December 2011
2 posts
Of Credit Unions & Unicorn Diets
A unicorn prowls the money matrix, waiting for people to clap him to life:
Being generally curious and ever-willing to throw myself into the clutches of danger, I’ve recently started researching how to start a credit union. Not that it’s a priority project, but it’s fascinating to think through what people could do better with a custom bank. I posted an email signup at...
1, 2, skip a few...
let this blank post stand for the many things that have happened but gone unblogged. check out facebook.com/makeloveland if you haven’t yet. <3
October 2011
2 posts
Talk To The Station: It's 2011... Have You Called...
Just sent this out to some friends and inchvestors, have a look-see and get your idea for Michigan Central Station up on the site for the owners and others to see:
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LOVELAND’s excited to announce a brand new web project at http://talktothestation.com .
Built in 1913 and vacant since 1988, Michigan Central Station is Detroit’s most iconic historical landmark, and a second...
New Collaboration: Imagine Detroit Together...On A...
Just sent this email to the inchvestor list. If you’re not on that, consider it sent to you, too! <3
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At LOVELAND we love getting into creative collaborations with our friends and discovering new ways to crowdsource magical things into reality. We’re happy to announce a very cool new collaboration that could use some lovin’. Please see http://bit.ly/oPMedd .
Our...
September 2011
5 posts
TL;DR: Puppies, Hollywood, The Real RoboCop,...
It was a week+ for the record books. Still processing everything and getting back into workflow. Gather around and I will tell you a story.
First, Mary got a puppy. His name is Jacob or Pasta Batman. There is now a tiny nipping and yipping force in the house with a 1/2 name borrowed from a This American Life story. He’s quite cute:
Last Monday through Friday I got called in to be an...
Subject: Making Sense of Detroit Foreclosure...
This is the text of an email I’m sending out to some friends, contacts, and mailing lists. If you don’t get it in your inbox, consider it sent to you, too ♥:
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Dear Hopefully Interested People,
Round 1 of the 2011 Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction is in progress with the first set of bids closing tomorrow morning.
LOVELAND Technologies is doing its...
Ten Years Ago & 2,000 Years Ago
This was the view my college roommates and I had of the Manhattan skyline on September 11th 2001 (pic taken last year by someone else at a prettier, more peaceful time):
It’s a crazy world and it’s always changing, now more than ever. Please be good to each other out there.
From The Economist, “Quantifying History: Two Thousand Years In One Chart”:
TEDxDetroit 2011
TEDxDetroit 2011 is coming up on September 28th, which also happens to be my 30th birthday. Wooha! Tickets are only $26, make sure you register soon because they might fill up. It’s an awesome event.
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since Mary and I spoke at the last TEDxDetroit. A little blast from the past:
This year we’re excited for LOVELAND Technologies to...
Introducing-ish: The Land Blank
Public Service Announcement: If you want to register for the 2011 Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction the deadline is **this Friday at 4 PM**. Registration costs a $1,000 deposit + a $35 processing fee to bid on one property at a time (the online auction comes in waves) or a $5,000 deposit + $35 processing fee for multi-core bidding. Detroit properties up for auction can be explored most easily...
August 2011
4 posts
It's A Painting... It's A Game... It's The Spirit...
Ding-ding-ding! The Detroit Vs Painting painting is done done done (see the Kickstarter for background on this experimental crowdfunded painting-turned-video game project).
Here’s Ryan Ford’s epic painting, and go here to see a larger version:
Backers were invited to suggest characters and settings in a [Something] Vs [Something] format ala Mortal Kombat etc, and Ryan went hard to...
New Map For Detroit Auction: Why Don't We Own...
Go to whydontweownthis.com for a map of all Detroit properties up for auction at the 2011 Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction, or read on for more.
At LOVELAND Technologies, our Detroit-focused internet startup, we’ve been working hard to develop powerful new kinds of interactive city maps (the working name of our mapping platform is Living In The Map). Last year we released a...
This Sunday At Imagination Station: The Spencer...
This Sunday the 28th Imagination Station is hosting an awesome concert by the Spencer Barefield Super String Quartet. Tickets are $10 right here and Facebook RSVP and details are here. Come one, come all! In addition to the musical epicness, if you haven’t been by the campus in a while, lots of interesting progress and developments, and this will be your last time to see Catie Newell’s...
Busy Busy Busy. Let's Lay It Out
My brain’s usually a pretty busy place, working on a few different interrelated things at once. Right now I’m feeling pretty bottlenecked and dizzy so I’m gonna lay out what’s up and needs done in the next 2 weeks. *deep breaths* This is sort of a public to do list, and if there’s something you want to help with, please let me know.
Imagination Station:
We’ve...
July 2011
9 posts
Venture For America
I was invited to (and did) join the entrepreneur board of the shiny new Venture for America, “A program for young, talented grads to spend 2 years in the trenches of a start-up with the goal that these graduates will become socialized and mobilized as entrepreneurs moving forward.” They’re currently looking for their first round of fellows who will receive training and support to...
LOVELAND Technologies Looking For Developers &...
Come on, you know you want to work on new school internets in Detroit (wherever you are). Job details on Facebooks, or, sure, let’s just paste it right here too:
CONTACT LARRY@MAKELOVELAND.COM IF INCHERESTED:
LOVELAND (makeloveland.com) is looking for a developer to help build our suite of community mapping and crowdfunding web apps. Front or back end or both, we’re open to working...
Metro Times On Crowdfunding In Detroit
Travis Wright has an epic cover story about crowdfunding and Kickstarter in Detroit with quite a bit on LOVELAND, Detroit Big F Deal, and other awesome city projects. Very cool and very human! Go Detroit!
Kickstarting Detroit: Creative crowdfunding in a cash-strapped city
A Social Network For Buildings?
Model D mentions some work LOVELAND is doing that could help a housing development manage properties and capacity while making community life more interesting for residents. We’ll see where it goes…
Working is a job
Demetri Martin on RoboCop and Kickstarter in Real Detroit (at the bottom):
RD: You may have heard (probably not) that a Kickstarter passed in Detroit to build a Robocop statue (silly, right?).
DM: Building a statue takes work. Working is a job. So, that means building a statue in Detroit would create jobs in Detroit. And that sounds good to me.
RD: If you created a Kickstarter to fund...
Leave Luck To Heaven
“Leave Luck To Heaven” is the English translation of “Nintendo”. My friend Brad (AKA Pierce P) and I have been dreaming about making games under that title for a long while. Well, it looks like that’s going to happen!
Ryan’s almost done with the oil painting for the Detroit Vs Painting painting-turned-video game thaht LOVELAND helped crowdfund. The next step...
Detroit Internet Club
In an effort to help catalog all the internetty things happening in Detroit and provide some more networking, good times, and a beacon for weary web travelers visiting Motown, the Detroit Internet Club was quietly born on the 4th of July.
Starter website: detroitinternetclub.com.
Facebook fan page.
Twitter sauce.
Wiki of internetty things, peeps, orgs, etc around Detroit.
The next meetup is...
Folk Art Like Button
On a boarded up window at the Imagination Station. Go ahead, click it. Awesome.
Very true
“When the time is ripe for certain things, they appear at different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.”
— Farkas Bolyai, to his son Janos, urging him to claim the invention of non-Euclidean geometry without delay.
Quoted in Li & Vitanyi, An introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, 1st ed., p. 83. Wikipedia entry on “Multiple...
May 2011
2 posts
LoveTax, Baby, LoveTax
Today is the 15th which means the LoveTax machine just paid out for a 2nd time. It’s obviously early days with just a few users and tax payers, but we’re really excited for how this can grow. Don’t be afraid to try it out…it works. We’re slowly adding features so as not to overcomplicate it, and feeling things out along the way. New to the table: embedding videos in...
The Honey Badger Placeholder
This is a placeholder for something else I want to put here in chronological order eventually. It is the finest placeholder post in the world. It just placeholds what it wants.
April 2011
3 posts
A $50,000 Napkin & A Detroit Music War
Inspired by the RoboCop statue funding and pushing for more crowdfunded alternatives, the Whitdel Arts gallery in Detroit is doing a little showing of $50,000 ideas for Detroit drawn on napkins along with 2 solo shows. The show opens tomorrow, Saturday, April 30th. Here’s my contribution to the show:
And I quote:
The Detroit Bat Signal
High power laser projection system mounted on...
Jobs, Taxes, Land, Money, Data, Funding
TL;DR: This somewhat lengthy post describes 2 brand new crowdfunding services in development by LOVELAND Technologies, both of which are at the beta testing stage. The first is recurring monthly crowd payments with LoveTax and the second is map-based fundraising with Living In The Map (note you must be logged in via Facebook or LOVELAND to see the feature). We would love feedback and tire-kicking...
This Past Month
There’s been waaay too much going on and I’ve fallen off my blog horse. The only thing that can fill in the time and story gap since the last post and get things rolling again is Epic Sax Guy:
Shwoow. There! Now we can move on! :-)
February 2011
4 posts
Funding A RoboCop Statue In Detroit
“They’ll fix you. They fix everything.” - RoboCop
If you told me 48 hours ago that I’d be helping to fundraise for a statue of RoboCop I’d have told you you were nuts. But now you can tell me I’m nuts, because that’s exactly what’s happening. You can donate to the project on Kickstarter, or share the link detroitneedsrobocop.com with your...
Detroit Super Bowl Ad Remix: The Chrysler Cycle...
Last night, Detroit and the internets blew up when a new Detroit-centric Chrysler ad featuring Eminem played during the Super Bowl. Fists were pumped, chips were dumped, and 180 characters were somehow squeezed into Twitter messages when people hung their eyeballs over this:
While I’d like to see Detroit stop threatening to punch other cities in the face and play nice in the greater...
The Curious Case of Inchvisible Houses
I’m not sure what the exact percentages are, but “pretty much every” vacant lot in Detroit tells the story of a house (or building) that’s disappeared. Actually, there’s a decent chance the house is still there buried in the ground. One of the preferred demolition methods is to just push the-artist-formerly-known-as down into the basement and cover it with dirt. The...
Map Attacks, Parcel Wars, & The Detroit...
Now that we’ve got a parcel-based starter map of Detroit up at livinginthemap.us and are beginning to work on filling out the Corktown neighborhood at corkstarter.com we’ve got an awful lot of options for how to proceed in displaying city information visually, and making it useful to interact with.
Today my inbox blew up with people pointing me to a map the Detroit news put out...
January 2011
3 posts
Logging Into Detroit (A Teaser)
LOVELAND is very close to releasing version 1.0 of our map of Detroit, dubbed Living in the Map. Larry’s been hacking on it hard like a drunkard with a broadsword and stitching it up sweetly like a hummingbird after heart surgery (sorry, been drinking coffee). If you’d like to take an early look and let us know what you think, email me at jerry@makeloveland.com and I’ll hit you...
How Big Can You Make An Inch? Mary & I At...
Mary and I gave a talk called “How Big Can You Make An Inch?” at the 2010 TEDxDetroit conference, held September 29th at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. The video just came online. It sweeps from the early origins of LOVELAND through to the beginning of the Imagination Station, from being alone with a bunch of tape on the floor and no land or website to leveling up and...
Linkin' Ain't Easy: New Internet Things for The...
We just pulled the switch on a brand new Imagination Station website at facethestation.com. Check it out and see what you think. We moved from WordPress to Posterous because it’s a faster and dare I say more joyous way to update a site than many alternatives (it’s sort of like tumblr, but you can create static pages and things). While I’m not a programmer, I’m definitely...
December 2010
6 posts
Stop! Producer Time! One More Day of Matching...
“Lemonade: Detroit is a film about the disarming resilience of those who are moving Detroit beyond automobiles into an era of entrepreneurism.”
You can help fund its completion and become a producer for as little as ONE MILLION dollars! Sorry. Stray decimal. For as little as ONE dollar! Peep the trailer and go here to squeeze some frames:
On October 20th at the 140 Characters...
Of The Online and The Earthly: Pixels and Poop
I’ve been crushing on this TechCrunch guest article by Redfin CEO Glenn Kellman: Take The Red Pill: The Rise Of The Hybrid Startup. It’s about the incredible opportunities for innovative internet businesses to merge with boots-on-the-ground in-person operations. A best of both worlds approach that’s especially relavent in Detroit where there’s a big digital divide to cross...
Of Cut-Scenes and Inchymations
Being back with the family over the holidays gave ample time to lounge on the couch and partake in one of my favorite activities: making little animations mixing drawings and photos. Ah yes, the humble North American inchymation:
Now, to some extent, I brought home the magic beans here because what I set out to do was make a cut-scene that advanced the story of The Bridge To Everywhere...
The Reason I Get Scared Sometimes
My teammates are probably annoyed that I keep making them watch this video of Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason back at his previous company, The Point. But it’s interesting enough to me that I’ve been hitting play on it like a song, once or twice a day. (Yea, I’m a dork like that. :-))
A couple of weeks ago, when the 18th-ish-month-old Groupon turned down a 6 BILLION...
LOVELAND Inchvestor Update: Peak Inches, Growing...
Here’s the latest inchvestor update we just sent out!
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Dear Inchvestors, Greetings from Detroit!
We’ve reached peak inches in the Hello World microhood. So far nearly 1,000 inchvestors have claimed 25,000+ of its 50,000 inches. Hot sauce! In honor of the occasion we’ve released our 4 remaining grant projects all at once. Check them out here along with the...
Evolve
Posted to http://makeloveland.com/evolve a lil bit ago. Trying to get better at blogging/writing/sharing again. Been so busy, been feeling like there’s no time to live my life twice. But, with everything we do, how excited we are about it, and how excited we want you to be about it, there’s really sort of not enough time not to. If you know what I mean.
Since we started working on...
October 2010
1 post
Kickstart "No Vacancy" by Hygienic Dress League
Check it out, here’s an amazing public art installation in Detroit that needs funding loving this week: “No Vacancy” by Hygienic Dress League.
You can read more about the project and HDL at that link, but check out what the piece will look like. We’re talking approximately 30’ wide x 9’ tall, all custom neon, powered by solar panels, on the side of a the...
September 2010
2 posts
Let this post stand for all the posts that weren't...
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted on this blog. Will try and fix that with the ferocity of a dinosaur laser attack.
You Rock -- The Curious Case of the Square Inch...
I just posted this update to backers of LOVELAND’s 2nd micro grant project on Kickstarter where we raised $2,000 for Spaulding Court. Read on, but also be sure to check out this new Detroit News article and video on Spaulding and their new Soup at Spaulding weekly dinner and fundraising series. <3
PS pssst…… next micro grant coming soon. shhhh……..
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August 2010
6 posts
Hello From An Inchropomorphic Microhood Draft
The physical 50,000 square inch Hello World microhood, without any pathways, would be about 19 x 19 feet. Once designed with pathways it could be…however big. I’ve been working on some different layouts and in the process discovered this creature, who’s not quite exact, but who wanted to say Hello. Each block is a square foot, the white paths are walkways, the grass is grass, and...
LOVELAND In Japanese...Sort of
I was just chatting with Larry who signed off with “Eat soup, have fun, $1 per square noodle!” The Engrishness of it reminded me we’ve been wanting to translate the LOVELAND site into other languages (the new microhood is called Hello World, after all). Anyone translators out there incherested in helping us translate the site into other languages?
I know there are some tools...
Micro Creation Tools Version 1 & The Zarzanzle...
Larry’s at it again. Among a bunch of updates to makeloveland.com he’s added a way to begin tricking out your inches online. Here’s Larry’s lot on Plymouth:
And here’s my lot on Plymouth:
The way it works right now is that if you’re inchvestor you log into your land, go to your profile, and hit Edit on your property. On the right you’ll see a new...
God Made Shirt, Shirt Don't Hurt
Our friend Phillip Lauri from Detroit Lives! is helping us silkscreen some new shirts. In addition to new versions of the “I’ve Got Inches In Detroit!” shirt and Detroit Ice Potato shirt we’ll soon have Monumental Kitty and Spaulding Court Unicorn Farm shirts.
If there’s anything you’d like added or changed about the shirts, speak now, or forever walk around...
SOUPy Spin-off Tonight At Spaulding Court
SOUP is a monthly micro-grant dinner in Detroit. You can read more about it right here in yesterday’s New York Times article that also features LOVELAND and Imagination Station. Jon Koller has been inspired to start a SOUPy spin-off happening TONIGHT AT 7 at Spaulding Court (2747 Rosa Parks and Perry in North Corktown). Read on for details.
If you can’t make it, go here to support...
1 tag
Virtual Layers Wanted For Entertainment...
Please get in touch if you are or know any game-y interactive-y programmers who like working on cool, small side projects ♥
Part of what LOVELAND is experimenting towards is a system for “entertainment fundraising”. That is, inviting people to chip in online with small (or large) amounts of money that fund real things while also providing them a fun interactive experience. Sort of...
July 2010
9 posts
The Big Inch Block Party Rocked. Thank You!!!
So, the first Big Inch Block Party was amazing. Thank you so much to the Synagogue for inviting and hosting us, Cafe d’Mongo’s for partnering, McClure’s Pickles and Betaworks for sponsoring, Valentine Vodka and Motor City Brewing Works for the booze, and iDetroit for helping spread the word. And there are sooo many people who helped out in planning and throughout the night. Read...