Visi, a company many of us are familiar with since its founding in 1994, is Minnesota's largest locally owned managed hosting and connectivity provider (11,000 business and residential customers who include thousands of DSL customers). What most don't know is that the company is expanding right here in Eden Prairie, with a Tier III data center, in order to meet growing demand.

Today's accelerating adoption of open source software (OSS), and the shift from desktop to web applications increasingly built on top of OSS, is being embraced by individuals, the nonprofit sector, and small, midsize, and even enterprise businesses.

At one of last year’s MinneDemo events, I had the chance to see dounder and CEO Maryse Thomas present Pokeware, a system for integrating "hot spots" in video that allows users to pause and "poke" around the screen.

Today's high school students are the always-on, always-connected, digital generation and have no time for inefficient or paper-based communications, or especially ones that don't leverage their peers who are involved in the same things they happen to be.

There are tremendous firms, organizations, groups and entrepreneurs responsible for some amazing innovations. There is also one Minnesota resident behind the look, feel and sound of some of those innovations.

In a time when energy prices are accelerating, threats from terrorism and epidemics (e.g., avian flu) are driving companies and individuals to better anticipate and manage risk, and the people with whom collaboration is critical might be in the next town or half a world away, the timing for an easy-to-use, fast and intuitive collaboration suite seems perfect.

The longtime head of the group within Best Buy Co. that served as liaison to the venture capital community is out, replaced by two senior VPs. Martin Nyman told me his position was eliminated June 30. He had been with the company for about seven years, with a recent title of director-global innovation network. At one time, Nyman had a staff of four, but that group was cut in April 2006 as part of a headquarters staff reduction.

At the age of 15, Daren Cotter was presented with the opportunity to get a birthday present every soon-to-be-a-licensed-driver kid covets: a car. Instead, he asked for what he really wanted, a computer, and so young Cotter began his adventure in computing and software development.

Anyone who understands that the internet is a platform, social media is fundamentally shifting the way we connect and communicate with one another, and that application and computing functionality is rapidly shifting to the cloud, will instantly appreciate the efforts of a broadband public policy initiative by the non-profit Blandin Foundation in Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Blandin on Broadband.

A unique collaboration to benefit public radio, MPR and maybe all of media for that matter took place at the studios of the Minnesota Public Radio on July 12. Read more...

By Phil Wilson