|
It's always a great treat when the IT Report Tech Tour reaches the UP, and Saturday was no exception.
In fact, the only unusual thing about the Marquette stop on the 2008 Spring Tech Tour was that yours truly was on the agenda.
I started the day speaking with Terry Dehring, president of Quick Trophy, a Marquette company that has used the Internet to create a mail order custom trophy and plaque business in a historic Marquette building a block from Lake Superior.
Dehring said Quick Trophy has now occupied the entire 14,000-square-foot building and is up to 22 employees.
The company has also "taken a lot of lessons from Toyota and lean manufacturing" to boost its capacity, he said -- in fact, the company's manufacturing capacity has tripled with the same number of people the past two years thanks to improved techniques.
The company begins its daily work with engraving plaques at 8 a.m. and works to assemble 800 to 1,000 trophies a day -- and everything stops, Dehring said, when the UPS truck arrives at 3:30 p.m.
The company is also working with Plymouth Web marketing consultants Morton Marketing to boost its name tag and office signs business. And it's begun doing wholesale work for another trophy company that has outsourced its operations to Quick Trophy, right down to its phone center.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the UP's best-known tech names is VIO Inc., which makes cameras and recording technology for point-of-view video.
VIO began in 2000 as Viosport, the brain child of UP mountain biking enthusiast Dave Olilla, who wanted friends to "relive the ride," according to current VIO president Richard Anderson. (Olilla is still with the company as chief of product design; Anderson said the company is in an intense product design period in preparation for several new product rollouts.)
Olilla's original intent was to create a YouTube-style online community where extreme sports participants could share video of that last crazy ski, snowboard or mountain bike run. At the time, it was repurposed analog security cameras strapped to his helmet and tethered to a VCR in a backpack.
"He did this in the era of dialup phone connections and difficult video streaming, so he was way ahead of the curve, and he hoped there would be an advertising model," Anderson said. "And the first thing people said was, 'That's cool content, where do I buy the camera?'" So he started getting more serious about the creation of systems that were wearable."
VIO's cameras have gradually shrunk to the point where now they're about the size of a lipstick tube, connected by a thin but tough cable to a small digital storage device, maybe six inches by two inches by half an inch. The waterproof, shockproof system is called POV.1 (for “point of view”) and the price is $699.
The company also has diversified out of "helmet sports" because, as Anderson said, "mountain bikers have become platoon leaders in Iraq, and they started contacting us and saying we need this technology in Iraq." So, today's POV.1 kit comes with a rail mount to attach the camera to a military helmet or weapon. Anderson said the company's been told by soldiers in Iraq that POV.1 has been indispensable for after-action training, intelligence gathering and field reports.
VIO also includes software to share content, and the company is rolling out a Web-based video sharing system of its own, for ease of use in managing and sharing video content. The sharing system links the POV.1 to software much like iTunes software links iPods to audio and video files.
Anderson came on board two years ago to help raise capital and build the company. He's the founder of Northern Initiatives, a community development and entrepreneurship organization connected with Northern Michigan University and Shorebank of Chicago, investing in companies to help diversify the UP economy.
Today, VIO has 16 employees in the UP, double a year ago. Its administration, design, marketing and sales are in the UP, while engineering operations are primarily in San Francisco and with firms in Phoenix. Software engineering is being moved to Marquette, and manufacturing is overseas.
"We think a big asset for us is Michigan Tech, only 90 miles away," he said. "We have a contract with photonics and imaging specialists in the electrical engineering department at Michigan Tech."
Anderson said VIO and Olilla have helped promote the mountain biking industry in the UP, making VIO "a small tech company that has an impact on tourism, spreading the word about what's going on in this special place up here."
He also said, with his old economic development hat on, that he believes the UP economy is doing a little better than the state as a whole, given its relatively small manufacturing base but relatively large resource extraction industry and strong global demand for natural resources.
----------------------------------------------------
I then got a tour of one of the UP's largest high-tech manufacturing employers -- or life sciences employers, depending on how you want to look at it -- Pioneer Surgical Technology.
Today's Pioneer employs 260, about 180 at a recently expanded manufacturing plant on the north side of Marquette.
Pioneer was founded by Dr. Matthew Songer, an orthopedic surgeon in Marquette.
"As an orthopedic surgeon he found things in the OR at his disposal often times not the easiest to use, sometimes potentially dangerous to the patient, and with an inventive mind, he got together with his father, a retired engineer, and they put together a couple of things he could use to reduce his time in OR and enhance patient care," said James Parks, director of corporate communications at Pioneer.
The company began by producing multi-filament cable for use in spinal and cardio-thoracic surgery, replacing wire -- cable is stronger, more flexible and has other safety and patient care advantages. Another early development was a cable tensioning tool that provides uniform pressure along the cable for greater surgical proficiency and improved patient healing. (Today's version of the device looks slick, but in a display case in the company's lobby it's easy to see the prototype had the head of a pair of wire cutters, the handles of a pair of Vise-Grip pliers, and the tensioning post was from the tuning mechanism of a guitar!)
Within two years, the company took off, landing contracts with the medical device firms Zimmer and Synthes for niche products that fit within their product lines. In 2004, the company rolled out its own spinal surgery equipment, producing even faster growth. "The rate of development and infrastructure growth has been phenomenal," Parks said.
The company recently opened an addition, giving it 110,000 square feet of space, up from 70,000, and the ability to add three more stories to its office wing.
Parks joined the company nine years ago and became head of its communications effort two years ago, handing public relations, investor relations and government relations. The company also maintains its own intellectual property law staff in house.
----------------------------------------------------------
I also spent time Saturday morning talking at an event organized by ConnecTech, the association for technology professionals coordinated by Automation Alley. Roughly two dozen tech professionals gathered at the Marquette Holiday Inn to talk about forming a ConnecTech chapter. I spoke on the overall state of the tech industry that I’m seeing in Michigan on the tour, which is remarkably healthy considering all the doom and gloom that pervades the business news.
Among the folks I talked to at the meeting was Jeff Thornton, who with his wife Rehema Clarken is establishing Evergreen Data Management. The idea is to start a data center in Marquette to connect the UP's small, community hospitals and allow them to move to electronic medical records technology.
The couple wants to launch the service late this summer.
Thornton has a master's degree in public administration from Northern Michigan University, while his wife is working on a doctorate in communications from Michigan Tech.
You can see more about their efforts at http://www.youtube.com/evergreendatamgmt.
I ended the day with dinner with my two traveling companions on this year's tour -- Danielle DeLonge, coordinator of the statewide ConnecTech chapters, and Diane Durance, executive director of the Great Lakes Entrepreneurs Quest -- at a relatively new restaurant in downtown Maruqette, Elizabeth's Chop House. I just have to tell you, if this isn't the best restaurant in the UP I'd like to know what is; everything was simply exquisite. A taste of the absolute best life has to offer in the North Woods, with a view of the bay to boot.
And so Sunday morning I point the Tech Tour Chevy Yukon Hybrid back south again towards the Mackinac Bridge, and farther south still towards Mt. Pleasant and Monday's Tech Tour stop. As usual I leave wishing I could stay in this magnificent place longer -- even if it is spitting snow this close to the first of May! The woods and waters here are beautiful, but what really sets this place apart, I think, is the resilient and optimistic and hard-working spirit of its people. As the novelty act "Da Yoopers" sang on their first album 20-some years ago, "Nothin's easy when you live so far." But these folks have decided that clean air and open skies are worth it, and oh, by the way, they're going to build their own tech economy, thank you very much. (And hey, if you need a "metro fix" -- as Fred Joyal, NMU's former provost and current special assistant to the president for economic development put it -- Chicago is a mere six-hour drive away. Heck, that's not much longer than it is from Detroit.) |
