This past weekend, Jesse and I left our respective coasts and headed up to Madison, Wisconsin for the Networked Insights launch event. While the Midwest is not unfamiliar territory to me (go Cubs!), this was both of our first visits to Wisconsin. The jokes were flying about cheese, brats and beer leading up to the trip, but Madison proved to be a really great town that seems to perfectly connect state government, a huge university, a growing technology industry and some big name companies such as American Girl and Trek Bikes all in one modest-sized city. According to Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights, Madison also has the highest number of restaurants per capita in the U.S. (and he’s a foodie with a deferred acceptance to the Culinary Institute of America, so I’ll take his word for it.)
Friday night was the Networked Insights launch party at the new Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in the heart of Madison on State Street. It was a great venue and brought together a great crowd of techies, socialites, and friends and family of Networked Insights. Networked Insights, who launched officially on November 7th, gives companies a way to create customer communities on their website and then tap the conversations and interactions customers are having in that network to gain rich insights and inform their business. It’s a new form of market research that is driven by the customer, not by the questions a company wants answers to, and is changing the way companies, such as The Guild, are going about understanding their customers.
Saturday delivered the classic Madison experience, beginning with a University of Wisconsin football game against Michigan (quite the rivalry!), a bratwurst and a tailgate…oh, and some beer, of course.
Madison is definitely a growing technology center with several cool startups like Networked Insights and JellyFish beginning to populate the business scene. The University of Wisconsin also has one of the premier computer science programs in the country, which, as can be seen in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, is a vital component to a vibrant technology ecosystem. The university also provides quite a bit of funding to various early stage ventures in the Madison and greater Wisconsin area. The challenge seems to be getting the talent to stay in Madison, but as the technology industry continues to grow and more opportunities become available for these students in Madison, retention will become far easier and will continue to power and grow the great things in tech going on in “Mad Town.”
(L to R: Jesse Odell, Dan Neely – CEO of Networked Insights, Michael Mitchell – Chief Experience Officer of Networked Insights, Jeremy Frank)