An unfolding narrative shows how two local women are taking the charge to rally local females within Minnesota’s technology industry.

Jacque Urick is the new Managing Director of Girls in Tech Minneapolis-St.Paul chapter.  Girls in Tech was founded in San Francisco (2007) with the goal of empowering, educating and elevating status of women in technology fields, and aims especially to inspire young women to pursue entrepreneurial technology careers.  The  networking group has a strong emphasis on supporting the next generation of females and features quarterly meetups — the next one scheduled for June 29th at Moscow on the Hill.

Liz Tupper is Managing Director of She’s Geeky, an annual 2 day unConference exclusively focused around bringing together women in STEM fields. The inaugural Minnesota She’s Geeky took place last August and drew around 100 local women together around technology, lifestyle and business; the second local event is scheduled for September 23 & 24th at the Science Museum of Minnesota (details to follow).

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Rochester-based mobile developer DoApp has come a long way since the founding trio left the security of their corporate jobs three years ago this month.

“We had a very schizophrenic anti-MBA go to market,” says co founder and CEO Wade Beavers, speaking to inception. “When we got started, we did a variety of things thinking that one thing would take off — and in some dysfunctional way, they all did.  It has created as much opportunity as challenge.”

The firm was one of  the first 2500 companies approved to develop for Apple’s iPhone, having created three of the first 500 apps (there are over 350,000 today).  “People will pay for flatulence,” Beavers says reflecting on the dubious honor of having the first app ever to be banned by Apple — Whoopie Cushion.

Collectively, DoApp’s mobile apps have experienced over 12 million downloads; today, the company has four flagship products and 11 full time employees:

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Local technology entrepreneurs now have a second major resource of late, when Minnesota’s first tech-oriented accelerator program begins accepting first round applications tomorrow.

Six months in the making, Project Skyway will choose up to 10 early-stage tech companies in SaaS & mobile to participate in a three-month long, mentor-driven startup acceleration based out of Minneapolis.

“Our emphasis is on building tech companies with long-term, sustainable value, ethical practices, mentorship, and strong networks,” Project Skyway founder Cem Erdem reiterates.

The program offers $6k in seed funding per founder (1-5), mentorship, co-working space (TBA), dedicated outsourced software development and connections-a-plenty.   In exchange for participating in the program, companies give 6 – 9% of founders stock.

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“My business philosophy is simple — human pain equals market demand,” says tech veteran and lifelong entrepreneur Chris Dykstra.

Chris has been using technology to solve real world problems for the past 15 years and is currently engaged in three distinct impact businesses:

Zanby is a white-label enterprise ‘group of groups’ social collaboration startup he co founded in 2005. With strong domestic and international reach, Zanby was used to facilitate discussions between private business, NGO’s, government and cotton collectives to curb Walmart’s child labor practices in Uzbekistan.

Warecorp is an onshore/offshore software consulting and development company he co founded in 2004 as a spinoff from a previous venture.  One recent WareCorp project facilitated crowdsourcing funds to build an orphanage in Haiti.

The Uptake is a citizen-fueled, online video news gathering organization focused on government transparency (think CSPAN for the web). Started in 2007, he chairs the board of this nonprofit journalism upstart.   “Better storytelling at the local level about business and more transparency about political processes can lead to prosperity,”  he says.

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Behind all the talk about innovation, startups and entrepreneurship in Minnesota are two men who have (modestly) been building the local tech community for years through a series of initiatives culminating under the brand umbrella Minne*.

It started back in 2006 with Minnesota’s first barcamp unconference aka MinneBar, followed by “show and tell” MinneDemo (next up: Jan 13), and more recently the introduction of MinneSpark.

“When we created barcamp, I had no idea what Minne* was going to be…I just thought Minnesota needed a barcamp…and we had one and it was a good time…then Luke Francl and Dan [Grigsby] picked up the Demo events, and it became a number of events and we needed something to support all these things,” says Minne* Catalyst Ben Edwards.

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Justin Kaufenberg’s entrepreneurial blood has been flowing since the days when his family would gather for the monthly “make dad rich” meetings.

“By the time I was 18 years old and off to college — the idea of ever going working for someone else was just a non option — it was really a foregone conclusion at that point that I was going to do something for myself,” he asserts.

While in college at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire studying economics,  Justin met designer/developer Carson Kipfer and the duo quickly setup shop and launched Third North Creative (Third Floor North Wing in Murray Hall).  The custom web development business was growing during the first two years, as was the desire to “own and iterate on a single product.”

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As a subsidiary of Capella Education Company (NASDAQ: CPLA), Minneapolis-based Capella University is Minnesota’s third-largest University based on enrollment — and it’s all done online.

Founded in 1993, Capella University offers accredited graduate degree programs in the fields of business, information technology, education, human services, public health, public safety, and psychology, as well as bachelor’s degree programs in the fields of business, information technology, and public safety.  More than 38,000 students are currently enrolled, representing all 50 states and 52 countries.
Seventy-eight percent are pursuing master’s or doctoral degrees.

Keith Koch is vice president of next generation learning where he leads Capella University’s award-winning efforts to provide a high-quality and relevant online user experience for Capella learners and faculty.

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Brent Gensler began traveling to China at age 19 to explore new fabric manufacturers for his parents’ upholstery business, which has been in the family since 1950.   A few years down the road and fresh off a business degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brent started going back to China…only this time it was to scout manufacturers for his own company.

In April of 2008, Brent launched Defy Supply — an e-commerce company headquartered in Minneapolis which sells furniture directly from Chinese manufacturers  to customers across North America.  “Throughout my experiences, I realized just how many middlemen are between the original manufacturer and the end customer,” he says. “Our company basically defies that traditional supply-chain using an e-commerce model.”

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“I looked around at all the models and unfortunately we are behind the curve when it comes to early stage investment of time, capital and resources,” says  Cem Erdem, President and CEO of Minneapolis-based Augusoft.

As a Turkish immigrant, Cem started Augusoft 16 years ago to provide Internet strategy consulting at a time when the Internet was still nascent at best. Over the years, Augusoft has become a “highly profitable” software development firm specializing in a learning management system called Lumens.

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As an observer of the Minnesota high tech scene for over 30 years, Harlan Jacobs thinks so.

Harlan moved from Des Moines to the Twin Cities in the early 70′s to be a part of  “a burgeoning high tech mecca.”  In 1979, he became the CFO of FilmTec Corporation (now Thin Film Technology), a (then) publicly traded thin-film composite venture started in 1977 by four scientists turned entrepreneurs.  After Dow Chemical bought the company in 1985 for $75m, Harlan began to re-invest his rewards through Genesis Business Centers, an incubator/consulting firm focused primarily on capital advisory services.

According to Harlan, Genesis has experienced two distinct high tech successes (NT International – sold to Entegris; Visual Circuits – sold to Focus Enhancements) as he continues to provide CFO & consulting services to other Minnesota tech companies by which he has a vested interest in, such as Cima Nanotech, Cymbet and Zivix.

“Over the years,” he says, “the halcyon days of abundant seed capital and wide/well practiced risk taking” have essentially eroded.   “It was once a good time and place for entrepreneurs, but sadly, looking back, we’ve lost our edge.”

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