How's your summer going? The students are gone, Art Fair traffic isn't in Ann Arbor yet, and it's time for more video gaming fun. Heart Shaped Games founder Scott Brodie recently sat down with us to talk about the Michigan studio's upcoming release: We Are the Caretakers, an afro-futurist sci-fi game that follows the journey of a group of wildlife caretakers discovering everything they thought they knew about their role protecting the environment is wrong. Check out the trailer below.

There's a new tech company hiring in Ann Arbor, and its biggest challenge is keeping up with growth. Gradient Valley is "Southeast Michigan's premiere provider of machine learning solutions," a machine learning and artificial intelligence consultancy built out of a partnership between owner Keith Bourne and Arbormoon Software owner Dave Koziol. Keith Bourne tells us he started this company in 2018 after doing similar work for 3 years because the cost of working with machine learning and AI is dropping and a lot of companies are interested.

On Main Street in Ann Arbor, right next to the wedding dress shop and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tearoom, Workantile co-working space is celebrating its tenth anniversary. It's a simple concept: professionals can rent a desk or drop in and use the space's private conference rooms and phone rooms, or utilize the space for group meetups. Workantile hosts the Festifool luminary workshops, parties, and get-togethers of various kinds, but it's a pretty low-key place during the day. There are two rows of desks around a conference table up front on the first floor. Then a kitchen stocked with coffee and snacks, several private rooms including a private conference room, and up the open staircase is another set of desks. Workantile has just opened the options for dedicated work stations, so people can leave their things longer in the space.

The story broke on Reddit a couple of weeks ago with a story by Washtenaw Community College student Marie Wood, and has gotten a lot of response on Slack back channels and in various local news outlets. Washtenaw Community College was blaming their IT department for a campus-wide outage in June of 2017 that lasted 3 days and using it as an opportunity to outsource all IT to a company with a somewhat dismal reputation for quality, laying off 31 full-time staff members or offering them the opportunity to work for the new service provider, though with lower benefits. On May 22nd, WCC announced on its website that the school was planning to outsource its entire IT department. “The network outage prompted us to conduct a comprehensive review of our entire IT infrastructure and staffing,” said WCC President Dr. Rose B. Bellanca. “We have a responsibility to ensure that the college has a sustainable, secure and robust IT infrastructure that meets the needs of all WCC stakeholders, including students, faculty, staff and community members now and into the foreseeable future.”