why Kazez relocated to Ann Arbor. He knew that Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and other big tech companies recruit from the University of Michigan, and that there is a great pool of talent among new and recent graduates.
One of the first Ann Arbor people he connected with was Jason Bornhorst, who in 2009 founded TechArb, a U-M student company business accelerator. Bornhorst joined the company and arranged for Mobiata to be housed, rent-free, at TechArb.
“It’s working out way better than I could have ever imagined,” Kazez says. Here, he’s found people with the right kind of attitude, although he is always looking for more engineers who are just as excited as he is about the user experience.
Here’s a story Kazez relates with obvious relish: he has a competitor named WorldMate, which Kazez says made a big deal out of having eight engineers working on an iPhone itinerary app. Mobiata’s itinerary app, TripDeck, was developed by “two and a half people” (Kazez worked on it only part-time) for three months. “I believe we were almost 100 percent inline with the WorldMate itinerary app,” he says.
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Author: Howard Lovy
Howard Lovy is a veteran journalist who has focused primarily on technology, science and innovation during the past decade.
In 2001, he helped launch Small Times Magazine, a nanotech publication based in Ann Arbor, MI, where he built the freelance team and worked closely with writers to set the tone and style for an emerging sector that had never before been covered from a business perspective. Lovy's work at Small Times, and on one of the first nanotechnology-themed blogs, helped him earn a reputation for making complex subjects understandable, interesting, and even entertaining for a broad audience. It also earned him the 2004 Prize in Communication from the Foresight Institute, a nanotech think tank.
In his freelance work, Lovy covers nanotechnology in addition to technological innovation in Michigan with an emphasis on efforts to survive and retool in the state's post-automotive age. Lovy's work has appeared in many publications, including Wired News, Salon.com, the Wall Street Journal, The Detroit News, The Scientist, the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report, Michigan Messenger, and the Ann Arbor Chronicle.
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