your family history.

This is not about Parrot or DJI drones.

This is about those flying multi-rotors that do 75* mph with a LCD strapped to your face, requiring precision flying skills as well as some soldering skills.

WARNING: serious addiction to a potentially expensive** hobby could occur as a result of attending this session.

In less than 45 minutes learn how to get a quad in the sky and immediately crashing it.

Topics we will cover:

• The core acronyms and terminology of this hobby

• The composition of a quadcopter

• Where to get parts (cheap)

• Flight Controller software options

• Radios, frequencies, ranges, antennas, and other wireless stuff

• The crazy fun stuff: FPV cameras, goggles, racing

Takeaways:

• A shopping list (or christmas wish list)***

• Resources for building, flying and racing

• How to not ruin this hobby for the rest of us

I will be bringing some fully-loaded quads, a radio and goggles for show-n-tell.****

* 75 is kind of the extreme ... 30mph is a more realistic speed.

** "Expensive" is of course relative. FPV flying machines can be thoroughly enjoyed for as little as $200. Of course, spending $2000 is a legitimate concern if you're not careful.

*** Suggestions on how to achieve "significant-other approval" for yet another hobby will not be covered. You're on your own. Good luck.

**** We will NOT be flying / crashing the quads at Best Buy. These are not toys and I have the scars to prove it. Plus our awesome government is kind of being a d*** about where we can fly these kick-a** vehicles and this is not the time / place for a protest.

I'm open to co-presenters!!! I am by no means an expert in this hobby and would welcome some more knowledge up on stage! DM me on Twitter: @Netizen01

What are some of the most important technology law developments over the past year? Notable lawsuits and legislation span areas that include privacy, social media, copyright, patents, trademarks, security, licensing, and cloud computing. A technology litigator will discuss the evolving tech law landscape, as well as trends that will likely continue to affect technologists in the coming year. Attorney Damien Riehl frequently speaks and writes on legal topics that affect businesses, including the legal implications of the Internet and technology.

This interactive presentation will provide a brief history of brands and branding — and then present a new theory based on the insight that brands and people interact across time and space. You will meet three new supermodels that examine how brands actually operate in time, space and brains. You will learn about the social economics of brands, how brands operate in the world, an overview of traditional brand theories, and and explanation of why brands provide benefits to individuals, society and brand owners. The 20 minute presentation will be followed by Q&A and a facilitated, open-ended group conversation.

HOW Publishing is currently printing the book, "The Physics of Brand," co-authored by Aaron Keller of Capsule, Renee Marino of Cupitor, and Dan Wallace of Idea Food. The book releases in late July. This is an opportunity to get an early look at content that has drawn high praise by early reviews on Amazon. For further information:

(http://physicsofbrand.com/) (http://www.amazon.com/The-Physics-Brand-Understand-Forces/dp/1440342679)

Are you a web developer who's jealous of the Android or iOS developer? Want to save your company some outsourcing money? React Native is a way to build native iOS (and Android) apps using javascript. This doesn't mean the app is just a glorified 'web view' embedded into the app, React Native uses the native components of Android and iOS. Open source in January 2015, react native is actively developed by Facebook. Attendees to this session will walk away with steps to start building react native apps and resources to keep going!

link

An introduction to two recommendation engine architectures and solutions. We will use a simple movie recommender to compare and contrast the Machine Learning solution (using Sprark) and the GraphDB solution (using Neo4j). The session will serve as an overview of the recommendation use case and the underlying technologies. It will also include a brief live demo of each solution.

When getting your startup off the ground, two of the biggest challenges are:

• Managing your workflow - keeping track of customers/leads, handling orders, and other tasks that consume your time
• Building your product - getting the coding done, or keeping your site running

There are a huge number of apps "in the cloud" which provide APIs that enable you to snap together solutions, which will free you from the repetitive tasks you perform on a daily basis - enabling you to spend more time with humans (potential customers!), and less time staring at your computer.

The quickest path towards your Minimum Viable Product may be something that can be built upon existing services and APIs - like these ten startups did.

This session will talk about the ways your startup can harness the breadth of existing APIs (and why it's important for existing companies to provide an API)

In the visitor lot we will have several electric vehicles and their owners available for showing and telling.

Vehicles currently scheduled to be there.

Tesla Model S, BMW i3, Smart Electric, Chevy Volt 1st and 2nd generation and the Nissan Leaf. We are also trying to arrange for Tesla Model X, Tesla Roadster, BMW i8, eGolf and others.

Many of the owners have multiple years of experience with driving electric vehicles in Minnesota, so this is a great time to ask your real world questions and see the available Cars of Technology up close and personal.

Most of us don't get to pick our coworkers anymore than we get to pick our family. Here's how to deal with the ones you wouldn't pick--

• Sad Panda
• Boy Wonder
• The Grinch
• Nontrad Nan
• Shadowy Board Room Villain

--and how to stop them from interfering with your good work and good vibes.

We all need a break from technology and the fast pace of modern life every now and then. In 2003 I got my break. I was a cast member of the Emmy-nominated reality TV show Colonial House, an experiential history television series on PBS that placed twenty-five people in a 17th-century replica English colony in the middle of nowhere and documented what happened over the course of several months.

This talk is NOT a behind-the-scenes look at the show, but rather an inspection of modern life in light of my experience living on the colony without modern technology. As a tech entrepreneur, business owner, and software developer myself, I very easily succumb the luxuries of daily life in 2016: Wi-Fi on airplanes, music and movies on demand, personal drivers at the push of a button, social networks that connect billions of people. What we've done is amazing and mind-boggling! Despite our advancements, we modern technologists tend to:

• Work too much.
• Isolate ourselves.
• Complicate solutions.
• Ignore our health.

If we take a close look at the most basic of human functions, it is possible to solve some of the modern-day problems we've created for ourselves. Daily life in 1628 required us to:

• Sleep when it's dark.
• Depend on others.
• Do less.
• Eat clean foods and move your body.

Let's take a close look at everyday lessons from the Colonial House experience that can help us successfully push the boundaries of modern technology forward.

And if you want that behind-the-scenes look, check out jefflin.net/colonialhouse.

There is no one path to becoming a product manager; while product managers often come from the engineering ranks, they may also come from finance, marketing, business analysis or project management roles. So how to we identify potential product managers and nurture the PMs in our organization to become better and more senior PMs? Once we identify someone with the right blend of soft skills, technical and business acumen and desire, how can we not only help them move into the role but also set them up for success? Anna, Viv and Marisa took different, somewhat peripatetic, paths into product management. We were able to make the leap because of strong mentorship, sponsorship, and, most especially, passionate, inclusive product management communities. The groups we have been involved with have, at their core, an environment set up for product managers to learn and help other product managers with the challenges and issues they encounter in their roles. Leveraging that bias for learning and growth makes them a natural source for cultivating emerging and future product people. Come join us for a discussion about what you are doing and/or what is in your sphere of influence to enable to help nurture both yourself and new product managers. While we might like to think that we are as wise and courageous as Athena, unlike that Greek goddess, product managers do not spring from the head of Zeus fully formed – so let’s talk about how to form product managers in our more mortal realm.

College: For the 2014-2015 academic year at the University of Minnesota, 64 MS and 27 PhDs in computer science were earned r1. Across all University of Minnesota graduate programs, this turns out to be < 2% of total MS and ≅3% of PhDs earned; 22 graduate degrees in computer science were earned by females. Minnesota has 14,420 open computing jobs but had only 796 computer science graduates in 2014 r2; 14% were female.

High school: In 2015, 666 high school students in Minnesota took the AP computer science exam; 20% were female, 14 were Hispanic, and 10 were Black r2. Only 13% of Minnesota schools with AP programs offered the AP computer science course in 2014-2015. Minnesota does not allow computer science to count as a mathematics or science admission requirement at institutions of higher education. Minnesota does not require that all schools offer computer science.

Yep – that’s the same pattern you’ve been hearing for years. We know computer science is foundational yet we continue to underprepare our students for high school and college level computer science. In this presentation, you’ll hear the latest status for computer science education in Minnesota, why we need to start computer science education early, and what programs are aiming to fill the current gaps. You’ll also hear from SuPoCo, a Technovation[MN] team, (Allie Nordeen, Annalee Kester, Gracie Marek, and Kali Jarrard) r3, about their experience (panel format). Lastly, you will learn what you can do to help and resources to get you started.

Come listen to pitches, stories about a few memorable pitch experiences, & best practices from veteran entrepreneurs and investors.

To Pitch:

Show up & give a 90-120 second speed pitch on your idea to a panel of investors & entrepreneurs. It can be your first time ever pitching or you can be a veteran, just have fun with it! Receive immediate feedback on both your concept & your pitch! We will listen to as many pitches as time allows!

Show up at the door to pitch Or to guarantee a spot to pitch please email brett.brohl@techstars.com. Or stop by and if we have time we will take walk-ups!

The Panel:

Brett Brohl - EIR @ Techstars Minneapolis & Serial Entrepreneur

Will Allen - President @ Behance & Angel Investor

Andy Christensen - Director @ Arthur Ventures

Ever heard of a Raspberry Pi or a BeagleBone Black? Ever heard of FPGAs and Yocto Linux?

Want to know more?

This high tech presentation on the current state of Embedded Linux is sure to satisfy!

We will be discussing the latest advancements in the field of real-time embedded controls based on Linux. We will explain how and why Linux with hardware acceleration can be a fantastic platform for advanced computer control systems. Algorithm acceleration in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware will be explained with a number of DIY examples.

The Yocto Linux build system provides a framework for the average computer hobbyist to quickly get started with real-time controls. Yocto can be used to target the two most popular Embedded Linux single board computers - the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black. We will describe how these low cost computers can be used to do things like robotics, home automation, computer vision, video streaming and more!

[description work in progress]

Overview of 3D printing

Industrial and Hobbyist

The overlap

Ideation to Creation Live Demo using Onshape and Hobbyist Printer

Concept generation

Iterative Design

Rapid Production

The Frontiers

Factory in a Box

Box in a Factory

It’s hard enough to get a brand new application noticed in a crowded domestic market, let alone in other places around the world. Come learn a few battle-tested tips and tricks picked up from exhibiting the mobile, PC, and Wii U action puzzle game, Astral Breakers as a part of the 2015 Tokyo Game Show Indie Game Corner in Japan. Discover how to shatter both language and cultural audiences alike and find a brand new audience for your application!

Some topics covered in the talk include:

• To translate or not to translate: what a difficult question!

• The 'Hot Sheet': making the job of the Internet press a whole lot easier -- and increase the likelihood of them covering your product in the process!

• Post-show parties: do you really need to attend? (Short answer: YES!)

• Meetings with Publishers and Partners: Selling Yourself and Your Product (the former is just as important as the latter)!

Sponsored by AngelPolleNation, Piranha Pool (TM) III is Minnesota's own live take on the TV series "Shark Tank." -- and our third year of doing it at MinneBar! A panel of experienced, local tech investors will, on the spot, consider investments in FishFood (TM), aka local entrepreneurs. Confirmed Piranhas are well-known local investors Cathy Connett, David Dalvey, Dave Mao and Steven London. Details on how to apply to participate as FishFood are here: link.

Cathy Connett is the President and founder of CorConnections, LLC, which specializes in guiding businesses through new business initiatives, equity infusions, ownership transitions and the building of alliances and partnerships. Ms. Connett is also a co-founder and CEO of the Sofia Angel Fund, a Minnesota-based fund focused on making private equity investments in companies founded by or led by women, or whose products and services target women. She formerly served as the director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas. Ms. Connett has an engineering degree from Vanderbilt University and a MBA from Harvard Business School.

David Dalvey is a Managing Partner of Brightstone Venture Capital since September 2000, and he has 27 years of venture stage investment experience with 17 years as a venture fund manager and 10 years as a technology investment banker. Also, Mr Dalvey has 35 collective years of corporate board director/advisor experience. Previously, Mr Dalvey has been a general partner at Food Fund Venture Capital II, L.P. from 1992 to 1995 and also held senior investment banking management positions with R.J. Steichen and Company from 1995 to 2000 and Wessels, Arnold & Henderson from 1987 to 1992. During his career, Mr Dalvey completed 40 public common stock offerings and 90 private placements totaling over $1.75 billion in equity growth capital for technology and life science companies. He currently serves as a Director at Mobile Realty Apps, Horizon Oil Field Services, Celcuity and Blue Rock Advisors and has also served Director roles with AppTec Laboratories, Navarre Corp., Definity Health, CHF Solutions, Nature Vision, TestQuest, Agiliti, Digitiliti and ShoreLunch Recipes.

Dave Mao is Managing Partner of Come Up Capital, a new $50 million venture fund based in Minneapolis that is focused on early-stage technology investments, with a preference for internet-of-things, smart devices and big data product offerings. He has a joint MBA from Columbia University, the University of Hong Kong and the London Business School.

Steven London is CEO of iCrimeFighter, a mobile evidence management solution, and co-founder of Six Points Capital, his angel investment vehicle. He is a also a member of Gopher Angels. Mr. London has his MBA from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. He also has his law degree from the University of Iowa and formerly practiced business law as an associate with Faegre & Benson.

*This is a repeat of the session from last year for those who missed it. It received over 100 tweets and re-tweets so I decided to resubmit.

I've spent most of my career managing developers, from informal peer-to-peer leadership, to big corporate structure. In recent years I am most often approached by non-technical entrepreneurs attempting to start a technology company, with no experience or skill in working with those of us who are the "difficult to deal with" nerds and geeks.

Scott is CEO of QONQR, a bootstrapped mobile gaming company in Minneapolis and former adjunct professor at St Mary's University in the Information Technology Management program. This session will be a 50 minute summary of the master's class Scott teaches on "Managing Technology Teams". We'll focus on the negative stereotypes, communication issues, trust concerns, and the challenge of ambiguity. The goal is not to teach entrepreneurs how to best manage your technical team, but expose the dynamics of working with technical teams that may be new to non-technical managers, or software developers not accustomed to working with new tech managers.

Let's talk about the early stage of a startup from idea to MVP. I'll talk about lessons learned and ways to navigate the sticky points such as: how do I get started, do I need to form a company, whats my next move, do I need co-founders, and many other mini-topics around business. I'll use real-life examples to tell a story around each piece. This is not a product pitch but please note that I will be referencing the startups I've worked on or currently working on.

This session is more around the thought process of creating the startup at the VERY early stage. Starting with the initial idea and how get moving. Don't go alone.

Who would benefit from this session? CEO's or leadership decision makers, product managers, entrepreneurs looking into the tech space, the startup curious.

Excel is ubiquitous in the business world and can be an extremely powerful tool. However, there are way too many instances where it is abused and used to create unsustainable solutions to very real business problems. Fortunately python is an open source language with a powerful data manipulation library called pandas that can help relieve some of this pain.

This talk will discuss some of the challenges with trying to use Excel as the primary tool for data wrangling including:

• Scalability for larger data sets
• Ability to version control and document the process
• Managing complex formulas
• Building repeatable processes that can be executed by non-technical users

After discussing some of the types of problems with an Excel-based solution, I will cover:

• High level overview of python and why it is a good choice for the solution
• Overview of the pandas library
• Highlights on how to approach these types of problems and items to consider when introducing this technology into an organization.

The purpose of the talk is to give a broad overview of a potential solution and provide pointers on next steps to implement in your own organization. The topic does not require any specific technical experience or knowledge.

We have a strong tech community here in Minneapolis & St. Paul. Participants and organizers drive a ton of options for local tech user groups.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to contribute to this awesome community? Come meet a panel of local organizers, hear about their experiences building and maintaining community around tech through user groups and hackathons, and ask them questions about how to get involved. You'll be hearing from:

• Allison F - Gr8Ladies and Gr8Allies
• Brian Dolan-Goecke - Penguins Unbound and Ansible Meetup
• Casey Helbling - Ruby.MN and the minnestar board
• Jenn Strater - Gr8Ladies
• Jenna Pederson - Geekettes, Hack the Gap, and the minnestar board
• Randall Meeker - Javascript.MN
• Robert Tomb - Javascript.MN and sort of Elixir.mn

Whether you're looking to get yourself out there into the community, or you're a perennial user group attendee, helping to organize a user group or event is a great professional growth step. If you're trying to figure out how to get one started, wondering about details like finding a space, or are looking for a group you can help out with, show up!

We will start with some base questions to tease out the experiences of this group, but if there is interest in the audience, we'll open it up and answer your community-related questions to make this as interactive as possible.

Lastly, here's a nice little hint for any of you who are running a user group and looking for help: this might be a good session to drop into if you're shopping for co-organizers.

In the visitor lot we will have several electric vehicles and their owners available for showing and telling.

Vehicles currently scheduled to be there.

Tesla Model S, BMW i3, Smart Electric, Chevy Volt 1st and 2nd generation and the Nissan Leaf. We are also trying to arrange for Tesla Model X, Tesla Roadster, BMW i8, eGolf and others.

Many of the owners have multiple years of experience with driving electric vehicles in Minnesota, so this is a great time to ask your real world questions and see the available Cars of Technology up close and personal.

Did you know that burning sugar isn't the only way to fuel your body? In fact, it may be harmful and be at the root of many chronic diseases. We'll talk about why everything you know about food is probably wrong and how you can use a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet to turn your body into a fat burning machine.

You may have heard of this diet in the context of losing weight, but there is much more. It can help reduce risk for many "diseases of civilization" (diabetes, heart disease, auto-immune issues), improve your mood and exercise performance, make you less hungry less often and give you ridiculous amounts of energy.

I thought it sounded like magic too, but my journey has made me feel as if I am hacking my body to be better than I thought possible.

Now that even Adobe has killed Flash (by renaming it "Animate"), there's no reason to use it anymore, right? Besides, we have the HTML5 Canvas, and WebGL, and CSS3 Transforms, and JavaScript, and faster computers, and...!

Well, we do have all that and more, but there are still challenges to easily create dynamic, interactive, web-friendly animation. For the most part the challenge is simply finding the right tool for the right job (such as CSS3 for UI animation), but you may also need a crystal ball to NOT use what's about to go away forever (such as Adobe Edge or and the famo.us animation engine).

I'll offer an overview of what I know, but hope to have this be more of a discussion, an open share: What works for you; what you need; can animators animate with code instead of timelines; and more.

Good overview on Web Animation Past, Present, and Future.

You could be writing prettier code, and you could be writing it faster.

If you've been curious about preprocessors like Jade and Sass but never had the time to learn how to use them, this 50 minute session should get you started. We're going to be looking at Jade (an HTML preprocessor) and Sass (a CSS preprocessor) and how to use both to write cleaner, more modern code that will comply to browsers standards without you thinking about it.

Change styles and layouts in a fraction of the time, minify code for quicker page load, get a better grasp of the DRY principle, and best of all, never touch the command line. This is a GUI-only approach.

Everyone has certain things about themselves they prefer to keep private. Though many will claim they "have nothing to hide," they are simply wrong, but for some of us maintaining privacy has higher stakes than for others. With employers more frequently requesting vast amounts of data on their employees, including requiring wearing fitness trackers, chronically ill people have even more reason to maintain as much privacy in the workplace as possible about their health and themselves. Activists also have myriad reasons to care about their privacy, but especially if they are working in a corporate environment that has ethics that run counter to their own, as activism is often unpaid labor and activists must get a paycheck from somewhere. This talk will discuss some of the good and bad policies towards privacy that my own company uses, as well as concrete ways to maintain your privacy in the workplace. If you feel comfortable sharing, I'd also love to have a discussion about your company and its policies towards privacy, so we can observe the local trend in which corporate surveillance of employees is moving.

The Kotlin Programming Language is a "statically typed programming language for the JVM, and Android" (kotlinlang.org) that features concise syntax, safe handling of null values, and 100% compatibility with the JVM. Swift is Apple’s new language for iOS and OS X that "adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier, more flexible, and more fun" (developer.apple.com). In this talk, I'll introduce some of the interesting features of both languages compare them side-by-side. Then we’ll put each language through a series of challenges, and together we can vote to see which language is our favorite!

Blogging? Employee Advocacy? Customer Success? What going on regarding social media in corporate America?

Not adobe and not google analytics - building a system that scales for web analytics

I will walk thru some hands on demos of a web analytics system and tracking pixel system designed to scale to 10,000 events / sec using technologies like: Kafka, Cassandra, Scala, Hive, Hadoop, etc. Talk about the key challenges including scale, data security for data in motion and at rest, using Public Key Encryption in the browser.

In this session, we’ll discuss the importance of the Gap stage, when it occurs, how to plan for it, and how to work your way through it so that you can get on with scaling your business.

Today, there is a lot of discussion about customer development, product/market fit and scaling a company. However, there is little discussion about that period between product/market fit discovery and when you press the gas pedal down in order to scale the business. This middle state is a messy time in a startup’s life. It’s a hard but transformative time. Done with the right thought and planning, it is during this period that you really birth your business and put your company on the tracks to success and an exit.

This period is called the Gap Stage. It is called this because there are gaps in your market and customer knowledge, gaps in your product and service capabilities, and gaps in your team that once filled will make scaling possible. The Gap Stage is where you refine, polish, re-polish, reposition and re-learn what you know about your sales process, the market, the product and target customer through repeated sales and customer engagement.

At a professional level, every video game engine requires knowing the rules inside out in order to abuse them for profit. Even a deceptively simple game like Guitar Hero can be manipulated in order to get ahead.

I'll go over some interesting math and algorithms that can be applied to maximize scores, as well the subtleties of the game engine that people used for points. (Yes, people wrote complex programs in order to solve Guitar Hero!) I'll also go over how you can catch people lying about their scores.

Whether it's moving out of your basement and into office space for the first time, or accommodating rapid headcount growth as a fast-growing multi-million dollar company, real estate can be one of the most challenging facets for your company. It is often one of the largest costs for any company, right behind labor, and has also become one of the top ways to attract and retain talent. In a time when money and talent are of utmost importance, it is critical to get it right with your real estate.

This session will discuss the real estate process from beginning to end, covering all the bases regarding your company's real estate. Some of the topics that will be discussed are:

*The first step once you've decided your company needs its own office space *How to find space that meets your budget while also establishing a company culture *How to determine your real estate budget *What you need to pay attention to in a lease *The real estate roadbumps that can be avoided *How to accommodate headcount growth or contraction, no matter how large of a company *The local and state economic incentives that are available to you and your company

This session is intended to be an open dialogue between the presenters and audience, so many more topics will likely be covered. The presenters have years of experience working with startups of all ages and sizes, and will be able to share countless stories of companies who were in the same situation many of you face, as well as how they handled the process. This will be a valuable session no matter what stage your company is at.

One of the greatest challenges to developing an API is ensuring that your API lasts. After all, you don’t want to have to release and manage multiple versions of your API just because you weren’t expecting users to use it a certain way, or because you didn’t anticipate far enough down the roadmap. In this session we’ll talk about the challenge of API Longevity, as well as ways to increase your API lifecycle including having a proper mindset, careful design, agile user experience and prototyping, best design practices including hypermedia, and the challenge of maintaining persistence.

Learn how to earn hundreds of thousands of airline and hotel miles and points each year for minimal or no cost. It’s fun, it’s challenging and it not only generates tax free revenue in the form of travel points, but it saves you money.

What You Will Learn

• Travel Commodities Trading – How much are points and miles worth? Which are the best programs?
• Travel Hacking – how it works, benefits, risks, buying and redeeming miles
• Credit Card Churning – how to decide what cards to get, when to hold them and when to close them. What is the impact on your credit score?
• Manufactured Spending- meeting minimum credit card signup bonuses. How to do it and how to develop a strategy
• How to track your miles, points, credit cards and debit cards

Accel.MN is a totally free peer-to-peer learning platform for entrepreneurs. It starts with a selective cohort of 20 entrepreneurs who go through a 6-week program focused on startup best practices. The content is curated from world-class sources and provides opportunities to gain new insights for even the most experienced entrepreneur. The various guest speakers all have tremendous expertise with their specific topics. Most importantly, the speakers are all entrepreneurs themselves, sharing hard-won lessons.

At last year's MinneBar, we hosted a session called "Planning a Startup Accelerator in MN". We applied much of the feedback shared in that session to this new program. Now after finishing 2 cohorts of Accel.MN we have some interesting lessons to share back with the community about what MN entrepreneurs need to be successful.

Speaking with your computing device is becoming commonplace. Most of us have used Apple's Siri, Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, or Amazon's Alexa - but how can you speak with your web application? The Web Speech API can enable a voice interface by adding both Speech Synthesis (Text to Speech) and Speech Recognition (Speech to Text) functionality.

This session will introduce the core concepts of Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition. We will evaluate the current browser support and review alternative options. See the JavaScript code and UX design considerations required to add a speech interface to your web application. Come hear if it's as easy as it sounds?

Want to learn Data Science and Analytics? The best way to get started is to participate in a data science hackathon! In just a day or two, you can build your skills, make connections, and solve problems that affect the real world!

There are THREE great data science hackathons in the Twin Cities! We'll have representation from all of them so you can find one that fits your interests.

This discussion panel will feature organizers and participants from data science hackathons in the Twin Cities. Speakers include:

• Wenqiuli Zhang, from the winning Social Data Science Hackathon team and recent MS in analytics graduate

• Priyanka Saboo, also from the winning Social Data Science Hackathon team and recent MS in analytics graduate

• Pedro Medina, data science startup founder, Analyze This organizer and Social Data Science competitor

• Jake Mason, current data science student and Analyze This organizer

• Sona Maniyan, data scientist at Veritas and Social Data Science organizer

• John Hogue, data scientist at General Mills, Social Data Science organizer and MUDAC judge

• Kevin Church, independent data scientist, Analyze This organizer, Social Data Science participant, and MUDAC judge

It will be a fascinating discussion about learning in a high-pressure hackathon environment while the clock is ticking!

Discussion will be moderated by Daniel Feldman.

If you don't have a full blown HR department, chances are that hiring is kind of a black box for you. It's the most important part of growing a company, and a hell of a financial investment, but a lot of companies end up hiring people who are good at interviewing, not good at their jobs. Chances are, you don't need someone who's only good at talking about their resume.

What this talk will cover:

(Briefly) Figuring out when you need to hire.

Interviewing stakeholders and doing a work audit.

Writing a job description people WANT to apply for.

Creating an interview rhythm.

Creating interview criteria and collateral.

Actually interviewing.

Deciding on, and executing, a hire!

What this talk WON'T cover:

Recruiting. You definitely want to go listen to Paul DeBettignies to learn all about that. Tech unemployment in the Twin Cities is so low you'll cry, so you need strategies to fill your hopper. My talk is mostly about how to separate the wheat from the chaff once they're in.

Do languages change how we think?

When it first came out, Apple’s Swift was a promising but awkward experiment. With last fall’s 2.0 release, however, it's ready for prime time: a pleasure to work with, the clear best choice for greenfield iOS development, and a serious contender in the general-purpose language space even for non-Apple-stack development.

It’s also quirky, surprising, sometimes eye-opening, and sometimes half-baked.

This session is a dive into Swift — not just “hello world” on a projector, but a focused look at the language’s distinguishing features. I’ll share my experience doing serious, day-in-day-out Swift work on Siesta and several iOS apps, and walk through illuminating code experiments that draw out the things that make the language unique. Swift makes some fascinating decisions about mutability, null checking, type inference, polymorphism, compiler optimization, and static ↔︎ dynamic type interactions that challenge long-standing language design traditions.

This session is also a meditation on how languages shape the code we write. More than just enumerating features, I’ll talk about how language differences shape code style and best practices. What does it feel like to code in this language? How do different languages lead to code differences that run deeper than syntax? I’m interested in whether and how the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis applies to programming: does changing how we code alter how we think?

There will be comparisons with Ruby, Javascript, Java, Objective-C, and C++, as well as some shout-outs to functional languages. (Don’t worry; you don’t need to know all those to follow the talk.) NB: This is a tribalism-free zone; we’re here to consider tradeoffs, not cheer for our favorite language as if it were a sports team!

The sad truth that is virtually every service eventually experiences commoditization - where customers feel any company offering a similar service will get you the same result and you may as well go with the cheapest option.

Technology is no different in this perception, but anyone who has worked in our industry know that the cheapest route is often the fastest path for disaster. We’ve seen how tremendously successful intimate, long-term partnerships can be with clients that allow us to help solve their problems, rather than respond to a 50-page, line-item RFP. How then, do we convince clients, prospects and the general public that it’s worth hiring us over any of the limitless options available?

I’ll be frank. This session will not provide you with a magic bullet that will keep your company afloat during challenging economic times. However, we will discuss strategies that I’ve found effective during my time marketing professional services and how to employ these methods into an ever-changing landscape filled with customers becoming more savvy (and skeptical) by the minute.

The Twin Cities tech landscape is made up of outstanding companies of all shapes and sizes with all manner of expertise and unique skill sets. Let’s talk about how playing to our our individual strengths can keep us in business during the age of offshoring, reshoring, nearshoring and freelancing.

Lean Startup had taken over as the prevailing, new Development methodology used to maximize the potential customer adoption of a product/service/technology, while expending the minimal amount of resources and time. However, Lean Startup has been thought to mostly apply to small, emerging startups and organizations that don't have the overhead and beauracracy of the "typical Enterprise" technology company (think of IBM, HP, Dell). What we will propose during this session is that Lean Startup (alongside Agile) CAN exist within an enterprise-class company and furthermore, can demonstrate substantial value in comparison to more traditional "waterfall" or "phase-gate" development methods. Additionally, Lean Startup can drive a much closer unity between the different stakeholders such as Development, Product Management and Technical Sales since they are all working on much more aggressive timelines with constant iterations. This session will explore how Lean Startup is being successfully implemented within an Enterprise IT organization right here in the Twin Cities and we'll cover not only the good, but also some challenges that any organization deploying Lean Startup should consider.

Around mid-2010 I registered a company in the State of Minnesota while sitting at my laptop in a $100/month, prison-bar-lined apartment in China. That company went on to sell over 10,000 solar mobile phone charging / LED lighting kits to service folks living off the grid in Latin America, and over 20 different countries in Africa.

As one might reasonably expect, it is quite a challenge selling to countries where trust is low, income and cash is low, and where...quite frankly...businesses with finance and distribution power write their own checks by making their own credit terms. But I'm glad I did it - and I learned a lot.

I have a crazy idea about how we here in Minnesota could disintermediate some of those questionable and often exploitative actors in impoverished regions around the world, through a risk model that is much lower than shipping solar kits. I've built a prototype and it will have been running for about 6 months by the time Minne* rolls around. I would be willing to let the Minne* audience in on the concept, if they would be wiling to dig into me and poke holes in my crazy plan.

This is a tale of solar power, climbing mountains, drinking coffee, mobile development, massive snowfalls, corn and grain, treasure hunting for data, all of the sorts of things that folks in the Minnesota tech community love (and maybe a few things that our friends and family would like to hear about too).

thanks,

Every entrepreneur should have an exit strategy. This is especially critical before contacting the first external investors. Different investors are compatible with different exit strategies. Getting this wrong can actually kill the company. The exit strategy is the foundation for the entire company plan.

This Session is for founders, equity incentivized employees interested in maximizing the probabilities that their company are among those that are ultimately successful with a business exit.

Why Attend? Exits have changed dramatically in the past decade. These changes have transformed how companies are being financed and sold.

Of businesses which are for sale; 25% are sold. Only 33% at the desired valuation. Most of the time, after as entrepreneurs who have built a saleable company, we fail to successfully exit. When we miss the ideal time to exit, the most likely end result is that the company will fail - completely. This session will focus on why this happens so frequently and give you insight to maximize the probabilities that your company is among those that are ultimately successful.

Exits are the least well understood part of being an entrepreneur. The primary reason exits are so poorly understood is simply because they don't happen very often. In reality, the exit is actually just another business process. Done right, the valuation and time line are just as predictable as other, more familiar, business processes like hiring, product development, financing activities or marketing campaigns.

Let's talk about songwriting. Potential topics include:

• How to break through writers block
• How to get your music on iTunes, Spotify, Google Music
• How to overcome fear
• How to get on the radio
• Where to perform
• Etc.
  

Anything is game. Just bring your questions and issues, and we'll help each other figure it out.

Based on interviews with senior leaders in the Minnesota tech community, this session presents seven things emerging leaders MUST know to succeed. From communicating with the right level of detail to mastering the people part of leadership to answering the question "Will I be any less of a technologist once I'm a leader?", emerging tech leaders will discover key areas that will set them apart from the rest of the pack as they prepare to lead.

High achievers and high-potential employees are the future of our technology organizations. It is more important than ever for employees to adopt a thoughtful, strategic approach to building leadership skills so they can learn to lead “from the side” and also be ready to move into leadership opportunities as they arise.

In August 2015, Minnesota was ranked as the fastest growing state nationwide for tech jobs, with a growth rate of 8.36%. That growth means new jobs and the people in those jobs need strong leaders. Will you be one of those leaders?

With 4 major headsets on the market, 2016 is being called the year of consumer Virtual Reality. What you may not realize is: Local MN businesses and developers have already been using VR for 2-3 years. Hear sage words of advice from 5 guys that look super suave with opaque ski goggles covering half of their face.

Consumer VR Tech: What's Here, Where First? - Zach Wendt
This year's VR headsets have capabilities that meet or exceed ones from 3-5 years ago, at literally 1-2% of the cost. But, there's pretty big differences in day-to-day use and development. Get an ultra-quick overview of capabilities, pricing, and target markets of this year's VR (and AR) headsets. Learn which applications and industries will adopt VR quickly due to the extreme value it brings. Hear speculation about killer apps that will lead to mass adoption and daily use!

Reality Captured! Online to VR with your DSLR - Bryn Erickson - Toursler
Toursler Inc is reality capture technology for real world practical applications and interaction. Get an overview of our technology and learn how you too can capture reality and reconstruct in 3D for your projects. Also get some insight and stories on boot strapping in the VR industry and in general.Feedback on our Toursler app for Google Cardboard is welcome!

VR Custom Hardware and Video Projects - Paul Christian
Paul will share several recent homebrew hardware and video projects that involved VR including:
* Cross platform VR driven by a stair stepper (exercise equipment)
* Stereo video capture via drone
* A homebrew data glove with position tracking and haptic feedback

360 Video Bootcamp - Chuck Olsen - Visual
The way most people will experience VR in 2016 is by watching a 360 video. What is 360 video, how many cameras do you need to make it, and why would you do such a thing? Visual has learned lessons producing 360 video for a wide range of clients including Rhapsody / Napster, the Mall of America, Washington Post, Minnesota Timberwolves, MPR and more.

Suspension of disbelief in VR! - Paul Eckhardt Tweaks, Tricks and Ticks that make virtual reality seem real, learned from VR exploring in the HTC Vive. Overview of film & CG trickery extend into the Virtual Realm, to make users feel like a super hero.

In this session we'll build a self-driving car. Don't worry, not a full size one!

We'll talk about:

• finding your position and orientation using GPS, mag, gyro, and accelerometer sensors

• real-time guidance using PID

• obstacle avoidance using proximity sensors

• navigation on a map

• long distance control using the cell network (using Minnesota's own Particle Electron)

And end it all with a demo -- a toy-sized car that you can send to different locations from your phone.

Has anyone ever told you "don't spend a lot of time on this, just make it easy to use"? Have you ever built a software product, only to realize no wants it, it doesn't meet the needs of your users, and/or it's completely unusable? Is gathering user feedback only something you've done after you've released the product? If any of these apply, then this talk is for you.

User-centered design (UCD) is the underpinning of any good user experience (UX) practice area. And yet very few know what it means or how to integrate it into their organization in a meaningful way. In this talk, we will take UX beyond the buzzwords and address what it takes to develop a culture of UCD within your organization, and develop truly useful, usable and desirable products.

More than hiring really good designers, a good UX requires stakeholder investment, culture adoption, process improvement, and incorporation of user input throughout the design, build, and maintenance process. In this talk we hope to demystify the "magic" of UX, and inspire you to become a user-centered design evangelist and change-maker for your organization.

Elisa Poquette is the UX Lead at Invenshure, UXPA Vice President, and also feels very strongly about UCD.

Conflicts between generations in the workplace have taken a new turn. With the influx of the Millennials, Generation X managers and bosses are facing new challenges. The work preferences of both generations are at opposite ends of the spectrum in many ways, and agreements about what constitutes a "good work ethic" are hard to come by. Add to that the Millennial approach to teamwork, Generation X's lack of people skills, and a total disagreement about how family and work intersect...and it can be challenging to find common ground.

Let's take a step back and build a deeper understanding of both generations. Let's look at core characteristics and how the strengths of one generation can compliment the strengths of the other. Now that Boomers are out of picture (who are we kidding?), we can find a new way to approach work that focuses on practical, pragmatic, and productive results.

Patrick Riley, CEO and Co-Founder of Modern Survey, shares 10 important lessons he learned while selling his business to Aon, a Fortune 500 company. The transaction closed in February 2016, and as a result has positioned Aon as a global leader offering employee engagement and talent analytics solutions to thousands of companies around the world.

In just a little over a year, we imagined, bootstrapped, and launched our Enterprise Collaboration platform that helps more than 25K users find each other, share information, and collaborate.

Our story starts w/ a job change, a serendipitous lunch meeting at Brits pub. From my basement to our campsite at COCO, we built out our ambitions and drove our first revenues that support our team and activities. We currently have about 5 customers with an aggressive goal of 100 by mid-summer. Today, COCO uses our platform for their member collaboration. Our platform is also used by customers of Infor/Lawson, Cerner Healthcare, and a few others.

Our presentation will focus on the unanswered questions we had from a bootstrapping perspective, we will touch on culture, people, founders, legal, marketing, and strategy. We will discuss our first customer and the experience we had when the rubber met the road, we will talk about our next phase of product and business development. Finally we will share our lessons learned along the way - what worked well, what didn't. We hope to answer questions others like us may have or have had along their journey.

We will demonstrate/share some portions of our product for context.

Video games continually push the boundaries of what we perceive as possible in art, technology, and the creative sector. As such, it’s not surprising that there is a strong connection between the economic success and innovation of a region with the vibrancy of its creative industries (Boix‐Domenech & Soler‐Marco, 2015). With a rich history as a leader in digital games and a strong creative industry that is ranked fifth in the nation (Creative Vitality Index, 2014), Minnesota has a unique opportunity to strengthen the sector and boost the overall economy.

Unfortunately, according to LinkedIn data in 2015, we are losing talent in this industry at a high-rate. As a non-profit founded and operating in Minnesota, GLITCH has a vested interest in seeing this community thrive, we started digging into some data to better understand the industry in Minnesota.

This session will cover the following topics:

• Summary of Surveying the Silicon Prairie: Digital Games in Minnesota. The first in a series of annual reports published by GLITCH.
• Comparison of the industry in Minnesota to other regions in the nation.
• Open Discussion - what’s next?

Join a conversation among app startups and developers who have proven that their app concept resonates with a critical mass of users and are now working to take their installs/retention to the next level.

Steven Clift, with the Minnesota-based 1 Radio News app startup - http://1radionews.com - will briefly share some of his big questions and lessons as his world radio news app approaches 50,000 installs on Google Play (and the app's iOS launch approaches). From App Store Optimization and tech media app reviews to targeted app install ads and social media sharing or guerrilla marketing, what works to emerge from the long tail of obscurity to a viable app-centric business?

This session will focus on peer to peer advanced discussion among those attending. Those in the room will be asked to share their direct experiences and top lessons on building installs and retention for their mobile app.

We will start/continue this conversation in this invite-only Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mobilestartupsmn/

Is the use of biotechnology in the plants we use for food, clothing, and energy a bug or a feature of our contemporary food system? What 'evil' forces are behind the pro- and anti-GMO movements? Let's talk science, culture, and economics in this inclusive and interactive session.

Conventional auctions sell a single item to a single bidder, and are familiar to anybody who's heard of eBay or Southeby's. But they they don't work well at allocating items where "the sum is greater than the parts", such as airplane landing slots, cell phone spectrum, or truck transportation. Combinatorial auctions can sell multiple items to multiple bidders simultaneously, but they also produce new computational and economic challenges.

This session will include: live auctions with volunteers from the audience, integer-linear programming, failed startup ideas, economic theory, and maybe a few Lego bricks.

Taking inspiration from architectural patterns like Flux and Redux, this session is an exploration of one-way data flow principles in Swift.

It's hard to resist the influence of Apple's Cocoa MVC architecture on our apps. We've all seen or written view controllers with thousands of lines of code that buckle under the weight of their responsibilities. They're difficult to test, modify, and maintain.

By thinking differently about how we handle application state over time, we've reduced complexity and improved extensibility of production code. And you don't need to buy into a specific architecture–you can benefit from using one-way data flow principles in your apps right now.

In this session, we'll:

• Define a simple, platform-independent architecture for stateless UIs.
• Consider how Swift lends itself to this architecture via protocols and immutability.
• Show the benefits of this architecture as applied to collection views.
• Discuss challenges and future work.

Lot of software engineers and analysts know how to work with code and build better product. We have little clue about how to save and invest and have fun. Traditional wealth advisor's or Financial planners have a lack of continuous education and lack time to communicate and discuss problems as they come up. White House Council of Economic Advisors estimates that advice tainted by conflicts of interest costs investors $17 billion annually.

Mobile devices and Crowd funding has changed the investment market in the last 5 years. We now have access to many of these tools and in this presentation we will see how we can leverage this at zero cost. There are many avenues to invest now. Angel investment in startups. Peer to Peer investing , simple stock, ETF purchase with zero commission, concept or folio investment, real estate crowd investment. Let us see the investment playing field and how it fits your life style. We will also try to find answers for some of commonly asked questions

• Do I need to still continue with traditional mutual fund investing in my 401K?.
• How much do I need to invest in ROTH IRA?
• Is Robinhood the future stock investment platform?.
• How to move from crowd funding to crowd investing?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of new generation online investment advisors compared with your traditional wealth advisors?

Founding shareholders of Hill Capital Corporation will share the vision of creating a regional investment fund to invest in growing small businesses.

Hill Capital Corporation was founded in honor of one of our most successful local entrepreneurs - James J. Hill. Not only did Mr. Hill create a significant business (Great Northern Railway), he was a tremendous community builder.

Learn about the inspiration that motivated entrepreneurs to come together in an effort to organize a fund that will invest in growing small businesses and support entrepreneurship throughout the Empire Builder Corridor. We will host a discussion about the funding gaps that exist in business finance and how we can come together as a community to provide a solution.

Founding Shareholders: James J. Hill Center Kevin Spreng John Bergstrom Jeanne Voigt Galen Vetter Jeff Brown Patrick Donohue

A term that repeatedly pops up these days is “Customer Success”. I didn’t see it used much when I changed jobs in 2014 but now many companies have this role or function. There is a lot of confusion regarding the term with no a solid definition of what Customer Success is nor the job roles that are defined by it.

In this session we'll discuss a definition, history, characteristics and why this function is so critical today, especially in the SaaS world.

This talk and Q/A will cover below topics.

How Does Bias Affect Our Actions? Our bias affects us and our decision-making processes in a number of different ways: • Perception – how we see people and perceive reality. • Attitude – how we react towards certain people. • Behaviors – how receptive/friendly we are towards certain people. • Attention – which aspects of a person we pay most attention to. • Listening – how much we actively listen to what certain people say. • Micro-affirmations – how much or how little we comfort certain people in certain situations.

How does Bias Affect our recruiting/ interviewing process? • Beauty Bias • Affinity Bias • Halo Effect • Similarity Bias • Contrast Effect • Conformation Bias

Tips and tricks to help us reduce these as we recruit, interview and hire tech talent.

Women Who Code, Girl Develop It, RailsBridge, diversity panels… all of these provide essential resources in supporting women entering tech, but with only 15% women in tech, we clearly need to be doing more. Many people are interested in contributing to the solution, but don’t know what steps they can take. It can be difficult to figure out how to contribute when the problem is so widespread and attitudes are so deeply entrenched.

In this session, I'll present information about the current status of women in tech and talk about my own transition from working as an astronomer to becoming a software engineer at BuzzFeed. I’ll share insights I’ve gained from my work on equity and inclusions in the astrophysics community and will discuss specific ways to help create a more supportive environment in tech.

So join me for a scientific update on the current status of women in tech and some ideas of what you can do. After the talk, we’ll open up for a discussion focusing on positive, concrete ways to be a part of the solution.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) data analytics make clear that digital technology is no longer just another tool. It has become the foundation of an entirely new way of doing business, as well as giving rise to entirely new businesses. There will be 100 billion connected devices expected by 2025, leading to a trillion sensor ecosystem. 1 billion digital natives expected to join the workforce over the next 7 years. In a hyper-connected era of mobile, social, cloud, big data, and the Internet of Things, future business models and end-to-end digital strategies will depend on the availability of more data flowing through more systems, being accessed and used by more people. The session will focus on the basics of what is involved in transforming your customer experience, products, business processes, and your business utilizing IoT data analytics.

People are becoming less tolerant of bad design. Many people will pay more for a product or service that moves beyond utility, and provides effective and pleasurable experiences. Customers have goals, and purpose for what they do. User Experience goes beyond traditional usability and business requirements of how and what will be delivered, to designing pleasurable customer experiences that build loyalty and participation.

In this hands-on activity, participants will experience and shape a UX Research experience with the ideas, tools, and analytical methods in user experience research that can be used to better inform technology and product development roadmaps. This includes:

Applying a user experience engineering life cycle Contextual inquiry and analysis Requirements extraction and design-informing models Conceptual and detailed design Iterative prototyping and evaluation Understanding and applying interaction design guidelines

User experience design and research is a maturing discipline. It's progression indicates a movement from the important, but narrow focus on task performance, to overarching characteristics of the entire user experience including emotion, social and cultural implications, fun, style, art, branding, reputation, political, social, and personal connections. Explore UX Research practices and implications. Brock Dubbels is currently the UX Mentorship Coordinator for the Minnesota User Experience Professional Association, and has offered coursework on UX since 2012. Come and learn about User Experience Research and how it can enhance your projects and ideas.

Most innovators, developers & builders love to create but hate the thought of selling. Those that learn how often become industry icons. Regardless of your standpoint on the subject, together sales & marketing produce the one thing that keeps every idea in business... revenue.

This session is focused on farming & harvesting this essential fruit, startup style & we are going to make it as fun as we are direct to the objective :: together, let's close more opportunity.

No longer do you need a team of data scientists and number crunchers. Thanks to the power of Google and their Open APIs we are now one step closer to predicting the future! This talk will give an overview of the Google Prediction API, how you can use it to analyze and train the system with large datasets, some of its strengths and weaknesses and we'll explore predicting the outcome of a variety of real-world situations!

Lightning talks are short, rapid-fire talks that aren't scheduled in advance. At the session, we'll spend a few minutes gathering topics, and then presenters will go in reverse order of the amount of time they request. We'll keep going until we run out of speakers or time.

Whether you are looking for a technical co founder, need to build a team of software developers for a startup or are a hiring manager at a Fortune 500 company… I am going to walk through some best practices on:

Career/web site page

Job posts

Networking

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

Raising capital by pre-selling products to the public on Kickstarter and Indiegogo lets startups judge demand for their creations and raise the funding to build them out. Recent law changes now also allow startups to raise capital by selling an equity stake to the public. Come learn about the federal crowdfunding rules taking effect later in May and about our state's own MNVest crowdfunding initiative.

Your panel is two of Minnesota's best and most-connected startup attorneys:

Jeffrey C. Robbins

See bio below.

Zachary J. Robins

Zach is a securities attorney in the Corporate & Transactions practice group at Winthrop & Weinstine. He counsels clients in the areas of general corporate, M&A, private equity raises and debt financings. Zach co-drafted Minnesota’s intrastate investment crowdfunding law, MNvest, and advises issuers, portal operators, investors, banks, and service providers on the nuances of state and federal crowdfunding laws, amongst other securities issues.

Are you afraid? Should you be? Computer hacking isn’t a new thing, but the threat remains. In this attackers’ advantage and defenders’ dilemma, how do you keep your data and secrets safe? Today’s ever-changing technology landscape means that the fundamentals of writing secure code are more important than ever. In this session we’ll take a look at the secure development approach and go through the top exploits that you need to know about. We'll show how you can use .NET features to stop exploits before they happen. You don’t want to be at the center of the next media frenzy over lost data and compromised records, or lose your customers’ confidence and trust in how you do business. From injection attacks and cross-site scripting, to security misconfiguration, we’ll look at the hacker's psyche and show how they think, and learn what we can do to build more secure software.

Do you think millennials are lazy and entitled kids who can't hold jobs longer than a year? Maybe it has something to do with how you hire and the exposure/mentorship/general learning opps you offer.

On-campus recruiting is horribly broken. Limited HR budgets force employers to recruit from a handful of target schools. Students from "non-target" schools need to network their way into career opportunities but unfortunately "networking" to young people sounds like emailing strangers asking for jobs. All of this results in companies missing out on great talent and young people working monotonous 9-5's at companies they don't believe in.

We'll be sharing insights we've gained from our deep dive into the graduate recruiting market and how employers can best rebrand themselves to young people.

After every fresh snowfall in Minnesota, people make footprints that show the path or paths that they've taken. The footprints of the paperboy walking to each door with the latest news. The footprints of the mailman walking to and from each mailbox. The footprints from the front door to the car that's warming up for you.

In today's digital age, people are making digital footprints. Leaving a trail that shows the life that they've lead and where they've been. When creating these digital footprints, what kinds of things should we be thinking about? What kinds of cautions need to be considered?

Lets look at making the best possible paths for ourselves.

Years ago, Lou Abramowski (aka hotlou) changed his birthday to the current day every single day on Facebook as a social experiment.

Find out how long the experiment lasted and what he learned that has now helped him create multiple businesses and how you can learn to meet your business objectives with these lessons. You'll leave the session both with a technique anyone can use to improve their social media marketing effectiveness as much as 10X in one day and better understand what it means for a startup to "win."

Going live on the Google Play Store with your new Android app can be a thrilling experience for your startup in more ways than one. Countless developers launched apps expecting a similar experience to their iOS launch. Then the hordes arrived and discovered a broken experience that left them frustrated.

Thousands of Android device manufacturers sold tens of thousands of unique Android devices where many present unique difficulties. These are real numbers, not hyperbole. It's easy to underestimate the challenges of Android success.

However, it's also easy to underestimate the opportunity. The Google Play store represents 80% smartphone market share. To become a top app today, you cannot easily afford to give up Android users.

It's not only possible to succeed as a small startup on the Android platform. The Play Store may even be easier for a lean startup. Most great Play Store successes began with rough edges and dramatic failures, but grew because customers understood their value.

I'll explain how to:

• keep user ratings above 4.5 stars

• launch fast and learn fast

• test your app cheaply and effectively

• catch major flaws before they get out of hand

• plan an effective revenue model

• get featured by Google

OMG Transit has recently gone open source and become an Open Twin Cities sponsored community project. Now everybody has an opportunity to contribute to this local civic technology application that helps hundreds of people use public transit to get to work, friends, family and parties every day.

Come spend a little time in a Minnehackspace focused on OMG Transit. Come learn about the tech, talk about current and future features, and become one of the first community contributors to this fantastic project.

There's plenty of opportunity for new features and tickets in the future. Right now, we do have one big goal in mind for OMG Transit: move it from it's current hosting solution to Amazon Web Services. Why? Because Amazon has donated AWS credits to Open Twin Cities to help us host open source, civic tech projects. As part of this project, we've decided to Dockerize OMG Transit, to both help us deploy the application to AWS, and to help any future contributors get OMG running on their own machines right away.

Join us if you know anything about AWS (bonus points if you understand permissions or deploying Docker containers via Elastic Beanstalk). And join us if you want to learn more about AWS and Docker!

During this session, Casey Allen (Enterprise Rising Conference, Skyway Fund) and Cole Grolmus (Enteprise.MN enterprise tech meetup) will riff about a variety of enterprise tech startup topics, including:

• Funding
• Investors,
• Seed stage and enterprise startups that are crushing it
• Minnesota IPO pipeline
• ...more!