Bruce HorovitzThis article was published in the October 2015 issue of STORES Magazine.Mall of America monitors online chatter to engage with shoppersAll the woman wanted was a place to quietly — and privately — breastfeed her baby.That’s not such a simple thing when you’re inside the Mall of America, one of the nation’s largest shopping centers, with a hungry, cranky child. So she did what any savvy Millennial mother would do: She griped on social media.Her post on Mall of America’s Facebook page went right to the point: A mall this big — with more than 500 stores and nearly 5 million square feet of shopping space — should have at least one space where a mom could privately nurse her baby.The mall actually has such a space. In fact, it has several such spaces. And it was able to let her know, right away.Mall of America heard her cry almost instantly thanks to a social media “listening” platform set up three years ago with Geofeedia, a location-based social media intelligence platform that is starting to seriously impact the way malls, retailers and even media organizations do business.Whether on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr or Picasa, the mall receives both aggregated social media information and individual cries for help.“People will be talking about Mall of America online no matter what,” says Erin Vande Steeg, Mall of America’s senior social media and communications strategist. “We can ignore those conversations or engage in them. And if you engage in them, you’ll likely enjoy higher revenue.”
Priceless goodwillWithin a matter of moments, the mall’s social media team posted a response advising the mother that, besides special nursing areas by the restrooms, the Nordstrom store inside the mall also had a lovely, private nursing section.The mother was ecstatic, apologizing on the site and thanking the mall for its advice. But it didn’t stop there. After the social media team found out where she was eating lunch, mall executives personally brought her and her family free passes to the mall’s indoor amusement park.“She told us that she’d tell all of her friends about this experience,” says Vande Steeg.That is precisely what the mall wants — especially if the mother tells her friends about the happy resolution via social media. “We are selling an experience,” she says. “For us, it’s about selling and retaining a great customer experience.”Retailers and malls ignore information shared via social media at their own peril: Digital interactions influence about 64 cents of every dollar spent shopping at mall stores, according to a recent Deloitte study.“I think it’s just as important for mall developers to pay attention to social media as anybody else in the retail or service industry,” says Dick Seesel, principal at consulting firm Retailing in Focus.“Given that review sites like Yelp tend to attract complaints more than praise, they are still hugely influential in shaping buying decisions.”Surprise and delightMall of America debuted the new system, a consolidation of all the channels through which visitors interact with the mall — telecommunications, security and the social/digital and public relations teams — in 2013. Essentially, with the help of Geofeedia, the mall drew a virtual perimeter to listen in on visitors who publicly post related social media content.“The biggest and best source for understanding a place is … the conversation that’s happening at that place,” explains R.J. Talyor, vice president of product management at Geofeedia. With location-tagged social media (and shoppers who have agreed to share their physical location), malls and retailers can do just that.Once a physical address is typed into the software, location tags from social media posts can be pulled into an aggregated feed and viewed in aggregate or individually. In aggregate, the mall can learn the general sentiment of what’s on shoppers’ minds on any particular day, says Talyor. Or it can focus on keywords like “Mall of America” and “bathroom,” allowing users to, say, pick up a post about a mall restroom that’s dirty and needs immediate attention.“The goal is to connect with guests wherever they might be and whenever they might need us,” says Vande Steeg. Mall of America monitors shopper sentiment from about an hour before the mall opens at 10 a.m. until an hour after it closes at 9 p.m.It’s not just trouble-shooting: When one couple posted that they were eating at the mall restaurant where they had their first date, the social media team spotted the post and quickly brought them a gift card. Another couple that was getting married in the mall (which has hosted more than 5,000 weddings since it opened) posted wedding photos on the mall’s site — and was immediately thanked by mall staff with flowers and balloons.Social media-watching also can help alleviate bad vibes. A handful of years ago, if a shopper had a bad experience at the mall on a Friday night — if a cashier at a store treated him poorly — he might speak with a desk-based guest service representative about it. That rep might hand the shopper the business card of someone from the public relations department. If the customer bothered to send an email, it might not be seen until Monday and re-routed elsewhere. Soon a week has past and the ticked-off shopper has heard nothing.But now, any negative comment received or posted on social media is instantly available for mall officials to view and resolve. The team passes relevant compliments or complaints on to individual retailers.
An extra earMonitoring social media gives security a boost as well. The mall routes notifications from social media posts to its security department about 15 times monthly, Vande Steeg says, anything from a celebrity sighting to a shopper who observes shoplifting or other suspicious behavior.The system will only become more important with the mall’s 750,000-square-foot expansion scheduled to be completed this fall, which includes more retail and dining space along with a new hotel. Mall of America also plans to install mall-wide complimentary Wi-Fi, which will further encourage guests to communicate via social media.“It’s all about achieving our overall goal of getting shoppers into more stores and keeping them in the mall longer,” Vande Steeg says.Mall of America recently experimented with moving efforts outside the mall, monitoring consumer comments at Minneapolis - St. Paul International Airport, located 10 minutes away by light rail. A tourist who had just arrived at the airport tweeted out an announcement: “I’m here, Minneapolis!” Mall executives spotted the tweet and responded, “We’re glad you’re here,” along with an invitation to visit the mall.The tourist was so flabbergasted that he vowed to add the mall as a vacation stop — despite his busy schedule. “I never had a mall welcome me before,” the traveler tweeted.
Product Feature: Innovation on Display at IACP 2015
Scott Harris, Freelance WriterFinding Patterns in the ChatterSocial media is ubiquitous and voluminous. A new tool can help police departments cut through the white noise to find localized information on crimes, including those that have not yet been committed.The tool is Geofeedia, created by a Chicago-based tech firm of the same name, and it doesn’t take a social media whiz to use. “You don’t need to know how Instagram works to use Geofeedia,” said Phil Harris, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “We wanted to set it up so that a middle school student could jump on and use it.”2Created in 2007, but more recently rolled out for the law enforcement community, Geofeedia is a cloud-based social media management platform that allows users to monitor Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, and a host of other social media tools for specific keywords and hashtags. Geofeedia takes it to another level by allowing users to easily target those searches within a specified geographic area. This allows law enforcement professionals to spot trends in social chatter inside a given region to help learn more about recent or potentially forthcoming criminal activity.“We help groups filter those networks by physical location and by keywords,” Harris said. “It can help public safety professionals across the spectrum, from gang activity to homicide to Internet crimes.”3The Los Angeles County, California, Sheriff’s Department uses Geofeedia, according to Harris, to start gathering data as soon as a 9-1-1 call arrives on a violent crime like a shooting. “In 53 percent of instances, someone in that location has mentioned the word ‘gun,’” Harris said. “This kind of intelligence is amazing… It’s very rich but it’s also very narrowed. We’re helping to solve crimes.”4With about 300 customers in the law enforcement space, Geofeedia, which sells its service as an annual subscription, is expanding its presence as a public safety tool. Along with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, the Chicago Police Department is also a prominent customer.“Anyone with a smart phone is a reporter,” Harris said. “You eliminate the noise and find out where things happen and where they’re going to happen.”5Filtering out that unnecessary chatter, Harris said, presented a “huge technology challenge.” But, when it came to creating an actual tool for law enforcement customers, making it accessible was a priority, just as much for those who had never even opened a Facebook account as those already immersed in the social media arena. Using police officers with less experience with social media as members of its development team, Geofeedia leadership came out with something that is simple for anyone to use. “We recognized early on that we had to make it remarkably easy to use,” Harris said. “Within 15–20 minutes, you can jump on and begin using it.”6 Geofeedia also hosts free webinars to demonstrate the product and its applications.
Kickstart me up: Elbee smart, handsfree wireless in-ear headphones
By Kevin Tofel for Mobile Platforms
Looking for wireless headphones that come with sensors for gesture controls and voice activated personal assistant commands? Elbee may be worth a look on Kickstarter for iOS and Android users.We can already speak commands to our phones to make things happen. What if we could do the same with a pair of smart in-ear wireless headphones?That's exactly what the team behind Elbee wants to know and it has a Kickstarter project to fund the answer.Elbee is interesting because it puts more "smarts" in a phone accessory than most. The in-ear headphones have sensors so that you can control apps and audio with head gestures, while also including some personal assistant voice controls.Say "OK Elbee," and you've got a range of handsfree commands to work with, similar to Siri, Cortana and Google's own voice-activation solutions.You can also tilt your head up before issuing a command or tap the headphones.Elbee works with Nest, WeMo and Hue lights, for example, so you could tell the headphones to raise the temperature or turn lights on without touching a button or a phone. Elbee also supports commands and controls in music apps such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music, plus works for handsfree phone calls and texts.Of course, the headphones work for handsfree phone conversations as well. And with the Elbee app installed on iOS or Android, moving your head left or right moves between songs. The outsides of the headphones are actually capacitive buttons; sliding your finger up or down adjusts the volume.
Using Social Media Monitoring Platforms to Enhance Security
By Stuart Goldman
In recent years, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has been using social media during March Madness to gauge the excitement of basketball fans nationwide.This year, as fans from Wisconsin, Duke, Michigan State and Kentucky descended on Indianapolis and Lucas Oil Stadium for the Final Four, the NCAA used location-based software to boost its interactions with fans, media and sponsors. No longer was the NCAA's focus limited to keywords and hashtags. Using the software, the organization was able to track posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that came from Lucas Oil Stadium, the parking lots around the stadium, the roads leading into the stadium and the city of Indianapolis.The NCAA used the location-based social media monitoring software for the duration of the men's basketball tournament. During that time, it recorded 350 million impressions across Twitter and Facebook — nearly 10 million during the Final Four alone."In the end, the results were fantastic," Chris Dion, the NCAA assistant director of championships and alliances, digital and social media, said in a recent webinar conducted by Geofeedia, the Chicago-based firm that provided the software. "Geofeedia was instrumental for engaging with social media users at Indianapolis celebrations and helped us separate nationwide activity from that of local fans and visitors."But engaging fans is just one benefit of the technology, which has been deployed at the Super Bowl, Wimbledon and the Olympics, as well as smaller events and venues. A less visible — but no less important — function of location-based software is keeping onsite fans safe and events secure.AHEAD OF TROUBLEOne example of social media monitoring at a sports venue that prevented a potentially serious situation from escalating occurred in the Minnesota Vikings' final home game in the Metrodome in 2013. By monitoring social media, officials with Whelan Security were able to anticipate a potential postgame field rush and increased the number of security guards that day to thwart fans' efforts. "It allowed us to have an idea of what was going on in the mindset of people in the building and counteract it," Jeff Spoerndle, director of special services for Whelan, told the Associated Press last year.The tool can protect the business interests of fans and ticket providers alike. On several occasions during the week of the Final Four, fans and media posted photos of their tickets or media credentials to the games. If the NCAA saw those posts, it responded to the posters and encouraged them to take them down for fear that some people might produce fraudulent tickets and credentials based on those photos. Many people were thankful for the reminder, Dion said."Our social media team is by no means responsible for fan safety and security," Dion said in the webinar, "but we did want to make sure that this was another set of eyes and ears around the event and around the city that could watch what was going on."Phil Harris, CEO and co-founder of Geofeedia, recalls seeing social media posts during Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans in February 2013. In the third quarter of the game, the lights went out at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Harris, as well as those monitoring the software onsite, saw posts on social media about the outage before it was broadcast on TV.COMPETITIVE FIELDGeofeedia, founded in 2011, has grown to attract nearly 500 customers. But it is not the only location-based software company servicing sports and athletic organizations. Other companies include Austin, Texas-based Snaptrends and London, Ont.-based Media Sonar.Put to practical use, the software can identify triggers relating to a word or words involving a fan's experience at an event. Those words could be "fight" or "overflowing toilet," for example, and trigger an alert that prompts members of a marketing or security team to look at the social media feed and take action. "We hope to identify opportunities for marketing and engagement and enhancement of customer service," Harris says, "but then also to prevent events from escalating and becoming more severe, whether it's a fight or traffic congestion, before it actually turns into a major event."Snaptrends' social media intelligence system has been used by athletic organizations in the areas of threats and general safety, event security and crisis management, among others. Snaptrends, founded in 2012, says its software helps "protect executives, coaches, employees, players and fans anywhere in the world." On football gamedays, the Snaptrends system is used not only to monitor stadiums, but the surrounding tailgate areas, as well, and can identify and respond to problems, investigate the cause and prevent future situations from arising.Media Sonar, which started in 2011 but began releasing its software the following year, has been used for a wide variety of events ranging from standard gameday situations to large-scale events including the Super Bowl, the Pro Bowl, the Final Four and marathons, says Mark Hall, the company's director of product marketing. While not giving a specific number of customers, Hall says teams and facilities across a wide range of sports — from professional through the amateur ranks — use Media Sonar software.Media Sonar is focused solely on public safety, Hall says, and the company has customers outside the sports world, as well. In July, the board of commissioners for Franklin County, Ohio, approved a contract with Media Sonar to help the local sheriff's office monitor and track potential threats to that region."Our solution has literally saved lives and helped to contain potentially volatile situations where weapons and violence were a real threat to public safety," Hall says. "As an organization, we are inspired by public safety, and our mission is integrating safety and technology with an eye toward helping sports teams, facilities and communities as a whole to ensure a safe environment for fans and athletes alike."Location-based Software Keeps Fans Engaged
Among the goals of the National Collegiate Athletic Association at this year's Final Four in Indianapolis was to improve the fans' overall experience through the use of location-based software. Chris Dion, the NCAA assistant director of championships and alliances, digital and social media, says almost 60 percent of the NCAA's messaging was direct fan engagement. "That's what I call engagement," Dion says. "I'd like to see that number go up next year, but I think that's a really strong number."Geofeedia, the Chicago-based software firm the NCAA used at the Final Four, monitors social media outlets Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa. In addition to the Final Four, Geofeedia's software has been used at other sporting events to alert fans to attractions outside the venue."This is a new technology," says Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris, who co-founded the company in 2011. "This wasn't available five years ago because smartphones were just emerging. The applications didn't have GPS capabilities embedded in them. Now, the trend is, 'Not only do I want to share, I want to let people know I am here. I am at the Super Bowl.' "Fans at the most famous tennis tournament in the world also have become more connected through social media. The All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club debuted social media monitoring at Wimbledon last year. The club set up the Wimbledon Social Command Centre to aggregate social media posts on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter into one database to deliver information to tennis fans."The Wimbledon Social Command Centre will help us follow the evolving topics on sites like Twitter to see what is being discussed, how the volume is changing, and we can tune and tailor that to the Wimbledon.com website," Alex Willis, head of digital and content at the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, told technology website V3.co.uk before last year's tournament. "So if the social media coverage is actually talking about a match on court 12, rather than Centre Court, it means we can understand that and give people the content they want."
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Gameday Security with the title "Real-Time Coverage"
Cubs merch store homers with location-based mobile marketing
by Lauren HorwitzExecutive Editor, Business Applications and ArchitectureSports World Chicago got a boost by targeting a captive audience of potential merchandise buyers near Wrigley Field.During a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field this year, Sports World Chicago owner Brad Rosen took a chance. Rosen alerted fans electronically that if one of the Cubs hit a home run during the sixth inning, they could get 10% off at his store, which is just 100 yards from the ballpark. He identified store prospects through hashtags that Cubs fans use combined with location data from fans' mobile devices that indicated they were in or near the ballpark.At Sports World Chicago -- which sells Cubs T-shirts, hats and jerseys -- Rosen now creates a direct line to Cubs fans. He entices them into his store using Geofeedia, a social media monitoring tool that uses location information and social media activity to pinpoint fans' whereabouts. This geolocation-based service has helped Rosen reel in new prospective customers who are more prone to buy because they're so close to his store."I can microtarget everyone who is across the street in real time," Rosen said. "I can grab the Twitter handles … of any tweets that come out of the park. There's no better way to reach out to these folks."Location-based services (LBS) present a new kind of captive audience from which companies can benefit. According to Rosen, targeted communication with close-by fans can boost sales. He said that if he receives 75 new customers a day because of geotargeted messaging, 60% to 70% of them are prompted to come into the store because of personalized messages about discounts."The reality is that LBS [are] of huge value," said Stuart Sim, a director in West Monroe Partners' advanced analytics practice. "It's just another dimension to the data set that organizations will have access to."But at the same time, that intimate knowledge of consumers' comings and goings is more than a little creepy. Companies need to travel a fine line between data insight and privacy. "It becomes a gray area to derive as much meaning without violating security processes," said Sim.
Elbee Is A Pair Of Smart Wireless Headphones
By Tyler Lee
If you’d rather not carry the bulk of wireless headphones on your head all day, but don’t want to deal with wired earphones, you might be interested in Elbee. Elbee is a Kickstarter project for a pair of wireless headphones. Now you might be thinking, what so special about them? For starters they are tiny, and another reason to be excited is thanks to its smart features.While headphones are generally rated on how well they sound, users might be drawn to Elbee for other reasons, like its smart features. For example the headphones can be controlled using your smartphone, voice commands, its built-in control buttons, and the coolest of them all, your head movements (although you might get some stares in public).Users can answer calls and access the phone through gestures, and they can also turn themselves on or off automatically. They can also inform you in the event you leave the home without them, which is basically like you going out of its range, so you won’t forget them or it might come in handy if you’re searching for it due to its diminutive nature.The Elbee headphones are also sweat-resistant and comes with noise cancellation features. If all of this sounds good and you would like to pledge your support, the cheapest Elbee for Kickstarter contributors is available at $149. The official retail price is set at $269 so if you’d like to save yourself $120, head on over for the details.
Meet Elbee, the next big innovation in wireless headphones
By Chris Smith
Are smart headphones the next mobile breakthrough? That’s what LBTech seems to think, as the company created and launched one such product type on Kickstarter. Announced on Tuesday, the Elbee smart wireless in-ear headphones are available for preorder on the popular crowdfunding site, aiming to reach $250,000 in pledges by November 21st.Priced at $149 on Kickstarter, or $120 off the future retail price, the Elbee headphones are only scheduled to ship next November, assuming the project is fully funded.Each pair of Elbee headphones will provide a variety of smartphones will provide various features on top of playing sounds. The company behind the project says the Elbee can recognize your voice or movements, and integrates with apps for voice-based app control.
The Elbee headphones come with a dedicated app for iPhone or Android that lets users customize gestures (head tilting) and voice commands. There’s also a button that can be pressed for added controls. The headphones also come with always on listening features – just say “Ok Elbee” out loud followed by a voice command to obtained the desired effect.Elbee headphones will supposedly work with music apps, Google Maps, email and messaging apps, and smart home apps and devices. As shown in the video below, Elbee can be used to turn the lights on and off, as long as the light system is also a smart one.The full press release also follows below, with the Kickstarter campaign available at this link.
Elbee is making wireless earbuds that will be hard to lose
By Sean O'KaneWireless earbuds are one of those futuristic ideas that can't seem to cross over the consumer technology horizon. Bragi had a very successful Kickstarter last year for its Dash earbuds, which it showed off at CES alongside prototypes from FreeWavz and HearNotes, but has so far only shipped developer kits. Earin, Skybuds, T-Rex, and Truebuds are just a few of the many other companies also trying to crowdfund the dream of wireless earbuds, but most (if not all) of those companies haven't shipped — or even produced a working version of — their product.Now another company called Elbee is joining the fray with a Kickstarter campaign that launched today. And in an increasingly crowded field, Elbee wants to solve one of the biggest concerns about wireless earbuds: losing them. Elbee's app knows when the earbuds are in or out of Bluetooth range, and can therefore tell you their last known location and point you in the right direction. The app will even be able to alert you if you've somehow left your home without them. All of these should be chief concerns for people spending a couple hundred dollars on two relatively tiny earbuds — concerns that Elbee is really the first company to directly address.Otherwise, Elbee's earbuds are somewhat similar to the Dash in their design, and they also include voice and motion controls. The company isn't focusing on flashy features like fitness tracking, and instead the Elbee earbuds are more utilitarian, designed specifically for hands-free controls and Bluetooth music streaming. This helps the small company keep the price competitive — Elbee earbuds are being offered for $149, $169, and $189 on the company's Kickstarter page, and will eventually retail for $269.Each Elbee earbud is a small, dark gray rhombus on one side, with touch-sensitive strips for simple tap and swipe controls, an indicator light, and a noise-cancelation microphone. On the other side are form-fitting earpieces, and a capacitive sensor that turns each earbud off when you take it out of your ear to help save battery life. (The company says the earbuds will last for about three straight hours of playback, and can be recharged three times in their portable carrying case.)
On the left is the working Elbee prototype. On the right is the miniaturized version that will power the earbuds.Where Elbee will be able to distinguish itself, according to CEO Konrad Holubek, is with the hands-free controls. Like with the Dash, a mix of voice controls and slight head nods will let you access Siri or Google Now, skip from song to song in Spotify, make calls or send text messages, or do whatever developers might come up if and when they get their hands on Elbee's open SDK. I got to demo some of these controls — on what was essentially just a circuit board, to be clear — and in these early days they all worked really well.When I finally do have a pair of wireless earbuds, I could see myself using functionality like this from time to time. But I do have a hard time believing that these kinds of hands-free controls will stop me from pulling my phone out of my pocket, which is one of Elbee's big selling points. "We are tired of constantly grabbing our phone throughout the day," Holubek says in the company's Kickstarter video, adding that we find ourselves "interacting with apps that are often time consuming to find and to use." It's the same argument companies have used to sell smartwatches, but even with those it's not clear that this is a major problem people want solved. When it comes to wireless earbuds, people will probably care more about a product that looks good, sounds good, and is simple to use.If Elbee solves these needs, it won't be any time soon. The company isn't going to ship the earbuds until the end of 2016, so the success of Elbee's Kickstarter will hinge on finding patient backers. But with other wireless earbud startups breaking delivery promises on a seemingly monthly basis, maybe preparing yourself for a long wait is the only rational approach.
Dispelling the myths of hybrid hosting
By Emil Sayegh, CEO, Codero HostingHybrid hosting lets you run your database on dedicated servers, put your front-end in the cloud, and tie everything together with a single clickWhen the Amazon Web Services platform failed recently some of the internet’s biggest sites -- including Netflix and Tinder – suffered extended outages. The culprit? AWS's NoSQL database DynamoDB, where increased error rates led to increased errors and latency in more than 20 AWS services.These and other sites wouldn’t have had a problem if they used hybrid hosting, the best way to architect modern apps. Hybrid hosting lets businesses set up their databases on dedicated servers, put their front-end Web apps in the cloud, then tie everything together with a single click.While many companies recognize that hybrid hosting and the hybrid cloud are “the next big thing” in hosting, some are intimidated by what they don’t know. Because hybrid cloud adoption is still nascent, there remains a lot of confusion about the technology. It’s time to debunk some myths.
Myth: Hybrid cloud is only used for cloud bursting.When an application running in a private cloud gets a sudden demand for computing capacity, it can “burst” to a public cloud to handle that spike. This cannot be a reactive measure, though, and it is difficult to run applications on traditional, dedicated servers and then swap that same workload to the cloud at will. For cloud bursting to work properly, applications must be designed from the ground up with that in mind; the vast majority of applications are not built this way. It takes special skill and intent to build applications that know how to burst to the cloud.Hosting on a hybrid infrastructure does not magically make an application cloud burst; the application must be designed for that. Furthermore, the hybrid cloud must allow for the cloud burst at the networking level, which requires integration of hybrid at the networking level. It is unreasonable to expect legacy applications running on traditional dedicated servers to just swap their workloads to the cloud on demand.Hybrid cloud cannot, in fact, be used for cloud bursting unless the application was designed for that. Combining an adequately designed application with a hybrid cloud infrastructure, however, would enable an organization to build up an auto-scaling and burst-capable application on hybrid cloud infrastructure.
15 Enterprise Startups That Proudly Call Chicago Home
By Will SchmidtEverybody has heard of enterprise startups before. However, when I ask people what the difference is between an enterprise and non-enterprise startup, a lot of them are at a loss for words. That’s totally cool though – after all, there’s enough acronyms, jargon, and lingo in the tech world to rival that of a law office.You see, there’s a fine line between the two worlds of enterprise and non-enterprise startups. An enterprise startup is typically the largely unseen force at work behind the scenes. I’m talking about the stuff that various companies use for bookkeeping all the way to running and automating a payment service.There are countless examples of bigger corporations aligning themselves with enterprise startups because they’re seeking outside solutions that they don’t have to develop in-house. However, it brings with it an entirely different arena of hurdles for entrepreneurs to overcome when compared to non-enterprise startups. They’re not necessarily harder, just different.Regardless, these technologies are the heartbeat of a lot of big companies these days. Look no further than the widespread integration of Salesforce, PayPal, or Slack and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about here.In that light you’re obviously going to see a hefty amount of enterprise startup activity in ecosystems like Silicon Valley, New York, and Washington DC. However, there are a lot of other cities where enterprise startups also thrive – St. Louis, Dallas, and Los Angeles all come to mind.Let’s not forget the gem of the Midwest though: Chicago. Not only do they have amazing pizza, they also have an incredibly dense concentration of big name companies constantly seeking technological solutions to streamline their businesses. This celebration of the Chicago ecosystem is brought to you by @properties, the leading Chicago real estate brokerage serving both the city of Chicago and North Shore through dynamic marketing and innovation. Read more here.To that end, enterprise startups are thriving in the Chicago tech ecosystem. Here are 15 of them that proudly call Chicago home:
- TempoIQ: A platform to start creating IoT dashboards, mobile applications, and websites without writing any code. TempoIQ’s View IQ interactive application composer makes it simple to design and deploy real-time views into your IoT devices, applications, users, and data that’s shareable with your company, your partners, and your customers.
- Jellyvision: When you’re trying to untangle a big idea or make a tough decision, getting help from an expert beats trying to decode pages of jargon on your own. Jellyvision wants to find a way to bottle that person-to-person experience into a digital form via Interactive Conversations, Storybooks, and other unique formats.
- KnowledgeHound: A software platform that helps market researchers, marketers, and sales teams find, visualize, and analyze quantitative and qualitative consumer research studies. They believe sharing and reusing information to reduce waste and that the answers you need are already within arm’s reach.
- Apervita: Apervita is a community and marketplace for health analytics and data sets. The platform allows thousands of analytics and data sets to be deployed all at once. Its foundation was built on a powerful, yet simple goal: the democratization of health analytics
- Rippleshot: They take a big data, machine learning approach that is familiar to search, genetics, and advertising and apply it to the payment processing industry, helping banks, merchants and processors to proactively monitor suspicious activities and implement smarter fraud risk management strategies when breaches do occur.
- Scout Exchange: They apply a “Moneyball” algorithmic model to corporate recruiting to help make the recruiting process more accountable. It’s basically a marketplace between big corporations and search firms. Scout is also integrated within companies’ existing human resources software systems so they can send a job posting to the marketplace and recruiters can bid on them and submit candidates.
- kCura: kCura’s platform helps corporations, law firms, and government agencies manage and analyze electronic data during litigation and investigations. Their software is currently used by more than 127,000 users in 9,000 organizations worldwide, including more than 190 of the top 200 law firms in the United States, as well as all litigating divisions of the U.S. Department of Justice.
- project44: project44 is middleware that uses cloud-based freight web service APIs to instantly connect shippers and 3PLs to capacity by integrating their services into the Transportation Management System (TMS) you already use. The result is real-time freight transportation management.
- Geofeedia: Geofeedia is a location-based social media intelligence platform relied on by law enforcement agencies across the U.S. as well as bigger corporations. They effectively create geofences around a location of interest so users can maintain public safety at events, manage corporate security risks, and gather competitive intelligence.
- LinkCapital: The Chicago-based financial startup tailors loan refi’s to medical professionals like physicians, PA’s, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and nurse practitioners. From there it offers better terms and rates than they can obtain elsewhere. With a data-driven web platform, Link is able to accurately evaluate the risk and pair that insight with flexible solutions that meet individual career goals and lifestyles.
- Main Street Financial: This is the company behind the product Oranj, which serves as a practice management application to help them offer a better client experience via collaboration and engagement. It combines the utility of aggregation and financial management under a one login umbrella, equipping advisors with the tools they need to engage clients.
- Braintree: A catalyst for the next-generation of commerce, Braintree provides a way to pay and get paid across any device. In 2015, Braintree’s global payment platform is processing more than $50 billion in authorized payment volume with thousands of online and mobile commerce innovators in more than 46 markets across the globe.
- Review Trackers: A scalable and easy to use program designed to help business owners manage online reviews. Reputation, much like everything else, has moved online, and while much of the social media focus has been on Facebook and Twitter, recent trends and studies indicate that user generated online reviews can be a far more powerful marketing and reputation tool.
- Epic Presence: A digital marketing agency based in Chicago that brings in targeted traffic without using any advertising. At Epic Presence they use proven content marketing and viral traffic formulas to achieve many different goals on behalf of their clients, including Direct Sales, SEO, Social Media, Lead Gen, and more.
- Tula Software: A software company that helps independent yoga studios grow their business. Using the software platform you can accept payments, manage memberships, share your calendars, handle registrations, track credits, and record attendances.