Doug Rothwell, CEO Detroit Renaissance, talks about the Road to Renaissance and in this clip focuses on the creative sector and investing in business accelerators. Doug also touches upon
Connecting local companies to UM students
2 Comments Published by drron June 25th, 2007 in Recruiting.Recently, when attempting to recruit UM Computer Science students I found myself facing a number of obstacles. UM seems to have a lot going on for large companies to recruit, but as a small local company it was not easy for me. Over the years I have very successfully utilized students from the School of Information, but that was the result of personal contacts and relationship building over the years. Since, these days people under 25 are using many new ways to network, such as Facebook, I thought it would be interesting to seek comments from people as to how we can get beyond just postings and resumes in a database and think about employing some Web 2.0 social networking ideas. Continue reading ‘Connecting local companies to UM students’
Michigan Man Arrested for Using Cafe’s Free Wi-Fi from his Car
1 Comment Published by drron May 28th, 2007 in legislation.Read this story in Ars Technica. I wonder if this will cause Michigan legislators to think about the law here and whether we need to rethink a few things, if we are to achieve an economic turnound. Interestingly, I came across this story in a post to the A2B3 list by former Ann Arborite, Alan Gutierrez. A2B3 (Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop) is a weekly lunch meeting organized by Ed Vielmetti. At this meeting I often turn on my notebook computer and access open wi-fi from somewhere else. I wonder if we’ll have to post a lookout for the cops next time?
A new Customer Relationship Management system called HighriseHQ was finally released recently. Here at MediaRica we’ve been fans of 37 Signals products for a while and we have been anxiously awaiting this release from one of the most highly acclaimed Web 2.0 companies, 37 Signals. We run all of our projects using Basecamp and all of our new development projects are in Ruby on Rails. The people at 37Signals created the Rails framework for the Ruby programming language in order to help the development of Basecamp. Continue reading ‘Using new HighriseHQ CRM tool from 37 Signals’
Coworking, Shared Space for Independents
6 Comments Published by drron April 26th, 2007 in New Workspaces.Several of us regularly attend Ed Vielmetti’s A2B3 Thursday lunch at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor. Among many of the varied topics we have been talking about is the concept of “New Workspaces,” which has had the attention of a number of people. We want to have a shared space downtown with wi-fi, where we could bring our computer and do work while surrounded by others, who might teach us something while we’re there. So, people aren’t so much interested in incubator space with a shared fax machine, as they are in building a community of people to share ideas. To see where coworking is happening in Ann Arbor, see the calendar at Microcoworking.
Coworking is the name many people are using to describe experiments in this area. In San Francisco, a group called The Hat Factory, set up a space in what used to be, you guessed it, a hat factory. They’re open whenever there is a keyholder working. The shot shown here is a still from their web site’s video tour, which I recommend watching. These sorts of experiments are currently in existence all over the world and the Coworking Wiki is a good place to get info about what other folks are doing.
Another good article about coworking is Workplace Democracy – The emergence of a community of independent workers by Mark Dowds, who founded the Indoorplayground, a coworking environment in Toronto, Canada.
It is time for people to start thinking of new ideas for a Michigan economic turnaround. As such, a group of us will be writing about tools we use that help us to be more productive. If you’d like to find out about becoming an author here, please contact us.


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