Geonetric introduces internal start-up company Blaze

By Angela Holmes

CEDAR RAPIDS – Since the Kansas City-based forum started earlier this year in the Corridor, 1 Million Cups has featured start-up entrepreneurs at weekly presentations alternating between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

Last week at the Vault Coworking & Collaboration Space in the Guaranty Bank building in downtown Cedar Rapids, an “intrapreneurship” was featured for the first time. David Sturtz, director of product strategy at Cedar Rapids-based web development company Geonetric, gave a six-minute presentation and fielded questions about his emerging company, Blaze, a start-up within and supported by Geonetric.

Mr. Sturtz, who has worked for Geonetric for seven years, and John Oberreuter, senior application developer, are working on Blaze full-time in the Vault space. Blaze will eventually move to Geonetric’s new building in the New Bohemia District in southeast Cedar Rapids, which is set to open early next year. Vault will manage one floor of the Geonetric building, which will be set aside as a business incubator and coworking space.

With Blaze, Mr. Sturtz hopes to raise awareness of content strategy along different platforms.
“We realized there wasn’t a tool out there to help content strategists,” he said. “Content is often an afterthought. We want to drive the trend forward to think about content first. Businesses are producing more content – not just press releases, but through videos, Pinterest and social media.”

Problems with the current authoring-publishing loop include outdated websites; inability to keep up with data and users not being able to find information.

“There’s not a lot of great tools,” Mr. Sturtz said. “People are annoyed about it; they are tweeting about it in the middle of the night.”

From the tweets, it is apparent people are dealing with the annoyance with alcohol and music, he said. That’s why he’s trying to create website to inventory, audit and analyze online content, identify gaps and set up a planning process.

“It’s not about publishing as much as it is about evaluating,” he said.

An internal alpha site has been up and running for about six weeks at Geonetric. While Geonetric’s customer base is primarily health-care organizations, Blaze is seeking a more universal customer base.

Mr. Sturtz appreciates the support Geonetric has given the project, but admits Blaze is a work in progress.

“The intrapreneurial process is something we’re still trying to figure out,” he said. “Geonetric is open to this type of thing. The level of focus needed is incredible.”

Ben Dillon, Geonetric’s vice president, said the company is tweaking the process, seeing what works and what doesn’t.

“It’s not a formal process with Geontric,” he said. “At this point, everything is on the table. We have an agile marketing group; we start putting things out there right away.”

He explained that often with long-term planning, situations can change in six months, but companies usually go forward even if the plan is not working.

“How can we fail fast and continue to evaluate,” he said of Geonetric’s philosophy.
The intrapreneurship is exciting for the 14-year-old company, Mr. Dillon said.

“We are at a point where we miss the start-up component,” he said. “This allows us to live vicariously through David and John.”

Mr. Sturtz said he is looking for people to join the beta group to give feedback. He is also looking for people with experience developing beta.

For more information, visit www.blazecontent.com

The next 1 Million Cups will be held at the Iowa City Area Development Group (ICAD) office in Iowa City from 9-10 a.m. Aug. 21, and will feature local web development company Componica. Steve Mitchell will pitch his software development company, which specializes in image processing, pattern recognition and graphical user interfaces; making computers see, hear and think.

Componica originated in Iowa City in 2004 and was founded with the purpose of finding practical applications for machine learning, pattern recognition and image processing. Memorize Words, its flagship product, is a suite of iPhone applications, and is designed to help users memorize thousands of words in months and still be able to recall all of them.