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BrightTag Sets Its Sights on Europe with SiteTagger Acquisition

Amina Elahi

Many would agree that BrightTag is a company that has, pardon the pun, an illuminated future. In June, it was named Startup of the Year at the Moxie Awards. Today, CEO Mike Sands announced BrightTag’s acquisition of a UK-based competitor named SiteTagger.

Together, the two companies combined to be the global leader in tag management services (TMS), representing over 100 brands. With this acquisition, BrightTag is making a major play to expand services in the UK and Europe. SiteTagger launched in 2009, and serves to manage analytics, affiliate marketing and other aspects of digital marketing for  brands in the UK and Europe. Cofounders Stephan Briggs and Paul Newbury will focus on expanding Yard Digital, their data-centric digital marketing agency, which will become a strategic partner and member of the BrightTag ONE Partner Program.

In terms of expanding into Europe, Sands sees the SiteTagger acquisition as a key step. “We found a group of like-minded folks at SiteTagger. They share our values and passion for what we’re doing,” he says. “It’s fun to learn about new cultures and yet realize that the business challenges we are addressing here and in Europe are remarkably the same.” Being able to hop a train instead of a plane makes a big difference in client service.

Read more: Learn more about Sands’ thoughts on expanding into Europe and keeping up here at home.

Inspired Recipe: Chicken Mandu Dumplings and a Trio of Dipping Sauces

Amina Elahi

What is a mother if not the heart and soul of a family? She is a nourisher, a provider, a caretaker, a comforter. Her family turns to her for love and support. In Please Look After Mom, the titular character is a source of comfort, an anchor for her family, strong on the outside but full of love. As the point of view changes with each passing chapter, so does the way we see Mom. She changes, you see, in the context of her daughter, her son, and her husband. That’s why I put together this dish—with the soft, plump mandu dumpling representing Mom, and each of the dipping sauces representing her daughter, son and husband.

Get the recipes at PAPER/PLATES.

Book Recommendation: Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

Amina Elahi

Sometime during my childhood, I learned that Heaven was under the feet of my mother. I was probably sitting in Sunday School, resenting that I was there instead of sleeping in, wishing to be anywhere else. What did it mean, that Heaven was beneath her feet? Was it a mobile place? Did I have to lift her to get in? For a long time, my mother was just my mother. She wasn’t the key to Heaven. And so it was in Please Look After Mom as well.

There are two questions swirling at the center of Please Look After Mom, a heartbreaking look at a family’s unraveling after its older, ailing matriarch goes missing at a subway station in Seoul. The first comes fast; it hits you hard, in the gut, and makes you think that if it were you, if it were your mom who had gotten lost, you would do whatever it took to find her. In fact, you would never lose your mother in the first place. You are so caring, so diligent a child that the prospect of not knowing your mom’s whereabouts is actually impossible. But is that true? If your mom got lost, would you pace the streets of your city, day in and day out, like you expect the characters here to do? Would you place ads in the paper and flyers on telephone poles? Would you revisit the subway station over and over? Well, would you? After a while, probably not. You have a life, a job, a family of your own. But you wonder, if this happened, would you do more than they did to find their lost mom?

Read the rest at PAPER/PLATES.

Braintree Acquires Venmo, Plans to Conquer Mobile Ecommerce

Amina Elahi

Braintree, Chicago’s own leader in online payments, is acquiring New York City-based mobile payments company Venmo for $26 million. This news comes less than three weeks after Braintree announced it would more than triple the size of its Chicago office. Both companies are backed by Accel Partners.

Earlier this month, Braintree CEO Bill Ready told us mobile commerce was one of two macrotrends on the minds of anyone in the online payments space. Already, mobile comprises one quarter of the $4 billion in credit card transactions Braintree processes per year. With his company’s acquisition of Venmo, it seems Ready and his team are pushing to take the mobile shopping challenge head-on.

And how will they do it? By pairing their processing power with Venmo’s digital wallet. While Braintree facilitates credit card payments for everyone from Disqus to Belly, Venmo makes it easy to swap funds with friends using a smartphone, and it’s the marriage of these separate but compatible services that looks to be a winning combination.

“By combining forces, Braintree and Venmo can continue to make the mobile shopping experience better for both merchants and consumers,” Ready said. For example, existing Venmo users will soon be able to use their digital wallets to place payments with any of the thousands of online merchants who utilize Braintree to process transactions. Ready sees this acquisition as an opportunity to bolster his company’s mobile offerings, by keeping up with the growing practice of mobile shopping and giving developers and consumers “a different set of tools to thrive in a mobile world.”

Read more at Built In Chicago.

CakeStyle Bags $1M to Change the Way Women Shop Online

Amina Elahi

“Personal shopper.” This phrase, though brief, has sent many a woman’s heart aflutter. The idea that another person, an expert, would look at you and understand your style and figure out your body type and then dress you—the concept is nothing short of a fantasy. E-commerce fashion provider CakeStyle wants to make that dream a reality, by shipping packages of pre-selected items straight to women’s doors. Some might call it the Trunk Club of women’s fashion. I call it the latest Chicago startup to score another round of funding. CakeStyle announced yesterday a $1 million raise from Sandbox Industries’ Sandbox Advantage Fund.

According to reports, CakeStyle boxes range from $2,800 to $3,000 apiece. That’s a steep price tag, but one women are apparently willing to pay—with thousands of new customers and shipments reaching six times the number they were at the start of the year, business has been good. CEO and cofounder Cecelia Myers acknowledges that word of mouth has been instrumental to CakeStyle’s growth. She and her team plan to put their funding to work for marketing and expanding into other cities, and that includes building on this system.

“The first step will be building a strong referral program to turn existing customers in [new] cities into brand ambassadors,” Myers said. “Next, we want to share our style advice in the local markets through press and style events.” Such events will allow CakeStyle to demonstrate how the company can provide customized services to women in cities as different as Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

More on CakeStyle and its plans to expand out of Chicago here.

Target Data Raises $1 Million from Facebook Investor

Amina Elahi

Moving is a stressful process for the people doing it, certainly, but also for the marketers trying to reach them at that time. Target Data is a marketing solutions company that’s built its business on using big data and analytics to reach people in the pre-moving stage. Their objective is to make it easier for marketers to reach those people—frenzied though they may be—before they move. Their just-announced round of funding, $1 million from Bay Area firm Western Technology Investments (WTI), is a vote of confidence that they’re doing something right.

Last spring, Target Data raised $3 million in a round led by Apex Venture Partners. “We will use the new funds to continue to invest in world class talent, specifically analytics and marketing strategy positions,” said president and CEO Ross Shelleman. “We will also use the funds to launch a new digital offering where we will work with third parties to translate our offline data to online data for targeted display advertising.”

For marketers, movers are a valuable audience. Not only are they looking for a number of services as they pack up one home and head to another, they are also in the market for lots of new goods to stock their new abodes. Their struggle is getting their messages in front of people before they move, and that’s where Target Data comes in.

Learn more about Target Data and WTI here.

Eat Your Words: Satire and Bake

Amina Elahi

Satire (noun): the use of sarcasm, scorn, or irony to ridicule human folly or vice.

Example: In Drown, Junot Diaz includes a short story entitled “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie).” The essay originally appeared inThe New Yorker in 2005, and presented a set of dating instructions for a Dominican teenager living in New Jersey. Here’s an excerpt:

Wait until your brother, your sisters, and your mother leave the apartment. You’ve already told them that you were feeling too sick to go to Union City to visit that tia who likes to squeeze your nuts. And even though your moms knew you weren’t sick you stuck to your story until finally she said, Go ahead and stay, malcriado. Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. If the girlOs from the Terrace, stack the boxes in the crisper. If she’s from the Park or Society Hill, then hide the cheese in the cabinet above the oven, where she’ll never see it. Leave a reminder under your pillow to get out the cheese before morning or your moms will kick your ass. Take down embarrassing photos. Since your toilet can’t flush toilet paper, put the bucket with all the crapped-on toilet paper under the sink. Shower, comb, dress. Sit on the couch and watch TV.

As a bonus, you can hear the author himself reading the story. Go here for the video.

Bake (verb): to cook food, covered or otherwise, using dry heat directly from an oven.

Example: In her pear and gouda pastelitos recipe, Kate Bernot bakes fruit-and-cheese-stuffed phyllo dough packets (below). Fifteen minutes at 400°F is enough to transform the raw ingredients into a warm pouch of flaky pastry with a gooey center that, when served warm, is perfect for breakfast, lunch or dessert.

More at PAPER/PLATES.

Social Entrepreneurs, Start Your (Impact) Engines

Amina Elahi

If for-profit social change sounds unusual, that’s because it is. Purists may think that profit and social change can’t coexist, but a new Chicago-based accelerator program called Impact Engine disagrees. The 12-week crash course offers support ($20,000 in seed capital worth of it) to companies taking on societal and environmental issues with for-profit business ideas. Program Manager Elizabeth Riley says, “We believe for-profit business solutions are crucial to solving problems [such as climate change and poverty] because they have the potential to be sustainable,” unlike governments and not-for-profits, who frequently face resource shortages.

Yesterday, Impact Engine announced the eight companies that comprise its inaugural class, known as Impact 1. The class, which takes off in September, is varied in its details, but a current of societal improvement runs through each company. For example, Ithaca Education offers a challenging but individualized literacy curriculum via its online platform, CERCA. POMS allows users to transfer funds in real-time, directly to the recipient’s mobile phone. And Raise5 matches micro-volunteering with fundraising, allowing participants to exchange a small task for a $5 donation, all on their online platform. See the rest of the list here.

The caliber of these companies speaks to the strengths of Impact 1, but that’s not to say putting the class together was an easy task. Explains Riley:

After Impact Engine launched in October 2011, we spent a lot of time engaging with entrepreneurs through our “Start Your Engines” event series. This gave us the opportunity to share our vision while getting to know potential applicants. We began accepting applications in May and received just over 175 in two months. Each application was rated on the overall idea, team, profitability, and potential for impact. After narrowing down the applications to 30 finalists, we spent four days interviewing candidates. Then we had to make some really tough decisions. The process was really inspiring for all of us. It’s great to learn about people’s passions and how they want to change the world.

Learn more about Impact Engine’s resources, goals, and challenges here.

Eat Your Words: Sibilance and Poach

Amina Elahi

Sibilance (noun): in writing, the effect created when sibilant sounds—the hissing noises created by “s,” “z,” “sh,” and even a soft “c”—are repeated.

Example: 50 Shades of Grey characters Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey have decently sibilant names themselves, but to give you a better idea of what we’re talking about, here’s a safe for work excerpt from the bestselling novel.

“I couldn’t agree more, Miss Steele,” he replies, his voice soft, and for some inexplicable reason I find myself blushing.

Apart from the paintings, the rest of the office is cold, clean, and clinical. I wonder if it reflects the personality of the Adonis who sinks gracefully into one of the white leather chairs opposite me. I shake my head, disturbed at the direction of my thoughts, and retrieve Kate’s questions from my backpack. Next, I set up the digital recorder and am all fingers and thumbs, dropping it twice on the coffee table in front of me. Mr. Grey says nothing, waiting patiently—I hope—as I become increasingly embarrassed and flustered. When I pluck up the courage to look at him, he’s watching me, one hand relaxed in his lap and the other cupping his chin and trailing his long index finger across his lips. I think he’s trying to suppress a smile.

Poach (verb): to cook a food item—frequently eggs or fruit—in a liquid such as water, milk, or broth kept just below the boiling point.

Example: In her sensuous sundae inspired by 50 Shades of Grey, Katie Halpern poaches pears in a sweet and sumptuous concoction comprised of raspberries, orange juice and cranberry juice (above). Slow-cooking the fruit in this thick sauce results in soft flesh, completely infused with flavor, which melts in your mouth.

More at PAPER/PLATES.

The Women Driving Chicago’s Digital Renaissance: Part 1

Amina Elahi

 

In this monthly series, Built In Chicago will highlight some of the most important players in our digital ecosystem: the women. From entrepreneurs to technologists, investors to academic leaders, and corporate innovators to developers, women play important and diverse roles in dozens of local organizations. Every month, we’ll introduce you to five women worth knowing. Through these exclusive interviews, get to know these women through their likes, experiences, and maybe even their secrets.

This installment includes Jellyvision’s Amanda Lannert, Motorola Mobility’s Blagica Bottigliero, venture capitalist Ellen Carnahan, BrightTag’s Kelly Davis and developer KD Ironside. Read about them here.