Nashville Technology Council

In recognition of Global Entrepreneurship Week, Tennessee wants to celebrate its business owners who embrace the spirit and meaning of entrepreneurship.  

The Tennessee ECD’s Business Enterprise Resource Office and Tennessee Main Street Program are promoting entrepreneurship in Tennessee with a statewide video competition. Entrepreneurs are invited to prepare a short video that answers the question “What makes you an entrepreneur?”

Finalists will be selected from five business categories: Main Street/downtown; home-based; agri-business; arts and entertainment; and innovation.

Entrants must submit an original video no more than five minutes in length describing the business using exterior, interior of business and highlight products, services or marketing strategies which make the business and entrepreneur successful. The video should ultimately answer the question “What makes you an Entrepreneur?” The video may not contain any work (in whole or in part) which is the subject of a copyright or infringes the intellectual property rights of any third party. Video must be the original work of the entrant.

The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development will use the winning entries in a department-produced video and print piece intended to identify and promote innovative entrepreneurs in Tennessee communities and encourage others to join them as small business owners. The statewide winner will receive $500 cash award plus a professional marketing package valued at $2,000.
The deadline to apply is December 15. Complete contest details can be found at the official website: http://www.tnecd.gov/tnopenforbusiness or for more information, contact BERO at 1-800-871-7201.

Grand Prize:
$500 cash plus $2,000 professional marketing package; award, statewide recognition
Category Winners:
Award plus statewide recognition

How to Apply:
1.    Register Online
2.    Upload your You Tube Video

Deadline:
December 15, 2009 11:59CST

Entrepreneur Categories:
1.    Main Street/Downtown
2.    Home-based
3.    Agri-business
4.    Arts & Entertainment
5.    Innovation

Contest Rules & Regulations

Nashville Tech Story (11/30/09)

If you didn’t want to fight the crowds in retail stores on Black Friday, today’s “Cyber Monday” deals might be a better bet.  The term Cyber Monday, formed in 2005, has continued to prove legitimacy, as shoppers search for the best deals in the comfort of their own living room.  According to the National Retail Federation, traffic on CyberMonday.com, a site hosting today’s deals for over 550 retail chains, is tracking three times higher than traffic on Cyber Monday last year. In addition, 72.2% of online retailers are planning a special promotion for Cyber Monday, up from 42.7% just two years ago.

With all of these deals, will work productivity decrease today? Absolutely. Shop.org says more than half (54.5%) of office workers with Internet access, or 68.5 million people, will shop for holiday gifts from work this year, up substantially from 50.7% in 2006 and 44.7% in 2005.  Get live updates on today’s specials on your favorite social networking sites at http://twitter.com/Blackfriday and http://www.facebook.com/blackfridaydeals.

All of your technology gadgets are available at a reduced price today, and many come with free shipping. Dell laptops are starting at only $449 , 10 megapixel digital cameras are available at Best Buy for only $49.95, and Blu-ray DVD Players are available at Walmart for only $79.  Foxnews.com says HDTV’s will be affordable today as well at Wal-Mart, where a 40-inch Sony Bravia, which will be on sale for $598. In addition, Target will sell a 32-inch Westinghouse set for just $246.

Find out more deals at www.cybermonday.com,  www.theblackfriday.com or www.black-friday.net.

Nashville Tech Story (11/27/09)

Black Friday is bringing lots of great deals from Apple and Microsoft.  Load up on the latest software for large and small enterprises.  While you are there, you can pick up some good stuff for yourself like new headphones, speakers, laptop cover cases, and more.

You can also head over to the Griffin Online Store and pick up the Evolve Wireless Sound System.

Nashville Tech Story (11/25/09)

We hope you and your family have a great holiday week.  Below are fun tech goodies that are zero calories to consume.   Enjoy.

Brain Pop – Thanksgiving Movie

Turkey Calorie Database

Follow TurkeyWire on Twitter to get recipes and other fun turkey tweets.

Nashville Tech Story (11/23/09)

[meta]marketer’s Kate O’Neill led the audience through key points to a strategic social media plan last week, as she introduced the group to a number of tools including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  As the workshop began, the audience emphasized their need for understanding Social Media as a business promoter, the safety and privacy of these tools, and the proper etiquette for the use of these tools.

Kate began the workshop by emphasizing the importance of adapting to this form of marketing, and embracing these tools as the “new normal.”  An interesting statistic she pointed out is that Facebook is beginning to encroach Google in quantity of web traffic, and very soon might surpass it completely.  Another interesting point, thanks to @Bazaarvoice, is that 64% of consumers connected to brands on social media made their first purchase from that brand due to a digital experience.  This really laid down the ground rules of the importance of getting to know and understand this type of marketing.

Although it is extremely tempting just to dive in and start using these tools, Kate illustrated the importance of creating a strategy for your marketing efforts.  You should ask yourself:
-Who are you trying to reach?
-Who are the audiences you are trying to connect?
-What channel is appropriate to communicate with your audience?  
-What are the key concepts that you want to get across?
-What are the key terms you would use to describe that concept?  
-Who are your content contributors?

After defining your strategy, it is important to participate, but in the proper way.  So, what is the etiquette for Social Media use?  Kate referred to this as, “Think of it like a cocktail party…. light and interesting.”  She also emphasized the importance of not only talking about what you think is interesting, but make sure it will be interesting to your target audience as well.  In addition, she stated that it is essential to think about everything and make sure it is always back on a strategic level.

If you missed Kate’ presentation, and want to find out more, take a look at her slideshow below:

Brian Dailey Realm 3 Web Applications

What brought you to Nashville?
After living in New York for three years, I decided to relocate my business to a more family friendly city. I visited several different cities (in North Carolina and Georgia) before deciding that Nashville had the combination of vibrant businesses and living that I was looking for.

What is your favorite venue to go to in Nashville?
My wife and I have spent a lot of time in Centennial Park during the three months that we’ve lived here. We’ve enjoyed the live theater and music at the band shell, as well as the dog park.

What surprised you most about our city?
I work primarily the open source branch of the technology world, and I expected most of the businesses in Nashville to be slow in adopting open source. To the contrary, many of the growing businesses here have embraced the open source movement and it seems to be a growing trend. I find that encouraging.

How does the Technology Community here compare to where you lived previously?
It’s not entirely fair to compare a city of one million with one of eight million, but Nashville certainly holds its own for its size. Adjusting for population, the involvement in user groups has been just as high if not higher than in New York.

In areas like the Silicon Alley and Valley there is a larger drive to chase down funds for new startups, but those areas tend to be hubs of activity since there is a heavy presence of money and new ideas. It’s more difficult to find that in a city like Nashville; as the city continues growing, more venues that connect great ideas with funding will rise to fill that need. While open source adoption in Nashville is encouraging, there’s still a large opportunity to share the advantages of embracing open source software with the industries of the heartland (healthcare among them).

Do you have any recommendations for other technologists who are new to the area?
Get involved! There are a legion of opportunities in the Nashville area to get to know your fellow technologists. The geek breakfasts, language user groups, and obviously the Nashville Technology Council are just the beginning. The more that people are involved, the more the city will stand out on the map! Creativity and inventiveness is something that grows as the creative class of Nashville interacts with one another.

FiledBy Partners with Scribd to Integrate Document Reader Publishing Technology
FiledBy Author Websites Now Enabled with Scribd for Seamless Document Sharing and Social Publishing

Nashville, Tenn., November 18th, 2009 – FiledBy (www.filedby.com), the leading online directory of authors, writers, illustrators, photographers and other book contributors, today announced the integration of the Scribd Reader technology into the online toolset provided to its fast growing community of authors and other creators.

Scribd (www.scribd.com) the largest social publishing company in the world, facilitates the creation and distribution of web documents that allow anyone to share written materials easily over the Internet.  As a result of the agreement, all authors and other book contributors who register and claim their FiledBy site can utilize Scribd’s document reader to publish documents on FiledBy and Scribd simultaneously.

“We integrated Scribd’s technology on FiledBy sites to provide a more powerful, extensible and integrated document viewing platform that can support many file types, improve discoverability and broaden exposure for authors and others on FiledBy,” said Peter Clifton, CEO and co-founder, FiledBy. “This integration also establishes a framework for our authors to engage in social publishing and empowers them with another state of the art way to promote themselves and their work. For authors looking to expand their reach and build their marketing platform online, document posting and sharing on FiledBy and Scribd is a very powerful connection.”

To upload documents, videos, podcasts or other media, authors must be registered and verified on FiledBy. One of the advantages to the new integrated model with Scribd is that only the author themselves or their publisher can publish documents through FiledBy. This provides a level of verification and authority that helps protect copyrighted material. Click here to view a sample document on FiledBy and Scribd.

“We are thrilled that Scribd is now integrated through our API into FiledBy,” said Jared Friedman, chief technology officer and co- founder, Scribd. “FiledBy users can easily publish their written works to the web and present their works in our document reader.”

About FiledBy

FiledBy is the most comprehensive online directory of book authors on the Internet. Every published author, co-author or other listed contributor to a book (illustrators, photographers, narrators, editors and translators) in every subject category has a free listing/website which they can claim and customize. FiledBy provides web tools, marketing services and community building solutions for authors, new writers and others to connect directly with readers. A single search engine provides access to information on over 3 million authors and contributors and 8 million books. For more information visit: www.filedby.com

About Scribd, Inc.

Scribd is the world’s largest social publishing company. Our goal is to make written works available for people to read and interact with, any time and on any device. Scribd is changing the way people discover, share and sell original writings and documents. Our innovative document reader technology enables anyone to easily upload their files — including PDF, Word, PowerPoint and other document types — and share on Scribd.com or embed on thousands of other websites. Scribd is a venture-backed company based in San Francisco.

For more information, please visit www.scribd.com.

Nashville Tech Story (11/20/09)

Oracle held an information session at the Sommet Center in Nashville, TN on November 16, 2009.  Xena Ugrinsky lead off the session with the Speed to Value proposition that TITAN Technology Partners, an Oracle partner and host for the Nashville event, is currently promoting.  TITAN Technology Partners builds, hosts, implements, and trains on the Oracle platform.

It has been a while since I received a good update on Oracle. This session went five hours and we only covered Hyperion and Sun (pending acquisition by Oracle).  It is amazing to think about the acquisitions over the past five years and where Larry  is taking the company.

Xena had a great graphic that showed Data Integration > Data Archive > Data Access/Reporting which summed up the Oracle solution on Analytics.  

Phil Potenza, showed the business analyst proposition through an impressive display of graphs and other dashboard tools designed to give every manager a clear view of today and predicative analysis on tomorrow.  Oracle’s application strategy is clearly embedded within their 1,500 + current patents and 1,500 provisional patents.

“70% of CFO’s today can’t forecast more than one quarter out.”  Wow!  This is scary and also points to the tremendous opportunity for analytics.

The afternoon was highlighted by Lisa Mullaney, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis, Chiquita Brands International.  She discussed the recent planning and implementation of Hyperion.

John Vakos finished up the session with a quick overview of Sun.  Their new Xdata strategy seems to be an impressive speed to value proposition.

TITAN Technology Partners and Oracle raffled off tickets to see Bruce Springsteen live that evening at the Sommet Center.

Nashville Tech Story (11/19/09)

Last week, Intel’s Roadshow made a stop in Music City.  I thought it a bit strange to have their roadshow following CMA’s at the Sommet, but come to find out it was a genius move.  They coupled their CMA tickets for clients and got to see some great country music as well as tout their new technologies.

The event itself was interesting.  Intel is really pushing the envelope on chip speed and size.  I learned about ticks and tocks.  Ticks are minor processor improvements, whereas tocks are large scale changes in size and momentum.

Some of their new healthcare technologies pique my interest.  They are working on bedside monitoring and clinician input modules to feed the electronic health record.

The average data center cost $1,000/square foot to build.  For every dollar spent on the data center it requires $8 for maintenance.  For every dollar spent on hardware, it requires $.50 in power and cooling.  Wow!

The Intel chip of today is the Nehalem EX and the future is the Westmere EX – Expandable.  Both are built on the Boxboro Platform.  It will continue to change the data center environment.  I was most impressed by their energy efficiencies in their new chip.  They are talking about 90% energy cost reductions and an 8 month payback as an ROI.  That is planning tough to beat.  If you are planning a tech refresh, you may want to check with the local Intel rep and have them provide you with their Excel tools to help you plan the refresh.

For more information or to download the presentations, click here.

PureSafety Welcomes New Director of Content Development

PureSafety, a leading provider of results-driven software and information solutions for workforce safety and health, has hired Kevin Eggers as director of content development.

Within this role, Eggers is responsible for all aspects of content development, quality assurance and support including the company’s growing course library of more than 600 Environmental, Health and Safety courses, as well as support for custom projects for clients. He oversees a growing team of 20 project managers, instructional designers, web developers and graphic artists.  

“Training remains the foundation of, and a key theme, for our industry leading suite of workforce safety and health solutions,” said PureSafety President and CEO Bill Grana. “Kevin’s extensive background in process improvement and operations management will help us continue to deliver superior quality, consistency and effectiveness in our off-the-shelf and custom courses.”

Eggers has more than 25 years of experience in business process reengineering and operations management and has specialized exclusively in Software as a Service (SaaS) organizations for the past 13 years. He is former director of operations at Dealerskins, a custom web solution provider to the automotive industry, and served in the United States Navy for 20 years, retiring in 2000 as chief petty officer. During his various tours of duty he held roles in engineering training, electrical safety and process improvement.

About PureSafety
Born out of a workplace tragedy in 1999, PureSafety empowers its customers to protect their organization’s most valuable assets: their people and profits. PureSafety provides comprehensive, web-based software and information solutions that support compliance requirements, overall risk management needs, and the enhancement of governance and company culture through improved programs, processes, awareness, understanding, visibility, and accountability within workforce safety and health. The company’s growing team of 160 employees serves more than 2,000 companies operating in more than 20 major industries including manufacturing, construction, distribution, energy, and healthcare, and encompasses 34 percent of the Fortune 500. Headquartered in the Nashville-area, PureSafety has an additional location in Colorado Springs, Col. To learn more, visit www.puresafety.com or call 888.202.3016.