When people think of technology in Kalamazoo, they usually think of pharmaceuticals.
And that's entirely reasonable, given the region's heritage -- how the Upjohn Co. fueled a lot of the area's growth in the 20th Century, and how its successor Pfizer remains a major employer, in pharmaceutical manufacturing if not research.
But there's a whole lot more going on in Kalamazoo than just pharma, as I learned Wednesday on the first full day of the Great Lakes IT Report Spring Tech Tour 2009.
My day began at Maestro eLearning, which has 1,200 square feet at Kalamazoo Valley Community College's beautiful Michigan Technical Education Center business incubator, nestled in the woods in Oshtemo Township.
President Josh Little oversees a dozen or so staff. Little, a Jackson native, got a degree in education from Western Michigan University, but after a year of teaching at Battle Creek Central High School decided his future was elsewhere. He turned to sales and sales training, working for SBC, Pfizer and Stryker Corp., the Kalamazoo durable medical equipment maker.
While at Stryker, he said he needed "a world class e-learning program, so I looked for a company that could sweep me off my feet. But I learned that it would take a village -- using separate companies for the learning management system and courseware to 3D animation to video work, all the things I felt needed to be part of a great e-learning program."
So he decided to build that world class e-learning program himself. "After a few years at Stryker it wasn't even a choice, really, it was a calling -- that this is what I would do. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I hadn't started Maestro. I wouldn't have been able to tell my children or grandchildren to follow their dreams."
Maestro was established in April 2007, and LIttle said that "since then we have been flying. We got our first client our first week, we grew 500 percent in 2008 over 2007 and we're looking at 150 percent plus this year. We got 15 new clients in 2007 and five in the first quarter of this year."
Little said e-learning "has this sort of bad connotation, like a mobile home," like it isn't real learning.
But what it is is text and pictures -- like those things called books, right? -- along with "stories, scenarios, games, anything that engages the learner and causes them to think, ask questions and make decisions and apply it somehow. That's how people really learn."
There are now 15 to 20 people involved in Maestro, Little said, including seven "official" full-time employees.
More at www.maestroelearning.com.
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Next I swung by Bronson Methodist Hospital, the sprawling health center totally unrecognizable from the hospital of my youth, for a look at the health care data system of the 21st Century.
Bronson's Clinical Portal is now available to 6,800 physicians and other health care professionals.
It provides an absolutely amazing level of detail on each patient, from their complete medical and medication histories to test results of all sorts, from blood work to CT scans to X-rays -- all available securely and remotely.
The system was built of a McKesson HPP Horizon Physician Portal system tweaked by Bronson's IT staff, said Mike Cramer Bronson Healthcare Group manager of applications and development.
Now that Bronson's literally dozens of IT systems can talk to each other, the next challenge is to get them to talk to the systems of other hospital groups -- and they're working on that in Kalamazoo too. The Southwest Michigan Health Information Exchange is gearing up with assistance from Birmingham's ChangeScape Inc.
Planning for the HIE began last fall though a grant from the Michigan Department of Public Health, and the plan should be complete and an implementation kickoff should occur within about six months.
The challenge is getting normally competitive health care chains -- and information vendors -- to allow even a neutral third party to exchange their data. There are five major health systems in the seven-county region to be covered by the HIE.
But those behind the effort say it will do much to reduce medical error and stop wasteful duplicate testing and care.
The federal stimulus package offers the region $47 million over four years to implement the system -- and that's just for hospitals. Each practicing physician can get $44,000 to hook into the system. But just as there's a carrot, there's also a stick -- docs who don't hook into a regional HIE by 2015 will get a decrease in Medicare and Medicaid payments.
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So what would you do if you broke your iPod?
Aaron Vronko and Ben Levy built a business.
Their Rapid Repair is housed in a former rent-to-own store in a funky West Main Street neighborhood in Kalamazoo (look for it next to the purple massage parlor and video store). But it does a national mail-order business in the repair of iPods, .mp3 players and game consoles.
Vronko said Levy owned a first-generation iPod when both men were students at WMU working at the IT department at Pharmacia, as Upjohn was known before being bought out by Pfizer. "He was messing around with it and he broke it and he couldn't find anyone to repair it," Vronko said.
Light bulb time. The two men started amassing repair parts for iPods and opened as iPod Mods in March 2004. By 2005, they needed a small office. They moved into their current, larger home in September 2006 and took on the Rapid Repair name in March 2007. Both men also finished their WMU degrees -- Levy in information systems in 2006, Vronko in business management in 2007.
Today the company employs 12 people and has branched out into consoles and non-iPod music players.
Vronko said electronics manufacturers are "mostly ambivalent" about his company's service. "People are repairing when the OEMS would rather they buy new, but at the same time, if a customer gets additional satisfaction out of a device, they may be more likely to come back," Vronko said.
And Vronko said he sees good growth opportunities ahead for the company.
"I think we have a ton of room for growth, especially if we continue to look for new product lines and new ways to reach our customers," he said. "The current model is business to consumer. It's a good model but it has its limitations -- it's difficult to scale and there's a lot of individual customer service required."
Vronko would like to grow the company along the lines of Dexter's ReCellular, where it's mass-refurbishing electronics and reselling them.
It's also branching into its own products, including a proprietary battery for the 240-gig iPod that lasts five times as long as the OEM product.
More at www.rapidrepair.com.
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Over lunch at downtown's excellent London Grill I met with Mark Pownell, vice president of the downtown Kalamazoo software development office of Invoice Insight.
Pownell is a Kalamazoo native who got a master's degree in information systems from Northern Illinois University, then worked in Chicago and Grand Rapids for Microsoft shops before partering on a company doing telecom audits in 2003. He further specialized into wireless audits in 2005. The idea was to let larger organizations, which typically use three to four wireless carriers for their employees, analyze which devices and deals were best for he company.
This company, Oreon, was bought by Manassas, Va.-based Invoice Insight in 2007. The parent company has left the development office alone, however; Pownell said it's growing and hiring, based in part on Michigan's lower cost of living.
The company relies heavily on relationships with value-added resellers, Pownell said -- companies who resell wireless services to business.
More at www.invoiceinsight.com.
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Finally it was off to South Haven, where Thursday's tech trip up the West Shore begins, for a meeting with Steve Antisdel, managing director of Buchanan-based AVID Commerce LLC, an e-commerce consultant.
As you know, the IT Report only allows capitalized company names when they're actually an acronym. In this case it is -- AVID stands for
Advanced Vertically Integrated Dialectic. And what is that? Said Antisdel: "It's a view of Internet topology that affects how we build our customers' sites and that results in our clients coming up very high on Google."
Antisdel built the company out of experience with a family business, Niles-based Bookout Furniture, which he and two partners bought from their uncles. They turned to the Web pretty much from the moment Vint Cerf fired it up -- creating FurnitureFind.com in 1996, which billed itself as "the world's largest online furniture store." The technology that became AVID put FurnitureFind up higher on Google than giants like Ikea or Pottery Barn.
Later, Antisdel took on another project, Indiana-based Working Person's Store, a retailer of work apparel and footwear, and increased their online sales by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Since we last checked in last year, AVID has added three new client relationships and is in talks with two others. Antisdel puts his company on the line with his deals, accepting payment only in part of customers' increased revenue.
AVID also last week signed a deal with the Michigan Small Busienss and Technology Development Center to analyze and optimize MI-SBTDC's online operations. The relationship is intended to assist Michigan businesses in analyzing the effectiveness of their Intenret initiatives and appraising the market potential to grow their businesses online.
More at www.avidcommerce.com
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