Category Archives: Technology

Revenue Producers: Where They Are, What They Do

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Sure, all businesses (or at least a very high percentage) are important contributors to society in some form or fashion. But for the sake of a research paper, the Kauffman Foundation identified Companies That Matter as the following: scalable, quickly reaching $100 million or more in revenues; generating jobs quickly and broadly; and disproportionate creators of wealth, directly through profits and salaries and indirectly through equity.

More from Kauffman on the research and what it found:

In the paper, "The Constant: Companies that Matter," Kauffman Foundation Senior Fellow Paul Kedrosky explores the rate and founding locations of companies in the United States that "matter" from 1980 to present.

"Companies unable to reach $100 million in revenues are still relevant to the economy," Kedrosky says. "But the $100-million firms meet an entirely different threshold that gives cities, states and countries an even greater economic advantage."

Anywhere from 125 to 250 companies per year (out of roughly 552,000 new employer firms) are founded in the United States that reach $100 million in revenues. The largest contributors, in percentage terms, are from the consumer discretionary and industrial sectors. Taking into account sectoral contribution to U.S. GDP, the information technology sector produces more $100-million companies than might be expected.

Geographically, the most productive region in terms of $100-million company production is the U.S. southeast (Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana) with the Pacific region (California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii) coming in second. Following closely behind are the Mid-Atlantic and Central regions. Most regions are balanced with regard to sector, except for the Pacific region, which produces only slightly fewer $100-million information technology companies than the rest of the country combined, most of which are in California.

The United States averages 20 technology companies founded per year that reach $100 million in revenues, 17 of which are in 7 states: California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Texas. Of these 17, 4 are usually in California. However, in the 1990s, California's share of $100-million technology companies was around 35 percent. That share has declined to around 20 percent in recent years.

"Looking forward, we will most likely see even more changes regarding the locations and sectors of these companies that matter," said Kedrosky. "With the prevalence of lean startups, accelerators and fractional entrepreneurship, and the declining cost of company creation, entrepreneurship is less expensive and more widely available to prospective entrepreneurs."

Lt. Governors Skillman, Ellspermann Find Great Value in Crane NSWC

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Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center (in Crane, Indiana) has a reputation as "the best kept secret" in Indiana when it comes to innovation and public/private partnerships that are changing what is possible in America. For a full story on how Crane is enhancing the state's entrepreneurship culture, keep an eye out for our July/August edition of BizVoice magazine. Our creative director and I were fortunate to receive a tour of the base and the Westgate @ Crane Technology Park to learn about what's happening there — all that isn't classified, of course. But it appears we aren't the only ones who are impressed. Two of Indiana's most esteemed legislators also have some kind words about the base:

Becky Skillman did admirable work as Indiana's Lt. Gov. during Mitch Daniels' popular administration. After leaving office, she landed back in her home region of Southern Indiana, and is leading Radius Indiana. Additionally, our current Lt. Gov, Sue Ellspermann, also offered remarks on how vital Crane is for Hoosier innovation. See below.

Becky Skillman, President/CEO, Radius Indiana
Radius Indiana serves as a catalyst to help support and promote the use of civili military innovation through technology transfer and entrepreneurship. We work with our network of partners, including Westgate @ Crane, the ISBDC (Indiana Small Business Development Center), and many others to help start-up companies connect to resources they need in order to promote entrepreneurial success and economic growth within our 8-county region and beyond. With the low-cost, business-friendly environment that exists in Indiana, we are perfectly positioned and ready for growth within the defense industry.


Sue Ellspermann, Lt. Gov.
In the past I have enjoyed working with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane to increase the capture of intellectual property and the potential tech transfer opportunities available by identifying an external non-military application and potential market.

Our administration’s vision for Indiana includes focusing on economic development within Indiana's defense sector. One of the goals of the Indiana Office of Defense Development is to leverage the incredible assets at Crane and our federal research labs, including identifying high-potential technologies and developing strategies to successfully commercialize them. There is growing interaction and collaboration between the private sector and our major universities to bring technological innovations developed at Crane to market, to bolster the economy and create more high-tech, high-wage jobs in Indiana.

Mobile Madness!

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Digiday explains why smartphones and mobile devices are no longer wants, but necessities, in today's world. Here are 15 stats that all brands should know about mobile:

  • The U.S. is at 101% penetration. (CTIA)
  • 1 billion smartphones will be shipped globally this year. (Gartner)
  • Apple beats all other phone manufacturers in customer satisfaction for smartphones. (J.D. Power and Associates)
  • 59% of mobile users are as comfortable with mobile advertising as they are with TV and online ads. (InMobi)
  • 85%  of mobile users prefer mobile apps over the mobile Web. (Compuware)
  • 75% of Americans bring their phones to the bathroom. (11 Mark)
  • 15% have answered their mobile phone while having sex. (Wilson Electronics)
  • Mobile advertising revenue is expected to reach over $11 billion worldwide this year, up from over $9 billion last year. (Gartner)
  • Mobile drives 23%  of paid-search clicks. (The Search Agency)
  • Americans spend an average of 158 minutes every day on their smartphones and tablets. (Flurry)
  • 15% of mobile users prefer to check financial accounts on smartphones and tablets. (Quicken)
  • 42% of consumers using a mobile device while in-store spend more than $1,000. (Interactive Advertising Bureau)
  • Mobile now accounts for 12% of Americans’ media consumption time, triple its share in 2009. (eMarketer)
  • 39% of mobile users access social networks from their phones. (Business Insider)
  • Mobile commerce will account for 15% of total e-commerce sales this year. (eMarketer)

Hat tip to Chamber staffer Glenn Harkness for the story.

SmartFile Awards Innovation in Bake-Off Contest

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Our communications VP Tom Schuman penned this blog back in February about SmartFile's technology bake-off contest. If you dig innovation — and would like to see more of it in Indiana — you'll be on board with this. The winners were announced last week, and congrats to IUPUI students Ani Chan and Manpreet Singh for their honors.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so simultaneously shocked and happy in my life,” said Chan. “Aside from being able to hold one of those ridiculously huge checks like a lottery winner, the best part of the competition was the validation that comes from building something from start to finish. Sometimes as a college student, it’s easy for your projects to go unnoticed, so it’s nice to receive feedback and interest from likeminded people and successful business leaders.”

Indiana college students were challenged to develop an open source application that interacts with the newly released SmartFile API over a period of 50 days. To help teams finish development, SmartFile hosted a 24-hour “Bake-Off-A-Thon” a week prior to submission to help finalize development. Registered students accepted the challenge to showcase their talents, but only nine qualified for the finals. Five of Indianapolis’ top business thinkers listened to five-minute pitches from the finalists before then scoring each “app” electronically in the following five categories: Innovation, Utility, Use of SmartFile Platform, Design and User Experience.

The top four teams re-pitched their applications to the Bake-Off party audience who then voted electronically before “Team Octodog” was crowned champion. Purdue University students, Eric Lovelace and Levi Miller, from  team "Winnovation” were awarded second place and received $5,000 for their mobile-app “SmartBox.”  Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology students, Erik Sanders and AJ Piergiovanni, from team  "Dangling Pointers” were awarded third place and received $2,000 for their web-app “ReciCopy.”

John Hurley, SmartFile’s President and Co-Founder, said the judges were impressed with the caliber of work, which made choosing the winners difficult. “But Team Octodog amazed everyone with an impressive and functional application with the right combination of entrepreneurial spark, innovation, real-world viability and skillful development.”

SmartFile’s Bake-Off was not only created to inspire and facilitate engagement between this next generation of programmers, but also to help develop the ecosystem for SmartFile’s new “platform” initiative.  During the ceremony, Hurley announced that “the online file platform” from SmartFile would now be FREE for developers who sign up for a beta account. Offering unlimited transfer and 100GB of storage space allows SmartFile to cater to the underserved development community. An official announcement for the online file platform initiative will be made in the coming week.

For more information about the ‘2013 SmartFile Platform Bake-Off’, please visit www.smartfile.com/bakeoff/. More details about SmartFile’s development can be found at www.smartfile.com/developers/.

Reporting Truth is More Important Than Speed

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When you work as a reporter at a small community newspaper, you learn early on that making a mistake – grammatical, factual or otherwise – will typically earn you a public flogging by way of scathing letter to the editor. So, you double- and triple-check your facts before printing.

But, something has happened in this 24/7 news cycle and Twitter-as-news cycle. Accuracy and truth in reporting has become less important than being the first to break a story.

I was shocked to observe it happening during the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. For example: The name of the shooter most news outlets had been using all day was the wrong name (it was the shooter’s brother). The first victim – the shooter’s mother – wasn’t, in fact, a teacher at that school. At one point there was a second shooter, and then there wasn’t.

Bad information. Just plain wrong. But it was out there and people were repeating it. Re-tweeting it.

It seems history is repeating itself with the Boston Marathon attack.

Shortly after the blasts, one news outlet said 17 people were killed. We all know that the actual number is three. Another outlet reported that a Saudi national was in custody and being guarded at a local hospital as a suspect. It turns out the innocent man was held down by frantic people in the crowd who thought he’d had something to do with it. He was never in police custody as a suspect; just recovering at a local hospital, like so many others.

Then, two days after the bombings, news outlets and social media erupted that a suspect had been arrested. An hour later: No arrests. It wasn’t until the Boston Police Department and FBI confirmed there had been no arrest made in the attack that the claims died down.

It dawned on me during the early moments of the Boston Marathon attack that as news consumers, we’re all part of the problem. We all want the information as quickly as possible. We re-tweet and share on Facebook the moment things are announced, whether or not stories contain a credible source. An “unnamed” or “unofficial” source does not count as credible, people.

Like so many Americans, Sandy Hook will always be on my heart. As a journalist, my mind will also linger on the shooter’s brother, who not only lost his family and has to live with the pain his brother caused, but whose name was vilified for the better part of a day, despite his innocence.

In the future, do your own fact-checking and wait for a named source. Contact the news outlet to let them know you value accuracy over rapidity.

It’s time to demand better.

Tricky Social Media Rules on Whistleblowing

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The California Chamber's HR Watchdog Blog delivers this complicated tale, explaining a potential victim can even be fired for improperly using social media to document undesirable behavior.

A tech company, SendGrid, recently fired a female employee, Adria Richards, who used Twitter to complain about sexual jokes made by male employees from a different company.

During a conference in San Francisco, Richards tweeted that it was “Not cool” that the men were making inappropriate sexual jokes. She used her phone to take a picture of the men sitting behind her and then used Twitter to post the picture.

One of the men in the photo was terminated by his employer, San-Francisco based PlayHaven.

But Richards also found herself in the middle of a social media storm and was ultimately fired by her employer. SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin blogged that Richards was not fired because she reported offensive conduct, but because of how she reported it – using Twitter to post photographs and “publicly shaming” the offenders.

Franklin also went on to say that Richard’s actions caused division amongst the developer community that Richards serves as part of her job and that she can no longer be effective.

But this is what often happens when an employee complains of inappropriate conduct: A complaint is made, which may create division at work and with customers; people may take sides. Regardless of such division and the ultimate outcome of any investigation, the employee is supposed to be protected from retaliation for complaining of harassment or discrimination.

This situation poses difficult questions: Can an employee complain in any manner he/she sees fit? Airing information across social media platforms and posting pictures of co-workers, customers or collaborators?

The law provides strong protections for those who complain about harassment or discrimination. As demonstrated by recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board, the law also protects employees who engage in concerted activity with other employees to improve their working conditions — which may include employees complaining to each other over social media.

Start-up Founder Laments Simple “For-Profit” Approach

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Start-up cofounder Rand Fishkin has an interesting post on his blog about how simple "for-profit" thinking may not be optimal if the view is just short-term. I'd argue some start-ups aren't profit-focused enough sometimes, but his general outlook is worth noting and he makes some valid points about the nature of doing business today.

Apple as a whole may be worth more, but Google’s trendline, particularly the past 6 months, is far more favorable. Fred’s assertion is that this stems from investors’ sophisticated understanding that Google controls so much of the data, software, and ecosystem around computing. Google’s mission isn’t to make as much money as possible, certainly not in the short term anyway. Google is aiming for total domination of their (ever-expanding) areas of focus. Revenue and profits are merely a helpful side-effect of these efforts.

Later in the week, courtesy of Dan Ariely, I watched this video about Hancock Bank’s remarkable $1.4Billion growth following Hurricane Katrina (it’s worth watching all the way through, but if you don’t have 6 full minutes, start at the 3:44 mark).

The mission of making money isn’t just boring and stale. It’s hard to get excited about. It’s hard to get behind. It’s hard to build a fan-base around. It’s hard to hire for. It’s hard to scale. And it’s hard to stick with something through the muck of despair and failure that inevitably occur if you’re not pursuing something bigger than yourselves – bigger than money.

I don’t mean to suggest that those who relentlessly pursue wealth at the cost of all else don’t occassionally succeed. But I would argue that most businesses that have changed the world in the technology age have been pursuing a mission beyond the financial.

Evansville’s Flanders Celebrates Major Milestone

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The video above tells the story of Roy Patterson and Flanders, an Evansville motor-maker that is celebrating 65 years in business and a reputation as a major player in the industrial motor industry. The company tells its impressive story:

The FLANDERS history features family patriarch Roy Patterson, his son and grandsons telling the story of FLANDERS’ impact on heavy industry – especially mining – through years of motor repair innovations and other engineering breakthroughs that have increased production, lowered operating costs and improved safety in mining, metals milling, utilities, alternative energy and other heavy industries.

Born in 1926, Patterson became a Flanders Electric employee after serving as chief electrician on a US avy warship during World War II. When he joined the company in 1947, the two-man shop mostly epaired residential furnace motor blowers and 50-horsepower pump motors used in coal mining.
Patterson bought the company in 1962, retaining its original name.

Today FLANDERS designs and manufactures motors as large as 7,000 horsepower. The company also ells and services motors, controls, drives, power systems and automation solutions that are known or increasing production, lowering operating costs and improving safety in mining, metals, utilities,
alternative energy and other heavy industries.

Roy Patterson’s son, Dave Patterson, now serves as company president while Roy continues to stay nvolved as chairman and CEO. Dave’s eldest son, Allen, acts as chief operating officer.

“All the research and interviewing that was done to create our company story really put perspective on how far this company has come – and why we have found success,” Dave Patterson notes. “Our approach to doing business really is captured with our tagline, which is ‘Listen. Innovate. Serve.’

Solving customer problems has driven us since the beginning. And our employees are our greatest asset because we’re all of the same mindset — which is to serve and solve problems for customers – whateverit takes. We don’t give up.”

Want to be ‘Smart?’ Ditch Your Smartphone for a While

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Every so often, you observe an encounter so poignant that it must be shared.

Here is the scene I observed this morning on a crowded elevator: A young man enters, absorbed with his smartphone. In steps an older man, who pushes the button to another floor. Looking around, he spots the first gentleman staring at the phone.

“You know there’s life happening all around you, right?” the older man says with a smile.

The first man takes a beat and chuckles awkwardly, not sure how to respond and not sure if he should take it as a slight or just a social commentary. I’m sure I spotted a red blush creeping up around his neck and face. I should have gone up a few extra floors to see how it played out.

I told a co-worker about the encounter and she added how she’d seen a news story about a woman that had walked into an open manhole because she was distracted on her phone. A little Google search confirms her story. It also turns up a 2012 study by BMJ (British Medical Journal), in which pedestrians were observed at 20 high-risk intersections and their behaviors recorded. Those who were texting took an extra 1.87 seconds to cross and were almost four times as likely to display at least one unsafe crossing behavior (not looking both ways, ignoring traffic lights, etc.).

Not only are we missing out on life, but technology addiction can lead to accident and injury!

I’m just as guilty as the next person; I play on my phone and listen to music on the way to the parking garage after work. Also, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to stop taking my phone into the bathroom with me. The bathroom! (Don’t even pretend I’m the only one.)

Another danger: This is breeding a new generation of workaholics. While technology allows convenience by being able to work wherever and whenever, employees who are constantly “on” aren’t getting time to relax and recover for the next work day.

Some companies have caught on to how this negatively impacts their workers. In 2011, Volkswagen created a new policy that its servers would stop routing company emails 30 minutes after the workday ended and would not resume until 30 minutes before the workday began (the rule doesn’t apply to senior management). Other companies are tackling the issue as well, realizing that blurring the line of work and personal life is bad for employee well-being and business.

What’s that famous proverb? Oh yes, “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy,” seems appropriate at this moment.

Do yourself a favor: Put your smartphone away today. Encourage your employees to rest and relax on their off hours. Remember the wise words spoken in my elevator and stop missing the “life happening all around you.”

National Award a Good Sign for Greensburg Sign Maker

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Shawn Green of Green Sign Co. was recently presented with an award for the 2012 United States Sign Council Design Contest. The winning design was in the category of Electronic Message Center. Green Signs designed, manufactured and installed the sign for Erich K Collision in North Vernon.

Based in Greensburg, Green Signs serves the Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky areas, and the greater Midwest. The company provides complete sign service and sign installation (specializing in modern LED Electronic Message Centers, electric signs, custom built signs, awnings and award winning sign designs). In addition to traditional signage, Green also provides full color vinyl graphics, vehicle wraps and logo design.

At the young age of 15, Shawn Green took over the family business after his father, Bill, passed away in 1986. He has been honing his craft ever since.

If you have signage needs, be sure to consider contacting this long-running Hoosier business and Indiana Chamber member.