Dan Haugen

So, last night I watched Enemy of the State, a movie about a D.C. lawyer (Will Smith) who inadvertently becomes the target of an secret, overreaching government spy agency. The rogue department has apparently blanketed the country with phone taps, hidden cameras and spy satellites, which allow it to see and hear what’s going on virtually anywhere, even inside buildings. The agency plants false stories about the attorney after he fails to surrender an incriminating video tape. Explosions, gun fights, and chase scenes ensue.

The most unbelievable part of the movie: That a newspaper would actually run a front page follow-up story (not to mention a huge yearbook photo) after the laywer’s good name is finally cleared:

The Business Agenda, my linky round-up of Minnesota company news for MinnPost.com, is now on Twitter. You can follow @BizAgenda for alerts to new blog posts, as well as a hand-picked mix of retweets and bonus links covering name-brand Minnesota companies like 3M, Target, Best Buy, Medtronic, General Mills and others. The past week or so has brought an interesting mix of stories to my plate. Some highlights:

• Were execs wrong about Delta-NWA merger?
• Medtronic issues clarification following AP report
• California accuses Target of dumping toxic substances
• Caribou Coffee tweeter passes reins to company

Wells Fargo found itself in unflattering company when the Treasury Department cleared 10 major banks — but not Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — to repay TARP funds awarded in the fall. But observers say that probably does not signal anything significant about Wells’ financial condition. (Read story here…)

Stillwater is best known as one of the state’s early logging towns, but it was also one of the state’s first brewing centers. Now a group of longtime home brewers is trying to bring back a piece of that history by going pro with their hobby.

Lift Bridge Brewery began a few years ago when cofounders Brad Glynn and Steve Rinker, then coworkers at a construction and engineering firm, discovered their shared passion for making beer. Over lunch one day, they decided to dust off their equipment and start a brewing business—a plan so simple that it’s certainly been dreamed up over pints by countless other home brewers before. But unlike most, they’ve carried it out. (Continue reading…)

I’ve agreed to participate in a Public Relations Society of America panel discussion later this month on how to pitch to freelance journalists and others like myself who write for multiple publications. I end up wearing quite a few different hats to make ends meet, and I imagine that makes me a confusing target to pitch.

I’m trying to brainstorm some coherent advice to share. Some initial, rough thoughts: Understand that the “news hole” one freelance journalist has influence over is relatively tiny, and a lot needs to happen for a story pitch to be successful via a freelancer. Not only do you need to successfully sell the writer on the idea, but then that writer needs to be passionate enough about the idea to successfully sell it to an editor. In my experience, it rarely happens that way. Focus story pitches on assigning editors.

The best opportunity for a return-on-investment is after a story has been assigned. Journalists are increasingly using social networking sites, particularly Twitter and LinkedIn, to alert sources and colleagues on what they are working on now. My favorite PR sources are the ones who follow those updates and suggest potentially relevant sources for story assignments that I’m actively working on.

Fellow independent journalists: Any thoughts on what else I should share? I’ve pasted the program description below. The event is Thursday, June 18 at the University of St. Thomas.

As the media landscape changes we are seeing fewer journalists but yet increasing amounts of media channels and Web-based outlets. With all of these changes, it’s easy to be left in the dust without knowledge of how to reach journalists for the multiple outlets they write for or target the right channel within an organization.

Join Mpls St. Paul Magazine’s Lifestyle Editor Christy DeSmith, and business journalist Dan Haugen as they talk about targeting your message to the right person for the right outlet or medium. As the lifestyle editor, DeSmith draws from personal passion for fashion and lifestyle trends to manage blogging, updating information on the Mpls St. Paul Magazine Web site, and pulling-off a monthly magazine. Haugen brings a freelancer viewpoint on the business side to the table. Not only is he writing for more traditional print outlets but he’s started a hyper-local news blog, is plugged in and using Twitter, and writes on a regular basis for Minnpost.com.

How can you reach influential journalists that are working on so many platforms? If you pitch them for one outlet do you need to create angles for the others?  Where does the line blur between journalists and other online participants? Take away best practices for pitching ideas to not only a long-lead print publication but also blogs, Web sites, e-newsletters and other print/web-based outlets. Learn how to better target your pitch and make it relevant to the journalist allowing for the highest probable chance for interest in your story from one of the media outlets they serve.

The results of Target’s contested board of directors election will be announced Thursday at the company’s annual shareholder meeting, but what does this internal battle mean for the rest of us who don’t sit on the board or own Target stock?

I’ve been asking around this week to find out what, if any, implications hedge-fund manager William Ackman’s board challenge may have on Target customers, company employees or Minnesota’s economy in general. (Continue reading…)

I took a break from my business and technology reporting yesterday to film this video of an Arbor Day celebration in my neighborhood (Waite Park in Northeast Minneapolis). Volunteers and students helped plant more than 80 trees around Waite Park Elementary School as part of a National Arbor Day Foundation event.

The world’s largest biotechnology conference is underway in Atlanta this week, and a large delegation of Minnesotans have made the trip to represent the local industry. The scheduled presenters at BIO 2009 include scientists and doctors from 3M, IBM, the Mayo Clinic, Hormel Institute and University of Minnesota.

Drew Flaada, IBM

Last week I spoke with Drew Flaada, director of emerging solutions development for IBM, who is scheduled to talk about the company’s collaboration with Mayo and the U of M in Rochester.

“The work that’s being done in Rochester is unique and critical,” Flaada said.

IBM collaborates with many other organizations on health-care technology, Flaada said, but what makes Rochester unique is that the company’s campus is literally down the road from the Mayo Clinic. In a smaller city, the two large employers have had an opportunity to create a “third culture” between the companies.

Medical research in areas such as gene sequencing is generating huge amounts of data for health researchers, and maintaining and studying that data requires massive storage capacity and computing power.

“Not only do you have a lot of data to deal with, the computational requirements you’re dealing with are just incredibly complex,” Flaada said. “The mathematics behind these type of endeavors are tremendously huge… You have to be able to take these huge amounts of data and compare them with other data sets that are the same size.”

That’s where IBM comes in. It’s been collaborating with Mayo for nearly a decade, developing supercomputers that will let researchers mine health data for new knowledge. The advancement of supercomputers is allowing researchers to tackle calculations of a greater and greater scale, with less waiting around for the results.

One example: a researcher could take the genetic profiles of a group of patients with a certain disease, and then search to see if there’s a gene they have in common that might be a cause. But with billions of pieces of data included in a single gene sequence, the computers needed to run them are tens of thousands of times faster than what you’re probably reading this on.

IBM’s supercomputers are measured in petaflops. A computer with 1 petaflop of capacity can do a million billion calculations per second. That’s roughly equal to the strength of 140,000 laptop computers.

The volume of data available to researchers is growing, the speed of supercomputers is accelerating and the understanding of how to use computers for interpreting data is growing, Flaada said.

Those developments lead him to believe health-care research is on the cusp of something big.

“If you look at different areas of science, there are times when you can see definite inflection points, where the science changes,” Flaada said. “The rate of discovery, I believe, within the biosciences is going to hit this inflection point very soon that’s just going to be staggering as far as the amount of advancements.”

“These kinds of things happen maybe once in a lifetime, looking at it from a scientific standpoint,” he said. “This is extremely exciting and we really, I think, are on the ground floor of what’s taking place.”

I’m spending the afternoon doing research for a magazine article about cloud computing. When my eyes tired of reading, I turned to YouTube for some educational videos.

Here’s my quick Pick Five Videos for Understanding Cloud Computing:

These first two attempt to visually explain the concept of cloud computing.

And now in with the talking heads. These next two videos touch on the lack of agreement over what cloud computing actually means. The latter introduces a term I’d never heard before called “cloudwashing.”

And if you’ve made it through the previous four videos, you might understand cloud computing well enough to get the humor in this song parody via Funny or Die:

Update: I missed this one in my original post. Thanks to @HighTechDad for sharing.

Minnesota’s economy—and identity—have been linked for decades to the strength of its life science community, from groundbreaking research at the University of Minnesota to global Fortune 500 companies like Medtronic and General Mills.

But the state is losing its competitive edge, and staying above average is going to require targeted planning and investment in key areas, according to a recent report by the BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota and Deloitte Consulting.

“Destination 2025 Roadmap: Recommendations To Grow Minnesota’s Life Science Industry” is a 20-year strategic plan based on input from more than 600 public, private and academic experts. (Continue reading…)