May 2012: Technori Pitch Recap
As always, the show kicked off with a great keynote speaker, and the following pitches didn’t skip a beat.
UX: Beyond a Beautiful UI
What do you think of when you hear the term “UX?” Do you think wireframes and software interface design? It’s true having designers to translate marketing requests into visual representations for your developers is a competitive advantage, but user experience design is more than just visual. A Systematic Approach to Empathy In order to truly be…
Failure: An Entrepreneur’s Life
“This is like you’re holding a loaded gun to my head and you’re promising that you won’t pull the trigger,” I said to one of our lead investors with regard to their financing agreement which penalized the company’s success at best and, at worst, sealed our fate. He reassured me that the investment group was…
Startup Weekend: From Idea To Action in 54 Hours
As an organizer for the next Startup Weekend in Chicago, I’m passionate about bringing together people from a wide array of different backgrounds to support them in building great things. If you can imagine being able to take a great idea and spin it around into actionable next steps towards a viable business within 54…
Just the Beginning: Lessons From a Hackathon
It’s Saturday afternoon, and amid cold pizza, micro brews, and half-eaten donuts, teams of three or four sit in front of laptops, heads poking up intermittently to scan a whiteboard full of vision statements, UX questions, and feature lists. This is the scene of the first hackathon at the newly opened 1871, the co-working-space-meets-tech-startup-beehive and Code Academy…
Technori Pitch Announces Restaurant Innovator Nick Kokonas as Keynote Speaker
Photo credit: Taylor Castle Photography We’re thrilled to announce the keynote speaker of the next Technori Pitch on May 29, 2012 will be Nick Kokonas, the business visionary behind Chicago’s haute cuisine standard bearers Alinea, Next, and The Aviary. Foodies across the country are well-acquainted with the iconic names of Alinea, Next, and The Aviary.…
Pinstagram Co-creator Pek Pongpaet
It started out as a joke between two friends: since Instagram and Pinterest are the hottest properties out there, wouldn’t it be funny to just mash the two together? But if the friends happen to be programming nerds, like Brandon Leonardo and Pek Pongpaet, co-founder of Tapisto that creates mobile websites for small businesses, the punchline you get is Pinstagram.co,…
How To Make Money As a New Developer
I constantly meet people who learned how to program by teaching themselves or taking a few classes. They learned how to code, but are struggling with how to start and actually make money. They typically don’t have in-depth portfolios that allow them to charge much for their services, and they are afraid to ask for…
Why Is Instagram Worth $1 Billion?
The purchase of Instagram by Facebook has been covered extensively by all sorts of media outlets. And for good reason. $1 billion is a lot of money to pay for a small company that isn’t generating any revenue. The conversations have ranged from: “this is completely crazy” to “it’s a justified purchase” and every conceivable…
Technori April Pitch Recap
We had yet another full house and successful April Technori Pitch at the Chase Auditorium yesterday evening! The Keynote We kicked the evening off with keynote speaker Harry Gottlieb, the Founder of Jellyvision Lab and Jellyvision Games. He presented a demo of the upcoming Facebook video game “You Don’t Know Jack,” which initially started as…