Buzz

Advertising Age reports on Olson acquiring its first significant footprint outside of Minneapolis.

Olson is acquiring Chicago-based public relations agency Dig Communications. The combined company will now total more than 360 employees.Olson isn't going to make them all move to Minneapolis, though. Dig will be rebranded as Olson PR, with its employees remaining in their current office locations in Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, and San Francisco.

"We've decided at this point in time our ambition is to continue to build the agency of the future as we see it and that isn't through a holding-company model," Olson President-CEO Kevin DiLorenzo explains to Ad Age. "Our next move will be similar. Mobile is an area where we have great interest and our clients have great interest, so that would be a smart next piece to put into the puzzle."

In its recently released top 10 list, Songkick, an online source of all kinds of concert and band information, rated the Twin Cities as the country's seventh-most happening rock scene. 

Songkick mined a database of over 1.8 million concerts from 2010, including everything from alternative music to classic rock, it states on its website. Cities got a score based on how many rock concerts they had over the past year, per capita.  

According to the charted results, the Twin Cities notched above Seattle. Austin, Texas was the most musically inclined while Nashville, Tenn. came in tenth. The average price of a concert ticket in the Twin Cities was also among the most reasonable, at just under $12. 

About the results, Songkick states on its blog, "We wanted to do a top 10 list that reveals something unexpected about the best places to see a show," adding, "We hope you'll agree that the list is surprising."

While the Twin Cities' population declined in the early 2000s, it's been steadily increasing in recent years, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reports.

For starters, both cities have attracted more residents over the past year: Minneapolis went from 385,378 to 388,123 while St. Paul increased from 281,253 to 282,038, the article states, citing data from its sister company, Buffalo Business First. 

Those figures appear to be part of a longer-term trend for incremental growth in the urban areas. Since 2004, Minneapolis has gained over 10,000 city dwellers. And, across the river, the population has been on the rise since 2006, when it had 276,237 inhabitants.

An article in the November 30 StarTribune takes a wide-ranging look at the possible impact of the Central Corridor Light Rail line on Saint Paul's West Midway, near the border of the two cities. This "amalgam of arts, industries,housing, services and transportation" could see major economic shifts as the line is completed and property values ramp up, writes Chris Havens,

Among the questions he asks: "Will artists be forced to move because of rising property values? Will new city land-use rules stifle business expansion? Will there still be room for manufacturing jobs? Will the neighborhood lose its character?...The area has some of St. Paul's most valuable land, thousands of jobs, hundreds of artists, small businesses and nonprofits, and accessibility to many major thoroughfares."

Havens talks to people with these concerns, as well as to organizations working to ensure that the area maintains its character and continues to offer opportunities for a diverse mix of residents.

"One group is looking at the area as a 'Creative Enterprise Zone' to figure out how the arts community can remain and thrive. Another group, the West Midway Task Force, is looking at business and jobs. The city is considering changes to its zoning code to encourage more mixed-use, high-density development along the light-rail line."

An Edina startup's throwable robot technology landed in last Sunday's New York Times.

Recon Robotics, founded in 2006, is commercializing robotics technology that was originally developed at the University of Minnesota's Distributed Robotics Laboratory.

The company's "throwbot" technology appeared in an infographic alongside a New York Times article on the military's use of robotics. The Recon Scout is a crawling, video-surveillance robot that can be thrown into an area and controlled by remote.

The Wall Street Journal gave the company's technology more than a passing mention in October, spotlighting how Swat teams are using Recon Robotics' throwbots.

Recon Robotics is among a couple dozen early-stage companies that are part of the University of St. Thomas' William C. Norris Institute investment fund.

New Scientist includes Minneapolis in a review of U.S. city "personality tests" and concludes we really are above average here.

Writer Jim Giles says cities have "ingrained characters that are stubbornly hard to change" and that they're often skewed because of population. Bigger cities have more wealth and crime than smaller ones, but a different story emerges when you factor for something called "super-linear scaling," according to researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Basically, there are several attributes such as wealth, crime and patent activity that tend to increase faster than the rate of population growth in big cities, which makes per-capita comparisons misleading, the researchers say. "When the super-linear scaling is taken into account, some supposedly exceptional cities, such as New York, are in fact quite ordinary," says Giles. "Other less-heralded places, like Minneapolis, emerge as unusually successful." Read more at NewScientist.com.

GOOD magazine sees a good idea in the Hennepin County health and human services department's flexible work schedule.

The county department is among a handful of employers to adopt a results-only work environment, or ROWE, in which employees can work when and where they want, as long as the work gets done.

"This is just clearly a good idea. After all, what could an employer possibly care about beyond results? And in Hennepin County, there is some initial evidence that ROWE has made things much more efficient. They used to have a two-week backlog of public support cases to process. Now that's down to five days. A ROWE program would also save employers money on everything from printing paper to electricity."

Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler came up with ROWE while they were working at Best Buy. They now help companies make the transition with their consulting firm CultureRx. More at GOOD.is.

The Twin Cities is the country's most "type B" metro area, according to Forbes Magazine, which recently put out a list of the top 40 relaxed U.S. cities based on six metrics that relate to stress. 

Synthesizing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the magazine examined cities based on how painful the morning rush hour can be, the average number of hours that people log in at work and unemployment rates. It also looked for reports of recent exercise, access to health care and medical coverage and people's general wellbeing.

Minneapolitans and St. Paulites fared well in each category.

Kathleen Grace Santor M.Ed., Ed.S., a therapist and founder of the Stress Management Center of Nevada, is quoted in the piece, saying, "Bringing the rest of the country's stress level down to that of these calm cities starts with making stress-reduction techniques an everyday practice, rather than an obscure fad."

In a Nov. 15 Minnpost story, writer Steve Berg considers the success of upscale apartment projects in downtown Minneapolis. 

The stylish Mill District building at Washington and Portland avenues, for instance, which probably would've sold condos a few years ago, he says, are moving apartments, despite the economy.  

For many young people and emptynesters who want to be in the city, Berg ventures, renting is likely the most realistic option. "Renting, long an upscale or mid-priced option in cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, is quickly overcoming its stigma here and becoming a smart alternative," he says.  

Developer Jonathan Holtzman, who compares his approach to that of a boutique hotel, says in the story that his target audience is a group of young, active urbanites: "Most builders are waiting for the recovery so they can come back into the market with the same old products as before," he said. "We're offering something different."

Advertising Age reports that U.K.-based brand strategy firm Naked Communications is opening a Minneapolis office.

The new shop is the company's first U.S. expansion since it opened a New York office in 2006. The local shop will be run by new partners Lisa Seward Perry and Amy Sheil.

"Naked sits outside [the traditional advertising agency], and we've always been sort of jealous of that," Seward Perry tells Advertising Age.

Naked's U.S. clients include NBC, Google, Planned Parenthood, and Johnson & Johnson.

The Minnesota Daily reports on a University of Minnesota student group that's erecting a pair of wind turbines for a small Nicaraguan village.

Alejandro De La Mora and Josh Durand, both engineering students, were inspired by a book about wind power to start the Innovative Engineers student group. The student group traveled to the village of La Hermita last year with turbine pieces and laid the tower's foundation. They plan to return this year to finish the installation.

The village currently gets electricity from car batteries that need to be recharged in a nearby town. The wind turbine will allow them to be charged without leaving the village.

The student group plans to continue working on other renewable energy projects that can have an impact.

"If you have the ability to change the world and you want to do it," De La Mora tells the Daily, "why not do it?"

The Star Tribune's Neal St. Anthony reflects on the legacy of the Sierra Bravo Corp.'s late CEO, Luke Bucklin.

Bucklin, 40, along with three of his children, were killed in a plane accident last month in the mountains of Wyoming.

Sierra Bravo Corp. and its Nerdery web-design business have been among the Twin Cities' fastest-growing companies in recent years. (We spoke with Bucklin in September after the opening of The Nerdery's Chicago office, and he joked then that the company's plans for global domination were well under way.)

"He always said if you do the right thing, trust people and spread the leadership, that the right things would happen," new CEO Mike Derheim tells St. Anthony. "We would succeed."

Also: "Remembering Luke" from The Nerdery blog.

At the Nov. 2-5 annual convention of the Minnesota chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), about half of a dozen prestigious honor awards went to local architecture projects, including everything from a contemporary standalone classroom to a woodsy-looking church.  

Public-sector projects dominated in the 56th annual honors awards, due in part to the slowdown of commercial work in the recession, according to Beverly Hauschild-Baron, the executive vice president of AIA Minnesota, who comments in a recent Star Tribune story.

Among the honorees whose work is in state is the prominent Minneapolis-based HGA Architects & Engineers Inc., which took home four awards and St. Paul's Alchemy and Salmela Architect in Duluth.

The winners will be recognized at the Annual AIA Minnesota Awards Celebration on Nov. 19 at the Minnesota History Center.

Late last month, Minneapolis and St. Paul received a $16 million grant from the Living Cities Integration Initiative, a New York-based philanthropic organization, to boost affordable housing and small business, particular around transit areas, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reports.  

The mayors from both cities traveled to Detroit on Oct. 27 to accept the grant. According to the Business Journal, the money will flow especially to areas along the planned Central Corridor Light Rail Transit Line.

The grant will help create or preserve between 400 and 600 affordable housing units while an estimated 100 businesses will receive support for everything from marketing to fa�ade improvements, including loans to offset hardships imposed by transit construction, the article states. 

Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reporter Katharine Grayson writes that no Minnesota technology startup raised venture capital in the third quarter. That sounds very bad, but Grayson notes that it's not surprising and, depending on who you ask, not all that important. The cost of building tech startups has fallen so much in recent years that some argue venture firms aren't needed in the equation any more.

But Michael Gorman, a partner at of Split Rock Partners, argued at a recent venture finance conference that tech startups still need venture funding in order to scale. He pointed to Chicago-based Groupon as an example. The privately held company has thousands of employees and projected revenue that could top $500 million this year. Is that type of success do-able without venture capital? Discuss over at Grayson's In Private blog.