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A News Source Does Not a Community Make
In starting WindyWire, our original intention was not to be a news aggregator and publisher but to be a site that amplified the connections that people make at great events like TechCocktail and ChicagoBeta and carried them throughout the rest of the year.
What we’re finding is that people did start talking, and people are a bit starved for a resource, but the talking they did was to us. Which is great for us but not for the growth of the community.
So what we’re doing now is figuring out the best way to create a better community and in the next few weeks we’ll be implementing some ideas that seem more inline with what we set out to do here.
The news will pause for a bit but hopefully what comes next does a lot more to expand the conversation and strengthen the community that we are building here in Chicago. Please, stay tuned to the Twitter stream for updates on the progress.
If you have any suggestions for what you would like to see here, please leave them in the comments.
Seed Conference Announces Scholarships
The SEED Conference has announced student scholarships and still has a few tickets left for non-students as well.Navteq Inks New Deal
Digital mapmaker Navteq said Tuesday it expanded its agreement with AOL-owned MapQuest to provide it access to all of the 73 countries in its map database, as well as future country releases.Threadless INC.
Continuing the recent theme of Chicago companies getting writeups in national publications, Threadless and skinnyCorp got the cover treatment in this month’s Inc. Magazine. It hits news stands next week:
Read The Full Article Online Here
Ogilvy gets the Contract for Chicago2016.org
Ogilvy Chicago was awarded the task of redesigning Chicago2016.org should the city make the next round of cuts.Planypus Redesigns
Planypus, the site that allows you to make and share plans with your friends, has just given a teaser of their upcoming site overhaul.SaveChicago.org using online shopping to help the city
A nice writeup on Steve Misetic and SaveChicago.org a fledgling database of hyper-local deals in Chicago that donates 50% of its revenue to area non-profit organizations.TechCocktail Races in Threadle Manss
Threadless has been known to do some pretty cool things and this Saturday they’re holding a huge Pinewood Derby race in which TechCocktail has an entry.Songza Rocks on with API, RSS Feeds, and a Facebook App
Songza, the company founded by Scott Robbin and Aza Raskin during their time together at Humanized, has jumped into the social web frenzy.
For those that are unaware, Songza is a streaming internet jukebox and music search and recommendation engine (for the record, they are in full compliance with music download laws and they do pay royalties where necessary).
They’ve launched a facebook app that tracks what you’re listening to, shows the songs on your profile and shares them with your friends through your minifeed. It also includes direct links to the specific songs on Songza so that your friends can go listen to the songs and add them to their playlist as well; a sort of social music recommendation system if you will.
In addition to the Facebook app, the site now also generates rss feeds for your personal playlist, the site’s most popular songs, and the featured music list where up-and-coming acts pay a small fee to get their songs exposed to Songza’s users. The obvious advantage here being that you can know push what you’re listening to to places like Twitter and FriendFeed.
Finally, they’ve opened their API, giving developers access to site data for the featured songs list, user playlists, and the last ten songs a user has added. It will be especially cool to see the types of mashups that come from this. Maybe, down the road, they’ll allow users to indicate their location and enable the type of mashup that would allow tracking of music trends across the country.
Songza looks like its becoming another great addition to the already startup-strong Ravenswood corridor.
(Songza Company Profile)
Minnebar Recap
BarCamp Minnesota happened last weekend and the MinneBar wiki does a pretty good job of making you feel like you were there and catching you up on what went down.Aberdeen Group Releases State of the Market Report
Several companies with Illinois ties made the Aberdeen Group’s list of the 100 Most Influential Technology VendorscrowdSPRING Launches to the Public
crowdSPRING, the crowd sourcing startup that made waves by allowing users to design its homepage has fully launched to public.
Billed as an online marketplace that “brings the power of choice to individuals and businesses and creates a community for untapped creative talent,” the site is taking the interesting approach of trying to fill gaps that are left in the marketplace by niche sites like Threadless, iStockPhoto, and Pixish by dealing mainly in the market of people and companies who are looking to have specific creative services performed; aiming to simplify the process of connecting them with talented freelancers.
If at this point you’re beginning to wonder what separates this site from things like oDesk and 99Designs, the best features seem to be the quality of the protection in place for all parties involved and the guarantee of results. The site offers stringent legal protection the buyers and for the participating creatives and offers a guarantee that all requests will receive at least 25 entries.
Founded by Ross Kimbarovsky a former intellectual propery attorney and Mike Sampson a former movie producer, the site enters an already crowded and competitive space. Though if risks like crowd sourcing the design of their website are any indication of what they have in store, we look forward to seeing what else they have planned to differentiate themselves from the crowd.
uSphere Rolls Out Parent Portal
uSphere, the Evanston-based company whose platform exposes Colleges to Students and Students to Colleges via proprietary matching technology, has been delving deeper into the information side of things lately as evidenced by the roll out of their parent portal.
They’ve used the information they’ve gleaned through building their business to provide parents with a pretty comprehensive guide to the process from a parent’s perspective; everything from planning for college, to paying for college, to finding the right schools and choosing between them.
We think this is a pretty important feature to highlight here as its a great example of what companies with web-based services can do to provide more value to their users and bring more people into the site. The line between content site and webapp is blurring and the companies that are combining both are finding out that it works pretty well.
Price Advance Launches to the Public
Chicagoan Roddy Richards (StartupSchwag) and New Yorker Adam Gotterer (CollegeHumor) have just recently launched the PriceAdvance browser plugin to the public.
The plugin shows you what the product that you’re after costs at other merchants across the web as you shop.
For example, surf to BestBuy.com and look at a flat screen TV and PriceAdvance will show you what that same TV costs at Buy.com, Amazon and others. If you see a lower price, just click on it and you’ll be taken directly to the product page on that store’s site.
Right now PriceAdvance supports 19 online merchants (with more in the works) and is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Since it launched in beta this December the plugin has saved its users over $100,000. I’d imagine the major impediment to a rapid increase in stores supported by the plugin is the quality of some merchant sites and the availability of their data. Check out the demo below:
Gapers Block is Turning 5
Gapers Block, one of the pioneers group newsblogging and one of the first efforts at Chicago-based internet citizen journalism, turns five years old this month and they’re throwing a party to celebrate.
The site was founded by Andrew Huff and Naz Hamid and bills itself as “an antidote to all those sites infatuated with the coasts.”
Merge is the news feed, Slowdown chronicles the city’s events, daily columns show up in Airbags, a daily Flickr photo gets posted to Rearview, and people ponder the mysteries of the universe while talking with their neighbors in Fuel. Along with the main sections, they have the seperate blogs A/C, Book Club, Drive Thru, Tailgate, and Transmission devoted to covering the city’s Arts, Literary, Culinary, Sports, and Music scenes respectively.
Since we think its one of the cleanest designs on the web, we thought we’d take a trip on the Wayback Machine and show you what it looked like on May 7th, 2003: Here.
The Gapers Block 5th Anniversary Party will be at the Hideout (1354 W. Wabansia) on May 30th at 9pm. Bossa Saravah, the Revelettes go-go troupe, DJ Arpad and DJ James Vane will all be there. For more info head over to GB.
CME Group Gets a new CEO
Kevin Kometer has been appointed Managing Director and CIO of CME Group, the company behind the CME and CBOT. Former CIO James Krause is retiring after 23 years.Univa UD Raises Series B Financing
Lisle, IL and Austin, TX based Univa UD (formed when Univa merged with Austin’s United Devices) has announced a second round of financing.
The company which produces hpc systems management and data center visualization software raised the round from new investor River Cities Capital Funds as well as several investors that participated in the company’s first funding round, including ARCH Venture Partners, New World Ventures, Appian Ventures and OCA Ventures.
They plan to use the money to further build out their development team in order to meet the goals of their product roadmap (and full coffers are always nice in a slacking economy).
The amount of the funding remains undisclosed.
InklingMarkets New Coat of Paint
Inkling Markets (YCombinator Funded and Finalist for ITA’s newcomer award) is getting ready for a relaunch with a nice new look.TechCocktail Conference Getting Close
The first TechCocktail Conference is scheduled to hit Chicago on May 29th at Loyola’s Water Tower Campus.
The event promises to be a one of a kind event for Chicago’s startup community and has what appears to be a great line up of panelists with Dick Costolo (FeedBurner), Jason Fried (37Signals), Mike Domek (TicketsNow), Matt McCall (DFJ Portage Ventures), Brad Feld (Foundry Group), and many more scheduled to present.
The main themes of the Conference will be: building a business anywhere (not just Silicon Valley), leveraging new technologies and social media to help your business, getting your business funded, discovering your inner CEO, and growing a community around a traditional business.
Tickets are still available and you can register here: http://techconference1.eventbrite.com/
As an added bonus the 8th Tech Cocktail Mixer will take place afterwards at the usual spot, John Barleycorn in Wrigleyville.
Feedburner Announces Google Account Integration
FeedBurner has started rolling out Google Account Integration, one of the most anticipated features since the company was acquired by Google last year.Twitterific!
And we’re live… On Twitter, check us out!skinnyCorp Hires a New CEO
Ravenswood-based skinnyCorp, creators of Threadless.com, have brought in a new CEO to oversee the day-to-day operations of the community creating company.
Thomas Ryan will take the post being vacated by Jake Nickell, one of the site’s founding duo, who now becomes skinnyCorp’s Chief Strategy Officer. Ryan was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Bessemer Venture Partners with previous stints at EMI in the global digital music department, Virgin Mobile USA, eMusic, and Cductive where he was a co-founder before he sold the company to eMusic.
This appears to be a logical next-step for the company that saw the recent departure of co-founder Jacob DeHart, opened its first store (announced plans for more as well), is opening an office in Boulder, and is in the process of growing its new kids section.
(skinnyCorp Company Profile)
(skinnyCorp Announcement)
[StartUp Spotlight] Sean Corbett of HaveMyShift
StartUp Spotlight is where we’ll introduce you to the newest wave of Midwestern Entrepreneurs.
Introduce yourself:
I’m an entrepreneur, technologist, and Ruby on Rails developer. So In general, I write code for the Internet.
What are you currently working on?
I’m a co-founder of HaveMyShift.com. Stephen Wooten and I started with an idea to help solve a problem he was having: as a barista at Starbucks there was no easy way to find somone else to cover for you if you wanted to rearrange your work schedule.
How did you get to this point?
I graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in General Engineering in the summer of 2006. I pretty quickly started working on building sites for friends and family and realized how much I wanted to start a start-up.
How long have you been working on HaveMyShift?
We did the first proof of concept release of the site back in the summer of 2007. Steve came up with a way to make his problem go away and we spent a week or so developing a site to implement that. From there, we got good feedback and and strong response from the user-base that this was something they needed.
Is the site fully open yet?
Nope, the site is only open for barista’s at Starbucks right now.
What’s Next?
from here we are expanding the scope of the project to make this into a service anyone can set up for their company or organization. We plan to get the word out about the service in as many markets as we can find, and build the user-base. We are working on reliable feedback mechanisms to increase the accountability of actions people take on the site, a feature which employee’s and managers are both asking for.
Have you received any funding?
We are self-funded so far but we anticipate growing much more quickly if we were able to be working full time on the project so we’re open to partnering with someone or taking investment to make that happen.
Now the fun questions…
Best things about starting up in Chicago (and the Midwest)?
It’s easy to get in touch with people, the community is relatively close. An event like Tech Cocktail can really bring a large portion of the community together. We’ve got a lot of hard working people in Chicago with big ideas, people are willing to put in the energy to get something cool and new off of the ground. Rails, Django, TechCocktail are all examples of this.
Worst?
It takes more time [than it would in somewhere like Silicon Valley] to explain the kind of business I’m building to people who are not familiar with web ventures.
What would improve the community?
More open conversations about making startups work. A lot of people see their idea, their project, or their approach to business as do or die. There are a lot of things we can make happen just by working together and giving each-other a chance.
If you’d like to see a startup featured here, let us know: office at windywire dot com.
iVentures 10 Deadline Approaching
The deadline to apply to be a part of iVentures10 at the University of Illinois this summer (similar to YCombinator & TechStars) is Thursday, May 15th.Aza Raskin (Humanized) Blogging
Having recently departed Chicago for Mozilla, Aza Raskin of Humanized has started blogging.ITA CityLights Video
Footage from the ITA CityLights Awards held at Union StationOrbitz First Quarter Results
Orbitz has announced its first quarter 2008 results, bookings were up 41% and the company posted a $15M Net Loss on Revenues of $219M for the quarter.Seed Conference Three-peat
The third edition of the SEED Conference is headed your way on June 6th, brought to you from the minds at 37Signals, Coudal Partners, Segura, Inc.
The SEED Conference theme this time around is learning about taking control of your own work by seeking out methods to inspire new thinking and adopting unconventional ideas about collaboration and business. The idea being to get past the theory and start taking real steps towards making your own products and building your business.
According to the conference site: You should attend if you’re a designer (print, web or video) or a business-minded soul who is looking to take creative ideas and turn them into something satisfying & bankable. Anyone creative with an open mind will take away something useful. This is a day of active learning, not just idle listening.
The day will consist of six presentations: Carlos Segura (Segura, Inc.), Jason Fried (37Signals), Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff (skinnyCorp - Threadless), Edward Lifson (NPR), and Gary Vaynerchuk (WineLibrary TV - Cork’d).
Check out Photos and Notes from the first two SEED Conferences here and register here (as of posting the conference is close to sold out).
We Now Return to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming
We’re ready to start publishing full blast here at WindyWire. Look for a lot of cool stuff in the next few days and thanks to those who have been checking in while we get things rolling. Tell all your friends, there’s a new technology news source in town.