Parents of toddlers will be able to sign up this fall for a City of Chicago program that will deliver information about education, social services, children’s health and city programs via text message, the Mayor’s office announced Tuesday.
Connect4Tots will be open to parents of children over age 1. Specifics on content and structure will be determined, said Michael Negron, chief of policy at the mayor’s office. He said parents will receive texts appropriate to their child’s age.
Indiegogo sees itself today as a platform to empower people to fund projects they love. Like other businesses that look to innovate and evolve, it sees itself in the future as even more.
Danae Ringelmann, Indiegogo’s co-founder and chief development officer, envisions a day when the crowd-funding platform also serves as a financial tool, giving investors a way to “never say no” again to an idea or small business that they previously might have considered too unproven and risky.
“We very much believe the future of finance is one where Indiegogo is co-working with the traditional system — banks, venture capitalists — where Indiegogo is this incubation platform for ideas,” Ringelmann said.
This may be the year of “Women in …” events. From talks to panels to support groups, the conversation around getting more women into science, technology, engineering, math and related fields is nearly unavoidable — and for good reason. Men dominate those industries.
Many of these events focus on the challenges women face. They highlight hiring biases, insufficient training, a lack of mentorship and the social pressures that persuade women to avoid or leave STEM. But they too often fail to feature female STEM leaders’ work. The emphasis instead highlights the obstacles.
Your workplace may have a gym, but does your gym have a place for working?
A hybrid work-and-work-out facility is in the works in the West Loop from Brooklyn Boulders, a New York-based indoor rock-climbing company. The remodeled 25,000-square-foot space at 100 S. Morgan St. will offer gym equipment, fitness classes and, of course, climbing walls. It will be Brooklyn Boulders’ third facility and its first in the Midwest.
Jen Myers could not have foreseen an interest in studying computers or technology.
She grew up near Alliance, Ohio, a small town about 60 miles southeast of Cleveland. Before enrolling in college there, she had no access to a computer or the Internet.
Today she credits technology for opening doors for her. And now she wants to see that it opens doors for others.
Myers, who has spent six years working as a designer and developer, this month will host the first Code and Cupcakes, a workshop for teaching mother-daughter pairs the basics of coding. Her 9-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, will be her teaching assistant.
Motorola Solutions CEO Greg Brown flared at criticism of companies that move their headquarters abroad for tax purposes in an address Monday night to the Economic Club of Chicago.
Keeping his comments measured even when describing fraught situations in his own career — including activist investor Carl Icahn agitating him for change and having to share the CEO title of a pre-split Motorola with Sanjay Jha —Brown showed spark when protesting politicians who decried the deals known as inversions.
India and China may get a lot of attention for their potential to produce startups, but a group led by a Chicago transplant is betting on Turkey.
Chicago-based accelerator Sente Advisory Services works with Turkish “technoparks,” university-run hubs for startup development, to refine promising new companies and introduce them to the U.S. market.
Raise your hand if you think there needs to be more diversity in your workplace, in technology, on boards and in executive ranks.
The challenge came from Melinda Kramer, CEO of Chicago-based think tank KloudVentures, a panelist Tuesday night at Breaking Glass: The Value of Collaboration in Business + Tech, an event focused on encouraging diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Asked whether this was a conversation still worth having, Kramer used the audience to prove a point. Hands from nearly everyone in the 60-person audience went up.
“Until all the hands are down, we’re going to keep talking,” Kramer said.
Leaders need to look beyond downtown Chicago to propel the technology sector to the next level, the city’s two most prominent tech boosters said Monday.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Howard Tullman, CEO of technology hub 1871, discussed Chicago’s digital-economy initiatives, what’s working and what’s not at the kickoff event of Social Media Week Chicago 2014.
In a discussion headlined “Building The City of the Future,” the pair said they communicate with each other at least once a week, with Emanuel promoting 1871 to global visitors and Tullman focusing on job creation and updating the mayor on tech and innovation issues.
The midst of a crisis is not the time for a company to cover its tracks. Companies should instead focus on collecting facts, said Judy Smith, founder and president of strategic and crisis-management firm Smith & Company, in her keynote speech Wednesday at the 28th annual Entrepreneurial Woman’s Conference Women’s Empowerment Luncheon at McCormick Place. The Women’s Business Development Center hosted the event, whose theme was “Your Growth Is Our Business.”
Amina Elahi 