Internet : In the News

Debt settlement has gone high-tech with HealPay, an A2 company that decreases the stigma of colection repayment by taking it online.

Excerpt:

"The venture came together after co-founder Lancelot Carlson, who had been consulting for a collection agency, started to talk with Bzovi, who had previously worked in advertising technology — where he said he became “enthralled” with ad server technology — about the possibilities of online bill payment.

Struck by how behavioral targeting can yield higher click-through and conversation rates, they decided to see if the same techniques would work with billing – and even debt collection."

Read the rest here.

Servicing the local food movement has become the mission of several Internet startups in search of better ways to connect growers to eaters. The Wall Street Journal surveys firms across the nation, including A2's own Real Time Farms.

Excerpt:

"Meanwhile, former Silicon Valley engineer Karl Rosaen co-founded Real Time Farms LLC and is building a database of farms and their growing practices, making it possible, for instance, to find a place to buy a tomato grown without synthetic pesticides with a few clicks. So far, the site has growing-practice information for a few hundred farms."

Read the rest of the story here.

In 2010 Ann Arbor was number nine. Last year we notched up three spots to take sixth place in the list of the top ten generous cities. This is, in terms of per capita online giving.

Excerpt:

"The report ranks the 273 cities with total population of more than 100,000 based on per capita online giving and total amount donated through Convio’s online marketing and fundraising suites. The average gift size remained steady in 2011 compared to 2010 at $65, as more than $435 million was donated by people who reside in the 273 major cities. The donors in the most generous cities increased their total online contributions by more than 11 percent over 2010.

The 2011 rankings are based on the almost $1.355 billion in total online donations generated through the Convio online marketing and fundraising suite that powers the online efforts of thousands of the nation’s leading nonprofit organizations. The current rankings come from donations processed between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2011."

Read the rest here.

For four years running the city of Ann Arbor's website has been ranked fifth best for cities with a population of 75,000-124,999 in the nation by e.Republic’s Center for Digital Government and Digital Communities magazine. Kudos were given for online access to city expenditures, right-of-way permits, and the soon-to-be implemented online process for other permits.

Check out the rankings here.

Love it or hate it, the experiment that is the AnnArbor.com online daily website is becoming a reality for more papers ...at least, those owned by Booth Newspapers.

Excerpt:

"Booth Newspapers operations will be turned over to two new companies and home delivery for papers in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Muskegon and Jackson will be reduced in the coming year, it was announced Wednesday.

MLive Media Group and Advance Central Services Michigan will begin running Booth Newspapers and Mlive.com on Feb. 2, officials said in a news release.

MLive Media will take over content, sales and marketing operations for digital and print properties, including each of Booth's Michigan newspapers, while Advance Central Services will provide production, distribution, purchasing and other functions for MLive Media."

Read the rest of the story here.

The year was 1996, and the Internet was the innovation too many wrote off as a passing trend.

Business Insider offers a website by website comparison of what sites were hot then, and what's hot today. The results are pretty surprising. All I can say is: At least we beat out Penthouse.

Check it out here.

Who says government can't keep up? When it comes to municipal innovation in the digital realm, Washtenaw County landed in the top ten among the U.S.'s second-largest counties.

Excerpt:

"The Digital Counties Survey identifies the very best examples of how counties are aligning technology to support strategic priorities and create crucial operational and administrative efficiencies," said NACo Executive Director Larry E. Naake. "Especially important during these tough economic times, counties across the country are using innovative technologies to reduce county operations costs and enhance service delivery."

Read more here.

We're not sure what it says about our commitment to Dungeons And Dragons, but Ann Arbor was ranked the 16th geekiest city in America. But seriously, we got faced by Huntsville, AL, Kennewick-Pasco, WA, and Ames, IA. How is that possible?

Excerpt:

In the "Science and Engineering Indicators 2010," the NSF ranked the top 20 cities in the United States by percentage of workers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics occupation.

Based on the NSF's criteria, it turns out that the densest concentrations of geeks in U.S. cities is not necessarily where you would expect, with one big exception.

Read the rest of the story here.

Berkeley, Calif. and Ann Arbor are teaming up to build a 100-gigabit per second network for the U.S. Department Of Energy, which is putting up $62 million to make it happen.

Excerpt:

"Science is becoming more data-intensive and remote instruments are producing significantly more data volume than in previous generations. As a result, research network traffic is growing at twice the rate of commercial Internet traffic, and the trend is expected to accelerate as the scope of scientific collaborations increases and scientists around the world draw data from geographically dispersed experimental facilities like the Large Hadron Collider," said Dave Lambert, Internet2 president and CEO. "Increasing the capacity of networks is more important than ever to enable scientists to analyze data, collaborate, and combine data sets in new ways from these experiments. Working together with Berkeley Lab to build more capable networks like the ANI prototype will provide researchers with richer services that will increase scientific productivity and shorten the time to discovery for the innovations needed to confront the challenges facing our society today."

Read the rest of the story here.

Solar panels, a garden to supply its cafe, and zipcars for employee use are the first arrows in Google's sustainable quiver, as the Internet giant teams with landlord, McKinley, to make its Ann Arbor office greener.

Excerpt:

"At the five-story McKinley Towne Centre where Google operates its main Michigan office, a large array of rooftop solar panels are turning sunlight into clean energy. Work has begun to create an outdoor green space on another portion of the building's roof. And two vehicles from the car-sharing service Zipcar can be found in the parking lot, making it easier for employees to walk, bike or take the bus to work without having to worry about needing a car later in the day.

Greenhouse veggies coming

Google also plans to transform part of the building's basement into a greenhouse. The vegetables grown there will be used by Google's chef for meals served in the company's café."

Read the rest of the story here.

Reference is dead. All hail the IT staff!

At a recent librarian symposium, Ann Arbor District Library associate director Eli Neiburger delivered the news that the way of the future for libraries across the nation involves data storage and distribution - which means big servers and the geeks who service them. Needless to say the message made some ripples.

Excerpt:

"We need big servers and the geeks to take care of them," Neiburger said. "What are we going to cut to be able to hire a geek? We are going to cut reference staff. Reference is dead," he said.

Despite the fact that a trained librarian can bring value to a reference interaction, the patron today, acclimated to Google searches, does not feel that way, and librarians cannot change their mind, Neiburger said.

"Travel agents were outmoded because people felt they had better access to the information than they could get from the travel agents. We're in a similar sort of spot," he said."

Rad the rest of the story here.

The hype behind Bebarang (formerly Bebaroo) is more than a baby bump now that one of the Ann Arbor-based startup's co-founders (Allen Kim) has been named Entrepreneur magazine's 2010 College Entrepreneur of the Year.

Excerpt:

College seniors skip class for plenty of unproductive reasons, but not Allen Kim. An industrial operations engineering major at the University of Michigan, he and Luis Calderon have been playing hooky to persuade investors to part with around $500,000 for Bebarang, their startup that Kim describes as a "Netflix for baby clothes." (In fact, we chatted with them on a drive back from some pitch meetings in Chicago.)

Kim's "aha" moment: Last year, "my aunt, who had a baby, was complaining about how expensive baby clothes were. And I love Netflix. I thought there had to be a way to combine these two things."

After some serious research, which included discussions with more than 100 moms, it really came down to the numbers.

"It's a $25 billion industry," Kim says. "The average kid outgrows baby clothes 16 times, which works out to be about $150 every two months on things that might be worn just a few times."

Read the rest of the story here.