Innovation + Job News

After signing a lease for its future brewery in downtown Minneapolis, Fulton Beer has a plan for its next round of growth.

First, though, it needs to make sure it can pay the tab.

The company is named after the Minneapolis neighborhood where the its four founders started home brewing together. They started leasing time at at Wisconsin brewery last fall so that they could brew beer for commercial sale.

The guys--Ryan Petz, Jim Diley, Brian Hoffman and Peter Grande--have doubled production twice since then, and their hoppy Sweet Child of Vine brew is now on tap at a little over 100 bars and restaurants in the Twin Cities.

About six months ago they started searching for a spot to build their own brewery, and last month they signed a lease on an empty warehouse just northwest of Target Field at 414 N. 6th Ave.

"We couldn't be happier with what we found," says Petz.

The plan is to construct a 15- to 20-barrel brewhouse that would be open to the public for tours and growler sales. They're talking to architects, contractors, and equipment manufacturers. The time line will depend on financing.

"As you can imagine, it's a pretty expensive endeavor. We're looking at getting some traditional bank financing, but are not exactly sure how that is going to play out," says Petz. "We've been able to start saving a little bit of money from our current operations, but it may be that we have to continue to do that longer or find some other alternative means in order to get this thing together."

They're hoping to be brewing beer within about six months of securing financing.

Source: Ryan Petz, Fulton Beer
Writer: Dan Haugen

Tommy Creal rolled into town two years ago on a custom-built chopper with a full tank of ambition.

This fall, the young entrepreneur is retooling his business in hopes of finding the right gear.

As a teenager, Creal started a popular bike-building bootcamp in Chicago. After moving to Minneapolis in 2008, Creal decided to relaunch Chopper College as a "green" technical institute.

Creal's Chopper College partnered with Minneapolis Community & Technical College on a catalog of 40 courses last year aimed at gearheads interested in building alternative-fuel motorcycles.

The demand wasn't what he hoped for, so this fall he's scaled back to two one-weekend workshops that will teach participants how to build a bike that runs on E85 ethanol.

Creal's E85 bike-building workshops will be open to 48 students each. Over the course of three days (Oct. 8-10 or Nov. 12-14) students will help build a pair of motorcycles from scratch.

Meanwhile, Creal is keeping busy on the side by building custom choppers for local organizations, from the Minnesota Wild to Life Science Alley.

If the workshops suggest there's interest in ethanol-powered choppers, Creal says the next phase for Chopper College will be developing a gasoline-to-ethanol conversion kit to sell.

The lower than expected enrollment for last year's classes hasn't soured Creal on the Twin Cities. Instead he says he's struck by how much support there is for businesses here.

"People are lending hands everywhere, opening doors for us, and I'm just trying to figure out how to give back, because everybody's been giving to us," says Creal. "You can trust me on this: it's not like Chicago where everybody's out for themselves."

Source: Tommy Creal, Chopper College
Writer: Dan Haugen

A Minneapolis health-care startup is hiring as its service graduates out of beta.

Bloom Health aims to simplify the process of picking out health insurance for both employers and their employees. Instead of choosing a few health plans to offer their workers, employers deposit their contribution to a pre-tax Bloom account, which employees can apply to any plan they choose.

CEO Abir Sen says their service is like a Charles-Schwab-meets-eHarmony for health insurance. Bloom acts as a broker and matchmaker. Employees take a survey that measures their health, finances, and appetite for risk and then recommends health plans based on those factors.

The company launched last September and hoped to have one customer by this fall, says Sen. Instead, it announced late last month that five Twin Cities companies are now using its service. Meanwhile, the company is hiring. It has 19 FTEs today and expect about 25 by the end of the year.

"We found the market to be very ready," says Sen.

Sen compares the shift that's underway in health insurance to what happened with retirement saving in the 1980s. Companies were under stress from rising pension liabilities, so they transitioned to 401(k) plans, contributing funds but letting employees invest them as they wished.

Today, says Sen, we're seeing a similar climate around health care with rising costs, recession and regulatory changes.

Source: Abir Sen, Bloom Health
Writer: Dan Haugen

An interactive marketing agency that counts Hulk and Spider Man as clients has developed a superpower of its own: growing in a downturn.

Antidote X, based in Minneapolis, has been working on interactive campaigns for some major entertainment companies, including comic book giant Marvel. The company recently hired six new employees, more than doubling its size since the start of the year from five people to an 11-person team today.

The company has been around for more than a decade, formed in 1998 by a pair of former developers from Campbell Mithun and Carmichael Lynch. It specializes in designing and developing integrated multi-platform strategies-- campaigns that look and feel the same whether a person is accessing them through a mobile app, their Facebook page, or a micro-website.

"The experience is only different in regards to the platform that it's being delivered on," says co-founder Paul Nealy.

Other clients include DreamWorks, video-game publisher THQ, and bath and kitchen product manufacturer American Standard, whose Antidote X-designed website was recently reviewed as one of the best corporate-designed websites.

While some companies have cut their marketing budgets in recent years, Nealy says in general they're observing an increase in spending on online and interactive--a good thing for a city that's a hub of interactive marketing.

Source: Paul Nealy, Antidote X
Writer: Dan Haugen

A nice thing about taking the skyways: you can walk around with your phone in front of your face and not worry about getting hit by a car.

A pair of local developers have created a free iPhone app to help people navigate and explore the Minneapolis skyway system.

The Minneapolis Skyway app, by Frypan Digital, includes a map and business directory that lets users search for stores, see reviews and save favorites.

Co-creator Casey Holley says the app has been downloaded more than 3,000 times since it was posted in the App Store a few months ago. They're hoping downloads will pick up some when winter arrives and more people are using the skyways to avoid the elements.

"We've had a real steady number of downloads," says Holley. "I think it's just iPhone users saying man, this is confusing, there has to be an app for that."

One of the biggest challenge so far has been keeping information up to date. With around 400 different retail spaces, there's a fairly regular turnover among tenants. They're relying largely on the crowd to keep track of changes, which has worked well so far.

Holley says they've had lots of requests for an Android edition. That's in the long-range plan, but for now their focus is increasing use of the iPhone app and then building out services for skyway business owners to advertise and promote specials.

Source: Casey Holley, Frypan Digital
Writer: Dan Haugen

Minnesota's breakthrough ideas this year include a battery for storing solar power, a device to help doctors communicate across language barriers, and a service for managing online movie and music ratings.

Minnesota Cup organizers last week announced division finalists for this year's sixth annual statewide entrepreneur contest. (We've pasted the complete list below.)

"Some of these ideas, you can tell they are thinking really big, and that's obviously what we want to see," says Matt Hilker, director of the Minnesota Cup.

Next, the finalists will make 12-minute oral presentations to the judges on Aug. 31 before division winners are named. The grand prize winner will then be announced Sept. 13 at McNamara Alumni Center.

One finalist in each division will receive $20,000 in seed capital. The grand prize winner will be awarded an additional $20,000. The student division winner receives a $5,000 prize.

The division finalists are:

High Tech Division

Curation Station--provides a multifaceted tool for gathering, curating and sharing content of nearly any media type on the web.
 
GeaCom--developing a multilingual medical communication system.
 
Open Preferences--provides a service that allows users to manage and control their ratings and preferences across many different media (e.g., music, movies, TV) and services (e.g., Netflix, TiVo, Yahoo, Last.FM, Pandora).

BioSciences Division

BioMatRx--provides tissue engineering products, equipment and information to the dental industry.
 
MRI Robotics--designs and tests medical equipment for use inside an MRI scanner.
 
NirvaMed--developing an organ-specific therapy-delivery technology platform for various clinical applications.

Clean Tech & Renewable Energy Division

EarthClean--commercializing an environmentally safe liquid that is exponentially more effective than water, Class-A Foams, and toxic retardants at stopping fires.
 
Silent Power--manufactures and markets easy-to-install, highly reliable, power inverters for the renewable energy and backup power markets.
 
Visiam--provider of processing technology that reduces the volume of municipal solid waste, dramatically increasing recycling rates and decreasing transportation costs.
 
General Division

Fresh EcoHarvest--developing a revolutionary greenhouse technology that allows growers to produce abundant, healthy food locally and in any climate with minimal environmental impact.
 
Fruchi--provides a line of nutritious, real fruit frozen smoothies.
 
Go Home Gorgeous--provides postpartum recovery treatments that have proven effective in decreasing the physical and emotional stress commonly associated with childbirth.

Student Division

Blue Water Ponds--provides environmentally-friendly services for restoring ponds through the use of barley straw and pond weed harvesting in an effort to control aquatic plants in the long term.
 
OncomiR--developing a data repository of microRNA expression profiles; this information is critical to the development of drugs for cancer treatment.
 
Power Trowel Solution Applicator--developing a device that allows a power trowel operator rather than a bystander to apply a chemical solution that slows the rate at which concrete dries.

Source: Matt Hilker, Minnesota Cup
Writer: Dan Haugen

A Minneapolis cleantech startup is loosening the nozzle after raising at least $765,000 from investors to roll out its non-toxic, biodegradable firefighting gel.

EarthClean recently disclosed that it was about a quarter of the way through a $3 million round of equity financing. The company's product, TetraKO, is a low-cost, environmentally safer alternative to conventional firefighting foams.

"We've had a couple of fire chiefs tell us that they understand it performs better, but quite frankly if it was just as good as foam they'd buy it because of the environmental aspects," says EarthClean CEO Doug Ruth.

TetraKO is a patented dry-mix product that, when mixed with water, forms a non-toxic gel that sticks to surfaces and suppresses flames. It was developed over the past decade by a Woodbury volunteer firefighter and a trio of former 3M and H.B. Fuller chemists and engineers.

Ruth acquired their patents and founded EarthClean a couple of years ago. The company is getting ready to manufacture its first 10,000 pounds of the product in the next two weeks and will have it available for commercial sale within four weeks.

It's hitting the market at a time when there's growing concern about the pollution left behind by chemical-based foams and gels. Minnesota health officials last year were investigating potential drinking water contamination in 15 cities. And a federal judge in Montana ruled last month the U.S. Forest Service is breaking the law when it uses harmful chemical retardants on wildfires because they can hurt fish and wildlife.

EarthClean's product is certified as non-toxic and biodegradable and offers a safer alternative, says Ruth. "It's a game-changing technology that really could change the way the world fights fires."

(Also: EarthClean is a division finalist in the 2010 Minnesota Cup competition. See our update here.)

Source: Doug Ruth, EarthClean Corp.
Writer: Dan Haugen

A former Medtronic manager has found a second career giving greeting cards a second life.

Last fall Christy Eichers started selling kits to help consumers reuse old greeting cards. Regreet kits come with fresh envelopes and recycled-paper labels to affix over the original signatures.

They also come with tracking labels that let users go online and see how many times the cards have been reused and where they wind up (as with the Where's George? dollar bill tracker.)

Eichers describes the inspiration as "a bit of necessity and a bit of red wine."

She was back home visiting family and friends in Mankato two winters ago when the idea struck. She couldn't motivate herself to go out into the cold to buy a birthday card for a friend, so her her mother suggested reusing one of the cards her father had just received for his birthday.

Her first thought: Where's the White Out? But later she started to wonder whether her crafty solution might contain a business idea. She took that thought to a WomenVenture class, developed a business plan, and started her company in October 2009.

Along the way she decided to take a voluntary severance package from her former employer, Medtronic, where she worked as part of the community affairs team. "A little bit of craziness," she says," but sometimes you just have to take the leap."

Regreet's card reuse kits are now for sale online and in 14 retail stores in seven states. And cards with the labels affixed have logged more than 138,000 miles around the globe.

Eichers doesn't have any employees, but she has a regular circle of consultants and creative professionals who work on contract, and she recently started signing up sales reps, too. Much of her energy is going toward building awareness and educating consumers about the product.

The $11.99 kits come with supplies to repurpose eight greeting cards, which works out to about $1.50 per card. In September, $2 from every purchase will support breast cancer research and awareness through the the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation.

Source: Christy Eichers, Regreet
Writer: Dan Haugen

 

A local software firm is attracting global customers for its cloud-computing services.

Minneapolis-based enStratus helps companies manage their cloud-computing activities. Cloud computing is a term for using data or applications that are stored online rather than on a desktop computer's hard drive.

"In 2010, what we've done is managed to become a global business," says George Reese, the company's founder and chief technology officer. And he has numbers to back it up.

As of mid-August, 80 percent of the company's new customers this year have been from outside of the United States. A year ago, enStratus didn't have any non-domestic customers.

The company handles everything from accounting to security for companies that buy cloud-computing resources from companies like Amazon, Google or Rackspace.

Its uptick in global customers coincides with the introduction of multi-currency financial support; enStratus' product can convert and track a company's spending whether it's in dollars, euros, or another unit.

With its new global customer base, enStratus announced this week that it's adding a couple of internationally known cloud-computing experts to its board of advisors:

James Urquhart is a senior market strategist for cloud computing at Cisco and author of a respected CNET blog, The Wisdom of Clouds. He's also a Macalester grad and former Twin Cities resident.


Simon Wardley is a researcher for CSC's Leading Edge Forum and an international speaker on the commoditizing of IT, utility computing, fabrication technologies, and the open-source movement.

Source: George Reese, enStratus
Writer: Dan Haugen

Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other website. A Minneapolis social commerce company is giving users one less reason to sign off.

Alvenda announced the rollout last week of an e-commerce Facebook tab for Delta Air Lines. The service is the first of its kind for the travel industry and allows Facebook users to search, book, and buy flight tickets without ever leaving the site.

The idea behind Alvenda's technology is to embed their clients' stores on the websites where their customers are already spending time. It also allows retailers to embed stores within advertisement boxes and as a widget on publishers' sites.

Alvendra was founded in 2008 and was the winner of the 2009 Minnesota Cup competition. Its team consists of about 20 people, and it continues to grow, according to product strategist Erik Eliason. Large companies are very interested in social media, he says, and Alvenda's tools give them a way to monetize and prove the ROI of a network like Facebook.

Other services allow companies to add shopping tabs to Facebook pages, he says,  but most of them redirect customers to other sites where the transactions are completed. In e-commerce, retailers generally lose customers at every click they require. "You want the search and the transaction to be as frictionless as possible for the consumer," says Eliason.

Alvenda opened the first retail store inside Facebook last summer for 1-800-Flowers.

Source: Erik Eliason, Alvenda
Writer: Dan Haugen

A University of Minnesota architecture grad student has designed a unique elementary school and clinic, and now he's part of a team that's raising money to build it in an Ethiopian village.

The project started when Andrew Blaisdell was connected through the College of Design with Wosen Kifle, a Minneapolis resident and Ethiopia native who was looking for help designing a facility for his family's land near Addis Ababa.

Blaisdell made the school project the centerpiece of his thesis, focusing specifically how a school could be designed to reflect changing technology and encourage learning through curiosity. His paper revolves around the theory that computers are going to make all information accessible to everyone within a couple of decades, and how that will change the role of a teacher.

The initial expectation was for a very modern, very Western-style building, but, says Blaisdell, "As you can see from the renderings I've put on the website, it's anything but western."

The open structure is made from compressed earth block, a labor-intensive but low-cost material that is widely available in the area. One of the centerpieces of the design is a wall of television-shaped cubby holes, where Blaisdell imagines students could place interesting things they discover to share with their peers.

Kifle has set up a nonprofit, and he and Blaisdell are trying to make the school a reality by raising $470,000 through its website, http://www.furischool.org.

Source: Andrew Blaisdell
Writer: Dan Haugen

A local company's creative outsourcing model is helping put laid-off technicians back to work.

Field Solutions recently announced the completion of its first round of outside fundraising, a $1.5 million investment led by StarTec Investments, whose president, Joy Lindsay, will join Field Solutions' board of directors.

Marty Reader, the company's executive vice president for sales and marketing, says the infusion will allow the company to stay on the aggressive growth track it's been on since it was founded in 2007.

Field Solutions connects large companies with independent field technicians wherever they're needed in North America. The company screens technicians for skills and performance, matches them to the jobs, and handles all the administrative tasks, like pay and taxes.

They're typically small jobs. The average assignment is for less than two hours. A work order, for example, might involve hiring numerous temp technicians to swap out cash registers at several thousand fast food restaurants. Reader says that Field Solutions can save companies 30 percent to 70 percent of what full-time employees would cost.

The company's business has tripled over the past three years, says Reader. It has more than 25 employees at its headquarters in St. Louis Park, but it works with 22,000 independent field technicians.

"This is the working unemployed," says Reader. Scores of skilled people have been laid off during the recession, and many of them, especially older workers, may never find permanent work again. Field Solutions gives them a chance to string together regular work, he says.

Some make over $80,000 a year, and quite a few make over $40,000 a year, according to Reader.

Source: Marty Reader, Field Solutions
Writer: Dan Haugen

A Minneapolis marketing and branding firm is growing into its arty new digs in the Lyn-Lake neighborhood.

Zeus Jones is a few months into its fourth year, and it appears to be its best on a record so far, according to founding partner Adrian Ho. It's grown in the past few years from four partners to about 20 employees, and it's still hiring.

Zeus Jones was founded in March 2007 around the idea that actions speak louder than words. Traditional advertising was, and still is, becoming less and less effective, the four co-founders thought, and there had to be a better way.

"Our whole thing was like, look, let's stop annoying customers and take some of that money and start doing things that actually enhance the product or experience," says Ho. "If you do that, people will do a lot of the talking for you." An example: a recent Zeus Jones project for Nordstroms involved putting photo booths next to the junior department dressing rooms so teen girls could share photos with friends or parents before deciding whether to buy.

Over the past few years the firm has outgrown its 1,100-square-foot Uptown space, and so when its lease ran out it made the move to more spacious digs in the Soo Visual Arts Center building near 27th and Lyndale. The gallery's director, Suzy Greenberg, had been looking for a tenant to help share costs, and "it seemed like a great match," says Ho. " She wanted a creative company and we like the idea of helping to support the arts through our rent."

The reasons for the company's growth, says Ho, likely have to do with the fact that businesses know they're getting less and less for their money via traditional advertising, and that Zeus Jones' small size and flexibility make it easy for companies to experiment. The company's clients include General Mills, Nestle Purina, and Haagen-Dazs.

Source: Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones
Writer: Dan Haugen

The Adholics have taken a step toward proving their business model.

The freelance advertising collaborative last week signed up its first client, a local web startup company, which they don't plan to name for at least a couple more months.

The Adholics is the brainchild of Josh Fedie, a new business and account manager for various small and mid-sized agencies over the past decade.

The advertising industry is increasingly relying on freelancers. What's bothered Fedie in recent years is the lack of transparency around that trend. Clients are paying top dollar for an agency's work and often don't realize the work is being farmed out to the least expensive freelancers on the market, he says.

"That's not what's being sold to the client," Fedie says.

About six months ago, Fedie started scouting for freelance professionals to join a virtual agency. The result is a 17-member, full-service advertising and marketing shop. Its members' expertise covers most of the major disciplines, from web and graphic design to copywriting and social media strategy.

What separates The Adholics from other collaboratives, Fedie says, is its transparency. All of its partners are listed on its website. It has a photography studio and one partner has donated office space, but the model eliminates most of the overhead associated with running a conventional agency.

Fedie believes the model will allow The Adholics to compete with any agency in town. He says the goal is to win business that would be out of reach for a solo freelancer:

"That's the number-one goal: to go after dream accounts," says Fedie. "We want to work for enthusiast brands. We want to go after those accounts that all of us have always wanted to work for and it's been hard to get to on our own, but I think with a group like this it's definitely in reach, and definitely within our capabilities."

Source: Josh Fedie, The Adholics
Writer: Dan Haugen

"Little" might be in the company's name, but a Twin Cities design shop is thinking big with its web video series.

Little & Company, a strategic design firm that employs about 40 people in downtown Minneapolis, is preparing another batch of videos for its Thirty Conversations on Design project, and they feature some high-profile names, says creative director Joe Cecere.

The series started last year as a celebration of the agency's 30th anniversary. It reached out to 30 creative professionals around the world and asked them to answer, via video, two questions: "What single example of design inspires you most?" and "What problem should design solve next?"

The results were posted on a website where designers, authors, architects, marketers and others could go to find inspiration, as well as participate in a conversation around the videos. In the spirit of TED talks, Little & Company now plans to build on the archive, adding more videos each year.

Little & Company cast a wider net with this year's interviews. Cecere says they wanted to expand beyond graphic design and marketing and include creative fields such as architecture, fashion, and filmmaking. The selection process was the same as last year.

"We get a group of us here. We get together in a room and we put our dream list together," says Cecere.

They draw ideas from pop culture, magazines, and design annuals. Cecere then starts reaching out to people on the list, and if they agree, they box up a digital video camera with instructions and drop it in the mail. This year's confirmed participants include design editor Allan Chochinov, author Daniel Pink, and skateboard entrepreneur Tony Hawk.

"The nice thing about the questions is they're universal enough and they're kind of timeless," says Cecere. "What's going to be interesting every year is to have a new perspective based on what's happening in the world and how those answers change."

Cecere says this year's website, which is scheduled to launch next month, will be more robust, with better tools for interacting with other viewers and sorting and searching the videos. The company is also considering staging a speaking event or series involving some of the participants.

Source: Joe Cecere, Little & Company
Writer: Dan Haugen