Advanced Photonix Revenue Up 16%

ANN ARBOR — Annual revenue rose a brisk 23 percent in fiscal year ended March 31 at Ann Arbor-based Advanced Photonix Inc.

The company said sales were $29 million, up 23 percent from $23.6 million a year earlier. For the fourth quarter, sales were $7 million, up from $6 million a year earlier.

Will Climate Change Hurt Rainforests? MTU Seeks Answers

HOUGHTON — Did you know that there is a tropical rainforest in the United States? It’s in Puerto Rico — the El Yunque National Forest — and Michigan Technological University researchers are joining United States Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey scientists there to get a handle on the impact that climate change — particularly warming — is likely to have on the tropical forests of the world.

The Tropical Response to Altered Climate Experiment (TRACE) research project is supported by the U.S. Forest Service with an additional three-year, $960,000 grant from the US Department of Energy.

Application To Increase Jury Participation Wins The Hatching

EAST LANSING — Last week’s Hatching first anniversary event saw a startup concept called Jurymind win the competition.

Jurymind is a smart phone application that potential members of a jury can use to receive proactive reminders and instructions for their jury duty service. A link to the application would be printed directly onto the jury summons, allowing for immediate installation and use of the app.

MTU Prof Finds Possible Carbon Lessons From Nitrogen Management

HOUGHTON — In 1900, about 1.6 billion people lived on Earth. Just a few generations later, over four times as many of us share the planet.

There are plenty of reasons for the population boom — childhood vaccinations, better sanitation, antibiotics — but perhaps the most important driver is a discovery that allowed us to snatch nitrogen from the atmosphere and turn it into food. That, notes Hugh Gorman, professor of environmental history and policy at Michigan Technological University, involved humanity’s hijacking of one of nature’s most fundamental chemical processes: the nitrogen cycle.

Gorman explores the repercussions of this new power and the efforts to mitigate its unintended consequences in his book “The Story of N: A Social History of the Nitrogen Cycle and the Challenge of Sustainability.” An article based on the book won second place in the journal Gaia’s 2013 Best Paper competition.

Advanced Photonix Gets $1M Navy Order

ANN ARBOR — Advanced Photonix Inc. said Friday it had been awarded a $1 million contract to develop a high-speed imaging system to detect corrosion under marine coatings from the United States Navy.

The contract from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center will use API’s Terahertz technologies.

Online Tech Will Open Westland Data Center Soon

WESTLAND — In a leafy corner of this western Wayne County suburb, Ann Arbor-based Online Tech Inc. is building its fifth data center.

Online Tech has evolved from being Michigan’s original internet service provider into a major Midwest data center operator. It has two data centers in the Ann Arbor area — one with 10,500 square feet of space (7,000 square feet of raised-floor data rack space), another with 19,500 square feet of space (10,000 square feet raised floor). Then, it purchased a former General Motors-EDS data center outside Flint, with 32,500 square feet of total space, 22,500 raised-floor.

Now, it’s refurbishing a former Sprint-Nextel data center in Westland, an area that’s easily accessed off I-275 and I-96 (once the latter is reconstructed). When it opens in August, it’ll be the biggest Online Tech data center yet — 34,500 square feet under roof, more than three-quarters of an acre, and 18,000 square feet of raised floor space, in four separate rooms.

New Security Conference ‘Converge’ Coming In July

DETROIT — Converge, a new IT security conference is coming to the newly renovated Cobo Center in downtown Detroit Thursday and Friday, July 10 and 11.

The organizers of three successful years of a smaller security conference, BSides Detroit, are staging the event. The fourth BSides event will still be held, on Saturday, July 12.

Ebert Succeeds Reuss As Lawrence Tech Board Chair

SOUTHFIELD — Douglas E. Ebert, former COO of the Cranbrook Educational Community, has been named to succeed Lloyd E. Reuss as chair of the board of trustees at Lawrence Technological University.

Linkner: Unleash Your Inner Creative

SOUTHFIELD — Creativity is the key to success, according to
bestselling business author and serial entrepreneur Josh Linkner.

Easy to say. But hard to do? Well, don’t worry, Linkner said. All of us
start out creative as kids. And no matter what’s happened to us since,
we can get back there, Linkner said — pointing to a Harvard study that shows that 85 percent of creativity is learned behavior.

Linkner spoke Thursday at a “Business Over Breakfast” event at The
Engineering Society of Detroit headquarters in Southfield.

Linkner offered example over example of creativity and innovation,
the seeds of which he says are inside virtually everyone.

Detroit CIOs Have Robust Hiring Plans

DETROIT — It’s a good time to be an IT jobseeker in Detroit. How good? Well, how good does zero layoffs sound?

Eighty-nine percent of Detroit-area CIOs plan to hire IT professionals in the last half of 2014, either to expand or fill vacant positions, according to a new report from Robert Half Technology. That’s 9 percentage points higher than the survey result for the prior six months, when the figure was 80 percent.

And exactly zero CIOs plan layoffs in the second half of the year,
down from 3 percent a year earlier.