Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) and The University of Michigan are now working together on a project that involves bringing cloud systems to cars. The service would be an add-on to Microsoft and Ford’s partnership on the Sync system. Sync is an in-car communications and entertainment system. Sync allows you to command your car to perform certain tasks using your voice.

The project between The U of M and Ford has the code-name American Journey 2.0. This will give U of M students the opportunity to work with a development operating system that could possibly benefit future Ford customers. “Already with Sync we have proven that we can access information in the cloud,” stated Ford head of infotronics Venkatesh Prasad. The infotronics division at Ford is part of the Research & Advanced Engineering department. “This research gives us the opportunity to harness the power of student innovation to explore beyond those capabilities and develop what’s next. We want the students to get creative and develop ways to responsibly connect the car to communicate and share with the outside world.”

“What excites me about this project is that it gives our students the opportunity to unleash their creativity using cutting-edge technologies that connect the vehicle and the cloud,” added U of M associate professor Dr. Jason Flinn.

American Journey 2.0 will be divided into two phases. The first phase involves testing and attempting to break the system by running several applications. During the second phase, an in-vehicle connectivity platform will be built.

After the platform is done, a competition will be held. The judges of the competition include representatives from Microsoft, Ford, the U of M, Maker Faire, and several others. The winning application developers will install their software in a Ford Fiesta at the Maker Faire DIY convention.

Last night I was sitting at the Good Time Charley’s bar watching the Michigan State vs. Iowa University football game in Ann Arbor, Michigan. All of a sudden I notice that a large crowd started gathering outside of the bar. When I walked out I saw smoke and fire spewing from the top of a building about one block down from where everyone was standing. The roof, the roof, the roof was on fire of a building that used to be known as Pinball Pete’s.

While the firefighters were battling the heat, students were busy taking pictures and updating their Twitter accounts. A couple of people next to me sent out some TwitPics immediately. Shortly after the pictures were taken, a video was uploaded on YouTube [embedded above] and Flickr user moto1986 uploaded a stream of pictures from the event.

When I was standing there watching all of the students sending out tweets and updating Facebook statuses while the firefighters were battling the fire, I couldn’t help but think about how far technology has brought us. Just imagine if this event took place about 10 years ago. Our friends would rely on how well we could describe the fire rather than having the ability to see our pictures on Twitter and our videos on YouTube.

Some of the tweets that were sent out are displayed below [click the image to enlarge]:

[Photo credit: Emma Bumstead]

[Photo credit: Kristen Oltersdorf]

Chyngle is a mobile application company started by Todd Sullivan. Sullivan went to Yale University for his undergraduate degree and earned an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan where he won the MBA Entrepreneur of the Year. One of Sullivan’s latest applications is an iPhone application that has football stadiums mapped out and reports where the food stalls and bathrooms are. There is also a button that contacts medical assistance. And the application also has the ability to find carpools for getting back home.

So far Chyngle has the University of Michigan Stadium (also known as “The Big House” and the second largest stadium in the U.S.) mapped out. The Chyngle branded application uses the GPS built into the phone to find out your location and find out the services and people nearby. The services are marked by a red dot on the map. To order a pizza, drinks, chips, or anything else the user can send an SMS message to the food stands. Sullivan coined this service “in-pocket marketing.” Chyngle makes money by charging the venue $2,000 per month as a licensing fee.

At the TechCrunch50 demopit session, Sean Parker suggested a name change. He said he started a company called Plaxo and “people thought it was a dental problem.” Another judge suggested making it free for iPhone users and creating maps of bigger venues such as Madison Square Gardens.

The University of Michigan (U of M) and Amazon.com is partnering on making books no longer in copyright available for purchase as reprints.  The agreement was made between U of M and Amazon.com subsidiary BookSurge.

The original books are contained within the U of M Library.  ”This agreement means that titles that have been generally unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time,” stated U of M librarian and dean of libraries Paul N. Courant.

The reprint program includes books that have been digitized by the U of M book scanning partnership with Google.  Over 400,000 books across 200 languages have been scanned so far.  U of M will be setting the prices of the reprints and the university will be sharing revenue with BookSurge.

The Office of Technology Transfer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has conducted an iPhone Application Challenge.  This competition gives students a chance to win prizes such as iPod Touches or iTunes Gift Certificates.  This also gives students an incentive to learn how to build iPhone applications.

Earlier this week the Office of Technology Transfer announced the winners.  Below are the top 8 applications.

Application: Lytes, Category: Business

Lytes is an application that has the ability to quickly pull information about medical causes, symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of electrolyte disorders.

Application: iToolbox, Category: Utility

iToolbox is an application that has five tools that are commonly used by carpenters.  This includes a flashlight, ruler, protractor, bubble level, and caliper set.

Application: Sound Fury, Category: Game

Sound Fury is a sound mnemonic game that focuses on memory.  The game will play several animal sounds in a sequence andthe user has to play them back in the same order.  The longer the game is played, the more challenging the game becomes.

Application: Campus to Campus, Category: Travel

Campus to Campus is an application that incorporates bus schedules and average commute times.  There is also a favorites route, a smart stop, and a trip planning feature.

Application: TalkingWalls, Category: Social Networking

TalkingWalls is an application where users can add oral stories about communities that they have visited.  This would be a great feature to use for tour guides to leave oral stories about different landmarks too.

Honorable Mentions:
StoryTime: An application that helps young writers to practice writing using different mechanics to trigger thoughts.  For example, children can be asked to watch a video and then write about what happened.
ThoughtShout: ThoughtShout is a way to randomly broadcast thoughts in your head and share them similar to Twitter.
GroupLoops: GroupLoops uses the accelerometer to playback music depending on physical gestures.  If a group of people get together and use this application, you may be able to produce something very musical.

No word on whether these applications will be submitted to iTunes, but it was still interesting to see what these students came up with at the University of Michigan.  Earlier this month, Larry Page gave a great commencement speech at the U of M.

Earlier today I had the privilege to hear Google co-founder Larry Page speak at the University of Michigan.  I found his commencement speech to be quite moving.  He talked about how his parents first met at the University which is why he is a more personal connection with Ann Arbor.  All of his family members went to school there and his dad ended up being on faculty at Michigan State University.

“This is way more than a homecoming for me. It’s not easy for me to express how proud I am to be here,” stated Page. “It’s an amazing institution that is responsible for my very existence.”

Page’s grandfather, an assembly line worker at General Motors in Flint insisted that Larry Page’s father attend school at the University of Michigan.  Page also talked about how he thought of the idea behind Google when he was 23 in the middle of the night.  He hopped out of bed and wrote down a plan to download the Internet and save all the links.  Now the company makes over $16 billion per year and employs around 19,000.  The company also has an office in Ann Arbor.

Page told the graduates of the class of 2009 not to be afraid of using their knowledge and creativity to try new things in ways that haven’t been tried before.  He also talked about how polio has affected many in rural areas of India and was the disease directly involved with the passing of his father.  Page’s father spent over a year in bed because of polio.  He said that one day perhaps the graduates can find a way to erradicate polio for good.

If a video turns up on YouTube, I’ll make sure to add it to this post.  Personally I was moved by Page’s commencement address.

Update: Looks like a video made it to YouTube within one day of the speech being made. Check it out above. The audio goes blank for one minute but comes back again between 1:30 and 2:30 minutes into the video.

Update 2: Full transcript is available after the jump via the Google Press Center
(more…)

A couple of executives at Concur Technologies has accidentally slipped in reporting their educational background.  Concur confirmed in company filings from 1998 to January 2007 that CEO S. Steve Singh did not actually graduate from the University of Michigan.  Singh did attend the school for some time though.

Although the CEO’s education was misrepresented, the company issued a statement stating that they have full confidence in Singh.

Steve Singh wasn’t the only board member that had incorrect education representation in the company’s documents.  His brother Rajeev Singh reportedly had a degree from Kettering University in Flint, Michigan in the S-1 for the company’s IPO.  However the company’s website indicated that Rajeev had a degree from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Concur Technologies is corporate travel and expense management company.  The company builds software for both of these services.

[via Barron's]

Dollar Amount Involved: $1.9 Million
YouMail is a start up company that has brought on a veteran from America Online as their CEO and has raised $1.9 million in angel funding. The company is planning to offer a service that converts voice into text. Luis Villalobos was the lead investor in YouMail. Former AOL executive, Alex Quilici is now the YouMail CEO. YouMail is based in Irvine, CA.

One of the co-founders of YouMail, Ken Brickley mentioned that the funding will allow the company to attract more users. In regards to the market potential, Brickley stated, “In the U.S. alone, there are 150 billion voice mails a year.” Brickley plans to turn these voice mails into page views. YouMail is currently filing for several patents.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $17 Million
Mimosa Systems, an information management solutions company that offers services such as e-mail archiving and recovery in Santa Clara, CA has announced today that they have raised $17 million in Series C funding.The new round of funding was provided the $17 mill was led by Mayfield Fund and was joined by previous investors: Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, and JAFCO Ventures.

“Mimosa is a rising star in the multi-billion dollar, white-hot live content archiving market for unstructured and semi- structured information management, a critical need that is being fueled by eDiscovery and regulatory compliance,” stated Navin Chaddha, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. With significant customer momentum and an experienced management team, Mimosa is poised to lead the email archiving market. We look forward to leveraging our global network of resources to propel Mimosa’s worldwide growth.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: $100 Million
New York based Dice Holdings, Inc. is preparing to file for an IPO soon. The amount will be worth $100 million in common stock and will trade under NYSE. Several major financial underwriters such as Credit Suisse Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Jefferies Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley will underwrite the IPO.

Dice Holdings has several brands under its name including one of the most renown technology and engineering job board websites, Dice.com.The company also operates eFinancialCareers (acquired on October 31, 2006), JobsintheMoney (finance/accounting job board), ClearanceJobs (U.S. government security clearance job board), TargetedJobFairs (job fair/career event board), and CybermediaDice (Tech job board in India).

Dice has also previously worked on a project to help former Enron employees get back on their feet.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
RIPL is an upcoming social network that is based in Seattle and will have advertisement supported music and photo sharing services. Currently the website is only accessible by those who have an invitation or attend the University of Washington and the University of Central Florida.RIPL will have a product called the RIPL Receiver (which I’m assuming is a widget) that will sample music, videos, photos, and people in one’s network on the website. RIPL’s marketing plan hopes to emulate a similar technique as the iPod. Start from the teenage generation and then move up/down the age spectrum.The site was founded in December 2005 and raised $1.1 million in Series A Preferred seed capital in July 2006. Now it is rumored that the company has raised an additional $2 million as a Series A funding according to a regulatory filing.

 

RIPL is led by CEO, Bill Messing who is a former VP of Production at Classmates Online and a former Director of MSN.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $10 Million

Cellfish Media, LLC is a New York based company that has a website where users can download games, ringtones, and share videos and photos with friends. Cellfish services are compatible with Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony phones.

 

Cellfish has announced yesterday that they have raised $10 million from Solidarity Fund QFL. It had previously raised $50 million in October from Trio Capital, Telecom Media Fund, and from a Desjardins Venture Capital affiliate. Cellfish is a subsidiary of French company, Lagardere Group.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Coming Soon

Zoodango is a social network for professionals that is looking to take LinkedIn head on. Currently, Zoodango receives about 30,000 page views per day and had close to 3,000 profiles. Zoodango focuses more on setting up face-to-face meetings for professionals.

 

Zoodango announced that within 30 days they will announce an investment from “big profile strategic investors.” Zoodango has received angel funding from a Seattle-based billionaire investor.

The founder of Zoodango is James Sun, who is also a contestant on Donald Trump/NBC’s The Apprentice-Los Angeles.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $6 Million
Reply!, a decision search engine has attained $6 million in Series B funding from Outlook Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Debi Coleman (former CFO of Apple Inc.). Reply! is looked at as a competitor to Zillow.

Reply! was started in San Ramon, Calif. 6 years ago and used to be known as Next Phase Media.

Through this round of funding, Reply! intends on extending its services beyond real estate and automotive listings.

“We’d like to expand into other categories like insurance and home improvement,” stated founder and CEO, Payam Zamani. Randy Haykin, Managing Director of Outlook Ventures has stepped on the Reply! board of directors as a result of the funding.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Acquisition Speculations
Let’s just say that this digital advertising technology company is being eyed by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The company acquired Tangozebra last month to gain a stronger market prescence in Europe.

 

The company announced a couple days ago that it is setting up an auction-like bidding system for advertisements. DoubleClick is based in New York and has been priced at an amount north of $2 billion.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $18 Million
OZON.ru is Russia’s largest e-commerce website for video, audio, books, games, and other electronics. It is known as “the Amazon.com of Russia.” Investors in the company have announced that they have plugged $18 million in the company. The funding was led by Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Cisco Systems Inc.

“With the support of our controlling shareholder BVCP, we at OZON.ru are extremely proud to have attracted top tier European investors such as Index Ventures. This investment round will allow us to pursue our ambitious growth strategy and further strengthen our logistical operations, with a particular emphasis on the fast growing Russian regions. We also look forward to benefiting from the extensive knowledge pool, expertise and international networks of our new shareholders,” stated Bernard Lukey, CEO of OZON.ru.

OZON has more than 260,000 items in 12 product categories and 400 suppliers. OZON has a distribution center in Tver and is HQed in Moscow.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $20 Million
Finally some good news from the mitten-shaped state… Ann Arbor, Mich. based company ForeSee Results has raised $20 million from Updata Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and CFI Group.

 

ForeSee Results is an online satisfaction measurement company that utilizes methodologies from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Compuware Corporation and CFI Group are both co-founders of ForeSee Results.

As a new college graduate, it is of my interest to ensure to report about the involvement of higher institutions in the world of Web 2.0.   As you may know, I previously reported when the University of Wisconsin inked a deal with Google Print and how IBM added a Web 2.0 class to the University of Arizona.

Bill Gates officially signed as the commencement speaker at Harvard University’s graduation ceremony this year on June 7.
This is a big moment for Gates as he will be speaking at the very same university that he dropped out of.  A couple years ago, Steve Jobs (founder of Apple) delivered a very dynamic commencement speech at Stanford University.  I look forward to reading Mr. Gates’ transcript after the ceremony as well.

“I am very pleased that the Harvard community will have the opportunity to hear from Bill Gates on June 7,” stated Paul Finnegan, the president of the Harvard Alumni Association. “His contributions to the world of business and technology, and the great example he has set through his far-reaching philanthropy, will rightfully put him on center stage in Harvard Yard. I look forward to greeting him in June.”

Gates will receive an honorary degree from Harvard.

Another interesting announcement made today was that the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor is introducing a master’s program that focuses on social networking. 
Through the Michigan’s School of Information (SI), students will be able to register for the first graduate-degree specialization in social computing.  The program will also offer specializations in Incentive-Centered Design, Community Informatics, Information Analysis and Retrieval, Preservation of Information, Information Policy, Library and Information Services, Archives and Records Management, and Human-Computer Interaction.

“The depth of our curriculum in social computing is unparalleled. Rather than a single course as you might find in other programs, we offer a range of in-depth courses in the technologies and applications that are driving the Web 2.0 revolution,” stated professor Paul Resnick.

As a current Ann Arbor resident, I am glad to see the University of Michigan taking initiative in training students about the importance of Web 2.0.  Google founder, Larry Page and Skype founder, Niklas Zennström were both educated at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.