A small startup trying to gain traction in the Windy City, Evzdrop has designed geo-social network that doesn’t connect you to your friends but to strangers wherever you happen to be. Read more »
Belly originally built its loyalty and marketing platform for local businesses, but it’s now gravitating toward big enterprise chains. McDonalds, Chic-fil-A, 7-Eleven and Domino’s are all running pilot programs of Belly’s service in Chicago. Read more »
Belly introduces the free sample to its local-business loyalty and rewards program. Through the Belly app, businesses can offer free goods and services to lure customers into their stores. Read more »
Chicago, Reno, and the LA burbs join Atlanta, Minneapolis and Seattle as the newest areas of the country where an iPhone will work on T-Mobile’s 3G network. T-Mo is now about one-third of the way from completing its nationwide HSPA+ overhaul. Read more »
A graduate of Excelerate Labs in Chicago, SpotHero wants to act as a parking spot broker for the big lots as well as offer consumers the cheapest parking rates through its mobile apps. The company’s $2.5 million round was led by Battery Ventures. Read more »
Sprint is launching its new LTE network footprint from the outside in. Rather than start with the big cities and then move to smaller markets, Sprint is starting in small cities and suburbs and building up to the big metro launches. Read more »
Chicago will become the first city to receive a fiber network as part of Gigabit Squared’s college town connectivity program. The Windy City may not be your classic college town, but the University of Chicago’s south side neighborhood makes an interesting testbed for the technology. Read more »
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is embarking on a gigabit fiber project, thanks to the suggestion of Google’s Eric Schmidt, taking advantage of the overhaul of its water infrastructure to lay new data pipes. The plan is create 15 tech zones to feed Chicago’s growing startup community. Read more »
AT&T is opening its first “experiential” showcase in Chicago. While technically the flagship retail location on Michigan Avenue is a store, it’s not like any AT&T store you’ve ever seen before. Instead of making the AT&T phones the prime draw, it’s showing off the apps within. Read more »
Chicago’s Excelerate Labs may not have quite the outsized demo day as Y Combinator, but the 10 companies that just graduated from is accelerator program were still impressive. Here are the five startups that made the biggest impression on us: Orbeus, Lasso, Cureeo, Pictarine and Whimseybox. Read more »
Motorola is giving its suburban digs for a new home in downtown Chicago, where it will anchor the Windy City’s emerging tech community. The corporate HQ will officially be in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, along 3,000 employees, but the big brass will reside in Silicon Valley. Read more »
Interested in trying your hand at worm composting or grant writing? Ever felt the desire to make your own sausage or kimchi? There’s a good chance someone on startup Dabble’s website is teaching just such a class this month, and for $20 you can sign up. Read more »
In an interview, Terry Howerton, co-founder of Chicago-area incubator TechNexus, argues that rather than view big companies as innovation killers or community destroyers, it’s time for some segments of the startup and coworking communities to grow up and leverage corporate America. Read more »
The Windy City is famous for one big giant startup Groupon, but the folks at Chicago’s newest incubator Catapult believe there will be many more, and — for a short while at least — it hopes to play host to the next big Web sensations from the Midwest. Read more »
A new RootMetrics report finds that AT&T’s industry-leading LTE speeds take a big dip in Chicago. The report highlights a problem AT&T has with several of its markets: it doesn’t enough spectrum to offer the big fat pipe it has in the rest of the country. Read more »
Verizon and Comcast are now selling their cross-network bundle of mobile and broadband services in six new markets. The U.S. Department of Justice may well find that their cross-selling pact anti-competitive, but Verizon and its cable partners aren’t stopping until they’re told they have to. Read more »
McKay Brothers, a firm that sells high capacity links to trading firms, is connecting the financial districts of New York and Chicago with a network that aims to execute the fastest trades in the country. Instead of using fiber, though, McKay is taking to the airwaves. Read more »
Next month, consumers in smaller towns and cities across the U.S. will have access to their first LTE network as U.S. Cellular ramps ups its commercial 4G service. The regional CDMA operator will start selling a tablet in March and a Galaxy smartphone in April. Read more »
AT&T had slower speeds in the city than you might expect, but overall the performance of the new LTE network and new smartphones was impressive, streaming uninterrupted Netflix video for 45 minutes and clocking average speeds of more than 10 Mbps on the freeway. Read more »
With an IPO in the cards, two of Groupon’s co-founders are already cashing in on its success. Now they plan to use their money to build a generation of companies that can mimic Groupon’s tactic of using people — not technology — to grow. Read more »
