John (left) and Scott Meyer of 9 Clouds speaking at FutureMidwest. Photo by Tatiana12 on Flickr.
Last week, I was able to attend and speak at the FutureMidwest conference in Detroit. The conference was made up of about 800 designers, developers, marketers, and creatives across the Midwest (primarily Michigan natives). Like Big Omaha, FutureMidwest is in its third year, has a cow for a mascot, and put together an awesome event that really captured the spirit of Detroit.
My brother Scott (co-founder of 9 Clouds) and I were anxious to arrive in Detroit and see if the vibe was as rough as advertised in the national media that we hear. Frankly, I felt that physically the city isn’t great. There are many empty buildings and the recent 2010 Census stated that over 200,000 people have left the city. However, the people of Detroit are some of the most spirited, confident and entrepreneurial people I’ve ever met. They truly believe that it will be entrepreneurship that rebuilds a city that was originally built by entrepreneurs.
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FutureMidwest is organized by Adrian Pittman and David Murray and like Big Omaha sets out to highlight the great ideas and entrepreneurs of the Midwest, but with an emphasis on Michigan. The FutureMidwest states range from North Dakota to Kansas, and east all the way to Indiana. The Midwest may be a broad term that is interpreted differently by many, but FutureMidwest had its own Silicon Prairie feel from a few companies.
Bo Fishback, CEO of the soon-to-release Zaarly, spoke at an event called Funded By Night, which was a startup pitch competition featuring 20 startups competing for a $100,000 check. Fishback did a 15-minute session telling the captivating story of how Zaarly has come to be and, and he provided insight for the co-founders of the 20 competing startups. Also from Kansas City, Josh Gunkel, foresight curator at Hallmark, spoke in a Q&A session with market researcher Ben Smithee of Spych Research. Gunkel spoke about how Kansas City based Hallmark is taking their 80 year old greeting card company into the digital age. And finally, yours truly and my brother did a keynote on Marketing Across the Digital Divide and how social marketing is being used across the Midwest today.
All in all, I thought FutureMidwest was a great conference, and it was nice to see other parts of the Midwest highlight awesome people and showcase the local talent much like Big Omaha. Through conferences like FutureMidwest, Big Omaha, and Thinc Iowa, we can continue to put the creative community of the Midwest on the map.
See you all next week at Big Omaha!
