All posts by Richard

Highway 61 Revisited … Innovation at Milepost 23

Economy 2.0

Having grown up in the land of Bob Dylan (northern Minnesota), I hope the singer would agree that his album title is an appropriate name for this post. Before the interstate highway system broke up highway 61, it streched from Minnesota to the Louisiana bayous. Next week, a busload of geeks will travel part of this route on their way to South by Southwest (SXSW). Most of these individuals will have never met each other before, and as the miles roll by … in a bus equipped with more laptops and web access points than a highway patrolman has ever seen, by the time they reach Austin fatigued from lack of sleep, the goal will be to create and code some of the ideas that lead to new software startups.

Minnesota will not be alone in sending a StartUpBus to SXSW. Buses will be leaving from both Coasts and points in between, all converging on Austin, Texas. Thus, Highway 61 will be revisited with innovation.

I work for a large corporation, and we often wonder how to encourage and promote innovation. Coming up with the right recipe to foster innovation is extremely difficult, but these folks have done it. Use Twitter, bookmarks, and RSS feeds to follow StartUpBus. You may learn something!

StartupBus

Airports … then and now!

Uncategorized

When I was a young boy in 1964, my family flew out to the New York World's Fair. For our airplane trip to the Big Apple from Duluth, our entire family dressed up. Each of us three boys wore sport coats and ties. We were expected by my parents to be on our Sunday school best behavior.

Earlier today, I flew the same trip from Minnesota to the New York City area. The experience was a cattle rush. There were very few smiles on the faces of my co-passengers, or the airline staff. What have we lost?

Enjoy this video from Encyclopedia Britannica titled "Airport" (circa 1948). This experience is much more akin to my own. In fact, on another trip back from visiting my grand parents, I remember my Mom dragging her little son (i.e. me) by the arm as we ran between two planes on the Minneapolis airport concourse! Passengers running outside between planes?! It would never happen today.

In fact, here is a photo of me all dressed up for my first plane trip (taken in 1958 at the Duluth airport)

1958-mom-rich-airport

Social Loppets!

Northern Life

Social media is expanding into our lives at an amazing pace. I recently experienced a phenomenal example of this trend. The City of the Lakes Loppet is a 25 kilometer cross-country ski race in which I recently competed. Like most races, they had photographers out on the course, and after the event one could purchase pictures.

However, this race took the camera work to a much grander level. Combining the use of technology (timing chips) and video, every skier was presented with a 2 minute video of their personal race! Thus, while skiing the 25 km took me just under two hours, I now present …

Rich Hoeg, The Movie!

  • See me "ski dance" at the 48 second point in the race.
  • See me ski kick for kick over 25km with another skier. 

After the mass start sequence, I'm the taller skier in the lead who is dressed in blue and black.

Seriously, I've tweeted, posted to Facebook, etc about this service. I've been doing one of the vendor's desired activities by promoting the RaceDay service, and happily. The service just requires you to inputsthe name of any skier, and a personal two minute video appears. Wow. This is smart.

If you're still with me, and watched my video (!), here is another great tool for monitoring social media, Social Mention. Make certain you use the filters to limit your query. You even get some great analytics and sentiment data, all clickable. I'm using the Facebook filter.

Loppet