Flint, that one-time industrial powerhouse that's fallen on harder times, is also developing the emerging technology economy that's now common among Michgian's midsized cities.

I learned that Wednesday on the final stop, Day Eight, of the Great Lakes IT Report 2008 Spring Tech Tour.

My first stop was Online Technologies Corp. Yes, I know they're based in Ann Arbor. But for the past two and a half years, it's also owned the former General Motors Corp. disaster recovery center in a tech park just west of Flint.

The 32,000 square foot building contains 10,000 square feet of office space and 22,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space.

OTC CEO Yan Ness said the building has redundant everything -- gigabit connections to the Internet, cooling sources and power sources, including two 1.3 megawatt generators out back.

The center was designed as a place for GM executives to gather after a disaster or other crisis. OTC now has just 15 employees in the cavernous offices, and also uses them for seminars -- including an event Thursday on disaster recovery that will draw 120 people.

The center offers several levels of service. "You can buy dedicated servers, put your box in the cage and we take care of it," Ness said. "You can buy a rack or a cage, put your box in and you can take care of it." The center also offers separate locked rooms for more privacy for clients.

Ness remains sold on Michigan as a center for data centers -- mostly because the greatest enemy of the data center is heat.

"That's what makes Michigan competitive, is that it's colder here," Ness said. "Literally it saves us a lot of money."

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The next visit was from a Grand Blanc company, Azentek LLC,  that up until now I've only met at the International Consumer Electronics Show each January in Las Vegas.

Azentek is about to roll out in-car computers that fit in standard radio enclosures -- not computer-like devices, but real honest-to-God computers, running Microsoft Windows Vista or CE with Intel chips running at 2 gigahertz and up to 160 gigabytes of storage.

Azentek won a "Best of CES" award at the 2008 CES, beating out much bigger competitors in the car tech category.

The company is aiming to introduce the compuers this fall and will target them to the aftermarket industry, said Donny Zaney, technical installation manager. But for now, the company is "still working on development, making sure everything is perfect, because we don't want to come out like a fly by night brand. We want to make sure everything we do is tried and true. We want to be a brand that's going to be around for years that people trust. We're making sure it's 100 percent before it's released to the market."

Azentek will roll out five in-dash computers, two running Vista and two running the less-capable CE. Some fit in the double-sized stereo slot in a dashboard now occupied by gear like a CD changer, and feature an in-dash screen; others fit in the standard stereo slot with a flip-up screen.

Azentek now has 20 employees and corporate and manufacturing space totaling 15,000 square feet. It plans to hire 20 more employees by fall, said Zaney and project engineer John Sonnenberg.

Azentek first came out four years ago with an in-car computer that was a ruggedized PC mounted on a bracket. But company officials say today's smaller electronics make the in-dash computer possible -- and besides, it's safer and better-looking in the dash.

The in-car computers will feature a small wireless keyboard. When connected to the Internet whether by Wi-Fi or cell phone card, they'll allow users to do anything on the in-car PC they could do at a regular PC, from check e-mail to surf the Web. And the Vista models will also offer the ability to run applications like Power Point or Excel.

The computer will also run all in-vehicle entertainment systems.

"It's not just your radio in the car, it's your mobile office now," Zaney said.

The Vista-based units will retail for $2,799, the CE units for $1,299.

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I then heard from John Ward of that traditional Flint old-economy employer General Motors Corp., with a most untraditional corner of that industrial giant, the million-square-foot Grand Blanc Tool & Weld Center.

When Ward hired on at the center it had 2,900 employees. Today it has a little under 700. But those 700 are trying to preserve their jobs by diversifying their tooling work out of the auto industry and staying very flexible within it -- reducing work rules and job classifications, and offering to install the manufacturing lines they build. (See http://www.uaw.org/solidarity/07/0807/feature03.php.) 

Ward said the plant's renaissance came after a retreat where managers and workers discussed Jim Collins' business book "Good to Great."

Basically, the center builds tooling, assembly lines and laser welding equipment -- originally mostly for other GM plants, but increasingly for a wide variety of plants both inside and outside the auto industry.

Ward said the center is trying to diversify from 30 percent so-called "nontraditional" business to 70 percent, especially in doing tooling for the aerospace industry. 

And the center is looking elsewhere as well. "If it was a washing machine I'm pretty sure we'd do it," Ward said.

He said the center uses a wide variety of high-tech toys to achieve its goals, from three-dimensional virtual simulators to the latest in design software.

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Next up -- and the final visit of the Tech Tour -- was Amanda Marcotte, who started in August as operations manager at Parking Carma, the Flint company that is developing technology to tell motorists where urban parking spots are available in real time.

Basically, Parking Carma's technology involves putting sensors in parking lots that transmit information on the availability of parking spots to a database.

Eventually, the public will be able to use Parking Carma to make reservations for prime spots at urban parking lots, and to check Web sites on mobile devices for parking availability.

Marcotte said Parking Carma is working with the mass transit authority in San Diego, Calif., to study the ebb and flow of traffic in its commuter lots, and has a live lot at a mass transit station in San Francisco.

"We're working slowly but surely" on coming to market, Marcotte said. "I can tell you that we have the entire city of Detroit cataloged on our Web site," she said. "We have 157 lots in metro Detroit listed on our Web site, which is a lot better than any other publicly available dataset that we found. We have pricing information, hours of operation, entrance and exit information."

Parking Carma has received funding from Ann Arbor Spark, Automation Alley and the Mott Foundation. It has five full time employees and an office in a former Delphi Corp. building on the south side of Flint.

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After that interview, I headed home to Dearborn, eight full days after setting out for Kalamazoo.

What did I learn from this year's tech tour? As usual, that Michigan's technology industry is bigger, smarter and faster-growing than anyone ever gives it credit for.

From the life sciences entrepreneurship of Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids' billion-dollar Medical Mile, to Traverse City's Web entrepreneurs to Marquette's high-tech manufacturers, from Mt. Pleasant's diverse tech scene to Lansing's red-hot tech economy, there are plenty of parts of our Michigan, our future, that have decided to build a new century in new industries. These people deserve our thanks and our support and whatever public policy help we can muster.

And finally I'd like to invite you to our Tech Tour Wrapup Party Wednesday, May 7 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the Detroit Science Center. Expect a fun wrapup of the week's events, some special speakers from ConnecTech and elsewhere, and oh yes, free food and drink.