DETROIT — Comerica Bank’s Michigan Economic Activity Index decreased in June to a level of 118.8. The index is comprised of nine variables — nonfarm payroll employment, continuing claims for unemployment insurance, housing starts, a house price index, industrial electricity sales, auto asemblies, total trade, hotel occupancy, and sales tax revenue. Bank officials said that in
TROY — The engineering technology developer Altair Inc. (Nasdaq: ALTR) announced the release and immediate availability of its new Altair Inspire simulation-driven design platform, and its Altair 365 cloud collaboration platform. The company said Altair Inspire enables manufacturers to use simulation to drive the entire design process, accelerating the pace of innovation and reducing time-to-market.
ANN ARBOR — SkySpecs, the developer of automated drone-based inspection for wind turbines, announced the opening of a new office in Amsterdam, Netherlands. “A European presence represents a strategic expansion for the SkySpecs brand,” SkySpecs CEO Danny Ellis said. “We are busy assembling an operations and sales team and are excited to double our footprint
PONTIAC — Deliver My Ride, the online car buying service launched by Peter Karmanos Jr.’s tech firm, MadDog Technology, and retail automotive industry veteran Michael McInerney, announced the launch of its newly enhanced platform. Deliver My Ride is a modern alternative to the traditional car buying process. The platform creates a convenient, unbiased, and pressure-free
DETROIT — AT&T Inc. announced an upgrade to its wireless network on 25 cell towers across a dozen Michigan counties. The improvements include adding greater capacity or bandwidth and speeds in 21 communities, including Idlewild, Kalkaska, Cass City, Beaverton, and Charlevoix. These upgrades are like adding more lanes to a highway carrying traffic from a
ANN ARBOR — The future of body armor might be silk spun by silkworms that has the amazing strength of spiderwebs. Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc., the company that has bred genetically engineered silkworms with spider genes, resulting in super-strong silk, announced Monday it has shipped panels of its Dragon Silk material to the United States
ANN ARBOR — On the night of Jan. 16, a meteor burst in the skies over Michigan, producing a fireball that was seen by people across seven U.S. states and in the Canadian province of Ontario. More than 600 sightings of the fireball were reported, along with reports of shaking and thunder-like rumbling. Numerous fragments
WASHINGTON TWP. — A suburban Detroit startup called Validu has introduced an app and software to prevent expense account fraud by offering real-time event monitoring and auditing of customer engagement events — in other words, meetings and sales calls. Validu is a mobile event monitoring tool for customer engagements that replaces a traditional paper sign-in
YPSILANTI TWP. — John Maddox, the initial president and CEO of the American Center for Mobility, has left the testing ground for autonomous and connected vehciles after about two and a half years on the job. John Maddox. ACM photo. Maddox was named to the post in March 2016. He had been assistant director of
KALAMAZOO — Western Michigan University is expanding educational opportunities in cybersecurity under a new collaboration with Ann Arbor-based Merit Network Inc., a nonprofit organization providing high-performance computer networking and related services to educational, government, health care, and nonprofit organization. Under the collaboration, WMU will offer noncredit, online professional development courses in cybersecurity training. Registration for
