Buzz

"The best jobs are going to go to the cities with the industries and the entrepreneurial incentives in place to support a highly educated, tech-savvy workforce," says online business-networking community BNET--and among those cities will be ours. The site list the Twin Cities in an elite rundown that includes Austin, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco. Read the full story here.

Source: BNET

Fast Company blogger Drew Neisser takes a look under the hood of Best Buy's "stunningly effective" Twelpforce, the retailer's initiative to reach out to customers via Twitter.

Since July 2009, 2,600 employees have tweeted responses to nearly 28,000 customer inquiries.

Twelpforce has "paid for itself many times over via extensive PR coverage, enhanced brand perceptions, and potential savings to the call center," Neisser writes. "Setting a new standard for Marketing as Service, Twelpforce is worth studying, both for its lightning quick development process and for the surprise benefits of this highly innovative program."

Read the entire blog post here.

Source: Fast Company

New York Times media columnist David Carr, himself a veteran of the Twin Cities media scene, takes a look at Minneapolis-based MinnPost as an example of online news experiments taking root in several cities across the country. Carr notes that MinnPost employs the equivalent of 18 full-time workers with an operating budget of $1.1 million drawn from diverse sources: advertisers, investors, members, sponsors, foundations and donors at fundraising events.

"The trends are impressive, even if the numbers sound more like a successful taco stand than a big news operation. Of course, like many other nonprofit news sites, MinnPost is taking advantage of one of the upsides of the downsides: many skilled journalists with years of expertise are on the loose and looking for a way to continue to avoid getting a real job.

"Doug Grow, a columnist at The Star Tribune for 20 years, has retired, but now finds himself filing as much as six or seven times a week for MinnPost.

"'We don't have enough staff to have any meetings, we can write with a point of view, which is wonderful, and the psychic rewards are enormous,' he said. And the money part? 'I worry about that. They haven't crossed the line in being able to sustain young reporters in the middle of their careers.'"

Read the full story here.
Source: The New York Times

Arne Carlson argues in a Star Tribune op-ed that delays, rule changes, and a lack of clarity from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration threaten to hurt medical innovation.

The former governor's comments were published Tuesday, the day the FDA official in charge of medical device regulation, Jeff Shuren, was in town for a town hall meeting with the Minnesota medical device community.

"The FDA must reinstate a culture of balancing patient risk and benefit to find ways to accelerate the innovation process and to halt this trend of slowing down or delaying device reviews," Carlson writes. "The agency must honor its existing agreements with device companies and change the rules only if new science obsoletes an ongoing trial or if there is a proven new safety risk."

Read the entire op-ed here.

Source: StarTribune

A Minneapolis app developer is helping local media companies distribute their content on mobile devices and generate badly needed new revenue.

DoApp's Mobile Local News platform has been used to build more than 120 local news apps. PBS' MediaShift blog spoke this week with DoApp CEO Wade Beavers and its founder Joe Sriver.

The company charges media organizations around $750 to $1,000 per month, plus a share of advertising revenue, to set up and maintain mobile apps for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices.

"It's very affordable," Beavers tells MediaShift. "We've heard a lot about media companies in financial trouble so we said, 'Let's make this a no-brainer.' They pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for content management systems. We're a mobile content management system and they're paying a fifth or even a tenth of the price."

DoApp's Minneapolis-St. Paul portfolio includes apps for WCCO and the Twin Cities Daily Planet.

Read the entire Q&A here.

Source: MediaShift

In early May Streetfilms, the organization that documents and celebrates cities with active streets around the world, came out with a video on "Major Bike Mojo in Minneapolis" -- hot on the heels of Bicycling magazine declaring Minneapolis "America's Top Bike-friendly City." The Line asked Streetfilms' Elizabeth Press by email what drew her to the Twin Cities.

The Line: Did the idea for Minneapolis film come after Bicycling magazine or before? Whose idea and why?

Streetfilms: The idea came before the article but the article did come out online when I was in Minneapolis....and became a good hook! I was there to cover this event. And since I was there for that press conference, I was setting out to make other shorts on public transportation and bicycling. I am going to post at least one more video on public transportation in Minneapolis during the summer. A combination of the Bicycling magazine article, bike share launching in June, and it being Bike Month in NYC made me want to post the bicycle video first.

The Line: What did you see in Minneapolis that impressed you or depressed you?

Streetfilms: Impressed by the off trail network (during the day) and community engagement! Coming from NYC, I have to admit I was not super used to commuting on the off-road trails alone at night. I have to say it takes some getting used to and could probably use some more lights.

The Line: What's the most challenging thing to capture when you make your films?

Streetfilms: For me the most challenging part of making Streetfilms outside of NYC has to be understanding and capturing the overall environment in a few days' time.

Read full story here.

Source: Streetfilms
Writer: Chris Steller