• Backyard Brains, which enables high school teachers to incorporate neurophysiology into their lessons.
• Carrier Mobile, which aims to replace hand-written logs for truck drivers with cell phone software.
• CrowdClarity, which uses the wisdom of crowds—often called crowdsourcing—to assist in product development.
• Mobil33t, a mobile development company primarily focused on smartphone application development.
• My BandStock, which allows bands to raise money from their fan base to make records.
• Phonagle, which focuses on team-based multiplayer games incorporating social networking.
• Quazie.net, which focuses on iPhone applications and other ventures.
• Shepherd Intelligent Systems, which tracks public buses and posts their locations online through Google Maps.
• WOMP Software, which creates and distributes lightweight, easy-to-use software.

The TechArb is a temporary home to these startups, but with the support of the university and local venture firm, RPM Ventures, it may be a more permanent space to foster entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan.  Full article from the University of Michigan News Service.

Since it’s just us three, we do what we want. If we have engagements during work time, no problem. We have a very cheap and flexible work environment – maybe not always so comfortable for visitors (or ourselves at times), but, it’s what we’ve created and it keeps our space fresh and highly usable for a variety of activities.

Flexibility and not having unnecessary expectations for others is key. For instance, we try to start each day (although it’s more like every other day) with a 20 minute episode from one our favorite TV shows. We all understand just how invested in the company we are. We know that if we take it easy one afternoon, we’ll be back in action the next morning, full force. One thing that enables this is that we all work very closely. We have an open space, no private rooms or cubes. We share and communicate constantly, solving technical challenges, planning our work, reflecting on our work habits, throwing out interesting experiences and ideas, making jokes and everything else. We’ve developed a rapport and camaraderie that allows us to be open, not afraid of taking risks or proposing out-of-the-ordinary ideas.

We enjoy working hard as well as taking time to relax. We do it all together and are able to solve problems (technical or not) together faster and better than if we were working on them alone.

This culture is tough to scale as new people join the organization bringing with them diverse experiences, interests and ideas but I think we’re keen on coming up with ways to make people feel included and valued members of the team.

Menlo’s advice and workshop really helped us to imagine new and effective ways to handle the development process.  We took what they shared and made it work for us with the resources at our disposal.  The greatest thing about their approach is that it is simple, “for humans,” and values a very high number of product iterations focusing on involving the client/user as much as possible (“guerilla” user testing, usability studies, product reviews, etc.).  We were able to come up with a plan for having user tests on prototypes every couple of days which has made designing our applications better and tougher at the same time.  Better because we have far more real user data to work with.  Tougher because sometimes that data is conflicting – some users want one thing, others want the complete opposite.  Balancing these needs with technical limitations adds an additional layer of challenges.  In the end, the greater the challenges, the greater our product will be when we meet them.

We tried installing Trac with Subversion on Hung’s Dreamhost hosting plan, but ran into troubles.  Subversion is a one-click install on Dreamhost and there is a user-contributed script to “easy-install” Trac, but they didn’t seem to work as well with each other as we had hoped.  After toying around with it for some time to no avail, I hit up Google for “free trac subversion hosting” and found Assembla.

Assembla is great.  500 MB of space for Trac integrated with Subversion for free at the click of a button.  There are additional tools for persistent chat, milestone management (although Trac also does this), uploading and viewing large format images, time tracking and more.  The site seems a little buggy here and there (i.e. it is still asking me to verify my email address even though I have already done so; initially tickets in Trac did not work because a separate Tickets manager was enabled in Assembla – not sure why they are duplicating tools), but we resolved that and Trac is working just fine.

We just started using Assembla today, so we’ll see how things go.  I’ll be sure to post any major updates on how using Assembla works out over the course of the summer.