GLITR Year Six In Review -- September 2006 - August 2007
September 2006: Dow Corning claims a breakthrough in solar photovoltaic material ... Lawrence Technological University puts the finishing touches on its environmentally friendly quad, including the new Taubman Student Services Center... State officials announced 61 awardees will share more than $100 million from the first round of the 21st Century Jobs Fund initiative to create jobs in Michigan's emerging technologies... Ann Arbor Spark, MichBio and Pfizer introduce the Michigan Innovation Equipment Depot to donate more than $1 million in surplus Pfizer equipment to Michigan life sciences industry applicants... Energy Conversion Devices announces a doubling of its solar panel manufacturing capacity in Greenville... Google opens its Ann Arbor AdWords office with 20 employees at 112 S. Main... Detroit CIOs intend to boost fourth quarter hiring... The National Science Foundation has awarded the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University more than $100 million to fund operations through 2011...
October 2006: The second annual E2 - Excellence and Entrepreneurship Conference draws 300 to Wayne State University, triple the attendance of 2004's inaugural event... DTE restarts a wind energy project with the Elkton-Pigeon-Bay Port schools in Michigan's Thumb... Lansing's ACD.net opens a new data center at 1800 N. Grand River in Lansing... Michigan Technological University buys the Environmental and Emerging Technologies Division of the Altarum Institute of Ann Arbor... The MichBio Expo is held in Grand Rapids for the first time... the Washtenaw County Clerk-Register's office has launched its new voter information web search application, WashtenawVotes... The Plymouth-based Connected Vehicle Trade Association and the Center for Automotive Research announce a $6.9 million research center for the connected vehicle... Ann Arbor's ProQuest sells its online parts catalogs and service manuals to SnapOn for about $500 million... Kalamazoo-based ProNai Therapeutics Inc. raises $6.65 million in additional financing... Blue Cross and Blue Shield adds online enrollment...
November 2006: Grand Rapids-based MinoritySpace.com says it has 3,000 users and hundreds of thousands of hits each week in its first month of operation... Troy-based Iterotext partners with Sajan Inc. to develop Authoring Coach TMX, software the companies say helps organizations improve the quality and consistency of their global content while significantly reducing translation costs... The battle begins over cable TV statewide franchising in Michigan... Compact Power wins a $6.3 million contract from the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium to develop lithium-ion batteries for electric-hybrid vehicle applications... NextEnergy devleops, launches flex-fuel management tool for vehicle fleets... University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University create the University Research Corridor to coordinate their research efforts... Hillman-based Allband Communication Cooperative begins providing service to a 177-square-mile of northeast lower Michigan that has never had wired telephone service...
December 2006: AT&T promises $620 million investment and 2,000 new jobs if the state passes a single statewide cable franchise bill... Metro Detroit leads the nation in the percentage of households with cell phones only... Grand Rapids city staffers, consultants and community partners have chosen to recommend Clearwire LLC as the main contractor for the city's public WiFi network... Washtenaw County's wireless contractor, 20-20 Communications, asks the Michigan legislature to wait on the cable TV franchising bill... A state senate committee passes the bill Dec. 5... Kalmazoo's BlueGranite marks its 10th year in the IT biz... RepairClinic.com celebrates the million-customer milestone... Google to expand into the McKinley Towne Center, 401 E. Liberty St. in Ann Arbor... The full state senate passes the cable TV bill Dec. 12... Michigan Technological University in Houghton has been ranked seventh among PC Magazine's 2007 Top 20 Wired Colleges.... The cable TV bill hits Gov. Granholm's desk... Michigan State University releases a white paper asking for $520 million in funding for a new rare isotope research center...
January 2007: Grand Rapids-based US Signal expands to Milwaukee... Construction begins on a biodiesel plant in Adrian... Orion Township-based Cobasys named a battery supplier for a Saturn hybrid SUV... GLITR covers Michigan tech companies at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas... Borders creates a new home on a new social networking site for adults called Gather... United Solar announces a 700-kilowatt office building installation in New Jersey... Verizon Wireless anounced it spent almost $200 million to improve its Michigan network in 2006... Illinois-based Federal Signal buys Codespear, a Birmingham company working on government and corporate emergency communications software....Randal Charlton, founder and outgoing CEO of Detroit-based Asterand Inc., has joined Wayne State University as Entrepreneur in Residence and Special Assistant to the President for Economic Development... Michigan's life sciences industry gets kicked in the teeth as Pfizer Inc. announced it would close human health research and development centers in Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo, resulting in the loss of about 2,400 jobs in Michigan. Ann Arbor was the hardest hit -- its research center has about 2,100 employees... DTE Energy looks for renewable energy...
February 2007: Kalamazoo-based NanoMed Pharmaceuticals gets an investment from the Southwest Michigan First Life Sciences Fund... Michigan State University gets serious about video games, offering a master's degree in telecommunication, information studies and media... Energy Conversion Devices announces it will build a solar photovoltaic plant in China with a 30-megawatt-a-year capacity... Microsoft signs up as part of the team behind Wireless Oakland, the effort to blanket all of Oakland County with free basic wireless Internet connectivity... Lansing's Arialink will wire Allegan County's school districts with high-speed Internet... 3,000 pack Cobo Center in Detroit for the launch of Microsoft Vista... Ann Arbor's NanoBio starts testing of a new drug to heal cold sores... A new West Bloomfield Township-based automotive Web site, truedelta.com, says it has improved the state of the art in terms of analyzing vehicle reliability and new car pricing.... Auburn Hills-based FEV Engineering to add 100 engine tech jobs in Auburn Hills... General Motors Corp. Wednesday awarded AT&T Inc. a huge new telecom contract worth nearly $1 billion over five years -- one of the largest contracts in AT&T's history... Verizon to hire 175 in the Detroit area by June... EPrize LLC of Madison Heights announced that it conducted more national promotions for its clients in 2006 than any other U.S. business... Comcast launches digital phone service in Grand Rapids... Global stock markets plunge amid credit tightening concerns (Editor's Note: It was the start of the recession, we just didn't know it yet).
March 2007: Former Ford Motor Co. employee Ken Nowicki has a new deal with Ford to create a custom Web site for workers taking Ford up on their recent buyout offer... GLITR releases its second major redesign -- less content in the newsletter, more content on the www.glitr.com Web site... Detroit CIOs are upbeat about second quarter hiring... Manpower calls the Detroit-area hiring outlook bleak... Orion Township battery maker Cobasys says it's exploring 'strategic alternatives'... Ann Arbor-based Advanced Photonix begins producting T-ray devices, which create terahertz rays, which occupy a space in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared light, and which have several commercial applications... Michigan's Pre Seed Capital Fund invests $600,000 in Parking Carma of Flint, which moved its operations to Michigan from Emeryville, Calif. in January, security imaging developer Pixel Velocity of Ann Arbor and biotech firm OTO Medicine of Ann Arbor... Lansing-based TechSmith announces plans (that it would later withdraw) for an $18 million new headquarters... Thousands of state government computers are infected with the Rinbot virus... Michigan tries to put the best face on its life sciences industry despite Pfizer's research pullout at the annual meeting of MichBio...
April 2007: Some 700 college and university techies gather at the Renaissance Center for the Association of Information Technology Professionals 12th annual National Collegiate Conference... The man in charge of Google's Michigan AdWords office praised the state for its "ridiculously warm welcome" and high-powered tech talent in a speech at the Western Michigan University IT Forum... Ann Arbor's NovoDynamics gets another investment from InQTel, the investment arm of the CIA... Compuware sells its stake Ann Arbor-based ForeSee Results, which applies the methodology of the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index to measure visitor satisfaction with Web sites... Ann Arbor-based Nanobio Corp. targets nail fungus with a new treatment... Ann Arbor's Meditrina Pharmaceuticals gets $4.4 million from the state's 21st Century Jobs Fund and the Biosciences Research and Commercialization Center at Western Michigan University... Researchers at Grand Rapids' Van Andel Research Institute report a new way to detect cancers from blood tests -- including cancers such as pancreatic cancer that today are almost impossible to detect until they're very far advanced... The Van Andel Institute breaks ground on a $170 million, 240,000-square-foot expansion to its biomedical research and education complex in Grand Rapids... Ann Arbor-based Accuri Cytometers gets $5 million in capital... Compuware profits surprise Wall Street on the upside, but its revenue doesn't meet estimates, so its stock falls 6 percent... DTE announces a new residential program called GreenCurrents under which customers can buy green power for $2.50 per 100 kilowatt hours or a flat 2 cents per kilowatt hour... Delphi forms a new spinoff, Monarch, to market a new high tech powered antenna design... Computer Sciences Corp. buys Farmington Hills-based Covansys for $1.3 billion...
May 2007: The GLITR Spring Tech Tour visits Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Midland and Flint ... Hemlock Semiconductor, a Dow Corning subsidiary, announces a $1 billion investment to make polycrystalline silicon... Flint's Parking Carma gets a $1 million investment... The Wireless Oakland system is now operational in Royal Oak and Madison Heights... The Smiths Aerospace operation in Grand Rapids is sold to GE Aviation... The Detroit Science Center will get a $5 million medical technology exhibit... a Macomb County automotive technology incubator gets $5 million from the feds... Oneupweb, the northern Michigan search engine and Web marketing firm, is buying the 23,000-square-foot Howard Energy Building at 13561 West Bayshore Drive in Traverse City... Google opens its new offices in Ann Arbor... Ann Arbor-based QuatRx Pharmaceuticals Co. raises nearly $44 million... Amazon.com buys Grand Haven-based Brilliance Audio, the largest independent publisher of audiobooks in the United States...
June 2007: Marquette-based Pioneer Surgical Technology buys Raleigh, N.C.-based Encelle Inc.; Advanced Photonix opens a new 5,000-square-foot microfabrication plant in Ann Arbor...UniSolar panels go to work on a 1.1 megawatt solar plant in California.... Spout.com, the Grand Rapids-based online community for movie lovers, announced advertising and financial support to the creators of Four Eyed Monsters, the first-ever full length feature film to be featured on YouTube. ... Compuware lays off 245, but none in Detroit... Lawrence Tech joins the Formula Zero fuel cell racing competition... Quicken Loans is again named America's No. 1 tech workplace by Computerworld... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gives an optimistic pep talk on the high-tech future of Michigan to the Detroit Economic Club... Compuware stock tumbles on an analyst downgrade... Michigan State gets $50 million to establish the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center with the University of Wisconsin...
July 2007: Apple's iPhone draws high praise from local users... Michigan.org is tops among state travel Web site with 5.8 million visits through June of 2007, up from 4.8 million during the same months of 2006... Quicken Loans is preparing for a move to downtown Detroit... The state rolls out a new traffic and construction Web site... Ford Motor Co. begins testing plug-in hybrids with a California utility.. Compuware shares plunge 19 percent after the company posts financial results co-founder Peter Karmanos Jr. calls "very disappointing"... NanoBio gets $2.4 million in funding... CareerSite.com closes down its Ann Arbor headquarters... The Michigan Broadband Development Authority dissolves and its loans taken over by the Michigan State Housing Development Authority... A wood-to-alcohol plant is coming to Michigan's Upper Peninsula... ACD.net to provide WiFi throughout downtown Lansing... Charter cable TV adds phone service in the U.P....
August 2007: Domino's Pizza offers its first online ordering system... a Brown University survey names Michigan No. 2 in use of e-government... It's a standoff between the new Big Ten Network and Comcast... Comcast also ends free service for fire houses and police stations... Online Technologies Corp.'s Yan Ness said Michigan's relatively cold climate makes it a natural leader for data centers, since the major enemy of the data center is heat... the Michigan Pre-Seed fund invests in XG Sciences, a Lansing company developing a new type of nano-particle, Phrixus Pharmaceuticals, an Ann Arbor company developing a new drug for heart failure, and Hybra-Drive Systems LLC of Deerfield, for its hydraulic hybrid propulsion system...
