A Tech Tour Wrap-Up
So what's all this mean? After seven campuses in eight days, more than 1,700 miles traveled, more than 90 gallons of gasoline consumed, and more bad road food than you can shake a roll of Tums and a Weight Watchers points calculator at?
Well, first of all, thank you to our sponsors, without whom none of this would have been possible: LaFontaine Automotive Group, which provided me with a stunning Cadillac Escalade Hybrid that was a technological tour de force and a brilliantly-performing vehicle in all (and I mean all) conditions; and Lawrence Technologcial University, the Michigan Education Association and the law firm of Miller Canfield.
Second of all, as usual, this tour left me feeling better about Michigan's future. There are so many smart people at Michgian universities working on so many great things with practical, real-world, job-creating applications, that we can't hardly help but get better.
I just hope we can keep some of the brilliant students I saw around.
But it also troubles me that criticism of the past few decades of United States trade policy surrounding manufacturing and science is coming from academics these days -- people like Thomas Glasmacher, project director and manager of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University, and Alan Freed, the Spicer Endowed Chair in Engineering at Saginaw Valley State University. Glasmacher says that America's manufacturing decline means we won't be able to build things like the FRIB for long -- meaning we'll be a second-rate power. And Freed, literally a former NASA rocket scientist, said both NASA has become a top-down-driven project agency rather than a real research agency, hacking its ability to innovate, and that he thinks the same thing happened to Boeing under the cost-cutting regime of "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap. Like it or not a lot of the most important innovation policy comes from the feds, and these guys say we're lacking.
As for my travels, a few bumps in the road, but nothing life-threatening. I would like to give the traveling techie's rose award for fastest Internet service to the Holiday Inn Express in Saginaw, which had hard-wired Ethernet, always the best, and which clocked in at 5.68 megabits per second download and 3.0 Mb upload. Nice. The fastest wireless award went to to the Holiday In Express in St. Ignace, which gives you 2.46 mb download and 1.42 mb up. Must be that new Merit Network data pipe they strung over the Mackinac Bridge. The traveling techie's raspberry award goes to the Holiday Inn Big Rapids, with an infuriatingly pokey 470 kilobits per second download and an anemic 100 kb up. Imagine trying to upload video there. I didn't bother to try. People, c'mon -- you're on the actual campus of a technology-focused school, ask them for help!
Overall, I can't wait until the spring tour, which focuses on tech-based growth company formation and nurturing. So, all you economic development agency folks out there, from Marquette to Midland to Muskegon, from Traverse City to Tawas City, from Alpena to Zeeland -- tell me, what are your four or five coolest tech-based startups that I can visit in four or five hours? Don't worry, I'll be in touch.
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