In the News

Detroit pizza is trending

SFGate Thursday, December 06, 2012

It's from the mouths of PR folks, but according to those who say they're in the know, Detroit style pizza gets more Google search hits than its New York or Chicago counterparts. For now, at least.

Excerpt:

"Google Trends data demonstrates that search volume for the term “Detroit Style Pizza” recently outpaced both “New York Style Pizza” and “Chicago Style Pizza” in relative search volume growth, peaking at 113 percent growth in the Food and Drink category for September 2012. During the same month, “New York Style Pizza” posted relative search volume growth of 28 percent and “Chicago Style Pizza” relative search volume grew by six percent."

Could a Bloomfield Hills entrepreneur corner the suspender market?

USA Today Thursday, November 29, 2012

Sometimes old timey is hip. The suspender business is booming for Sal Herman, who puts his money where his mouth is and wears the alternative to belts every day.

Excerpt:

"So intense is Herman's devotion to suspenders — and the 1% of the population he says wears suspenders — that he has turned them into an unlikely and thriving business. About 2,400 stores nationwide sell his suspenders.

And he's expecting a record-breaking season on his company's website."

Read the rest here.

Royal Oak sneaker sellers to become stars of Eminem-produced YouTube series

CBS Detroit Thursday, November 08, 2012

The owners of Royal Oak's Burn Rubber aren't only getting their own Internet program, it's being supported by the Michigan Film Incentive and produced by Detroit native son, Marshall Mathers (aka Eminem).

Excerpt:

"Detroit Rubber will follow Rick Williams and Roland “Ro” Coit, owners of the Royal Oak sneaker shop Burn Rubber. In addition to opening a new boutique, called two/eighteen, the show will highlight these Michigan entrepreneurs as they balance family, a growing business and day to day struggles. The show will be released on the premium YouTube channel Loud."

Read the rest here.

Southfield's Benzinga featured in Windows 8

Crain's Detroit Business Thursday, November 01, 2012

Not that Metro Detroit's Benzinga needed validation, but becoming part of Windows 8 is a pretty hefty endorsement of what this dynamic Southfield Company is doing.

Excerpt:

"Benzinga, which has a multiyear contract with Microsoft Corp. to provide the Windows 8 Bing Finance section with content, is featured alongside larger media companies such as Reuters, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.

"They're billion-dollar companies," Raznick said. "We're in a good mix."

Benzinga also has contracts to provide content to Ameritrade.com, Tradestation.com and Forbes.com."

Read the rest here.

DTW to offer free wi-fi

HuffPost Detroit Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, SEattle, Albuquerque, and Boston all offer free high speed wi-fi in their airports. Will Detroit International be joining them? Sort of.

Excerpt:

"The Wayne County Airport Authority (WCAA) Board approved a deal with the airport tech firm Boingo Wireless Wednesday to provide the no-cost service along with a premium subscription based option. Travelers using the free option will be able to connect for 30 minutes after watching a 30-second video advertisement."

Read the rest here.

Metro Detroit governments embrace the Cloud

The Detroit News Thursday, February 02, 2012

Macomb County is putting info into the Cloud. So is Rochester Hills. And Sterling Heights. U-M has launched Google Apps for Education, to service their 90,000 students and faculty. Online technology isn't just a fad, it's become an economic strategy for cutting municipal budgets.

Excerpt:

"Robert Ferrari, director of digital strategy for Michigan Municipal League, said information technology upgrades are a big investment for cash-strapped jurisdictions.

"They have to buy servers, backup and hardware, where with the cloud you can kind of rent or pay on a monthly basis. You don't have the cost of having to update that infrastructure to stay current. That's what the big boys are for — the AT&Ts, the Googles, the Microsofts — to provide that support," Ferrari said."

Read the rest here.

Is Farmington Hills' Mango Languages the next Rosetta Stone?

The Daily Thursday, August 25, 2011

Watch your back Rosetta Stone, Mango Languages is poised to become a market heavy-weight in the language education market. After all, do you offer lessons in how to talk like a pirate?

Excerpt:

"Mango’s digital products were first introduced in hundreds of libraries across North America and now are expanding to a wide range of consumer and educational products that include dozens of courses in 49 languages, including 15 English as a second language courses, each with about 10 lessons. The products are being sold to libraries, educational outlets, military branches and departments and, more recently, consumers.

Mango has gone from developing practical, smart products to now developing a religious scholarly course. At the same time, Mango tries not to take itself too seriously. It offers a course, for example, in “pirate” language, mocking the sea bandits’ way of speaking."

Read the rest here.

Google's Eric Schmidt says Detroit should embrace the Internet

Detroit Free Press Thursday, August 18, 2011

In a guest editorial, the executive chairman and former CEO of Google makes the case that if we want our region to be economically ascendent, we need to more fully embrace and exploit the Internet.

Excerpt:

"For some businesses, new technology is unwelcome. Progress is disruptive for incumbents. Some will be unable or unwilling to adapt.

But research shows that for every job lost to the Internet economy, 2.6 jobs are created. And the Internet doesn't just displace old industries. It helps renew them."

Read the rest here.

Oakland County government ranks 4th in digital innovation

Digital Communities Thursday, August 11, 2011

Who says government can't keep up? When it comes to municipal innovation in the digital realm, Oakland County landed in the top ten of the U.S.'s largest counties. Cloud computing, a portal that allows residents to monitor budgets, and the creation of an online forum boosted the metro Detroit burb's cred.

Excerpt:

"The Digital Counties Survey identifies the very best examples of how counties are aligning technology to support strategic priorities and create crucial operational and administrative efficiencies," said NACo Executive Director Larry E. Naake. "Especially important during these tough economic times, counties across the country are using innovative technologies to reduce county operations costs and enhance service delivery."

Read more here.

Metro Detroit's creative community gets its own incubator

Wall Street Journal Thursday, July 14, 2011

In the rush to create new economy jobs in metro Detroit the talk has mostly centered around incentives and support for engineering, life sciences, green energy, and computer technology. But building a creative class is more than hot on the job market front.

Enter Detroit's new Creative Ventures Acceleration Program, an incubator oriented toward design, film, music, and social media. And it's getting national attention.

Excerpt:

"The Creative Ventures Acceleration Program offers local entrepreneurs access to resources, services, strategic counseling, development support and other services that seek to "increase the density of creative-sector businesses in the downtown area," according to the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, a business accelerator that developed the program.

Backed by $500,000 in funding by the Michigan Economic Development Corp. and the U.S. Small Business Administration, among other groups, the program features a 12-month curriculum for "ventures-in-residence" to better identify development goals and best practices."

Get the rest of the story here.

Ford, meet social media. Social media, meet Ford

Industry Week Thursday, June 30, 2011

The house that Henry Ford built has decided to open its doors to social media geeks of every stripe, courting coverage from eco-bloggers to mommy-knows-best websites. The first conference of its kind (for Ford, that is) was called "Forward With Ford."

No word yet on whether they produced videos with cute kittens romping through the new Focus or a line worker getting I-beamed in the family jewels.

Excerpt:

"After three days of behind-the-scenes access to Ford's engineering labs, opportunities to test-drive Ford's latest vehicles -- decked out with high-tech options such as Ford's self-parking system -- and keynote speeches by thought leaders Malcolm Gladwell and Joel Garreau, the nearly 200 media representatives in attendance left with plenty of fodder for stories.

But in a sense, the conference itself was the story.

For three days, Ford executives, engineers and communications staffers rubbed elbows with a ragtag group of self-proclaimed "social media geeks" from all walks of life. "

Read the rest of the story here.

Macomb County waxes poetic on the virtues of going Google

Google Enterprise Blog Thursday, March 24, 2011

Macomb's Circuit Court and County Clerk sing the hosannahs of converting to Google Apps in order to cut down on costs and better organize their services.

We'll bet it's pretty nice when a municipal government turns its tech experiences into marketing copy for one of the biggest companies on the planet.

(full disclosure: Metromode's editor relies on the same apps to keep him sane).

Excerpt:

"The biggest draw for us to go Google is the cost control that comes with cloud computing. For a fixed per employee cost, the county gets Google Apps for Government and Google Message Discovery for archiving and e-discovery. There is no additional cost for servers, backup, antivirus or antispam protection, or disaster recovery. When new enhancements are available, there is no need for extra investment. Savings are also realized because Google Apps for Government has zero scheduled downtime! Maintenance is performed while the system is running. Our IT Department staff who have become proficient with Google Apps for Government are making themselves more valuable to the taxpayers."

Read the rest of the story here.

Email pioneer sees Detroit as "enterprise town"

Xconomy Thursday, November 11, 2010

Talk about reinventing Detroit is now coming from one of the Internet's inventors. Nathaniel Borenstein, an early email pioneer and Michigan resident, talks about how the potential for Michigan's tech rebirth isn't necessarily in the college towns of the Great Lakes State, but its urban prairies in the Motor City.

Excerpt:

Borenstein, for those who don't know, is one of the fathers of modern e-mail (an original designer of MIME, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), and currently chief scientist at Mimecast, an e-mail management software company based in the U.K. But Borenstein lives in northern Michigan, a few hours' drive from Detroit, and he was speaking to me not only as a software pioneer, but as a 16-year resident of the state.

I asked him for his ideas on how to promote high-tech growth in Michigan, and I got that and a whole lot more. He shared his thoughts on the role of big tech companies in reviving Michigan's economy, the future of autoworkers, and an interesting take on history.

Borenstein's main suggestion is to "create an enterprise town" in Detroit, and to include incentives for people coming from outside (underemployed Midwestern technologists), to achieve a critical mass of companies and concentrate talent and opportunities in the city. But why Detroit instead of, say, Ann Arbor?

"Historically, the place is Ann Arbor. Five years ago, I would have said that's the place to concentrate it," he says. "But Detroit has this big empty space emerging, perfect for a tech campus." As he explains it, "Detroit is ground zero for everything going on in Michigan. Around half of the land area around Detroit is vacant. They tore down houses that weren't being used. It's an improvement, and necessary for a city that's lost half its population�The mayor is trying to concentrate the population in big contiguous areas that are vacant. This is a huge opportunity."

Read the rest of the story here.

Detroit gets big share of Kickstarter microgrants

Detroit Free Press Thursday, October 28, 2010

Kickstarter may be a well-known buzzword in the Internet startup world, but it's also becoming well known in Detroit. And for good reason.

Excerpt:

Idealists like Noam Kimmelman, Tom Nardone and Ellen Donnelly flock to Detroit, eager to lay claim to what they see as a blank canvas for urban renewal.

Their projects are creative, artsy and altruistic -- but not quite fodder for traditional grants.

So each has turned to kickstarter.com , a global micro-granting Web site for art, film and creative projects. The three are among a dozen at any given time in metro Detroit asking the world for chunks of $25 or $50 to fund projects in their quest to fix the city. Donors have given thousands of dollars, so far, to local art-as-renewal projects.

It's a phenomenon the Brooklyn-based company is seeing only in Detroit.

"There's a groundswell of people all over, saying, 'Let's save Detroit,'" said Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler. "It's seen as a kind of wild west for art."

Read the rest of the story here.

Loving Detroit by the inch; welcome to the microhood

Xconomy Thursday, October 21, 2010

The people at Xconomy take a close look at Detroit's Loveland project and the ties its founders have to San Francisco's Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem. It's one of the more revealing pieces on this well-known story, even if it does call Detroit's most photographed ruin the "Michigan Central Railroad station."

Excerpt:

It would be easy to dismiss Jerry Paffendorf and his friends as a bunch of art-nerd carpetbaggers from San Francisco who see Detroit as the latest canvas for their airy-fairy ideas about virtual communities and social entrepreneurship.

In fact, that's how some locals reacted when reports surfaced in The Detroit News last year that Paffendorf had bought an abandoned lot on the city's east side for $500, renamed it Plymouth, and announced plans to resell it, one square inch at a time, on the Internet. "People brought up stuff like, 'Who does this hipster f*ggot think he is, moving in from San Francisco with stupid Internet ideas,' or 'It's illegal to represent that you are offering land for sale if it's not real,'" Paffendorf says. "And there was some skepticism that I would want to stay in the city."

Read the rest of the story here.

Internet : In the News