Recently, Phimation Strategy executive coach Dave Haviland and team piloted a podcast with Ann Arbor SPARK called SPARK.grow and a new pilot program for mentoring startup founders and tech professionals called Rising Leaders. Now, even if you’re not part of the first cohort, you can join the Rising Leaders program for a panel on leadership and career advice in Ann Arbor.
We knew this would happen, it just came sooner than expected. We couldn’t possibly cronicle all the amazing tech-related events around Ann Arbor and Detroit, much less the entire state of Michigan, in one post anymore, so our tech events posts will now contain highlighted events you might not know about or one-off conferences you won’t want to miss.
It’s day 2 of DevOps Days Detroit at CCS overlooking the downtown skyline of Detroit from New Center, and once again the theme is trending toward a common challenge for devops teams: handling disasters and rollouts. Devops folks are no strangers to stress, and the speaker lineup this morning covered a number of recognizable topics to people on teams who have been faced with an onslaught of challenges.
Day one of DevOps Days Detroit is in progress in downtown Detroit at the Alfred A. Taubman Center for Creative Studies, launching with talks by national and local speakers on subjects from data security to tech education for underprivileged youth in Michigan. Executive leader and coach Ryan Lockard kicked off with a talk on “The Enterprise SRE (eSRE) Approach, discussing how SRE helps turn fragile, error-prone enterprise computing into robust systems. “Even further,” Lockard’s talk summarized, “with Contino’s Enterprise Site Reliability Engineering (eSRE), you can tap into your organization’s ability to connect technology decisions to the customer experience or business decisions.”
The world requires innovation—now more than ever. Science. Technology. Engineering. Math. Along the wild shores of Lake Superior, researchers, students, and entrepreneurs create the future. So says the website for MTEC SmartZone, a tech incubator that is located on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Michigan. You can’t get much farther north in the United States toward fresh air and rugged wilderness at the gateway to the Keewenaw Peninsula that juts out into cold and stunningly beautiful Lake Superior, and you can’t get much better aligned with Michigan tech. That’s because MTEC operates out of Michigan Technological University in Houghton. One of the biggest challenges currently facing Michigan’s new growth in tech-related industries is that there is so little media coverage or visiblity for all the smaller players that make up a very large movement of startups that are revitalizing Michigan’s economy. Who knew there were tech incubators all over the state of Michigan? Hardly anyone, including us until recently.
When new businesses start up, arranging financing can be fraught. When that process involves a bank loan, it’s hard to know where to go. Many banks have a reputation for turning away small or risky tech startup businesses. Good news for tech businesses in Ann Arbor and Southeast Michigan. Bank of Ann Arbor, which according to DBusiness is now the 4th largest bank in Metro Detroit, has created an entire division specifically for financing and guiding tech businesses in the growing startup hub. BOAA Technology Industry Group President Michael Cole says this has been a long time in process. Cole has been working for the past 17 years to create business financing options specifically tailored to tech and life sciences businesses in Southeast Michigan.
Are you going to DevOps Days Detroit? This year, DevOps Days Detroit features speakers from tech towns across the U.S. from Silicon Valley and Seattle to Philadelphia and Detroit. The conference runs October 23-24 at the Alfred Taubman College for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit. Cronicle is a media sponsor of DevOps Days Detroit 2019 and will be covering the event on site, but if you’re a devops person and can take the time, we highly suggest being there in person. We hear the talks are small enough to connect with the DevOps community and the food is bomb.
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.
Forgive me, Father, for it has been 3 months since my last A2NewTech…. Can’t believe it’s already October. Thank you again to those of you who have generously allowed us into your conferences and offices to profile the behind the scenes of the growing Ann Arbor tech scene. This month, we’re highlighting a few conferences going on at the end of the month. Remember if your event isn’t listed, you can contact the editor to add it. Have a great month, A2 Tech!
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.
