The May Report

News From Ron May

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The May Report: 5/11/2012: The ITA CityLIGHTS Awards went to the following people, companies and organizations Thursday night: New Concept Award: Gogo; Best Strategic Use of Technology Award: Allstate Insurance Company; Prominent Woman in Tech Award: Carole McCluskey, Coinstar & Redbox; Newcomer Award: Trunk Club; Rising Star Award: Braintree; Lighthouse Award: SXC Health Solutions; Technologist of the Year Award: Michael Fineberg, SurePayroll; CEO of the Year Award: Michael Alter, SurePayroll; CityLIGHT Award: Dan Lyne, World Business Chicago

The May Report May 11th, 2012

The May Report: 5/11/2012: The ITA CityLIGHTS Awards went to the following people, companies and organizations Thursday night: New Concept Award: Gogo; Best Strategic Use of Technology Award: Allstate Insurance Company; Prominent Woman in Tech Award: Carole McCluskey, Coinstar & Redbox; Newcomer Award: Trunk Club; Rising Star Award: Braintree; Lighthouse Award: SXC Health Solutions; Technologist…

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The May Report: 5/10/2012: Too bad we had no time to handicap the ITA CityLIGHTS Awards, so we’ll just have to do a post mortem; Flipper, now known as Andrew E. Filipowski resurfaces as a filmmaker; no time for the usual endless header… If you see a fat guy with a cane in a wheelchair sitting outside Union Station with a sign saying “Will pay for gossip” and asking you for your card — well, take a guess about who that is… Can someone please save me a program and keep track of who won each category?

The May Report May 10th, 2012

The May Report: 5/10/2012: Too bad we had no time to handicap the ITA CityLIGHTS Awards, so we’ll just have to do a post mortem; Flipper, now known as Andrew E. Filipowski resurfaces as a filmmaker; no time for the usual endless header… If you see a fat guy with a cane in a wheelchair…

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The May Report: 5/9/2012: My info. about SOBCon is that boisterous, bombastic, blowhard blogger Chris Brogan broke down (possibly a full blown nervous) after break up (divorce), according to his begetter (dad); and Steve Hall of http://www.adrants.com/ reported privately that his blog traffic is way down; 3 key speakers at Techweek revealed; At the ITA, someone should be getting the axe — Dorothy Radke, Sarah Habansky, Fred Hoch?; Mobcart https://mobcart.co/ raised $100K from angels, including from Orlando Saez of the State of Illinois; not every firm moving into the reserved space at 1871 has 2-5 people — some have 12 or 15 people but just 2 or 3 desks at 1871, and Song Lyrics http://www.songlyrics.com/news/category/news-roundup/ (I hope that URL is correct), has 30 programmers in India; another firm I talked to, www.kboomgames.com, has developers in Quinxado, China; at the Efoora bankruptcy hearing, Trustee Catherine Stege revealed that Efoora has just $190,000 left in the bank, so with the extra $50,000 from Subhash Varshney and Applied Biomedical, they’d have $240,000 and that’s before legal fees eat away at it; btw, Rich Fogel, the lawyer at Shaw Gussis who assisted receiver Ira Bodenstein with the receivership, fielded many calls and handled many issues without billing for it; and there are Efoora investors who want to write off their investment and close the books — at least that’s part of Stege’s argument, and Fogel confirmed to me that he has gotten many such calls; at one point Judge Goldgar snapped at Stephen J. Browm, a lawyer for www.srcattorneys.com and the objector (Doug Jaeger) to the trustee’s motion, “What did you expect Ms. Stege to do, travel around to find competitors, buyers, and investors?”; my gut feeling is that despite the glaring lack of 3rd party, independent evaluation and verification of Varshney’s claims and the impeachment of his testimony, the judge will probably back the idea that there are limited prospects for mass production of the glucose meter in a saturated market — in statistics, they call it regression toward the mean, so if Efoora is the outlier, then Judge Goldgar and Trustee Stege may not have the patience for it

The May Report May 9th, 2012

The May Report: 5/9/2012: My info. about SOBCon is that boisterous, bombastic, blowhard blogger Chris Brogan broke down (possibly a full blown nervous) after break up (divorce), according to his begetter (dad); and Steve Hall of www.adrants.com/ reported privately that his blog traffic is way down; 3 key speakers at Techweek revealed; At the ITA,…

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The May Report: 5/4/2012: Do not shoot the messenger, Chris Dalton, because we all know about your legendary temper – but according to The Motley Fool (5/1/2012): “The four companies that dared to go public were initial duds” starting with Acquity Group. AQ’s stock price has been underwater since it went public – which reminds us of the famous Saturday Night Live throwaway line: “Haile Salassie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie_I is still dead.” Let’s see if AQ can make it to the surface this quarter!; Kudos should go to George Jewell Catering http://www.georgejewell.com/ which I believe provided the entertainment as well as the food and drink; www.desksinc.com which won the contract for the desks at 1871; The Artisan Cellar, www.foodandwinemenus.com, and of course partner companies like CISCO and CDW; even Lightbank, www.lightbank.com is sponsoring a conference room, although I didn’t see Brad, Eric or Andrew — Wednesday was JB’s, Matt’s and Kevin’s night — (the one guy from Lightbank I did see was David Wald, a fairly low level guy, http://lightbank.com/team) and I did meet the publisher of Chicago Magazine; a high level guy from The Onion w/ a Brooklyn, NY address, Dave Snyder, publisher of Crain’s and get this, he’s been there 30 years!; a marketing guy who helped bring Bill Curtis back to WBBM; two orthodox Jewish rabbis whom I introduced to Eyal Amir, www.faspark.com, as Eyal was one of about 20 people who wheeled me around (thanks to all of you who did); the rabbis can give me the run down on the law of Lashon Ha Ra, http://www.jewfaq.org/speech.htm; “A Chasidic tale vividly illustrates the danger of improper speech: A man went about the community telling malicious lies about the rabbi. Later, he realized the wrong he had done, and began to feel remorse. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything he could to make amends. The rabbi told the man, ‘Take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the winds.’ The man thought this was a strange request, but it was a simple enough task, and he did it gladly. When he returned to tell the rabbi that he had done it, the rabbi said, ‘Now, go and gather the feathers. Because you can no more make amends for the damage your words have done than you can recollect the feathers.’ ” So, with the idea on mind that gossip is the equivalent of murder, let me make a few amends with (or to?) Arabella Santiago, Sarah Boyd, Iain Shovlin, Kapil Chaudhary, Matt Moog, and I’m sure there are others but these guys come to mind right now and I’ll give you more details on what this is about next week — these are specific goofs on my end and not a blanket apology; if I heard Josh Metnick right, www.chicago.com has under 1,000 paid subscribers — Josh is living in Israel and he stays in hotels here, plus he has an office at 744 N. Wells; btw, the Macallan 18 was great and I was sober again by Wednesday morning from Monday evening, but maybe I should have tried the Johnny Walker Blue; when I told Matt McCall on Weds. at 1871 the story about how Iain had gotten me drunk — and he does know Iain from TCV and the party they threw at SXSW — Matt laughed and said, “What did you expect? He’s Scottish.”

The May Report May 4th, 2012

The May Report: 5/4/2012: Do not shoot the messenger, Chris Dalton, because we all know about your legendary temper – but according to The Motley Fool (5/1/2012): “The four companies that dared to go public were initial duds” starting with Acquity Group. AQ’s stock price has been underwater since it went public – which reminds…

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The May Report: 5/3/2012: By all accounts, everyone had a great time at the 1871 Grand opening, (JB was still there at 10:20pm, as was Matt Moog and his wife Lucy, along with Jim Dugan and his wife), replete with interesting food, drink, and some entertainment that had to be seen to be believed with some high tech screens to augment it (sort of reminded me of the old days at Limelight) with women dressed and dancing exotically with their heads completely covered; they were expecting 800 people for the two parties combined, one for VIPs (5:30pm to 7pm) and one for the general crowd (7pm to after 11pm) and of couse there was quite a bit of overlap, and my guess is that they had about 600 throughout the evening — there were 300 people still on the wait list in the late afternoon; 1871 has accepted 65 firms so far with 130 desks taken when they all move in and many more firms are still in the application process hopper; the 6 suites are being occupied by i2A, Sandbox, New World Ventures, UIC and UIUC (btw, John Noel has resurfaced as an entrepreneurship director at UIC), IIT, Northwestern, and possibly several others including Hyde Park Angels — several of the suite tenants are doing space sharing, so IIT has a few groups in their space and will try to have someone there every day (one person told me); I talked to many start-ups and got a ton of information: Jeff Judge’s Signal (www.signalhq.com) did $2.85MM last year with a staff of 12; Dan Verakis from www.safetybook.org says that they’ve been invited to the White House on May 16th; Ben Blair was hired 3 weeks ago at Markitx as the CTO and he comes from Peak6 where he was the first developer; I believe that Toodalu https://www.toodalu.com/ raised $1MM and I talked to one angel who put in $50K; much more to come; kids’ games developer KBoom, www.kboomgames.com, has 5 people now; Brian Stanish from http://www.ffocal.com/ raised $250K — the elevator in my bldg. is out so I have to leave to get to SOBCon; the month of May and June are basically booked up, and they’re already booking through October for events at 1871; big news on Accretive Health and Allscripts — tonight will be an all nighter; btw, there were a few real VIPs including Bill Curtis and Fox reporter Anna Davlantes, and can we count Harper Reed?; Shawn Riegsecker from Centro, LLC (which now has 270 employees) said that by 2017 daily metro papers and printed magazines will no longer exist, but suburban weeklies will; I really like Nick Rosa from Sandbox because he tells it like it is with no varnish

The May Report May 3rd, 2012

The May Report: 5/3/2012: By all accounts, everyone had a great time at the 1871 Grand opening, (JB was still there at 10:20pm, as was Matt Moog and his wife Lucy, along with Jim Dugan and his wife), replete with interesting food, drink, and some entertainment that had to be seen to be believed with…

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The May Report: 5/1/2012: So, I’m a bit hung over since I don’t drink, but Iain Shovlin and I shared a bottle of Macallan 18 Year Highland Single Malt Scotch Whisky … and he said he’ll sue me if I write that it was Macallan 12. Meanwhile, I learned a lot about Techweek which expects 5,000 people over 5 days, and as far as Iain Shovlin is concerned, he’s quite likeable, and yesterday was his 34th birthday, but he’s also very calculating, so much so that almost all of our conversation was “off the record” which leaves me with some fancy footwork to correct some errors in what I’ve written — in other words, I’m boxed in since I can’t write “Iain says x or y is wrong”; the Techweek staff, full of pi** and vinegar, numbers nine or ten, all young, energetic, enthusiastic, and working until after 7pm; I did find out that i2A has gone to 1871 which makes absolutely no sense to me, except that 1871 is like a tree house for 7th graders and they wanted in; Fippex got $1.4MM last year (old news, I guess) and now has 16 employees; I could write much more, but the clinic has really cracked down on my arrival time…

The May Report May 1st, 2012

The May Report: 5/1/2012: So, I’m a bit hung over since I don’t drink, but Iain Shovlin and I shared a bottle of Macallan 18 Year Highland Single Malt Scotch Whisky … and he said he’ll sue me if I write that it was Macallan 12. Meanwhile, I learned a lot about Techweek which expects…

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The May Report: 4/30/2012: Here’s what happens when I sit on a story, no matter how benign: Dan Ehrmann of www.clubexpress.com has hired two new employees since we spoke in February! He had 6 people then, now presumably he has 8. I forgot to mention that while he was attending CCEA last Thursday, Bill Anthony’s 2007 Honda Accord was stolen from Randolph and Wells (I think); www.xolve.com, out of UW-Madison and working with WARF is closing on a $2MM extension of Series A in June and seeks a $4MM Series B round in 2013, but that’s secondary: the important thing is that they’re claiming to have game-changing technology since 2008 which allows for solubility of nanomaterials and they’re focusing on graphene for composite and energy storage materials

The May Report April 30th, 2012

The May Report: 4/30/2012: Here’s what happens when I sit on a story, no matter how benign: Dan Ehrmann of www.clubexpress.com has hired two new employees since we spoke in February! He had 6 people then, now presumably he has 8. I forgot to mention that while he was attending CCEA last Thursday, Bill Anthony’s…

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The May Report: 4/30/2012: Locks being changed at Fastroot http://www.fastroot.com/ Is Terry Howerton, aka Terry I. Howerton II, pulling a fast midnight run out of Fastroot? Two views on Acquity Group’s corporate culture: Chris “all is well” Dalton and several letters on the upper management’s FU (this is our moment) revolving door policy (but why do we care) – Acquity Group is a Chinese company after all – and not a Chicago firm!; Excelerate has decided to hold its classes at 1871; no word yet on what rent, if any, the participants will pay or what space they’ll occupy — I saw the classroom they have set aside for Excelerate and others, but there were no desks in that room; I had the darndest time finding the interview Carman did with Matt Moog, but I did come across this gem, http://vimeo.com/35136307, which is Matt’s 10 minute montage with music of the life of his son, Max Kraft Moog, Bar Mitzvahed earlier this year — I’ll say that Matt Moog may not be much of a businessman, but I’ll bet he’s a good father; Midwest Renaissance Fund now has a PPM, prepared by that poseur law firm Polsinelli Shughart, as of a week or so ago, and David Bird, one of the GPs, claims he’s collecting an actual check from an Iowa investor; Len Bland (whose firm the 10 judges at CCEA took a pass on) and David Carman are still dufuses, so would that be dufi for two of them?

The May Report April 30th, 2012

The May Report: 4/30/2012: Locks being changed at Fastroot www.fastroot.com/ Is Terry Howerton, aka Terry I. Howerton II, pulling a fast midnight run out of Fastroot? Two views on Acquity Group’s corporate culture: Chris “all is well” Dalton and several letters on the upper management’s FU (this is our moment) revolving door policy (but why…

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The May Report: 4/27/2012: Excelerate Labs (along with other accelerators across the country) announces its class of 2012: 71lbs, Cureeo, Fibroblast, frintit, Good Karma Clothing for Kids, Lasso, Orbeus, Pictarine, SpotHero, Whimseybox; The six companies that the CCEA judges selected to go to the next level in the national competition were: H.E. System Technologies (http://www.hecng.com), Kelix (http://www.kelix.com/), Power Generation Technologies (www.powergenerationtech.com), Resolute Marine Energy (http://www.resolutemarine.com/), Turbulent Energy, and Xolve (www.xolve.com); I really enjoyed the CCEA event, attended by about 120, and learned a lot, a lot, notwithstanding some organizational and logistical glitches, but more on that another time; the irony of the Groupon story is that the final jeopardy category on Wednesday, the very same day as the meeting in which Andrew apologized for drinking too much, was Websites and the clue was “It launched its first offer on October 22, 2008 — a 2 for 1 pizza deal in Chicago” — of course, all three contestants wrote “What is Groupon.com?”; on their first day of trading, Acquit group, AQ, opened at $6.00/share, went up to $6.25, and is now at $5.75, http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/AQ:US; WBBM just reported that CEO Chris Dalton flew all the way to NYC just to watch his employees lose their money, as the stock trades down

The May Report April 27th, 2012

The May Report: 4/27/2012: Excelerate Labs (along with other accelerators across the country) announces its class of 2012: 71lbs, Cureeo, Fibroblast, frintit, Good Karma Clothing for Kids, Lasso, Orbeus, Pictarine, SpotHero, Whimseybox; The six companies that the CCEA judges selected to go to the next level in the national competition were: H.E. System Technologies (www.hecng.com),…

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The May Report: 4/26/2012: You just can’t make this stuff up! “Groupon Inc. GRPN -2.77% Chief Executive Andrew Mason told the company’s employees Wednesday that the daily-deals site needs to grow up-right after he apologized for drinking too much beer.” And I heard that in addition to ripping on Apple, he supposedly said that Groupon is a colossal joke.

The May Report April 26th, 2012

The May Report: 4/26/2012: You just can’t make this stuff up! “Groupon Inc. GRPN -2.77% Chief Executive Andrew Mason told the company’s employees Wednesday that the daily-deals site needs to grow up-right after he apologized for drinking too much beer.” And I heard that in addition to ripping on Apple, he supposedly said that Groupon…

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