How the Industrial Internet is bridging the Rust Belt and Silicon Valley

Technology buyers in some sectors drool over the promise of things like cloud computing and big data, but those words don’t mean a whole lot in places like warehouses or manufacturing plants, where how something works is far less important than that it works. Until recently, Jon Sobel and Sight Machine had a perception problem: “Someone once said we were too Michigan for Silicon Valley and too Silicon Valley for Michigan.” He can laugh about it now that companies like GE have made “Industrial Internet” a household term, but it’s still a little true. Sight Machine, which is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Ann Arbor, is trying to sell big manufacturing plants -- from the ones building cars in nearby Detroit to those producing packaged foods -- on the idea that they need to upgrade their computerized vision systems for quality control to Sight Machine’s cloud-based platform. It might end up being a transformative experience, but try telling that to prospective customers.