At a recent lunch meeting of Ann Arbor’s A2B3 Group we went around the table and asked who would buy a car from a company in bankruptcy. Most said no, some said they have never bought a new car and a couple of people said they walk, bicycle and take the bus. What are your thoughts?

Email from a UM Computer Science Professor

. . . My understanding is that Ann Arbor has a number of companies and entrepreneurs that are in need of software development help (Amy can provide more complete information). Companies often require software help, but are unable to pay for full-or-part-time developers. Many
entrepreneurs do not have seed money, and need software help to develop prototypes.

In teaching 285 and 398 for the past few years, I’ve talked with a number of students who were very interested in working on real software projects. I think there is value in discussing how to connect
motivated and interested UM computer science students with local companies and entrepreneurs. The companies and entrepreneurs get software help, and students get real software development experience. Other benefits include the potential of retaining local talent and helping to grow a technology base in Ann Arbor. Given the Michigan economy, I think there is a real need and opportunity here. . . .

I won’t be doing a full product review in this post (maybe we’ll post more comments in this thread later on). But, I wanted to highlight one outstanding feature that just makes my life much simpler.

Email-CRM integration made simple:

HighriseHQ lets you set up an email drop box, that you should save as an address in your email client (whatever you use). While emailing, BCC this address or forward an old email to the dropbox and like magic the info appears in your HighriseHQ dashboard, recent history. And the person you were corresponding with in the email automagically becomes a contact in the CRM system with the contacts email filled in. In the dashboard, you can then just click on the new contact’s name to get to the contact editor view, where you can easily add additional notes or tags. It also takes about 30 seconds to add a note and a task such as phoning the contact in a week. A seamless CRM application, it’s best claim is the Zen like simplicity that is characteristic of other 37 Signals products.

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.