Hands down, our most popular posts in Cronicle’s first 6 months have been the feature on indie game design studios in Michigan from University of Michigan professor Austin Yarger, plus all the followup interviews of game designers from Finji Games to Heart Shaped Games to Dreaming Door. We caught up with Yarger again recently to ask when his popular student gaming showcase was taking place. Turns out, we were just in time.
There’s a new tech meetup in Ann Arbor, organized by engineers. Web app developer Mohammed Abouzahr of ITHAKA, Soar Technology software engineer Dana Foley, and front-end web developer Jacquelyn Aimee Olson have organized a new meetup in Ann Arbor for people getting into tech when they don’t have a background in the industry, or even a degree. It’s called Bloom In Tech, and the first one is 6 pm tonight Thursday December 5th in northeast Ann Arbor.
Can’t believe it’s already the end of 2019, but we’ve still got some great tech events to end the year. This month, since everyone is busy with the holidays, we’re highlighting some special events and foregoing our usual meetup coverage. We have included some public or semi-public events below that require registration but are open to new members.
Today we caught up with the new Phimation Strategy Group and Ann Arbor SPARK sponsored Rising Leaders program, which piloted this year to mentor business leaders in the Ann Arbor area. At the Circ Bar in Ann Arbor, we heard speeches from several tech, talent, and business leaders to hear their best career advice and leadership lessons.
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.
