Innovation - much less of an art and more of a science
1108_ 11/14/11 - Well we have another Colorado Companies to Watch Winner, we're with Matt Larson, CEO of Confio Software. Confio provides software that monitors two key pieces of the IT infrastructure inside of companies, data bases and the workflow environment. Data bases hold most of the companies important information and they are constantly changing and growing. The Confio data base monitoring software looks at how those data bases are performing in a new way that reveals hidden and significant problems. Confio also has software that monitors the virtual environment. Just one-and-a-half years ago Confio recognized this was going to be a major shift in the IT infrastructure and there were going to be very significant problems that needed to be solved. In the past applications would get their own individual server to run on inside of a data center. But most of the time those servers would just sit idle and that was a waste of money. Now applications are put into a virtual server that shares the physical server with lots of other virtual servers. The net effect of that is the underlying hardware is now working most of the time. So Confio's software monitors the virtual environment to make sure it's working correctly and if not how to fix it. Larry asked Matt what he felt the challenges are facing leaders today. Matt said, "I think a challenge that hasn't been nearly this significant in the past is uncertainty." The health bill is a great example, what's going to happen and regardless of which way it goes, what are the costs going to be. What will happen if Greece goes bankrupt, Italy and for that matter what happens if the U.S. can't figure out its own long term debt. These are questions that experts have a difficult time predicting what's going to happen, much less business leaders. As a result of that there is less hiring, less spending, less opportunity. When asked about opportunities for business, Matt said, "Innovation - it's become much less of an art and more of a science. The result of that is companies have a lower failure rate for new products and services than they've had in the past." Matt suggests companies should take the time to learn about these new best practices and implement them and that would be a pretty big opportunity for them...Listen for much more...
Related Links: Confio Software || Colorado Companies to Watch || Colorado Companies to Watch Channel || PodCast Directory || Gala Event || Keywords: Matt Larson, Confio Software, Lowe Foundation, Colorado Companies to Watch, Gala Event, COCTW, Second Stage Companies, Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade - bytes=5957488
LISTEN to: Matt Larson, Confio Software, Inc.

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Marketing expertise takes a Denver company global
1110_ 11/14/11 - We're back to check in on Denver based SwiftPage CEO, Bob Ogdon. It's been over a year and Bob tells us Swiftpage's world has become the whole world - in fact they've started actively working in the European countries of Germany, France and soon to be Spain. And, they do a lot of work in South Africa and Australia as well. SwiftPage is an email marketing company. They deliver, for the small business segment, a platform where they can send out their newsletters or marketing messages. It's inexpensive, targeted to that small, micro up to 100 employee type businesses - Swiftpage's main focus. Bob tells us they really get to market through OEM partnerships who have large audiences of small businesses and add a service to their service. And, they are seeing this dramatic change in the market where people have decided to try to get more money out of their existing customers. - So these small companies are trying to add new services rather than spending their money on getting new customers. You can try the SwiftPage service for free then the subscription starts at $15. They also have a service called Drip Marketing which is really bringing automated marketing down to small business. It's something that has been a mid market to enterprise solution. Larry asked Bob, “If you were to sit down with an entrepreneur, given the challenges we've faced over the past few years, what advice would you give them?” "Well as a matter of fact, said Bob, "I do sit down with a lot of entrepreneurs, and they're not all young - a lot of people are going down this path. The best time to start a business is in a down market. You spend the early phase of your business formulating plans, testing, reaching out, finding things that people need. Difficult periods are also times of change and that's when there are shifts in what would be available, opportunities. My encouragement is for people to look for what the world is going to be five years from now. Start building it and be ready when they show up." ...Listen for more details...
Related Links: Swiftpage || Try Swiftpage Free || Sage SalesLogix || Mastering Change Book || Keywords: Bob Ogdon, Swiftpage, Email Marketing, Surveys and Web Forms, Drip Marketing, Call List, Integrated Solutions, Sage SalesLogix, Newsletters - Bytes: bytes=4734540
LISTEN to: Bob Ogdon, CEO/Founder, SwiftPage

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Tech Transfer Award Winners and Bio Frontiers Institute
1104_ 11/7/11 - We took a trip out to Broomfield, to meet Dave Allen, Associate VP, Tech Transfer Office, University of Colorado, where he introduced us to one of the 2011 Tech Transfer Award Winners, Jim Linfield, Managing Partner at Cooley. Really, if you spend time around the university or in the bio or clean tech communities, you know Jim - but there's more to the story. Dave Allen said the best way he could describe the award "...is acknowledgement that Jim has his fingerprints on all the things that work really well as it relates to the technology environment/infrastructure/ecosystem creating a vibrant environment for commercialization of technology..." He goes way beyond, whether it's bio science, cleantech, Boulder Innovation Center, Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, Technology Transfer Advisory Board, and more. I don't think they'd be what they are without Jim, so that was basically the acknowledgement." Dave points out that Jim plays a major role in two other significant areas. He played an instrumental role in the attraction of Tom Cech back to the university about two, three years ago. He's one of the leaders in the Bio Frontiers Advisory Board and he is one of the three people on the FRA Board at Anschutz Medical Campus - both provide interesting challenges and great opportunities. Larry asked Jim for what was on the horizon. In the Bio Science area there is the Bio Frontiers Institute which will be the center of activity for the university interdisciplinary studies and Tom Cech is the head of that, the building should be completed in February on the east campus in Boulder. Jim said, "I think that will solidify CU's position as one of the leading institutions for interdisciplinary research in the life sciences area, covering both therapeutics and diagnostics but also bio fuels, so I think it will be a remarkable institution." ...Listen for much more...
Related Links: Cooley LLP || CU Technology Transfer Office || CU TTO Channel || TTO Blog || CU TTO Awards || Award Photos || Keywords: Jim Linfield, Cooley, David Allen, CU Technology Transfer Office, CU TTO, Bio Frontiers Institute, Bio Science, Cleantech, Boulder Innovation Center, Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, Fitzsimmons Redevelopment Authority
Listen to: Jim Linfield, Managing Partner, Cooley and Dave Allen, Associate VP, Tech Transfer Office, University of Colorado

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Captive insurance companies as a financial strategy
1106_ 11/7/11 - Retirement didn't work well for our guest, and for the past 8-10 years he's been very active on the ACG Denver Board as well as the FEI Board which is Financial Executives International a global organization for chief financial officers. We're talking with Howard Potter, the self described 'recovering lawyer and CPA’. Going back many years he was in the tax department of Touche Deloitte, then he had his own law firm for about 27 years, in the mid 90s he retired, I wonder if that counts as his first failure (failed retirement, that is). The real story for today, starts with Howard's fascination with 'captive insurance companies'. He's followed this financial strategy for many years and finally the IRS came out with what they refer to as 'safe harbor rules' providing some guidelines how these financial strategies and these insurance companies should be setup and also established. We first heard Howard talk about this at an HRO event in Denver. So in 2002 Howard got involved. Currently he has an affiliation with Artex Risk Solutions, a subsidiary of Arthur J Gallagher & Co. out of Chicago. They do not sell any insurance, they structure, form and manage captive insurance companies. The concept very briefly is that Howard's firm reviews middle market companies looking for uninsured risks. If they can find enough of these risks, qualify them and can support a premium on those risks, there are some real advantages to forming a micro captive insurance company. The risks Howard is talking about are typically of low frequency and uninsured. For example the first place they look is the current policies - at the deductibles and exclusions. The other risks are low frequency, product recall, product liability, environmental, some in terrorism, cyber risk - any type of risk that has a low frequency. Those are the natural risks to put into your own captive insurance company. What they're doing is optimizing the risk coverage for a company by keeping your existing coverage, but also having your own insurance company that insures the low frequency risks. Between these two insurance companies you gain some real advantages...Listen for more details...
Related Links: S T Consulting || Howard Potter || ACG Denver Channel || Holme Roberts & Owen || Mastering Change Book || Keywords: Howard Potter, S T Consulting, Captive Insurance Companies, Association of Corporate Growth, Denver, ACG, FEI, Financial Executives International, Artex Risk Solutions, Arthur J Gallagher - bytes=5465550
LISTEN to Howard Potter, S T Consulting

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Seminars / Keynotes

Winning the Future through Open Innovation, Startup Colorado
1107_ 11/14/11 - Aneesh Chopra, White House Chief Technology Officer (CTO), visited the Defrag Conference, and the Startup Colorado Public Launch, to talk about recently unveiled initiatives targeted towards entrepreneurs and innovators in his keynote address entitled Winning the Future through Open Innovation. In an historic and groundbreaking approach to our nation’s most pressing problems, these initiatives seek to tap into the creative genius and solutions oriented focus demonstrated by those with the entrepreneurial spirit in an effort to “invent our way out” of some of the greatest dilemmas ever faced by our nation. Chief among these programs, a number of public – private partnerships arose from the push for bottom up change. Several regulatory agencies, such as the FDA, hope to benefit from the success and experience of entrepreneurs and CEO's through entrepreneurships in residences, and numerous contests have opened to the public designed to tap into innovative solutions. Announcements of novel, low cost, technology based solutions suggest success and significant positive movement within an atmosphere of openness, transparency, and collaboration. On Monday, November 7, 2011, the Veteran’s Job bank went live just 90 days after program conception. The job bank seeks to answer the challenge issued in August 2011 to hire 100,000 returning veterans, and does so in a manner that brings the job to the veterans, in their locale. Through open innovation and collaboration, Google, Bing, and Yahoo created schema.org , a jointly designed job-listing schema, which they in turn brought to the job search industry. SimplyHired and other job search vendors quickly jumped on board with the program, adding tags to jobs committed for veteran employment. The job schema search engine...there is much more in this article by Kirsten Nelson...
Related Links: Aneesh Chopra || Startup America Partnership || Startup Colorado Public Launch || Defrag Conference 2011 || Read Article by Kirsten Nelson || Keywords: Aneesh Chopra, US, CTO, White House, Silicon Flatirons Center, Defrag, Phil Weiser, Brad Feld, Vic Ahmed, Startup America Partnership, Startup Colorado, Kirsten Nelson - Watch Video: Aneesh Chopra US CTO the White House

Part 1 of 2 - Startup Colorado Launch

Part 2 of 2 - Startup Colorado Launch

Spending time in the cloud and developing new products
1109_ 11/14/11 - Here in the midst of DefragCon 2011, [BTW 5th Anniversary] we've corralled one of the keynote speakers, Jason Carolan, the VP of Product Development at ViaWest. Jason says he has the 'funnest' job at ViaWest, he gets to develop crazy new products and see how they're used, spend a lot of time on cloud. ViaWest just had their launch last week and have a couple of different offerings that fit really well in the managed services and collocation side of the business. ViaWest is a super regional data center, collocation, managed services, cloud and hosting provider, with 22 centers across the western U.S., centered in Denver, but also have a big presence in Texas in the Dallas area; Salt Lake; and expanded into Portland and Las Vegas as well. Jason said, "We like to think of ourselves as being that local connection... you've got someone to call and we are really happy about our support staff and that personal data center, IP provider." There's a lot of talk about the cloud. When you talk to different people and they have different definitions or explanations of what it is... the fears and the happiness, so we asked Jason for an overview. "I think it's about getting the right resources at the right time, at the right price." and Jason said he's going to trademark that phrase. For some people it's just having their email hosted, for others it's about hosting complex applications and give them the structure around it - be able to monitor it and secure it. The right time means time to market. Jason says, ”Increasingly, the tools that developers need, which are closely aligned with the business - to get new features out, to go make money, is all about time to market, it's about how fast can I do that. The right price is the CFO, they want to know how much is this going to cost, is it predictable, how much is it going to cost when I scale it - so it's really the whole pricing model that is a big piece of cloud and how we make that very transparent for customers. Transparency is good but it's a challenge. Jason agrees and pointed out he spent 13-14 years on the vendor side of things and logging and telemetry and all these things are sometimes an afterthought. So when you're building all this and trying to get the right data back to the customer it's sometimes a challenge...listen for more...
Related Links: ViaWest || Defrag 2011 || In the News || Software Channel || Keywords: Jason Carolan, Viawest, Cloud, Defrag, Super Regional Data Center, Collocation, Managed Services, Hosting Provider, Innovation bytes=4380110
LISTEN to: Jason Carolan, VP Product Development, ViaWest

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Leadership advice that is needed today
1103_ 11/7/11 - Get ready to take some notes. The ACG Denver monthly keynote was John Kelly, Chief Executive Officer of CereScan Corp. He offers a great deal of advice for building and running a successful company; from funding to teams and so much more. This is a live recording of his talk. Here's a little background. John A. Kelley, Jr. has been a director of Polycom since March 2000. Mr. Kelley has served as the Chief Executive Officer of CereScan Corp., a provider of high-definition functional brain imaging, since July 2009 and as Chairman of the board of directors of CereScan since February 2009. John also served as the Chief Executive Officer of McDATA Corp., since August 2002 and as its President since August 2001 and Chief Operating Officer from August 2001 to August 2002. Mr. Kelley has more than 30 years of telecommunications experience. Mr. Kelley re-built the management team, introduced multiple products simultaneously on a global basis, acquired and integrated both private and public companies. He served as an Executive Vice President of Networks of Qwest Communications International Inc., (Qwest) from July 2000 to January 2001. Prior to the acquisition of U S WEST by Qwest, he served as Executive Vice President for U S WEST from April 1995 to June 2000. He served as President of Wholesale Markets for U S West from May 1998 to July 2000. From March 1995 to April 1998, Mr. Kelley served as Vice President and General Manager of Large Business and Government Accounts and President of Federal Services for U S West. Prior to joining U S West, Mr. Kelley served as Area President for Mead Corporation's Zellerbach Southwest Business Unit from 1991 to 1995, and has served senior positions at Xerox and NBI. Mr. Kelley serves as Chairperson of the Board of Directors of INROADS of Colorado. He has been the Chairman of McDATA Corp. since February 2004. He serves as the National Vice-Chairman for INROADS. He has been Director of Circadence Corporation since November 2009. He has been a Director of Aztek Networks since August 2008. He has been a Director of Polycom since March 2000. John has done so much for the business community and the community of the whole. He talks about many business issues including ethics...this is a live recording of his keynote address...
Related Links: CereScan Imaging || ACG Denver Home || ACG Denver Channel || Polycom || In the News || Keywords: John Kelley, CereScan Imaging, ACG Denver, Polycom, McData, Functional Brain Imaging, US West, Qwest, Telecommunications, Zellerbach, Circadence, Inroads - bytes=32132182
Listen to: John kelley, CEO CereScan

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The recovery has been a little bit tougher than the recession
1105_ 11/7/11 - A little over a year ago Larry promised to follow up on a company he interviewed as a winner of the Colorado Companies to Watch program. We've been keeping an eye on their progress, they've moved into a new location and we're back to check in with Judy Amabile, Co Founder and President of Product Architects also known as Polar Bottle. Product Architects make hand held hydration devices for outdoor enthusiasts and for anyone who is on the go. Their main product is Polar Bottle, an insulated water bottle they came out with in 1994. Since then they've added more products, a stainless steel bottle and a single wall plastic bottle with an innovative new cap called the half-twist cap. They've just begun selling those through retailers, but all of their products are available online. The best part of this business is that everything is manufactured here in the U.S. and proudly carries the "Made in America" stamp. With the economic challenges everyone has been facing, Larry wanted to get Judy's opinion and experience as a local business and manufacturer. Judy explained their company did well in the recession, the sporting goods industry in general did well in the recession. People went from buying a lot of high priced luxury goods to back-to-basics, fun things for the outdoors as a way of still getting out, still vacationing and still having a good time - but not spending a huge amount of money. The recovery has been a little bit tougher than the recession was. Part of what's happening is retailers are consolidating their assortment as well as consolidating the number of vendors they deal with. For a small company like Product Architects they are at risk, but that hasn't happened with any of their larger accounts - so things have been good and they're still on a growth trajectory. "But", said Judy, "we need the economy to turn around." Larry asked, "what do you think the opportunities for companies are today?" As other companies drop off there is opportunity to fill whatever that void is. There has been quite a lot of consolidation in the outdoor industry, a lot of companies buying companies. Judy says, "Being a small company with an American made product, doing manufacturing here in the United States really sets us apart from other companies." Listen, Judy shares a number of other useful points...
Related Links: Polar Bottle Web Site || Economy Builders || In the News || Colorado Companies to Watch || Keywords: Judy Amabile, Product Architects, Polar Bottle, Made in America, Hydration Devices, Outdoor Enthusiasts, Sports Authority, REI, Trek Bicycles, Dick's bytes=4881661
LISTEN to: Judy Amabile, Product Architects

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