Once upon a time Karl and Cara Rosaen were living the digital dream, working for Google in its Mountain View wonderland. Then the start-up bug bit and the couple moved to A2 to launch Real Time Farms - which just might become the IMDB of locally grown food.
A little more than a year into its life, and MyBandStock is getting its footing in the music scene, landing its first customer and some seed capital.The Ann Arbor-based start-up that focuses on connecting bands to their fans now counts the After Midnight Project, which is signed to Universal Motown, as a client. MyBandStock will let fans buy "shares of stock" in the band through purchasing tickets and merchandise. Those shares can be used to gain insider access to the band."Anyone who buys a t-shirt or a record gets a tag for 100 shares of stock to the band," says Drew Leahy, founder of MyBandStock. "They can take that stock and use it to view exclusive video."The top 10 shareholders will be eligible to do a video chat with the band at the end of the Warped Tour this summer, in which the After Midnight Project is taking part. It's part of the firm's new business model of connecting underground artists and fans via digital access. User demand dictates which bands will be featured.MyBandStock has raised seed capital from angel investors, which is enough to hire six employees through the rest of the year. It hopes to sign another 5-10 artists by the end of 2010.Source: Drew Leahy, founder of MyBandStockWriter: Jon Zemke
Ford and the University of Michigan are seeming less like an odd couple and more like a match made in heaven when it comes to technology development. The latest partnership includes combing cloud computing and traveling in your car.Excerpt:Two Ford Fiestas will leave the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on May 13, and though the cars may be separate, they will be linked to each other and to the entire global community in ways that mark a new era in mobile connectivity.Embarking upon a week-long road trip to Maker Faire, Silicon Valley's annual ideas festival, the Fiestas and their occupants will be serving as messengers from Ford announcing the arrival of the car as a technology platform."The car is the ultimate mobile device," said Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader of the Infotronics team in Ford Research & Advanced Engineering. "Ford has led the convergence of the auto and consumer electronics industries, and now we're researching how to responsibly and safely harness the Internet to enhance drivers' time behind the wheel."Read the rest of the story here.
The University of Michigan and Ford have come up with a new way to help streamline the commute by combining some of the biggest buzzwords in the tech world – cloud computing, GPS and social media.Students at U-M taking a "Cloud Computing in the Commute" course developed a set of applications that combine social networks, GPS location awareness, and real-time vehicle data. The idea is to help commuters get from Point A to Point B in the most efficient way possible. "It allows people who are going to a common destination keep track of each other," says Jason Flinn, associate professor of Computer Science & Engineering for the University of Michigan. Ford Research & Advanced Engineering helped organize the course as part of American Journey 2.0 initiative, a joint research project where students could help mold the future of the in-car experience. The winning application, Caravan Track, runs on a Windows 7 PC in a Ford Fiesta research vehicle that will make a socially networked road trip from the university to Maker Faire, the world's largest do-it-yourself ideas festival in Silicon Valley, later this month.The students built the applications based on access to Ford's developmental operating system. They harnessed the power of social networks and accessed to vehicle performance data, networking services, voice recognition, social networking tools and other data. Think: taking a lot of information from lots of different sources to come up with one steady stream of knowledge that helps commuters avoid things like construction or accidents. "This is really an exploratory class," Flinn says. "The Ford folks gave us a really interesting sand box to play in." Source: Jason Flinn, associate professor of Computer Science & Engineering for the University of MichiganWriter: Jon Zemke
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