“The exodus from Best Buy Co. Inc.’s executive suite continues.

Ryan Robinson, the company’s No. 2 finance official and chief financial officer for Best Buy’s U.S. business unit, is stepping down, a source close to the company told the Star Tribune.”

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Two firms local to Minneapolis, Reve Studios and Gray Squid Division, are teaming up on a new ’2D puzzle platformer’ gaming concept for iOS with the hopes of leveraging the money and social wisdom of the crowds to fund their next product launch to the tune of $70k — or more.

Rather than contemplating a traditional bootstrapped vs. angel investor model, they’re pursuing an increasingly popular third option via the ubiquitous crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to determine if Monster! has the kind of merit to be the next big fan favoritite.

The idea for Monster! was initially birthed in 2010 by Reve Studios founder Chad Robinson who made an early attempt at launching it through a national indie video developer contest.

“While that contest came and went, I always found myself coming back to it,” Robinson says.   After getting to know Joel Stewart and Matt Pacyga from Gray Squid Division over the years through a different project, the trio hit it off.  Robinson will spearhead the project on the creative side, while Stewart handles more of the technical mobile development and Pacyga holds it all together.

“We are excited to be pursuing something new that we’re all so passionate about,” says Pacyga.

“Monster! is a 2D puzzle platformer where the player must defeat gigantic beasts that threaten the lives and lands of his people. You journey through the game as either Bruce or Lenny, two best friends who assist each other in their quest for the five fragments of the Amulet of Oogle. This ancient amulet gives the wearer the power to speak to and control the great beasts who have put this world in peril. With the power of teamwork, and a little help from the friends they make on the way, Bruce and Lenny navigate through five treacherous lands in search of the amulet pieces that will help them save their homeland.”

The project officially went live yesterday on Kickstarter and already has accumulated 31 unique supporters pledging a cumulative $1,407, or 2%, towards the $70k minimum needed to get it off the ground.  If the project is able to amass full funds within the next 29 days, the anticipated development cycle for Monster! is “optimistically” 7 – 8 months down the road.  With a minimum pledge of $1, supporters can choose from a variety of commitment tiers (and accompanying incentives) up through $10k+.

New York Times recently compiled data on “Three Years of Kickstarter Projects,” and found that the gaming genre is the fourth most popular category behind film, music, and design, coming in at $20m pledged through the platform since its NYC launch in 2008.  Detailed findings show that the average financing of “successful” gaming projects was roughly $27,000.

While there may be little risk in testing the global appetite for Monster! considering the all-or-nothing nature of a Kickstarter campaign, one has to wonder…why such a high financial threshold?

Well, that’s all a matter of perspective to Pacyga, who cites the market value of the sheer number of people involved (5-6), the desire to “do more than scrape by,” and “raise the standard” for indie developers.  “The $70k minimum benchmark would truly enable this project to under promise and over deliver, considering the other devices, operating systems and possibilities in terms of game play depth.  We want to do it right the first time.”

“Kickstarter gives independent developers like us, those who don’t have the history or storied careers of industry vets behind us, the opportunity to show the world what we can do with the ideas we have,” says Robinson.

“This kind of creativity, technology and scale can happen here and we will prove to the world that Minnesota has what it takes to hang in the indie gaming industry,” Pacyga concludes.

“THE noise level is rising at the Shirley G. Moore Laboratory School. Children are charging through the classroom shouting, playing, picking up toys and tossing them around. All the while, in the corners of the room, five Kinect motion sensors watch and record their every move.

The unusual set-up at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development in Minneapolis is designed to look for signs of behavioural disorders. The plan is to find out if Microsoft’s gaming sensor, combined with computer-vision algorithms trained to detect behavioural abnormalities, can be used to automate the early diagnosis of autism.”

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“BOSTON, MA – The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) and Fortune Magazine announced that Atomic Data (Rank 26) based in Minneapolis, MN was selected for the 2012 Inner City 100, a list of the fastest-growing inner city companies in the U.S. The Inner City 100 program recognizes successful inner city companies and their CEOs as role models for entrepreneurship, innovative business practices and job creation in America’s urban communities.”

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The newly formed Center of Excellence for Big Data (CoE4BD) will serve as a teaching and research group that will offer education and support to groups in academia, government, and business in need of help processing big data.

As a field, big data doesn’t exactly have a concrete definition. One of the organizers of the CoE4BD, Dr. Brad Rubin, considers a problem that contains a certain amount of “volume, velocity, and variability” in its data set to fall into the big data domain. Large sets of marketing, business operations, and scientific data sets are the usual suspects. Dr. Rubin is an information retrieval specialist in the GPS program, but the idea for the center sprang from collaboration with a neuroscientist at the University of Saint Thomas.

The neuroscience researcher had terabytes of data collected from the hippocampus in the brain of a rat that was trying to find its way through a maze (of course). The GPS department is in possession of a 43 compute core Hadoop cluster with 40TB of storage. Dr. Rubin offered to provision the cluster to perform what was essentially digital signal processing of the neuron data; once setup, the cluster crunched numbers and provided results to the neuroscientist in relatively short order using 15 of the compute cores.

Similar comparison to attempting the analysis on a workstation is extremely difficult — as the researcher had to down sample the data just to fit it in his workstation’s memory whereas the Hadoop cluster could absorb all of the data available.

Working with big data requires the ability to conceptualize abstract data sets of what is generally unstructured data. In addition, the mathematical, statistical, and software skills must be present to manipulate the data. Even with those in place the success of a big data project ultimately rests on asking the right questions about the data and coherently communicating findings.

This all makes big data problems some of the most interesting multidisciplinary problems in the market place today. The market for solutions to big data projects has been validated by the recent IPO of Splunk, a big data software & service provider with a market capilization of over $3 billion.

The CoE4BD was soft lunched last month by six University of Saint Thomas faculty members with a vision to become a broadly recognized local resource, in addition to the modern curriculum offerings that begin this fall. The center aims to identify big data challenges facing industry and work on them as class projects & independent research projects for grad students.

“It’s easy in academia to make up problems & then solve them. It’s much more difficult and a much richer experience to find real world problems to tackle. Because that really forces you to be creative and break bounds”, says Dr. Rubin of his desire for industry engagement with the center.

Last week I had a coffee with a Minnesota angel investor and we began talking about Instagram and its recent $1b exit to Facebook. I gathered that he had not heard of Instagram prior to the acquisition announcement, which really got me thinking:

If Instagram had been started in Minnesota, what would the experience of raising capital from our local investors have looked like?

First, let me set the stage. I have read commentary on the Minnesota investment ecosystem and heard from angels and venture capitalists, all of which collectively summarize that Minnesota entrepreneurs are: (a) naïve, (b) not prepared to ask for money, and ( C), not putting in the hard work.

After all, ‘Good ideas will always get funded’ – right?

Well, I’ll say it: Minnesota angel investors are not thinking big enough.

It seems the vast majority of (the few) active tech angel investors are only playing for bunts and singles – the safest of bets – that will never really move the needle in the way that a smash hit, like Instragram, can. You can’t win a championship without first thinking big and the reality is there are entrepreneurs right here and now, that are fighting tooth and nail to get that shot from Minnesota. Local entrepreneurs who seriously want to crush it.

The over reliance on early stage due diligence is the proverbial stuffed animal a toddler needs before they can go to sleep at night. On the surface, it’s comforting, but the risk of losing every dime invested is marginally different, while the potential upside is radically different.

I have concern with angel investors who are Minnesota nice enough to show up and dip their toes in, but downright counterproductive when it comes to jumping in with the confidence that they themselves can swim. This conservatism is contagious and demoralizing to big swinging entrepreneurs.

If entrepreneurs are going to aim past the fences, it helps they not only to have the right mindset and training, but also the right backing. While we are preparing the often required (but rarely feasible) detailed business plan at the mercy of potential investors, hungry investors in different parts of the country are stacking their lineups with entrepreneur after entrepreneur ready to tear the hide off entire industries based on sheer will alone. They are more concerned with intention and less focused on the nuances of trying to have it all figured out from the start. As a result, our entrepreneurial competition is playing with juiced bats.

If Minnesota angel investors feel that Minnesota’s tech entrepreneurs are not prepared, I think they need to take a good look in the mirror.

You don’t know the mobile space? Never heard of Instragram? Can’t fathom why they were acquired for a billion dollars? Rather than fearing what is not understood and retrenching, do the hard work that it takes to become a savvy investor in today’s world.

Place your relatively sure bets now and then, but by all means when you see ambition, passion and desire from that entrepreneur sitting across from you, don’t get scared – get turned on.

Less emphasis on the relic that is a business plan and more emphasis on the opportunity will better serve your desired outcome while enabling entrepreneurs to do what they are here to do — figure it out as they go along. Business plans don’t predict success at the start; often times, they limit necessary creative exploration and waste critical execution time. Building a business is more art than science. Have some courage and faith!

When I met with a well known Silicon Valley character a few weeks ago, she scolded my business partner and I for being too “midwesternized” — or in other words, small minded.

How awkward.  I’ve become a product of my environment.

She said we needed to be more brash and bold in how we were going to create an entirely new industry. We needed to unapologetically state that we were here to lead this company as a game-changer.

The message applies equally same for Minnesota investors. We have more than enough talent, money, and connections here to make it happen. Let’s stop apologizing for being in Minnesota. Shed this insecurity. Embrace fear and take big bold risks.

Let’s work together on overcoming these barriers, because as entrepreneurs, we have them too.

We need you, Mr. angel investor, to commit to being best in class. Once considered ‘Money-apolis’, we were an envied business hub just a generation ago. It’s time to put Minnesota on the map again. Stop half-assing it and get behind your big swingers before they’re poached or pushed away.

And should I ever become complacent from success, if my biggest issue becomes where to dock my boat on Lake Minnetonka and I start asking to see detailed financials for seed stage companies, belittling and berating entrepreneurs who should not have it figured out yet, I hope that a young upstart finds this piece and holds my feet to the fire.  I hope she looks at me with a big smile and says: “Joe, you once said that the best way to predict the future was to create it. Do you remember that? You actually did it, but not alone.”

Join your entrepreneurs — the creators, makers and doers of the future — in this heavy lifting.

“Did you know that 46 percent of adult Americans now have a smartphone, according to Pew Research?  And, Flurry Mobile Analytics estimates that 45 percent of our media consumption time is spent interacting with our phones and the Web.

Business has also moved to the Web in a big way. Our enterprises sell differently, communicate expansively and track information robustly. Storage, security and software engineering — long Minnesota strengths — are being leveraged in exciting and creative new businesses, as well as large businesses.”

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“Could the days of notes coming home to parents in students’ backpacks be numbered? Probably not entirely, but school districts across the metro are embracing digital communication more than ever.

Inver Grove Heights schools are the latest to offer digital communication options, launching a smartphone application last month.”

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2) Meet Minnesota’s Radical Tech CEO #4: Igor Epshteyn

3) Investment banker turned tech CEO ready to flip the switch

4) Co.lab opening doors for Duluth techies, and then some

5) Needl pitches at Blueprint demo day

Launched last summer by industry veterans seeking to “spark a movement to help Minnesota’s software economy rank among the most vibrant and respected in the nation,” MESA has recently engaged with Toovio, a Minneapolis startup pioneering ‘insight as a service’ in the enterprise retail environment.

Having been on the fence about where to relocate their one time Florida startup — Minneapolis, Austin, Indianapolis — CEO Josh Smith credits MESA for their instrumental role in the decision to plant the flag here, saying:

“MESA is largely responsible for Toovio’s decision to headquarter in MN. Their experience, talent and passion to help us grow is unlike any mentorship or advisory group we have encountered. They are a credit to our local tech community and we are fortunate to have their support.”

“Toovio has the attributes we look for in an ideal portfolio company (customers, revenue, etc.) and represents the promise of our mission,” said MESA founding mentor Todd Krautkramer, speaking to the new addition, noting that the group is actively seeking qualified software mentors to increase the range of support available.