I spent seven years in Traverse City early in my career and met my wife there, so I still have a serious soft spot in my heart for Michigan's beautiful city by the bays.
What I didn't fully realize until Friday is that a serious technology industry is emerging there, helping diversify the economy beyond tourism.
I started the day at the offices of Appia Communications and ISPhone, two companies founded by Chicago native Victor von Schlegell, a longtime entrepreneur and former owner of an original northern Michigan Internet service provider, Traverse Internet.
"In 1997 or 8, I got interested in convergence, because it dawned on me there was no reason why IP couldn't do voice and video as well as data," von Schlegell said.
So he started a company called ISPhone, which bought long distance minutes for four or five cents per minute from the incumbent phone companies and sold them for 10 to 11, "back in the good old days when you could do that ... in about 2000 it dawned on me that it was time to take convergence direct to the public, and that's when we started Appia."
Not long after von Schlegell started the company, "long distance prices went through the floor and we had to rethink the business." So today, the company makes its revenue by selling American phone connections overseas, to companies undercutting the prices of the state telecommunications monopolies in places like Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Along the way, Appia has added a network monitoring and management subsidiary in St. Louis, Mo., PC and server support and offsite storage. It also has added a videoconferencing and video broadcast product, and is adding an electric signage product, a collaboration product and a product called "Intant Office," a turnkey system of PCs, thin client systems and applications that will allow a company to open a branch office quickly.
The company now has 38 employees, with corporate, marketing, communications and software development in Traverse City, an engineering center in Chicago and the St. Louis office. The company is marketed through resellers.
Von Schlegell said the company is in Traverse City because he grew up vacationing there as a child, and that he and his wife decided that "if we're going to go into business for ourselves, we can live where we want to live."
He said it can be hard to recruit tech talent to Traverse City, because while "people really want to live up here, they worry what happens if it doesn't work out, where else they can go. We're just beginning to attract businesses with programmers and folks like that to what I call the Silicon Tundra."
More at www.isphone.com or www.appiacommunications.com.
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From Appia's modest home I journeyed to the spectacular new headquarters of the Web marketing consultants Oneupweb -- 26,000 square feet on the shores of West Grand Traverse Bay.
Oneupweb started in CEO Lisa Wehr's Suttons Bay home and most recently was in a Lake Leelanau pole barn before moving into the former Howard Energy building. The company is using the third floor and part of the second, and rents out the rest of the building.
Wehr said she sees social media marketing, podcasting and Web site usability as her company's greatest opportunities going foward.
"When we concentrated on search engine optimization, we used to have to sell it first, and then us as a company, because people didn't understand that SEO works," Wehr said. "Now that people understand that it works, they're paying for large volumes of traffic. Today it's become all about converting more of that traffic to paying customers."
Besides moving into eye tracking technology and "heat mapping" to see which Web designs are most effective, Oneupweb is also dedicated to social media, "helping companies establish a blog presence that is meaningful and how to leverage that in a meaningful way." Also, she said, it can be critical to help companies manage the negative parts of social media that they can't control.
She said Oneupweb is helping big companies like Mayflower, Eli Lilly, Accenture and Cancer Treatment Centers of America experiment with podcasting and video podcasting.
Wehr said her busines philosophy is to "get in on the advance of the curve ... so when it finally does hit you've established a presence in that space."
Wehr said that as the company grows, her biggest challenges become more personnel-related. And she said she has some problems with the younger members of today's work force: "I hate to make broad sweeping generalizations but I will: they have a sense of entitlement, they think if they have a college degree that means a six figure salary, many don't understand what a true work ethic is, keeping them satisfied is a continual challenge, they've just been so spoonfed that they don't understand basic business interaction outside a social network. They don't understand that behavior at work, while it can be relaxed, is different. And I'm not real tolerant of those things."
But she said the company still has found good employees. And as for where they work, Wehr said, "we could grow to 100 people here. I'm not going to be looking again, this is the final resting place."
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From Oneupweb I journeyed to the former grounds of the Traverse City Regional Psychatric Hospital, which is the site of a massive rebuilding project. According to this story, at http://blog.mlive.com/travelstories/2008/04/traverse_city_michigan_new_lif.html, nearly a million square feet of yellow brick institutional buildings are gradually being converted into loft-style condos, offices, restaurants, wineries, brew pubs and retail shops.
One office tenant is Traverse Legal PLC, an intellectual property law firm that is using the Internet and modern technology to both change the way law is practiced and attract an international clientele.
"We get over 1,000 hits a day on our blogs, and more than seven figures a year of business that comes to us through our blogs," said founding attorney Enrico Schaefer.
The law firm offers intellectual property, trademark and domain dispute law, among other specialties.
Traverse Legal sponsored Friday's visit to Traverse City of a Cisco Systems Inc. Network On Wheels van, intended as a membership recruitment event for the Traverse City chapter of ConnecTech, the association for technology professionals sponsored by Automation Alley.
More at www.traverselegal.com.
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At Traverse Legal I bumped into someone I've known of for years -- Ray Pleva, president and CEO of Cerise Nutraceuticals LLC.
Back when I lived in Traverse City Ray Pleva ran Pleva's Market in Cedar, a small town supermarket with a terrific meat counter. Pleva's daugher Cindy -- the 1987 National Cherry Queen -- hit upon the idea of mixing ground cherries in with ground beef, and the resulting "Plevalean" product tasted great and had far less fat than regular ground beef.
Pleva has since found a niche as "Mr. Cherry." The antioxidant health benefits of cherries have been studied by Michigan State University and Central Michigan University, whose Brain Research and Integrative Neuroscience Center is researching cherry-based treatments fo Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases.
The company's products are sold at health food shops in northern Michigan as well as on the company's Web site, www.cherrylotion.com.
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From the state hospital I journeyed to my old neighborhood on the near west side of Traverse City, where a provider of geographic information systems, services and products is growing rapidly.
InfoGeographics Inc. is "popping on all cylinders right now," said founder James A. Bennett.
A year ago, it moved into a beautiful, 132-year-old home on Third Street. The company's five employees have offices in the home's four former bedrooms and its living room. The company is looking to hire a Web developer, Bennett said, adding: "So if you know any good Web developers who want to move up to Traverse City..."
InfoGeographics' major product, GeoConnector, is commercial software that combines tabular data like lists on database programs with spatial data, combines it, and serves it up in a format that a mapping application can use.
Bottom line: you can take long lists of stuff like locations and turn it into a gorgeous map that can actually shows you some trends.
The company has sold about 100 licenses in Michigan and surrounding states to use GeoConnector 2.0. The company is working on a third version with a better interface, better integration into Microsoft .Net technology and database improvements.
"We feel that version may start to break out nationally," Bennett said. "We're looking at that this summer."
Among the company's customers is the fast food giant McDonald's, Muskegon and Jackson counties, and the Mt. Clemens Downtown Development Authority, which plans soon to use the system to provide maps of downtown properties available for development.
Bennett is a mathematics graduate of Western Michigan University who worked briefly as a teacher, then spent 10 years as a land and marine surveyor, then worked in civil engineering design of roads and bridges on computer-aided design software, which led to an interest in GIS. That led Bennett into a masters program at Eastern Michigan, where he's completed course work.
He moved to Traverse City in 1993 and started InfoGeographics May 1, 2001.
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After lunch I headed out of town north on US-31 and crossed the Mackinac Bridge into the Upper Peninsula, towards Saturday's Tech Tour visit to Marquette. The trip took about six hours, but the smooth ride of the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid helped the time hurry by.
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