Ann Arbor, Michigan Tech Talk / Tech Trek

Last Friday in Ann Arbor, Michigan, there were two events that took place for Tech. The Tech Talk was hosted at the Michigan Theater, and it consisted of a number of speakers giving 6 minute talks mostly focused on entrepreneurship with a tech focus. I found most of the talks really interesting. The two that stood out the most was the talk from Ford Labs and Dominos Pizza. The Ford Labs talk was interesting because it was about there division being created to work and act like a startup using lean methodologies. The Dominos talk was interesting because of the scale of technologies Dominos is using and developing. In one of the slides the speaker described how the company used to be a pizza company that used technology, but now it is a technology company that sells pizza. According to the presenter, Dominos is the third largest e-commerce platform right behind Amazon and Apple.

Besides the big corporate players, there were a number of true startups that described how their passion allowed them to build their business. Most of these were motivational stories of people who found a need in a community that was close to them and built solutions for them. One example was a company that supported users who were recovering from one form of addiction or another, and another was a site https://mipadrino.com was designed to help the Latino community plan and fund family events. Another site was working to use AI to help with solving issues with getting a college education. With only have a few minutes for each talk, they really were just overviews, and they were designed for a broad audience. There weren't any really deep technical discussions which were little disappointing to me, but someone like me wasn't their target audience.

Between the Tech Talk and the Tech Trek, there was a mobility fair where they closed off the street and had vendors presenting a number of different automotive solutions. The Dominoes self-driving delivery car was there, and there were a couple of autonomous shuttles as well. One of the shuttles is currently being operated on U of M's north campus, and the manufacturer was there talking about their technology. The other shuttle that was on display was being tested in downtown Detroit, but they weren't taking any passengers yet. Besides the autonomous vehicles, there were a number of component manufacturers and other auto-related businesses.

There were three hours between the Talk and the Trek, so they had a stage at the end of the Mobility Fair where they had a couple of local performers. The concert closed with a performance by  Laith Al-Saadi. I had heard of him before because he had been on some TV show, but I had never heard him play. He played with a drummer and bass player, and it was a really good show. I always enjoy a good three piece rockin blues band.

At 3:00 pm the Tech Trek began. I really wasn't sure what to expect. The SPARK center housed a number of the startups, but it was really crowded and hard to talk to anyone since it was also a registration point. A number of the vendors just put on dog and pony shows designed for families, but no real technology being discussed. There were also several businesses that were just there trying to recruit talent, but again not a lot of deep technical discussion.

Then there were the businesses that were showing off their businesses where you got a chance to talk to their developers and DevOps teams, and those were really cool. The first place I came across was Jstor. They had a system for archiving research materials. The application was pretty cool, but more from how their market was supported than the technology they used. I really liked their DevOps team, and I was able to have a really deep conversation with them on their use of continuous integration to get their product updates to market quickly. I also had a good conversation with their front-end developers about their choosing Vue.js over Angular. I am glad I ran into this company early in the trek or I might have given up and gone home.

My next stop was Pillar Technologies at The Forge. I had planned my route so that I would visit them early because I didn't want to miss them. I go to the .Net user group meetings at their office every month, so I was looking forward to seeing what they did. I also really enjoyed the Tech Talk from their CEO. They had a nice spread with food and drinks as well as a full bar. They were presenting lightning talks all afternoon so it would be easy to just stay there and not see the rest of the walk. After visiting all the places on the map, the forge is by far the nicest office space. There were a number of business that had offices set up to work in an agile way, but Pillar's setup looked like it would be the most comfortable, and their staff really looked like they loved working there.

The forge also housed a number of the startups that were given grants to develop their ideas. Most of these were interesting more based on the problem they were trying to solve than the use of any advanced technology. The one startup I thought was really interesting was a company that was providing websites to small business. At first, I thought it was just like any other template based web platform, but when the woman showed me how the application worked, I was pretty impressed. Their business model was pretty simple, they would design a website for a small business and host it for them for a monthly fee. The thing that made it cool was that the end user could edit the text on the website just by adding an edit parameter to the URL and logging in. The really cool part was that they were editing the actual page in real time. It wasn't that it was technically very difficult, I would imagine it was all javascript with the REST backend, but the approach was something I hadn't seen before. A definite improvement on your typical CMS.

I really enjoyed visiting the Human Element company which was located in an old import car dealership that I remember from my childhood. They were another agile development shop, and a lot of their business is e-commerce where they specialize in a couple of platforms to support their customers. They had a really nice space, not as nice as The Forge, but it had a pretty cool vibe. They had a locker room with a shower in the basement because a number of employees ride bikes or run to work which I thought was pretty cool. I almost didn't visit them because they were the farthest away from downtown, but when I went to the next closest business, it wasn't that much farther.

One of the other really cool places I visited was Backyard Brains. They were a neuroscience company that had a number of human interfaces. One was an Arduino board with a shield that allowed you to put a couple of electrodes on your arm and you could open and close an electrical claw by making a fist and releasing it. Another demonstration they had was a video game with electrodes attached to your face that allowed you to make Mario jump by blinking. Their office was the least technical of any of the places I visited. They were located on the third floor of an old building on State Street. It kind of reminded me of the place where I had one of my first jobs over 30 years ago.

The last place I visited was Ford Labs. I had seen their speaker earlier in the day at the Tech Talk, so I was really trying to get there before the end of the event. I made it with just a couple of minutes to spare. There were two engineers there who were getting ready to pack up. I was reading through their display when one of them asked me if I had any questions. I made the comment that I had just read the lean startup, and this looked really similar to the principals outlined in the book which were really just test driven development applied to business processes. She told me that book was required reading to be in that department and that I was exactly right. Their department is based on the idea that they are entrepreneurs and they act like a startup. They are given the flexibility to generate solutions without all the red tape of a corporate infrastructure. It was really interesting talking to the engineers at Ford Labs, and it was cool that I had just read about these principals.

The Tech Day in Ann Arbor was worth visiting. I usually go to events that have a deeper tech focus like user group meetings and code events with demos, but this was a good look at the other side of the business. Often times I get so enamored by the cool technology behind a solution that I forget why people create solutions, to begin with. Sometimes you don't need machine learning, AI, and IOT to create something that makes a real impact on a user community.