ITA: Latest Buzz

Retail traffic analyser, ShopperTrak, sets up new shopping centre business unit

sthomas

Retail traffic counter and analyser, ShopperTrak, has formed a global business unit to address the needs of shopping mall developers and centre owners.

Orc Americas Appoints Jeremie Bacon as President

sthomas

Stockholm-based technology and services provider Orc Software has named Jeremie Bacon as new regional president to consolidate the firm’s growth strategy in the Americas region.

Infobright, The Bloor Group, and Bloor Research Team for Investigative Analytics Webinar

sthomas

Infobright has announced that CEO Don DeLoach of Infobright, and analysts Dr. Robin Bloor of the Bloor Group, and Philip Howard of Bloor Research will participate in a webinar on May 29, 2013 at 3 p.m. CT to discuss "Hot Technologies of 2013: Investigative Analytics."

Dean DeBiase Named Executive Chairman at Digital Product Design Studio ÄKTA

sthomas

ÄKTA, a leading digital product design studio, has announced that Dean DeBiase has joined the company as Executive Chairman.

INXPO Partner One Smooth Stone Receives 2013 Ex Award for Best Virtual Event

sthomas

INXPO partner One Smooth Stone, Inc. received a coveted 2013 Ex Award for Best 100% Virtual Event.

AvePoint Teams with Tahoe Partners, LLC to Enrich Microsoft SharePoint Deployments and Improve Collaboration

sthomas

AvePoint, the leader in governance, compliance, and management solutions for social enterprise collaboration platforms, has announced a partnership with Tahoe Partners, LLC, a consulting firm based in Chicago, Ill.

ITA Spotlight on Software that Builds Efficiency: Branchfire, Granicus, Milyli, Spindle Technologies

sthomas

Check out how these Chicago companies are growing the local technology industry!

The ITA Spotlight features four companies on a weekly basis, growing the awareness of some of the amazing companies who call Illinois home.

Want to be featured in an upcoming Spotlight? Only ITA Member Companies are included, as one of the many benefits of membership.

Complete the ITA Spotlight survey. Then email us a copy of a high-res .jpeg logo, not more than 200 pixels wide and up to 150px tall, to headquarters@illinoistech.org, with subject line 'Spotlight'.

We will be in touch to let you know when you can expect to step into the Spotlight!

Robert van der Hooning, former Assistant Dean of the University of Illinois, named Practice Manager of Macon Haye

Ben Bradley

Macon Raine, Inc. announced that Robert van der Hooning has been named Practice Manager for Macon Haye, a demand-side innovation consultancy that helps higher education, financial services and technology companies create new products and services.

10th Magnitude Builds Interactive Content Distribution Platform for The Shadow Gang

sthomas

Cloud application developer 10th Magnitude has built Galahad, a cloud-based, multi-platform distribution engine for digital experience entertainment company The Shadow Gang (TSG).

KFSA Selects Applied Systems for Agency Management System and Producer Mobility

sthomas

Applied Systems has announced that KFSA has selected Applied Epic to automate agency operations on a single software platform across its four locations in the states of Kansas and Colorado.

Chicago's GrubHub to merge with Seamless

sthomas

One company was founded in Chicago by hungry software engineers, the other in New York by hungry lawyers. Great insight from our own Fred Hoch, President, ITA.

BridgePoint Technologies Names Jon Mathews As Director of Business Operations

Rita Nolan

BridgePoint Technologies, a full service information technology consulting firm, is pleased to announce the onboarding of Jon Mathews as its new Director of Business Operations.

OptionMonster Holdings’ Sanjib Sahoo Awarded 2013 CIO of the Year by The Executives’ Club of Chicago, AITP, and SIM

sthomas

OptionMonster® Holdings, Inc. has announced that its CTO, Sanjib Sahoo, was selected as the 2013 CIO of the Year award honoree by The Executives’ Club of Chicago, the Association of Information Technology Professionals and the Society of Information Management.

Rightpoint Expands Presence in Michigan -Opens New Office in Metro Detroit

sthomas

Chicago-based Rightpoint, a leading digital agency and technology consulting company, has announced that it has expanded its Michigan presence, opening a new office in downtown Novi, located approximately 25 miles northwest of Detroit and 30 miles northeast of Ann Arbor.

Infobright CEO to Speak at CTIA 2013 on Investigative Analytics and the Internet of Things

sthomas

Infobright has announced that CEO Don DeLoach will speak at CTIA 2013 on May 22, 2013 at 1 p.m. PT at the Sands Expo & Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Textura Announces Sponsorship of Global Construction 2025

sthomas

Textura Corporation, the leading provider of collaboration solutions for the construction industry, has announced that it is a Sponsor of the Global Construction 2025 report -- a global forecast for the construction industry to 2025, prepared and written by Global Construction Perspectives and Oxford Economics.

ITA Spotlight: Branchfire

sthomas

With Ravi Bhatt, CEO & Co-Founder of Branchfire

Company name:

Branchfire

Company url:

www.branchfire.com

What is your company’s Twitter handle?

@branchfire

Who are the founders of your company? What are your company roots?

My co-founders (Jim Brink and Steve Hockema) and I have long believed that content creation applications (like word processors) have failed to keep up with the immersive and interactive experience of consuming content on the web. We have an extensive academic and professional background in computer science and cognitive science and felt that we could do something better. A couple years ago, with the emerging adoption of cloud storage services, increases in network connectivity, and the introduction of exciting new devices like the iPad, the time finally felt right to start bringing the pieces together to start building out our vision.

Give us your Elevator Pitch?

Branchfire develops software and tools that simplify how people work with and share information. More than one million people around the world – from students and teachers to top Wall Street investors, lawyers and Hollywood screenwriters – use software by Branchfire to empower their work.

Our award-winning iAnnotate app allows users to read, mark up and share documents and images via an iPad or Android tablet. Branchfire also offers an enterprise version of iAnnotate as well as a powerful software development kit (SDK) that enables businesses and developers to embed secure document reading and annotation features into their own custom and commercial applications.

What problem do you solve?

Put simply, we make it possible for people to get work done on their mobile devices. iAnnotate allows our users to easily read, mark up, and share documents and images without the hassle of carrying around large amounts of paper. Our intuitive annotation tools replicate the experience of highlighting or jotting notes on a physical document, but also make it easy to index, search, and save those annotations for later review. iAnnotate also makes it easier to work with documents on the iPad through a powerful file management interface that connects to popular cloud storage services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive.

What makes your company special? How is your product differentiated in the eyes of the consumer?

We believe strongly in the power of good design and understanding the true needs of our varied customer base. The low barriers to entry for other app developers can make it easy to get caught up in tit-for-tat competition based on adding a feature here or there. Instead, we spend a lot of our time thinking about how to continually improve on the user experience of iAnnotate in the context of what our users need to accomplish. This focus on user-oriented design has helped us bring a number of killer features into iAnnotate including the ability to customize many elements of the interface, powerful tools to review notes and other markup in a document, and the fastest document viewing experience on the iPad.

How do you make money? Who are your primary customers and why do they choose you?

The consumer version of iAnnotate is sold for $10 in the Apple App Store, and to date nearly 1 million people have purchased it. Second, we have an enterprise version of iAnnotate (with enhanced security and centralized administration capabilities) that has been sold to over 300 companies through our partnerships with companies in the enterprise mobility space (such as Good Technology). Finally, we have productized our underlying technology components in the form of a software development kit (SDK) that we license to over 100 organizations that have built their own custom iOS applications incorporating PDF viewing and annotation functionality.

For the consumer product, our customers come from all walks of life; we have large user bases in academia (students, teachers, and researchers) as well as a number of professions such as law, finance, consulting, accounting, health care, etc. We’ve even made it big in Hollywood, where the cast and crew of TV shows such as House, M.D., Dexter, Modern Family, The Walking Dead, CSI, and more use iAnnotate to facilitate numerous aspects of the production process!

Our enterprise and SDK customers now include some of the world’s pre-eminent brands – one of the Big Four accounting firms, two of the largest hedge funds in the world, three of the top five US banks and blue-chip corporations like Boeing, SAP, Siemens, DHL, Thomson Reuters, Canon and many more.

What are your dreams for your company?

Our experience developing one of the very first iPad apps has given us a unique perspective on how emerging technology can transform the creative and collaborative process. This insight is helping us build our next software offering, which will connect words, documents, pictures and videos in new ways in order to improve the discovery and sharing of ideas. We call it the next evolution of storytelling, and we believe it will fundamentally change the way people communicate with one another.

It’s our kind of town too… but what are the advantages of being a Chicago-based technology company?

One of the terrific things about being in Chicago is the diversity of industries that are represented here; this means that many of our customers and prospects are right in our backyard. Beyond the obvious sales benefit, this is also really helpful as we gather input during our product development process. Chicago’s also a much more affordable place to live and work than either of the coasts, so that gives us more flexibility as we continue to grow.

What trends do you see heading into 2013/2014 that are relevant to your industry and company?

There are a number of trends we’re seeing in the mobile productivity space. First and foremost, we see recognition in the marketplace that tablets can be used for more than just playing games and watching videos. Much has been written about the consumerization of IT within larger enterprises – we continue to see users who discover the consumer version of iAnnotate driving subsequent purchase decisions of our enterprise or SDK products in their companies. Related to this trend is the rapid emergence of technologies to provide mobile application security; while generally a good thing, this emerging security landscape is extremely fragmented and we expect that there will be a great deal of consolidation and standardization in this space soon.

What are the biggest challenges you are facing in scaling your business up?

We could be happy being just an app company, but our ambitions are far greater. We are aiming to fundamentally improve the way people work and collaborate. However, executing on a vision like that isn’t always easy. We regularly face challenges prioritizing between short-term and long-term goals. This is particularly important in the competitive world of software.

We are proud to be based in Chicago and we love that there is strong focus on creating a vibrant tech scene. But at the current time, it’s still challenging to find enough high-caliber software engineers to join our growing team.

This one is all you… Anything else you want to tell us?

We’re very excited to have joined the ITA and look forward to meeting many more like-minded technology professionals in the months ahead!

ITA Spotlight: Granicus

sthomas

With John Cichon, Former Principal of Daystar & Steve Pascucci, Director of Sales

Name of your Company:

Granicus, Inc.

What is your company URL?

www.granicus.com

What is your company's Twitter handle?

https://twitter.com/granicus

Who are the founders of your company? What are your company roots?

Local company Daystar Computer Systems was founded by native Chicago brothers Ronald and John Cichon in 1983. Daystar essentially created the technology for legislative management solutions for municipal government that is now used throughout the US, Canada and other international sites. In 2011 Daystar was acquired by longtime corporate business partner, Granicus, Inc. headquartered in San Francisco.

Founded in 1999, Granicus’ award-winning cloud platform and product suites are currently being used by thousands of local, state, and federal government agencies across the U.S. and Canada to establish meaningful connections with the public while reducing operational costs. For the past four years, Granicus been recognized for being one of the fastest growing company private companies in the U.S., San Francisco, and the Silicon Valley by Deloitte LLP, the San Francisco Business Times, and Inc. Magazine.

Combining these public sector pioneers and leveraging cutting edge technologies and development resources, Granicus creates software that helps government and municipalities to work more efficiently, provide open access to public information and online tools to engage citizens in meaningful dialogue. Granicus Founders Tom Spengler, Javier Muniz and Emery Jones are all passionate about a company that not only delivers great solutions for our clients, but also provides a creative, productive, fun and collaborative workplace environment. CEO Tom Spengler is passionate about changing the way citizens interact with government and has authored two white papers discussing the ways technology is being used to transform government. The first one is about Government Transparency and the second one covers the increasingly pressing topic, Governing in the Cloud™. Furthermore, Tom supports transparency at the grassroots level by working closely with clients and citizens to advance transparency initiatives. CTO Javier Muniz draws on his broad knowledge of networking and application development to provide direction on product strategy and design for Granicus’ product development team. Javier enjoys leveraging new technologies to solve pervasive business issues for Granicus and its customers.

Through hundreds of discussions with our clients and potential clients we have developed the following guiding principles for the development of our streaming media solutions:

1. Provide a complete end-to-end solution that exceeds client expectations.

2. Utilize, instead of replace, a client’s current technology assets.

3. Offer client and user interfaces that can be easily used by non-technical staff.

4. Provide a reasonable total cost of ownership.

5. Build software tools that scale and automate the legislative process.

Are you a Start-Up or Growth Phase company?

Growth Phase

In 25 words or less, what are you all about?

We are committed to delivering the most innovative solutions that help Governments work more efficiently, provide open access to public data, and better connect with Citizens.

What problem do you solve?

We help improve efficiency by leveraging technology that removes redundant workflows and improves the accuracy of tasks related to meeting agenda creation and publishing and meeting minutes creation. We also provide a solid and reliable out of the box webcasting solution that allows communities to deliver live and searchable video to citizens and staff on PC's, Macs and mobile devices. This meeting video is integrated into the meeting documentation to create an "Integrated Public Record." that empowers Citizens to get involved in their Community by making information easily accessible. Lastly, Governments have a difficult time connecting and gathering feedback from Citizens in a productive and valuable way. We leverage crowd-sourcing technology and a SaaS platform that makes it easy, productive and cost effective for Governments to reach across their entire community and engage in meaningful, quantitative conversation.

How did you get started?

Ron and John started business in 1983 as a private sector custom software house called Daystar. In 1987 the City of Milwaukee contracted to have them develop the first computerized legislative agenda management system ever designed specifically for city and local government. Within a short time following the successful implementation of this new technology, a number of other major cities also purchased the software and the company redirected its operations to specifically serving the public sector. Granicus started in 1999 with a passion for technology and for making Government more accessible to citizens, and it was a natural marriage of technology and purpose between the two companies.

What makes your company special? How is your product differentiated in the eye of the consumer?

There are two things we are especially proud of: Our innovation and our customer service. It takes a special company to create all first-to-market products that we have, and it also takes a special team to deliver the level of Customer Service that we do. Our customers are our Family! Our customer service team is a talented group of people with the skills to answer questions on a variety of topics.

How do you make money? Who are your primary customers and why do they choose you?

We have over 1000 clients across all of North America - our customers are local Governments, County Governments, Special Districts, State Legislatures and Agencies, Federal Agencies and both the US House and US Senate.

Work Hard/Play Hard or The Early Bird Gets The Worm?

A little bit of both! We have a team that both knows how to innovate and also how to get the job done for our clients on a day to day basis. Our team has a diverse group of interests outside the office - We have musicians, tri-athletes, artists, Golfers, Cyclists, Outdoors enthusiasts, motorsports experts, budding Chefs...it is a great crew of people to work with and makes the office a fun experience which we pass on to our customers.

What's the #1 thing on your To-Do list?

Each day we are working on making our Customer Experience as perfect as it can be.

What are your dreams for your company?

We hope to continue to add meaningful solutions that help Governments to connect in a meaningful way to citizens.

It's our kind of town too... but what are the advantages of being a Chicago-based technology company?

The talent pool in Chicago is one of the biggest advantages - there are smart, creative, driven individuals that are looking to do important work that makes a difference.

What trends do you see heading into 2013/2014 that are relevant to your industry and your company?

Mobile is the biggest trend in 2013 - Our iLegislate iPad app continues to be one of the most compelling platforms to deliver solutions to our customers. We recently added Citizen Engagement data to the app so that elected officials could see Citizen feedback and Comments at their fingertips.

What's your #1 need going forward... other than funding and customers, anyway?

We're lucky to have a solid customer base and financials, so our #1 need right now is to continue our customer first focus while we deliver new products and solutions.

What are the biggest challenges you are facing in scaling your business up?

There is never a shortage of great ideas at Granicus! Prioritizing the next great "first" can be challenging.

This one is all you.... Anything else you want to tell us?

In a recent poll, fifty-six percent of communities said that they primarily gather input through in-person meetings. For much too long, government agencies have been siding with the lowest-common-denominator of the digital divide, assuming the job is done because everyone can meet in person. The landscape has changed. Community ideas are not represented by the people with the time to schedule meetings with government leaders. That interaction needs to happen where the citizens are at; today, citizens are online. Check out www.granicus.com to see how Granicus solves this problem.

ITA Spotlight: Milyli

sthomas

With Steve Ankenbrandt, Co-Founder and CEO

Company name:

Milyli Inc.

Company url:

www.milyli.com

Who are the founders of your company? What are your company roots?

Steve Ankenbrandt, Jed Cassinelli, and Chuck Kinnan founded Milyli in early 2008, after working together for five years at Savo. There, they ran engineering teams and took to market both the 1.0 and 2.0 versions of Savo’s SaaS product for large corporate Sales and Marketing teams in the Sales Enablement space. The founders decided to branch out on their own and start Milyli, which stands for “Make It Like You Like It” and is not only the name of the company but its credo.

In 25 words or less, what are you all about?

Milyli was founded around the principle of creating a team of smart, dedicated, and passionate engineers committed to solving real-world business problems with software.

What problem do you solve?

Our product Arc allows internal users to collaborate simply and securely with external parties while keeping content in the systems they know and work with every day. Users can simply right click and share a folder or file from SharePoint, a network location, their desktop, or other internal systems without needing to involve IT to create accounts or grant access. Arc is not only easy to use for both internal and external users, but it also provides additional layers of security on content, such as tracking actions taken on shared files and folders and even locking down how they can be viewed.

How did you get started?

Solving the problem of simplifying external collaboration was something we helped some of our most early clients with. That led us to building Arc as a platform for external collaboration that could easily integrate with any source system in an organization. We started development of Arc in late 2011 and took the product to market in the Fall of 2012.

What makes your company special? How is your product differentiated in the eyes of the consumer?

While most new businesses are focused on the cloud, we are addressing the need for a secure on-premises solution that allows companies to easily share and track content from within their organization with external users (customers, vendors, partners, etc.). We provide a mechanism for controlling an organization’s content while making it as easy to use as business users have come to expect from cloud-based solutions they work with at home.

How do you make money? Who are your primary customers and why do they choose you?

At this stage we are boot-strapping our product development by providing consulting services to a number of customers in the eDiscovery market and by building custom solutions focused on SharePoint utilizing the latest Microsoft platform technologies. Our customers choose us because of our expertise with the tools and technologies we use, the level of knowledge and skill we offer, and our passion for delivering high-quality solutions with a user-centered approach to design and requirements.

What’s the #1 thing on your To-Do list?

Our top priority is to add more early adopter customers for Arc and to extend the base of feedback for our product roadmap.

What are your dreams for your company?

Simply put, we want to develop and build software that addresses the real needs of our customers. Our team loves the process of software development and being able to see the value of our work in the successful solutions we deliver to customers. As long as we can all come to work and have fun solving problems with software each day, things like overall company size, large profit goals, and winning awards don’t really factor into what makes us happy!

It’s our kind of town too… but what are the advantages of being a Chicago-based technology company?

The Chicago tech culture is certainly a different culture than one would find in the Valley, because you’ll find more of that honest and hardworking attitude generally attributed to Midwesterners. Founders and employees alike tend to focus more on customer satisfaction than they do on exit strategies. This is also evidenced by the number of privately owned start-ups that are growing without taking funding. Altogether, there’s a unique culture and attitude around Chicago technology companies, which is why it has evolved into such a great community to be a part of and to watch grow these past ten years.

What trends do you see heading into 2013/2014 that are relevant to your industry and company?

Companies are continuing to fragment along department lines with the platforms and technologies they adopt. Instead of large, company-wide software decisions that involve IT, we are seeing more and more individual departments purchasing point solutions to solve their specific needs. This is good for sales in that it creates an additional need for securing documents across varied systems, but it also means that there is no single decision-maker in the organization responsible for solving the problem of Information Rights Management.

What’s your #1 need going forward… other than funding and customers, anyway?

Recruiting, always recruiting. Our team has developed the ability over the past ten years to find and identify passionate and highly intelligent people to join our software family. The challenge is not one of hiring the right people, but rather creating a large enough reach to pull an adequate amount of those qualified people into the recruiting pipeline. As Chicago continues to become better known as a hub for technology and start-ups we are starting to see less of our local talent drawn to the coasts, which has helped to lessen this problem the past few years.

ITA Spotlight: Spindle Technologies

sthomas

With Chris Dobrez, President

Name of your Company:

Spindle Technologies

What is your company URL?

www.spindleservices.com

Who are the founders of your company? What are your company roots?

Spindle is a spin off from parent company Dober Chemical. Dober Chemical is owned by the Dobrez family.

Are you a Start-Up or Growth Phase company?

Growth Phase

In 25 words or less, what are you all about?

Spindle is a technology company focused on monitoring labor in real time in the cloud.

What problem do you solve?

Typically, labor performance is captured after the fact making it impossible to manage in real time; the most opportune time to truly effect change. We provide all levels of an organization real time management of one of their highest direct cost: LABOR!

How did you get started?

We addressed a need in the commercial laundry industry: a labor intensive industry. Labor cost were high and there was no way for the facility to manage the labor force effectively due to lack of information. We stepped in and developed a solution to automate the entire process from collecting the data to writing the BI and hosting in the cloud. This provided multi-site functionality giving multi-site corporations the ability to look at comparative analytics of their facilities labor performance in real time.

What makes your company special? How is your product differentiated in the eye of the consumer?

We make labor performance readily quantifiable in real time and build tools around it enabling a significant transformation in the way facility managers run their operations. In the past the terms "readily quantifiable" and "labor management" did not mix well; here at Spindle we make them mix well and the result is significant operational savings.

How do you make money? Who are your primary customers and why do they choose you?

We are a SaaS business. We have a suite of software products where our customers pay a subscription fee per site. Our customers are large commercial laundries employing 100 to 400 people at a single location. We have our software implemented in North America, Europe and Australia. We will be entering other industries with our product in 2013.

Work Hard/Play Hard or The Early Bird Gets The Worm?

Work Hard/Play Hard...of course!

What's the #1 thing on your To-Do list?

Remember to look at my "to do list."

What are your dreams for your company?

To reach the top...what top...the very top!

It's our kind of town too... but what are the advantages of being a Chicago-based technology company?

The people, the people, the people! Chicago has the brightest minds mixed with great character and strong work ethic. This is a rae combination which gives Chicago it's unique position as an emerging technology hub. Being a world-class city goes a long way in attracting the top talent as well...oh and "Da Bears" of course.

What trends do you see heading into 2013/2014 that are relevant to your industry and your company?

There are many industries that have very little if any price control in their markets. These industries have to look at innovative technologies to enable them to reduce their operating cost in order to preserve or increase profit.

What's your #1 need going forward... other than funding and customers, anyway?

#1 need is knowledge. There is so much out there to absorb with limited time...maybe the #1 need should be time!

What are the biggest challenges you are facing in scaling your business up?

Effective Marketing Expertise.

This one is all you.... Anything else you want to tell us?

My Dad always said, "You gotta have dreams" and it is so true. How many of us would be here if it were not for having dreams? Dream on!

ThinkChicago to Draw 100 Elite Students from Around the Country

lauren

Sign up today for a chance to visit and meet with the leaders of some of today's most innovative tech companies. Students will meet industry leaders and venture capitalists, visit business headquarters, gain free VIP admission to Lollapalooza at the second annual Chicago Ideas Week, and much more.

Accenture buying Acquity for $316 million

sthomas

Global consulting firm Accenture has agreed to buy digital marketing company Acquity Group for $316 million, the companies announced Friday.

Chicago Tech Jobs Growth: It's Even Better Than That!

dradke

It’s great to see the recent CyberStates Report that Illinois’ technology industry is increasing jobs at a rate higher than the national average (See: Crains; Tribune). What’s even greater is that it does not capture the whole picture.

With CyberStates, the TechAmerica Foundation does the most comprehensive job of providing an outlook on technology jobs in the country. There is no better national data. Unfortunately, their results are only as good as the data they have to work with it. Being government data it doesn’t capture the whole picture.

Cyberstates pulls the employment database on the classification of high-tech companies in the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The system classifies companies as best they can but given that it’s a government program it can’t keep up with the industry. There are 2 issues with this model. (BTW – there isn’t a better model, unless you develop your own.)

First, it can’t classify technology companies that have a vertical bend to them. For example employment at firms such as Classified Ventures (NAICS: Directory and Mailing Lists), SurePayroll (NAICS: Payroll Preparation Services), Orbitz (NAICS: Travel), Dotomi (NACIS: Advertising) and OptionXpress (NACIS: Financial), IfbyPhone (NAICS: Telephone Answering Services) would not be included in this data.

Secondly, since they don’t pull by job type (nor do they portend to) they don’t capture anyone who is a “technology” worker at any corporation that isn’t high-tech (e.g. Wrigley). Chicago has big tech operations of multinational firms.

As Chicago has a very vertical technology community, the report can’t categorize us completely. Interestingly enough it’s the firms such as those above that are doing the most hiring right now. Companies are desperate to hire across the board and going gangbusters.

Just look at the @itabuzz CityLIGHTS Winners and Finalists…just 32 companies plan to add over 2,000 new jobs in 2013!

Their data is a good start but there’s even more going on which is great thing for Chicago.

Just some food for thought. I welcome your comments.

ITA CFO Forum (June 13)

meghan@illinoistech.org

CFOs who participate in the upcoming ITA Leadership Forum for CFOs build priceless relationships, outcomes, advice, analysis and tools from others who are leading the charge for their organizations. Think of it as your CFO Band of Brothers!

The CFO Forum will be held on April 3rd, in the evening. This event is by invitation-only and is reserved for CFOs of growth-stage technology companies.

Hackathon aims to solve traffic problems around region

sthomas

Typically, when you hear the term "hackathon," you picture computer geeks sitting in a large room, rifling through untold number of passwords or other avenues to break into secret websites or files during a competition.