Author: Howard Lovy

Howard Lovy wrote:

OK. You’re a Hollywood director, and you’ve come to the Detroit area to film your movie and take advantage of Michigan’s highest-in-the-nation 42 percent tax credit. You’ve set up your home base in a local hotel and your star—let’s say, oh, Meryl Streep—she’s costing you $100,000 a day. You need to find a local crew right now to begin shooting. And …. action!

What happens next, if all goes well, is that a Michigan-grown crew is available to step in and—for far less than it would cost the director to fly in Hollywood folks—has the expertise and talent to, if you want to use a pure Michigan analogy, put that movie on an assembly line and crank out a quality finished product.

And that’s where a Detroit business incubator and one of Michigan’s few homegrown film studios and film schools enter the stage, with a soon-to-be-announced collaboration that will make sure local film crews are trained to step in. Wayne State University’s TechTown and Unity Studios of Allen Park, MI, and its affiliated Lifton Institute for Media Skills are expected to announce a formal agreement in the next couple of weeks, under which the institute will teach the would-be crews how to make movies and TechTown will teach them how to become entrepreneurs to sell their services.

“Everybody in the film industry has to be an entrepreneur because everybody is a freelancer,” says Randal Charlton, TechTown’s executive director. “They have to be. There are very few long-term gigs.”

Jimmy Lifton, president of the studio and institute, grew up in the Detroit area, then moved out to Hollywood to work in the film industry in the ’80s. He came back to Michigan about four years ago with the hopes of launching his studio. Michigan’s tax incentives made it easier for him to convince partners that, yes, this state really can be a center for filmmaking. He recently graduated his first class of about 100 students, whose average age is about 40. So, these are people whose auto-industry jobs were cut off in mid-career, but whose skills can translate easily into filmmaking. Lifton says he’s doing very little training from the ground up, but more retraining of existing skills.

Take, for example, people who formerly worked in computer-aided design for the auto industry. That is a skill that lends itself to digital effects and animation in the film industry—a skill that is increasingly in demand in the age of Avatar.

“These are people that have 20 or 25 years of design experience,” Lifton says. “Twenty years of design experience at Chrysler. Well, that translates immediately into the art department.”

Digital media training, Lifton says, is an increasing focus at his institute because of the demand. He says he knew he would find great, untapped skills in the Detroit area, but …Next Page »

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Howard Lovy wrote:

A decade of hard work is beginning to pay off for breast cancer researchers at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, whose spinoff company, Delphinus Medical Technologies, announced last night it has attracted $8 million in venture capital to help bring its breast cancer imaging device to market.

The lead investor is Arboretum Ventures of Ann Arbor, MI. Beringea, with offices in Farmington Hills, MI, co-led the deal through its InvestMichigan! Growth Capital Fund, which provides expansion capital to promising Michigan businesses. Also joining was North Coast Technology Investors, with offices in Ann Arbor and Midland, MI.

Delphinus Medical’s product, SoftVue, has been undergoing development at Karmanos for the past 10 years. It does not use radiation or compression, as in mammography, to image the breast to detect early stages of breast cancer. Instead, the breast is submerged in warm water and surrounded by an ultrasound ring that emits sound waves much like sonar and employs sophisticated computer algorithms to build detailed, three-dimensional images of the tissue.

I first heard about this technology a little more than a year ago when I spoke with Dr. Cassann Blake, then team leader of the Breast Multidisciplinary Team at the Karmanos Institute. She was quite excited about the possibilities of what was then known by the acronym CURE (Computerized Ultrasound Risk Evaluation) because it could potentially detect breast cancer sooner than standard ultrasound or MRI. She said at the time that she hopes the device could complement other methods of imaging and that Karmanos researchers were in the process of finding out whether it was actually more accurate than MRI.

Since then, CURE was renamed SoftVue, and Delphinus was launched in late 2009 to shepherd the product to market. Karmanos has the only SoftVue prototype now, but the company says it has already secured commitments from several health institutions to purchase the SoftVue system.

The company said the VC investment will enable it to build the first 10 machines that will be used in clinical settings, which in turn will help validate initial findings in order to win FDA approval.

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Howard Lovy wrote:

Dow Venture Capital, the VC arm of Dow Chemical, headquartered in Midland, MI, has contributed $3 million to a $3.5 million Series B Round for Clean Filtration Technologies, based in Redwood City, CA, Dow announced Wednesday. Dow announced its “first closing” of $1.5 million for the company in February, with another $1.5 million anticipated. Wednesday’s announcement closes the round. Clean Filtration Technologies is developing a device that reduces particulate matter in difficult-to-filter water, such as waste water.

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Howard Lovy wrote:

Automation Alley, a Troy, MI-based business association, has opened a defense office at the Macomb-Oakland University INCubator, in Sterling Heights, MI, the group announced today. The office will provide assistance local companies that are looking to work with the military. One  project includes creating an industrial capabilities database to identify new military suppliers. Companies interested in being added to the database can visit www.dmsms-tardec-army.com.

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Howard Lovy wrote:

Wayne State University in Detroit and Walsh College in Troy, MI, will get an entrepreneur training program called LaunchPad off the ground thanks to a $2 million grant from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation. Detroit’s New Economy Initiative will partner with New York-based Blackstone to launch the program that it hopes will be come a “national model for fostering entrepreneurship through higher education.” A similar program at the University of Miami attracted more than 1,000 students and young alumni who received support enabling them to create 45 new businesses and 102 new jobs, according to Blackstone.

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Howard Lovy wrote:

Bruce Legge is on a mission to infiltrate the Detroit area’s defense industry and report back to his iRobot overlords in Bedford, MA. For a lone flesh-and-blood vanguard of a future invasion of metallic warriors, he’s not doing too badly.

Legge is a card-carrying member of the Michigan Homeland Security Consortium and is planning events for the Great Lakes chapter of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). It’s all part of a “hearts-and-minds” strategy for iRobot  (NASDAQ:IRBT), which wants to become an integral part of the already established robotics landscape in Southeast Michigan.

But right now, Legge is still an army of one.

When I first spoke with Legge in July 2009, he had just established the Troy, MI, office of iRobot and was getting ready to ink some military contracts and start hiring employees. As of today, none of that has happened. Why? Well, when we talked again in late February, he started to tell me why, and then stopped himself.

I asked whether it was one of those situations where he’d have to shoot me if he told me.

No, nothing that “top secret,” the retired U.S. Navy submarine officer says. The company is simply waiting for some government funding to come through. Later, Legge indicated that the funding might come from the Recovery Act.

Meanwhile, there is still a great deal of ground-preparing for iRobot to do in the Detroit area. In a region where once-thriving industrial robotics companies are either changing or dying, iRobot practically stands alone as one that has experience in both the mass consumer and defense markets. That makes it one to watch, and perhaps emulate.

Robotics companies that once counted solely on the auto industry are learning, like many other auto suppliers, to diversify or die. iRobot comes to Detroit already diversified. We’ve all heard of the Roomba, the company’s robotic vacuum cleaner, which recently topped 5 million units sold. For the consumer product, Massachusetts is as fine a home as any. But for its “government robot,” Legge says, the Detroit area “is where the customer is.”

In 2007, when the University of Michigan launched its Ground Robotics Reliability Center, Legge “could really sense that the center of gravity was coming to this area for unmanned vehicles.” More recently the Robotic Systems Joint Progress Office (RSJPO) moved from Huntsville, AL, to the U.S. Army Tank-automotive & Armaments Command (TACOM) in Warren, MI, leaving little doubt that …Next Page »

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Howard Lovy wrote:

Business incubator Ann Arbor SPARK is asking Michigan startups to take their best shots at five open spots in a business pitch competition it plans to host on June 4, the group announced today.

The winner will get up to $50,000 in business acceleration services and a one-year incubator lease at SPARK East in Ypsilanti, MI. The competition is co-sponsored by the Eastside Innovation Campus (EIC), which hosts small businesses.

“The EIC collaboration is helping to expand the region’s entrepreneurial success by delivering critical services to startups,” Michael A. Finney, CEO of Ann Arbor SPARK, said in a prepared statement. “The pitch competition is a celebration of that success to date and signifies a continued commitment by SPARK East and its partners to growing startup businesses.”

The event will showcase five “innovation-based entrepreneurs” who will have three minutes each to pitch a panel of judges who are “noted funding and business experts,” the group said. The winner has to set up shop at the SPARK East business incubator. Applications are due by close of business May 14 and finalists will be notified by May 21.

An online application is available here. Those who want to attend the free event can register here.

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Howard Lovy wrote:

Beringea, a Farmington Hills, MI, venture capital firm, has invested $6 million in InTouch Health, a telemedicine company based in Santa Barbara, CA, which plans to use the Series D financing round to open an engineering research and development center in Michigan, according to an announcement today. The investment was made through Beringea’s InvestMichigan! Growth Capital Fund. InTouch plans to hire a team of advanced robotics engineers for the new Michigan center, according to Beringea.

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Howard Lovy wrote:

Don’t get Randal Charlton wrong. The executive director at the TechTown business incubator in Detroit is thankful for a recent announcement of $5 million coming his way to help graduates of his FastTrac business training program launch their companies. But, he says, look at it this way: The money, granted by the New Economy Initiative, a Detroit-area philanthropic partnership, is not being thrown at comfortable entrepreneurs. This is, essentially, aid to the unemployed. And, as such, $5 million barely scratches the surface.

Many of the entrepreneurs to be helped by the First Step Fund, the entity created by NEI’s $5 million investment, are not launching startups because it seems like a promising thing to do. They have nowhere else to go, Charlton says. Their former jobs in the auto industry are gone, never to return. Their choices are to leave the state or try to create their own jobs in Michigan.

In the world outside Detroit, Charlton says, the national unemployment rate of 10 percent is a grim figure that conjures images of the Great Depression. Inside the alternate economic universe of Detroit, with a 15 percent unemployment rate, that 10 percent figure would hail a new era. “If we could get down to 10 percent unemployment in the city of Detroit in the next three years, we’d be holding block parties to celebrate,” Charlton says.

So, March’s announcement of a $5 million investment from the New Economy Initiative to create the First Step Fund is just that-a first step, Charlton says.

The companies chosen to take that first step are:

• Air Movement Systems of Southgate, MI, which develops and sells thermal recovery systems.
• Current Motor Co. of Ypsilanti, MI, which designs and sells, electric mopeds and scooters.
• Clean Emission Fluids of Detroit, which designs and sells fuel blending systems for biofuel dispensing stations.
• NextCAT of Detroit, a Wayne State University startup whose catalyst technology allows for low-cost production of biofuels.

Charlton’s TechTown has been basking in positive international media attention lately as it attempts to fling startups out into the world. Or, as Charlton puts it, each new company is a “bet,” since many …Next Page »

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