Automation is revolutionizing the economy and our lives. On October 15th, in Columbus, Ohio, leaders of the automation revolution including Clinc co-founder Lingjia Tang, StockX COO Greg Schwartz, and Andy Lonsberry CEO of Path Robotics will gather to discuss the rapid changes affecting all industries through automation.
Ten years ago, this editor was writing about climate change and green technology that could make a difference through Inhabitat, the web’s largest green design blog. It did help get the word out with millions of monthly subscribers. We Cronicle founders even got to drive Elon Musk’s personal first-gen all-electric Tesla Roadster for a test drive before the company had a test fleet. Seems like ages ago now that you could walk into Tesla’s old Los Altos headquarters and get thrown the keys to Elon Musk’s personal vehicle. It kind of was. Burnout is common among people working on climate change or other urgent global issues, and it wasn’t easy watching one deadline after another to stop climate change pass while the world was actually accelerating in the wrong direction.
Starting today, Friday September 20th at 4:00 pm and running through Sunday September 22 4:00 PM, the Into the Dataverse hackathon in Ann Arbor will explore AI-enabled user interfaces “that can intuitively capture both structured and non-structured maintenance data, and associated maintainer actions, in an efficient and user-friendly manner to produce more accurate maintenance logs.” You still have time to get involved by signing up through Eventbrite at the link below. It’s free to register, and food and snacks are provided through the weekend. Here are more details from the event website.
Several months ago during our launch, Cronicle interviewed Censys co-founder David Adrian to hear about how a University of Michigan student went from falling into a research project to avoid a machine learning class to having 30,000 customers. Since that interview, Censys has expanded into their first-floor suite on Ann Arbor’s Main Street from the second floor, planned a security-themed tech talk for the fall with a colleague from Palo Alto, expanded from 15 people to 28, and just publicly announced their new Censys Enterprise platform tool that curates data sets for users so they don’t have to wait 10 months for a data scientist to analyze the massive amount of information Censys can deliver about their servers, domains, and other assets online.
Stop what you’re doing and check out this list of Detroit-made podcasts. Included in that list: IT in the D, a podcast by “The Geek” Dave Phillips and “The Sales Guy” Bob Waltenspiel, is all about tech in the Motor City. (Also check out Motor City Geek, and even classes to create your own podcast based in Detroit and Royal Oak.) We caught up with IT in the D co-founder Bob Waltenspiel to ask about how IT in the D got to be a popular local podcast about and for Detroit tech.
Ann Arbor’s Voxel51, an AI startup that analyzes video for self-driving automotive applications and more, was featured last week in TechCrunch for its seed funding round raising $2 million, and because the company was chosen as a top 5 AI/machine learning company across the U.S. selected as a TechCrunch Top Pick to present at Tech Disrupt 2019. AI is growing up, and startups like Voxel51 are getting out there. That’s because Voxel51 is using adaptive tech to analyze videos using AI, not just traditionally frame by frame, but through analyzing the relationships between frames to understand what is going on content-wise over time.
The Tangent Gallery in Detroit this weekend is hosting the Marvelous Detroit Art Emporium for a multimedia music and art show Saturday August 17. Why promote this for a tech blog? Because BrandXR’s augmented reality murals are part of the show. Come check out the multimedia art recently featured on Cronicle created by Moody Mattan and friends. Summer is drawing to a close in a few weeks. Check this out for some end of summer festival fun.
How does a young marketer bring best practices from one of the world’s most elite marketing academies and festivals back to a small tech town and apply it to B2B marketing? Silas Bush of Nexient recently was accepted to the Cannes Young Lions Marketing Academy, one of 4 small classes of marketing professionals at the 66th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France, and says he learned a lot from hobnobbing with the CMOs of major global brands from tech to retail on how certain marketing practices can be applied to any kind of business. Everyone from Loreal to Google and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to Redbull to actors Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum were there on the French Riviera, where Bush says the connections with technology taught him an enormous amount about how to apply agency best practices to tech marketing.
We live in a time where old orders are collapsing: from the post-colonial nation states of the Middle East to the EU and the American election. Amid all of this, a generation of young men find themselves burning with resentment, without the money, power, and sex they think they deserve. Written and performed by Javaad Alipoor and co-directed by Kirsty Housley (who also co-directed Complicite’s The Encounter), this multimedia show weaves together stories of three disaffected men and their journeys to radicalization, exploring the smoke and mirrors world of online extremism, anonymity, and hate speech.
It’s an improving but still perennial issue for the “flyover states”: finding funding for your business. Different types of tech companies require different types of funding, but it never hurts to know who is out there. With this in mind, the Michigan Venture Capital Association has created the Michigan Entrepreneurial & Investment Landscape Map, which includes not only local and regional VCs and angels but also economic development corporations, university partners, funds of funds, and more.
