John Tolvo, CTO of Chicago will be helping kick off the first day of TechWeek with an introduction.
How much Agile can you learn in a couple of hours? The answer is: a lot. In this course, Michael Feathers will walk you though the history of Agile, explain all of the relevant practices, and when they should be used and when they shouldn't. You'll learn how to do the initial and on-going planning for a project, how to write user stories, when to estimate (and when not to) and, through simulations, you'll learn how emergent design through Refactoring and Test-Driven Development impact the development process.
Big companies and start-ups can benefit from working together, but sometimes they don’t know how or why. We’ll be exploring this with our panelists. We want everyone to walk away with key pointers to ensure that when big companies and start-ups come together, both are able to achieve their business objectives.
At Apparel Media, we team up with big companies all the time. We want to share our experiences by moderating this Techweek panel with executives who have been instrumental in bringing start-ups into their own companies. To help us explore this subject we have four perspectives from accomplished executives:
At home, work, on our phone - tech is everywhere -- but are educators ready to make the full switch in their classrooms from books to computers?
Tech buying is top of mind of school boards and curriculum decision makers... but what are the next steps to make this transition a successful one? Is tech taking the place of teaching, or actually helping children succeed?
The question also circulating is how much technology is too much for schools. Schools are coming across new issues when it comes to Education 2.0 (for example Google Images and some racy content), open-web data is amazing for kids to find answers fast, but is it factually correct and age-appropriate? How do schools regulate what kids see on the internet and how do they also use it to their advantage?
Now that you have passed the start up phase how do you face the new challenges? What are the new challenges and how does you business change? What are the new sets of issues in the complexity of growing? How do you change your mindset?
From peer-to-peer lending to private stock sales, the internet has enabled the creation of brand new investment opportunities and financial marketplaces. Democratized online exchanges have forced us to rethink what is an investor, what is an asset, what is a clearinghouse? What are the new financial markets? Can anyone trade on them? What are the challenges for liquidity? How does regulation threaten the creation of markets?
With success comes the need to hire new staff, and it’s critical for growing companies to know how to approach the hiring process. At this critical early stage in your company's existence, choosing the wrong person for that must-fill position can be potentially devastating.
In this session, an outstanding panel of 5 seasoned Chicago tech entrepreneurs will share their experiences with hiring and managing new employees as they grew their business in the early days. Attendees will hear about mistakes that were made, discover the approaches that worked, and absorb the lessons these successful Chicago tech CEOs learned along the way.
Panel will discuss the changing ecosystem in online advertising, and specifically, what the transition to Real Time Advertising Exchanges means for advertisers, publishers, and the end user. Attendees will learn what Real Time Advertising Exchanges are, what top media companies have them (answer: all of them), and why they are so fundamentally important to how digital media is being bought and sold.
Most importantly, the panel will discuss why this matters for the end user and how this shift to real time analysis and media buying will change the way that users view, and interact with, online advertising now and in the future.
The spread of the social web has created a new industry of digital reputation management. From referral and word of mouth to feedback scores and social network risk analysis, the field of digital reputations continues to spread into our daily lives. What are the best practices for consumers and professionals to take control of their digital identity, and how can a web application offer its users their own 'reputation management' ? What problems are yet to be solved in the field of digital reputations?
From enterprise productivity apps and knowledge management to crowd-sourcing and online user feedback, working in a company has become more collaborative and interactive than ever. Here are some issues that compel our companies to rethink work.
From social media and job post aggregators to human resources software and innovative application processes, what is the new hiring lifecycle? How important is it for employees to manage their new digital career identity? What are the new tools for matching the right employee to the right job? Does anyone get a job anymore by answering an online help-wanted ad? Are traditional resumes a thing of the past?
This panel aims to give tech companies an introduction to the major topics, lessons, risks, and opportunities in turning innovation into intellectual property.
Entrepreneurs Unpluggd is a new event in Chicago that brings together successful entrepreneurs to share their lessons from actual experiences in an intimate, “unpluggd” format.
http://techwkpeoplebrowsr.eventbrite.com/
This panel will address the all too overlooked, yet invaluable skill of technology business development and the importance of building powerful, and effective relationships. Technology often offers us quick and efficient solutions to our business needs, however the central need to any new business owner/entrepreneur is a vendor relationship that is built on trust. That can only be engineered by “person to person.” This panel seeks to debate the most effective means by which these relationships can be established, maintained, and ultimately make them a factor in your business' successes.
This bootstrapper panel will bring together some of the most successful bootstrapping entrepreneurs in the US to discuss their techniques and tips to building a high revenue business without taking any outside venture or angel funding.
Working on setting up a mobile application? In this session, learn the more technical side to UX Design for mobile devices and look at examples of HTML and CSS. Develop a sense for responsive design as it relates to mobile design while considering the various viewport sizes and resolutions and how best to present content in a meaningful way for different contexts and device sizes.
We'll cover product strategy, design and development through marketing for the most favorable outcome! Join AKTA Web Studio, SocialKaty and GeneXus USA!
"Startup Puzzle" is our way of sharing the most efficient and successful ways to strategize, design, build, implement and market startups!
Your customers share stories, events, advertisements, and purchases with their social graph. The growth of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google Connect has created incredible opportunities to identify, engage, and analyze your next customer.
Data is the cornerstone of understanding the opinions, demands, demographics, and behaviors of customers. Customer intelligence combines the utilization of internal customer data via tools like salesforce or online behavioral analytics with third party data that augments your customer targeting and analysis. What are the current tools and methods for utilizing customer intelligence? What types of industries and businesses are being most impacted with new customer intelligence tools? What are the newest sources of intelligence data? What challenges, such as government legislation, are appearing on the customer intelligence front?
Everyday millions of blogs are launched and everyday millions of blogs die. There are now blogs covering every sector, niche and idea. Blogging has changed the way that publishing works and thrown the traditional media world on its head. But can blogging be a career? Our panel features four entrepreneurial power-bloggers who have turned blogging into a career -- one reader at a time. This isn’t a conversation about SEO and spammy sites that fill the internet, but about creating a blog with quality content and building a solid readership that translates into a paycheck.
What is the pulse of the publishing industry in the face of disruption brought about by new technologies and business models? How are publishers and authors changing their strategies? What are the new tools and platforms enabling new entrants, models and customers? We'll talk to our panelists, many of them Chicago based, to understand the changing landscape of publishing.
Entire business divisions and technology functions have been disrupted by crowdsourcing. "Big Crowdsourcing" includes the stories, use cases, and practical implementations of crowd-sourcing design, data, tasks, or other services for your business.
From trendsetting to jetsetting, women influencers have been dominating the social web. Find out their secrets and what makes them subject matter experts who have tens of thousands of followers clinging to their every tweet.
Take a deeper look at the two components of social commerce—social shopping and social CRM—and where they’ll have the greatest impact on the way businesses connect with customers.
Social shopping is already a well-established way of life for consumers, comparing notes and making recommendations among their own personal network. It can be directed, as when consumers solicit opinions among their friends (“What do you guys think—iPad or Android tablet?”); in this form, it’s similar to traditional e-commerce, where people actively search for something they’re already interested in buying.
What will tomorrow bring? What major developments lie ahead, and what problems remain to be solved? These are the topics Craig will discuss.
The talk will comprise of three presentations that will focus on innovation in Health 2.0 technology, which is focused on the consumer and patient engagement.
"The Gamification of Health" by Chirag Patel
"Crowdfunding Patient Care" by Desiree Vargas Wrigley
"How Smart is Your Doctor?" by Subbu Arumugam
From e-payment apps and productivity apps to workflow and financial management software: how do I bring my small business online? The new small business paradigm gives SMBs the same power and flexibility of the enterprise at a low cost and with rapid turnaround. Why should SMB's choose a dozen 3rd party apps that mashup together instead of higher-priced enterprise tools? How does a SaaS web startup engage small businesses in the first place?
One of the features that make online advertising so attractive is the ability to measure everything – impressions, clicks, engagements, completion rates, etc, resulting in a lot of data. That data should come in handy as marketers, thanks to the recent squeeze on ad budgets and consumer behaviors that change with lightning speed, come under greater pressure to account for every marketing dollar spent. But, as most marketers will attest, all that data is becoming a hindrance, not a help. Marketers are suffering from “data paralysis” – not knowing where to start or what to do with an overwhelming amount of data.
The fundamental problem lies in the fact that many marketers think that if we get the data right, all else will fall in its place. And, in the absence of knowing what data is the “right” data, online marketers collect everything. This misses the point – data at the end of day is just a collection of standalone numbers that do not mean anything until marketers do something with this information.
Using example case studies, this panel will focus on strategies to turn existing data points in actionable advertising strategies and explore best practices for setting up data gathering strategies that focus on actionability.
What is TechWeek: Projects?
TechWeek: Projects is where you and 100s of other coders, designers, and entrepreneurs connect, innovate and develop tech projects during TechWeek around Chicago. TechWeek: Projects includes coding, media, and design projects with the help of our partner organizations and your independent endeavors as well. Fill out the form link above and tell us what idea, app, or project you plan on working on during TechWeek!
TechWeek: Projects Lounge
The Projects Lounge is a dedicated area in the TechWeek headquarters from July 22nd through July 25th where you can work and mingle with other TechWeek: Projects groups. Meet our partners and find the advice and ideas that will help you whether you’re still getting off the cocktail napkin or figuring your best launch strategy.
TechWeek: Projects Kick-off
TechWeek: Projects Kick-off is a 1-hour session where organizers and partners can introduce their track of TechWeek: Projects. The kick-off is Saturday at 3:30 in Conference Room D of the Merchandise Mart floor 7.
Ruby on Rails is the web framework of choice if you want your application to be developed quickly, and still want it to be extensible in the future. This introduction to Rails will get you started with Rails web development, and show you how the Rails way makes web development manageable and fun.
Changes in the media landscape have heralded the evolution of content and distribution. This panel will explore web technologies and innovations in journalism and media. Leaders and visionaries from local and global news to Hollywood will share their experience.
Ever wanted to put a RoboCop statue up in middle of Detroit, produce a documentary or start the world's next great tech venture? Today, all these things are being accomplished through crowdfunding. More than just a hot new buzzword, crowdfunding is creating a fundamental shift in the way we raise money for our businesses, support our loved ones during medical emergencies and even elect our national politicians. In this session a panel of experts will discuss this trend in micro-giving and how it will disrupt the funding landscape for years to come.
With the rise of custom typography (via @font-face) on the web, we designers now have thousands of typefaces to choose from when laying out our designs. But as we begin to shift our prefrences away from "web safe fonts" which, in almost all cases, were designed and optimized explicity for on screen use, how do we avoid choosing typefaces that harm the usability, readability, and accessibility of our websites and applications?
Without the constraints that old standbys like Georgia, Lucida, and Verdana placed on our projects (and on our clients' web identities) how do we navigate the sea of possibilities to choose typefaces that are brand (and screen) appropriate?
In a volatile end-user landscape (browsers and mobile devices with different screen sizes and resolutions, media consumption in vastly different environments, contexts, and situations) how should we be setting type?
In this talk I will explore a few strategies and possible solutions to the concerns outlined above. In so doing, I hope to equip audience members with a toolset to help them make intelligent type-related design decisions for the web.
The purpose of technology is to solve problems. Mass tweeting from protesting nations enables the coordination of grassroots activism. Online challenge sites are able to solicit niche experts who propose computer science, biotechnology, or pharmaceutical solutions online. Knowledge collaboration sites help centralize problem-solving efforts for the public. From interpreting the human genome to enabling mass citizen protest coordination, what new technologies will solve the big problems of this decade?
Games are everywhere and there is a reason for that. Games make things fun! Making new tech projects a game can help retain users and gain a larger untapped market that previously was not thought of. The rise of older social gamers has taught a new untapped market to have digital fun. Come learn from the different schools of games from the best in Chicago how to tap into the ideas of fun and games.
Join Illinois Launch for their official TechWeek after party!
Mobile marketing is the ultimate one-to-one communications channel and a game-changer for businesses of all sizes. But mobile is also a minefield for the uninformed, subject to FTC and FDA "rules and regs" having to do with privacy, spam and making claims. In this session, you'll get tips and tactics on using mobile to rev up your business AND learn how to avoid the Top Ten Legal Landmines of a mobile campaign.You'll leave with practical, actionable information that is easy to understand and free of jargon. Mobile is here to stay. It's not a question of should you use it, but how and when! (This session is co-presented by Lori Colman and Tammi Franke)
Is my audience talking about my brand? What are they saying? How are they trying to communicate with me? Sales and marketing are incomplete without customer engagement, and the Art of Engagement asks thought leaders from tech startups about the latest tools and metrics for engaging your audience.
Ten year ago, Ruby was the unknown gem of programming languages. Today Ruby is practically mainstream and millions have profited from its power. Today, Clojure is the Ruby of 10 years ago. It's powerful, fresh, sexy, and relatively unused.
In this session, we will succumb to the allure of Clojure. We'll learn about it's Lisp heritage and how it fits into the world of functional languages. Software Transactional Memory? You bet we'll talk about that. We'll see how even though Clojure is not an OO language, it provides all the tools needed to build an architecture that stinks of OO goodness. Oh, we'll also talk about some real work uses.
Up until this century, information was generally associated with a place: clustered around the radio for FDR’s fireside chats; at the kitchen table talking on the telephone; lounging in the living room watching The Ed Sullivan Show; surfing the web on the desktop at work. Well, the phone is now in my pocket and I’m listening to music on my iPod while downloading a movie on the iPad -- or maybe all of this is happening on one device. The point is, these events are not occurring within the context of their own unique place -- rather, these events are occurring where I’m at. I am the place.
The boundaries of where and when information is received began to blur with the advent of the web and have disappeared completely with the combination of wifi + mobile devices. I am the place. I now expect information to be where I’m at rather than my having to be at the one place and the one time where information is delivered. Finally, it’s all about me.
What does this mean? Well, we need to rethink how we design products. Rather than starting with the end (let’s design a website!), we need to start up front with delivery and act (what information is relevant to where the user is at and what they’re doing). It’s a different way of thinking but it’s an important distinction to understand in order to design products that are relevant in today’s culture.
How do you connect to the people, places, and things around you right now? From mobile daily deals to social check-ins and local point-of-sale, there is an entire industry of social-local-mobile that did not exist 5 years ago. What are the new business models around social-local-mobile? How can small businesses, large brands, news publications, and the end user benefit right now?
Join us for a Fireside Chat with Jeff Lawson!
When marketers buy television spots, they can turn on the tube and watch them run. Magazines and newspapers? Marketers can flip to their ads. But when it comes to online inventory, the questions still linger: Are my ads truly running where and when I want them to? Am I wasting impressions and ad dollars serving ads in front of the wrong audience, or are they subject to impression fraud? Are they running next to content that might be offensive to my audience or on the same page as one of my major competitors? Most of us may have chuckled over humorous examples of the wrong ad in the wrong place, but it isn't that funny if it's happened to you.
Major factors such as social sharing, product data, customer engagement, hardware technologies, and real-time analytics are reshaping how we buy. How can businesses take advantage of the new commerce right now? Are we driving towards a convergence of 'augmented shopping' online and off-line? Are the challenges to advancing retail technology around user behavior or more advanced technology?
Open versus closed source. Java versus .Net versus Ruby and a hundred other languages. How do you make the right choice? Who can help you make the right choice? Picking the right platform is daunting and choosing poorly will hamstring your project from day one. In this workshop, I will discuss some simple principals that can help you make the right decision and put your startup on the path to success.
Come catch a Keynote by Sam Altman, CEO & Co-Founder of Loopt!
Who is PeopleBrowsr?
Come find out tomorrow at 1:30p in the Hacker Lounge... Join us for a demo presentation on Sunday with CEO, Jodee Rich. Learn about PeopleBrowsr's social media analytics and engagement Platform - the only integrated workspace that combines analytics, search and engagement with 1,000 days of data.
Ads are designed, coded, priced on a market, targeted to an audience, matched to a publisher, and measured for effectiveness. How is the ad network ecosystem changing? Will the advertiser or the publisher set the rules for the next phase of advertising? Where will the next big ad network appear?
Thinking about entering the Apps for Metro Chicago Illinois Competition? Don't miss this chance to hear data experts from the city, state and county - including Brett Goldstein, CDO of the city of Chicago - talk about the available data and some of their favorite app ideas. Victoria Carlson, President of A4MC, will also be there to talk about the kinds of apps the judges are looking for.
A surprise nationally known speaker will be coming in for this popular lean startup-focused entrepreneur group.
What happens after someone downloads your app? Most likely, that user stops opening up your app. User engagement is one of the biggest hurdles in growing your mobile app, but gamification is an approach that seeks to buck the trend of decreasing app activity. Gamification—making the experience like a game—is what fuels mayorships in foursquare or badges in Gowalla. The newest and most popular apps gamify their social connections, rewarding their users for their activity and challenging them to keep up with the app. It makes the mobile experience more dynamic and interactive, so where will this trend go as mobile continues to take off? What are the big gamified apps on the horizon, and more interestingly, how will this play out as the mobile experience becomes a more social experience?
Orbitz Worldwide (NYSE:OWW) is composed of a global portfolio of online consumer travel brands including Orbitz, Cheaptickets, The Away Network, ebookers and HotelClub, Additionally, the company operates business-to-business services: Orbitz Worldwide Distribution provides third parties such as Amtrak, Delta, LAN, KLM, Air France and a number of other leading airlines hotel booking capabilities, and Orbitz for Business provides corporate travel services to a number of Fortune 100 clients. The Orbitz Worldwide sites process millions of searches and transactions every day, which not surprisingly results in hundreds of gigabytes of log data per day.
Some of the challenges we face analyzing these large amounts of data are: sparse, multi-sourced data, performing multidimensional analysis on both the online and offline data, developing a data driven culture, and working in a "centralized decentralization" model. This talk will detail how the Web Analytics team leverages big data technologies like Hadoop to meet these challenges. We’ll discuss how we use tools like Hadoop, Hive, Pig, and Sqoop to power our web analytics framework. We’ll also discuss how big data along with an agile organizational structure provides immense opportunity to build a platform that can be used to drive the business to the next level.
Join marketing humorist and communications expert Steve Lundin of BIGfrontier for a rollicking presentation on some of the most notable examples of marketing programs gone awry. These incredible, disturbing, and (unintentionally) hilarious stories will leave you scratching your head and wondering out loud: “someone actually approved AND paid for that?” We’ll review disasters from giants Groupon, WalMart, Facebook and the “genius” agencies behind their campaigns. Interactive Marketing Horror Stories provides an in depth look expensive mistakes, coupled with an explanation of why they happened and what marketers can do to avoid them.
The post presidential election mayhem in Iran in June 2009 was a preview of the a phenomena that later re-appeared in the Arab countries, and today is called "The Arab Spring". Within 72 hours after the announcement of the allegedly fraudulent results, over 3 million protestors flooded the streets - streets in a country where no organized opposition was allowed.
The presentation will posit a thesis that new media entities are substituting for the classic opposition political parties infrastructure; the processes of mobilizing, messaging and the logistics of street action no longer need to be organized through the traditional organizational paradigm.
Seond half of session will include a panel of the book What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy. Additional panelists include Jerome McDonnell, Lyric Hughes Hales, and David Hale.
Many developers don't know the best way to present technical material to a technical audience, much less to a non-technical one. The rise of agile practices like sprint reviews and demos, and the opportunities afforded developers like lightning talks or corporate presentations, is making public speaking an essential skill for software engineers. In this talk I give a kind of "Lightning Talks 101" tutorial, covering how to organize a presentation, how to speak to an audience, how to prepare for live demos, and more.
Bringing together entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the media from all parts of the tech community, midVenturesLAUNCH is a unique opportunity to watch the great new ideas come to life. Hundreds of startups will showcase the newest innovations as thousands of people explore the future of web 2.0 technology.
Accepting credit card payments is a critical requirement for any company that sells goods or services on its website—which, these days, is most companies. But doing so can be daunting and carries risk. Not only is the payments ecosystem complicated, it’s also flooded with providers that have deceptive pricing and questionable business practices—including hoarding your data. This session will shine light on the mysterious and unscrupulous payments world and help you make sense of it all. At the end of this talk, you’ll understand who the players are, what each does, and the important do’s and don’ts of choosing a reliable service provider.
One of the exciting things about the Lean Startup approach is that it’s applicable not just to startups, but to innovation within large companies.
As part of TechWeek, Pathfinder has organized a panel of “intrapreneurs” – entrepreneurs within larger companies who are charged with innovation and creating new products and services. In this case, the companies are all quite large, ranging from $1 billion to $31 billion in revenues.
Join us as Pat Quinn shows his support of technology advancement in Chicago and Illinois.
We all know the story of a hot internet startup raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital in under 5 years, diluting the founders round after round in pursuit of an exit opportunity. When should a tech company raise venture capital, and when should it grow off of its own cash flow? How can a startup get the best investment terms from a venture capital firm? Is it dangerous for a tech company to accept debt financing?
A fundamental shift is underway in how people work and how companies manage talent. Access to talent is one of the primary and ongoing challenges for startups and small business, and the changes in how we work will have unique implications for growth business. Matt Cooper, VP of Operations for oDesk, will discuss the future of work and how it will change the way startups find and employ the talent they need.
A half day conference & workshop designed to encourage women to get started and make the leap into entrepreneurship while understanding their unique advantages and challenges.
Your business is established and you are ready to take the next steps in making it available on a mobile device. Now What? Join Brandon Passley as he speaks on this topic.
Befuddled by incubators and crowdfunding? Curious if a male-dominated venture capital firm could understand your vision behind a revolutionary new bra design or other woman-specific idea? Learn more about the changing world of funding and how your company could benefit from additional capital. This panel will be a candid discussion on funding options, how to decide which option (if any) is right for your stage of business, and best practices for attaining and maintaining relationships with investors.
If you want to move past loans from friends and family and maxing out credit cards, register to learn more about the fundamentals of funding and the changing landscape of financially taking your company to the next level.
Building a website can be an undertaking and if poorly executed the outcome can crumble. Having a solid design process and strategy in place will help ensure that your website meets your standards and is a success. This Design Process workshop outlines the steps involved in properly researching and planing for a website, demonstrates the key points in strategizing a websites architecture, visual design and development, and shows you how to launch and grow your website with confidence.
