Dan Haugen

I had an energizing conversation Thursday with the guys at Element Six Media, a green advertising and branding firm in Minneapolis that builds campaigns around sustainable earth materials and social media buzz. I’ll be unpacking my interview notes in the next couple of weeks for a story on The Line, but I wanted to share one snippet now that particularly lingered with me: This is the New Economy. If we’re waiting for things to turn around or resume to normal, we’re wasting time because this is the new normal. Here’s how co-founder Maikel van de Mortel put it:

“We don’t talk in terms of things turning around. This is the new reality, and we’re at ground zero. The question is: how are we going to build up. The problem is that not everybody has come to peace yet with that new reality, and as long as that doesn’t happen, if you’re not at that point, then you’re going to struggle. The truth of the matter is it’s not going to go back to what it was. We’re not going to see profit margins as high anymore as they used to be. We’re not going to be able to charge those dollar amounts anymore as we were used to. Every single industry is going to have to face some realities, because people are going to object. It’s just part of the new economy. Every day that we talk about how things were, we’re waiting for things to turn around, is time that we spend wasting. That’s what’s really unfortunate. We can’t waste our time. We can’t afford it.”

Way too much on my plate this morning, so I need to keep this brief. I’ll be unpacking my thoughts/notes today on last night’s Policy & A Pint on “Cities, Bicycling and the Future of Getting Around.” I’m also going to be talking/playing phone tag with a few more entrepreneurs I want to feature in next week’s issue of The Line.

I’m going to get straight into the links now:

SUSTAINABILITY
The Seward Co-op celebrated its new 32-kilowatt rooftop solar photovoltaic system with a “commissioning party” on Thursday. The array was installed by Solarflow Energy, a Seward neighborhood company that is trying to prove a solar leasing model. I wrote about ‘em this week for The Line.

MEDICAL DEVICES
ProUroCare , an Eden Prairie medical device startup, announced an extra infusion of cash from its existing investors. The company makes an imaging product that it believes can help doctors diagnose and document prostrate cancers. Thomas Lee wrote late last year that the company may have a hard time convincing reimbursers that the product is necessary. I was humming the Yeah Yeah Yeahs after reading this story in the Star Tribune this morning: an airline worker in Arkansas came across a container of human heads and head parts on their way to Medtronic that were apparently not packed or labeled properly. The state confiscated the body parts until it can confirm they were obtained legally.

ECONOMY
The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development announced May job numbers on Thursday. Minnesota employers created a net 5,600 jobs during the month while unemployment fell to an even 7 percent from 7.1 percent in April. It was the second consecutive month of job gains — a first since Jan.-Feb. 2008. U.S. Census hiring is responsible for a large chunk of the increase, but private employers in the state still created 2,600 jobs. Construction and financial services were the only sectors that didn’t see growth. I spoke with an official from an IT staffing agency in the Twin Cities, who told me that it’s placing a lot more web and app developers than it was a year ago, although much of the activity is temporary contract work.

A student group at the University of Minnesota wants the school to set a time line for phasing out the burning of coal on campus.

Students Beyond Coal, part of a national Sierra Club campaign, will stage a rally today against the fuel, which is a major source of greenhouse gases and other pollution.

“We want to support what the University has done already” to reduce its coal use and energy consumption, said Siri Simons, a sophomore environmental studies student, “and we want to pressure them to keep moving in that direction.”

But is completely cutting coal from the equation realistic? Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy Creal builds motorcycles that are meant to catch the eye’s attention.

That effect is intensified here in this sprawling, basement shop room beneath Minneapolis Community & Technical College (MCTC) where a pair of Creal’s custom choppers and all their flashy chrome curves share the space with rows of dull, boxy fans and air ducts used by the college’s HVAC program.

Creal, 23, made a name for himself in Chicago teaching people how to build these bikes from scratch during a series of three-day boot camps. The motorcycles he and his students built over the past four years are one-of-a-kind bikes. And that will certainly be true of Creal’s latest machine. Its most distinguishing feature: It’ll run on purified water instead of gasoline. (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.