• 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.

It’s been a long time since Troubadour Mobile posted anything. We wanted to let you, our faithful readers, know about our future plans. Troubadour Mobile will be at South By Southwest Interactive, the premier conference for musicians, filmmakers and location-based mobile software developers (that’s us)!

If you are going to SXSW, you should meet up with us and we can party! Oh, did you think the title of this blog post meant we were sponsoring some kind of party? No, we’re just going to other peoples’ parties.

Here are our profiles via my.sxsw.com. Follow us and let’s chill:

• Adam
• Gaurav
• Hung
• Chris (Not affiliated with Troubadour but he’ll be traveling with us)

Hope to see you at South By!

A few weeks ago, an Ann Arbor News reporter came into the office to talk with us about our company and the RPM10 program. And just last week, the news story came out. We didn’t see it at first since we don’t subscribe to these so called “newspapers” (we don’t really know what this “paper” stuff is all about) but the story is also available on their blog. So check it out to find out more about our company!

So after a few false starts, I have an iPhone 3G that works.

The journey was a long one; at the end I grew weary and lost faith. But finally, I have a neat iPhone 3G that does cool stuff.

It started this morning at around 5:30. I woke up (though I only got like, 3 hours of sleep since I had taken a nap earlier and messed up my sleep cycle) and took a quick shower. No breakfast. Just took a vitamin water (these things are kinda good!) and a coffee granola bar for energy.

Gaurav (from Troubadour Mobile) picked Adam (also from Troubadour Mobile) and I up. We drove to the mall and saw a bunch of peeps. We also saw some officemates from CampusRoost (yes, that’s a slick mention!). They told us that the AT&T store on Liberty had like, zero people and we should go there.

When we actually got to the AT&T store, it was around 6:30ish. There were actually about 30 people in line. Apparently everyone showed up around 6:15 or so. There was a really cool line wrangler named Steve that kept everyone reasonably informed. We found out there were like, 40 phones. So we should be able to get one. Adam and Brent didn’t want to settle for white ones. Or 8GB ones. But I think eventually Adam got a black 8GB and I dunno what Brent did.

At 8am, the line started moving, and it was moving well. But then disaster struck! It seems either Apple or AT&T didn’t have the resources to take a billion people in the US all wanting iPhones at the same time (and having to activate them in the store). The activations were apparently taking around 45-50 minutes each when they should’ve taken 15 or so.

Eventually, the AT&T people let us just do most of the steps in store and then activate at home. By the time we were done, it was about 11am. I went home and tried to activate the thing for about 15 minutes. iTunes was just being bad. So I went to sleep. I woke up at around 2pm and tried to activate again. This time it worked after about 30 minutes of trying.

I’ve been loading up apps and trying them out. It’s pretty cool. My favorite so far is the PhoneSaber.

Welcome to Troubadour Mobile! We hope you enjoy your stay.

Thanks!