Farmist: An online resource for small farmers

Farmist, a Chicago-based startup whose agricultural-information pin board for farmers will launch in January, is one of 93 finalists nationally in VoltCrowd.com’s Job Creation Challenge. It’s a Kickstarter-esque campaign through which Farmist founder Amy Sprague is attempting to raise $10,000 in order to hire marketing staff ahead of the site’s launch.

Contributors receive gifts ranging from T-shirts to the chance to beta test Farmist, and unlike Kickstarter, Farmist doesn’t need to raise the entire $10,000 in order to receive pledged contributions.

Ms. Sprague, who grew up on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma and has graduate degrees in public policy and design, tells Silicon City more about Farmist.

Crain’s: What was the inspiration behind Farmist?Amy Sprague: Farmist grew out of the realization that there’s no well-designed, well-subscribed, nationally focused online platform for small farmers. I had been monitoring the market during my graduate work in the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, because I just kept assuming that someone would step into this role. But no one has, so I decided that I would launch it myself.

We are currently in the internal beta testing phase, and hopefully soon we’ll begin beta testing externally. We’re quite excited because Farmist will be releasing at a time of year when farmers are in front of their laptops and computers as they’re planning to prepare for the spring planting.

Describe how the site will work.

We’re starting as a pin board. Farmers will find things that are useful and pin them to the site, and then their peers will be able to see what’s buzzing in agriculture that day. They’ll have a wider range of information at their fingertips.

There are a lot of resources out there on the Web for farmers, whether it’s research institutions, universities, nonprofits or government sources, but it’s really hard for farmers to find that information. My user research has shown how, if farmers have a specific problem, they will either Google it or go to ask someone locally. But they’re basically just looking for things that they already know they need, so they’re not coming across new things that would be helpful, because they don’t know to look for them. And Farmist will have all of that information.

What’s an example scenario of how you envision Farmist assisting farmers?

My family has a cattle ranch, and for years I’ve been asking my dad if anyone has been doing grass-fed or organic beef in the area, and the answer has always been no. I decided to figure out how we could convert to a grass-fed or organic operation ourselves. The information was very hard to find, and the process was hard to figure out.

I called a sustainability institution in one of the neighboring counties, and I was asked why I would want to do this. And I thought, if the sustainability institute is asking me this, we really have a problem. I got in touch with grass-fed beef ranchers themselves, and they told me that it’s really hard to do. You have to get the mixture of grasses right, you need local processors, and you need to market your beef in local farmers markets. There aren’t a whole lot of ranchers that can do this.

So with Farmist, the thought is that if you see a lot of people pinning on grass-fed beef, for example, then you can eventually identify that maybe it’s something you’d want to look into, too. And as we advance, we can add more of a networking function, where a farmer can say, “Here’s a guy doing this in the next county, and here are a few other guys who I kind of know. Let’s get together and talk about what it would take for us to do this.”

It’s only when you get folks learning about things, talking about issues together that you can have movement in the system. In the case of grass-fed beef, nothing is going to happen until you have a pull-up lane that says “Grass-Fed Beef” for your trailer at the sale barn where you sell your cattle. A lot needs to change in the system, and the idea is that if farmers and ranchers can start sharing information more widely, they can start to move the system a little bit.

“Silicon City” is a weekly report on Chicago tech startup news and newsmakers written by Crain’s contributor Steve Hendershot.

Share your ideas and news tips on the local tech startup scene with Steve via email: stevehendershot@gmail.com. Check out Steve’s blog here. And follow him on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

The ABCs of building a gaming brand for kids

By Steve Hendershot

“Left Right Pup,” a children’s game for the iPad, is slated to hit the App Store in early July. The game is the third release for Chicago-based Mrs. Judd’s Games, which takes its name and inspiration from Frances Judd, a longtime kindergarten teacher at Francis W. Parker School.Mrs. Judd’s Games is officially a subsidiary of KBooM! Games, but as KBooM! devotes the bulk of its resources to games in the Mrs. Judd portfolio, the two companies are virtually synonymous.

Steve Gradman, president of both companies, worked as a marketer at companies such as Kraft Foods, Energizer and Newell Rubbermaid before investor Andy Bluhm of Delaware Street Capital approached him about running KBooM! Games. That was in July 2011, and initially Mr. Gradman envisioned KBooM! as a game studio that would develop custom games to support advertising campaigns. That approach proved difficult, especially compared with the fast start for Mrs. Judd’s Games.

That shift is fine with Mr. Gradman, who can now apply more of his direct marketing expertise. He doesn’t disclose the companies’ revenues, but says the first two Mrs. Judd titles have combined for 10,000 downloads. The first game, “Snowflake Station,” sells for $1.99; the more recent game, “Chalk Walk,” is $2.99.

Mr. Gradman tells Silicon City more about the company’s pivot and the challenges in building a gaming brand for children.Crain’s: How did you meet Mrs. Judd and decide to transition the company toward educational games?

Steve Gradman: As I was getting frustrated (with KBooM!’s white-label efforts) I was spending more time in the App Store, finding out what games were growing and which ones were not growing. Meanwhile, my own children, ages 6 and 3, are obsessed with the iPad, just like every single one of their friends. I started to become aware of how many poor educational games there are.

Around that time, I was at a school function along with my daughter’s kindergarten teacher, Frances Judd, who had just retired from Parker the year before. She said, ‘I saw what you’re doing in gaming. I have every one of my classroom curriculums mapped out for how they would look as an iPad game.’ I said, ‘Really?’ She had also worked at Hasbro and Playskool during the summers while she was teaching as a consultant and toy designer.I started talking through it, started doing research, and saw the space was starving for an educational expert. If you look at the top 20 educational games in the App Store, only one or two of those companies actually have an educator on staff. There was a real opportunity to come in with that expertise, to create a real brand and start owning this space.

So we did a little pivot. We’re continuing to do a few games for hire, but that’s not the focus because we think we’re really on to something with Mrs. Judd.

This is an opportunity because we can rely on Mrs. Judd and her network to make sure our games are completely vetted in sound educational foundations, who can take care of the whole pedagogy. (Mrs. Judd) thinks about things differently when she approaches learning. She is very methodical and careful about every little detail that goes into a game, all the little details and patterns that are so important for a young child’s developing mind.

Our goal is to be the brand that your teacher has confidence in, so that when a parent comes to a teacher and says, ‘My kids are playing with the iPad,’ the teacher says, ‘I would suggest apps from these guys, because they’re pretty careful about how they make their games.’ We have that opportunity in a space that is screaming for a brand.

Crain’s: Most of your development team is based in China. Was that decision made in order to keep your costs down as you pursued the white-label strategy? If so, how does that fit the new plan to build a premium educational brand?

SG: There is a cost advantage to some degree. We’re also there because we can get great talent there, a pretty consistent pipeline. I have a team of five folks at 1871 in Chicago that includes game designers and a couple of the artists. Then the heavy programming is done in Qingdao, China, where we have 12 employees.

Working on educational games has made things a little easier, because there’s less cultural idiosyncrasy involved than with the other games. The developers also love the opportunity to teach kids, there’s the sense of a little higher calling there. They also recognize these learning concepts, so that’s made the transition a little easier, too. When we talk education and literacy, they get it right away. They had to learn English later in life than we did, so they’ve been exposed to the learning concepts behind the games much more recently than us.

Crain’s: Describe your plan for building an audience for Mrs. Judd’s Games.

SG: We are exploring the best ways to drive downloads. We have to be careful because our users are children, and they don’t make Internet purchases. So as we grow here, just like everyone else in that market, we are looking for the magic bullet to drive downloads and awareness among parents. And we think there are cool opportunities to make games go viral with parents.

In the app world, the things that are the wild successes get that way because Kim Kardashian or someone like that tweeted about it. Everything is shareable, everything is social. People invite people, so you start by getting one person to jump in, and then they invite people to join the game. Children don’t and shouldn’t have social networks, but parents do, so we’re looking at opportunities to take the bragging that parents do about their kids on Facebook and Twitter and put it into our apps. It will be an interactive, safe operation where kids can share what they’ve done and parents can offer praise, then share those great results with their networks.

We’re about halfway done with building this. Because it’s for kids, we’re being very serious about it; we want to make sure it’s closed and that there’s no opportunity for predators or other people that shouldn’t be there to hop on. We also want to make it’s designed so that children get that positive reinforcement and feeling of accomplishment.

Crain’s: You’ve done several focus groups with kids, parents and teachers in addition to getting feedback from customers. What have you learned about the market that’s surprised you?

SG: We’ve found there’s guilt associated with extra screen time for kids, whether it’s TV or the iPad. Your overall goal, whether you’re a teacher in the classroom or a parent with your kid, you want to feel there’s some sort of positive in adding more screen time to a child’s life. So our goal is to create an educational moment that’s so powerful that parents will say, “It’s great if you play with this.”

IN OTHER TECH NEWS:

• Evanston’s NuMat Technologies won the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition last week, adding $100,000 to its competition haul of more than $1 million. Here’s a link to a March Silicon City Q&A with co-founders Ben Hernandez and Chris Wilmer.• The annual TechWeek conference is coming up: June 22 to 26, to be exact. To build excitement ahead of the event, the organizers today released their list of the 100 most influential tech-industry leaders in the Midwest. Some familiar names are on there, including entrepreneurs like Jason Fried of 37Signals and Seyi Fabode of Power2Switch, connectors like Kevin Willer of the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center and Sam Yagan of Excelerate Labs, and investors like Brad Keywell of Lightbank and J. B. Pritzker of New World Ventures. Here’s a link to the complete Tech 100 list, and here’s a link to the conference registration page.

Silicon City is a weekly report on Chicago tech news and newsmakers written by Crain’s contributor Steve Hendershot.

Share your ideas and news tips on the local tech startup scene with Steve via email: stevehendershot@gmail.com. Check out Steve’s blog here. And follow him on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Crain’s small-business editor Ann Dwyer is on Google+.

New, exclusive and local social network launches Wednesday

By Steve Hendershot

Beginning tomorrow, you’ll have a chance to join an exclusive club: the Chicago Social Network, powered by Chicago.com Inc.As the name implies, it’s a social network aimed at Chicagoans and based on the open-source Diaspora framework. Unlike Facebook, the network won’t sell your data to advertisers (or include advertising at all), and you even can pack up your data and port it to other Diaspora-powered communities.

Just one catch: unlike Facebook, this new network isn’t free. There’s no subscription fee per se, but to join you need an @chicago.com email address — the other product offered by Chicago.com Inc. The prices for those email addresses vary according to their prominence. The address stevehendershot@chicago.com would cost me $9 per month, while steve@chicago.com runs $79 per month.

Chicago.com CEO Josh Metnick has owned the Chicago.com domain name for about a decade but only recently hit on the idea of using it to offer vanity-plate email addresses and an exclusive social network. (Previously, it was a travel site that aimed to connect tourists with local hotels and events.) He said several hundred people have signed up during the project’s beta phase, which included a release to the tech-community site BuiltInChicago.org, and that the network’s first users include several heavyweight venture capitalists and tech execs.

Mr. Metnick knows, of course, that charging a premium price will limit his audience. That’s just what he wants.

“Maintaining that exclusivity is important,” Mr. Metnick said. He adds that even though Facebook is free, in its early years it was exclusive — first for Harvard students only, then only for students at a few select schools. “And Facebook isn’t truly free, either, because you’re giving them access to your information.”

Steve Hendershot writes “Silicon City,” Crain’s weekly column on Chicago’s tech news and newsmakers. Follow him on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

5Degrees’ ambition: A one-stop app for all your mobile communications

Steve Hendershot

He and Mr. Hopkins hope that business is 5Degrees. They tell Silicon City about the product they will introduce at SXSW Interactive, and how they hope it will evolve over time.

Crain’s: Describe what the version you’ll release at SXSW will do, and how that fits into your long-term plan.Jeb Ory: 5Degrees will take all the people [you interact with on your] mobile device, find the communications you’ve had with directly with those people, and put that all together. The initial version we’ll launch [at SXSW] will be focused on very basic information that’s contained on your mobile device or integrated within people’s email. Later, we plan to add information from [Twitter and Facebook] profiles. From a contact page within 5Degrees, we allow you to contact the person by message or phone; if you choose message, initially that will be email, and later we’ll add in the ability to post to their Facebook wall or send them a direct message on Twitter.

You’re also going to be able to see all of the email communications you’ve had with that person. That will be in the initial build. Then, over time, we’ll be able to add other forms of communication. so that, for example, if you’ve exchanged direct messages with a person on Twitter and you pull up their profile, you’ll see those in the communications history as well.

We’ll also let you split up [different categories of contacts] so that if you have customers’ phone numbers and friends’ phone numbers, they don’t both show up in the mailing list for a marketing email list—that’s a big pain point. Then we’re adding one more piece to the first release, a day-based activity system. It doesn’t manage meetings or manage your to-do list; it’s right between the two. It’s the whole ‘I need to call someone at some point today’ phenomenon, done right. It will help you stay on top of those types of things—remember to call so-and-so, or email so-and-so.

Crain’s: The central idea is to collect different types of communications in one spot. Explain how that will change the way people (or at least smartphone users) will interact with one another.Kilton Hopkins: This is the inflection point, the difference between people-centric and function-specific software. A function-specific product like [Twitter client] Hootsuite says, ‘You have three Twitter accounts and I’ll let you spread your communications across these different accounts.’ 5Degrees says, for each of your contacts, I’ll let you see all the emails, Tweets, Facebook messages and times when you made a phone call. That will all be listed underneath the person. So instead of check the ‘sent’ folder in your email, you go to the person’s page in 5Degrees and that’s where all the information is logged.

Nobody’s done that before: Make software about people. People have been stored as data, as contacts or customers. They’re pieces of information, or accounts. But we’re realizing that by putting together a Twitter profile, a Facebook profile, an email address and a number from your mobile device’s phonebook, you’re talking about a person. Put all that information together and you have the world’s first people-centric mobile relationship management platform.

Crain’s: How do you determine how much of that vision to try to capture in the first release?

JO: The way to do it is to start small. The end goal may be to build a complete, people-centric relationship management platform, but you don’t start by aiming to build the whole thing at once.

There’s no way to be everything to everyone right away, so the first way in is the area where no one else is doing it right, So, for us, ‘Evernote for contacts’ is the way we need to think about 5Degrees at Day One, because that describes the functionality you get at first.

In terms of process, what we want to do is put the product out there, then wait and see what people do with the application; what features are being used. Then we want to study the analytics on how people are using 5degrees, and that will let us know what features work and which ones don’t.

IN OTHER LOCAL TECH NEWS:Early applications to Excelerate Labs, the three-month Chicago startup accelerator ranked third nationally by the Kauffman Foundation, are due Thursday, March 1.

“Silicon City” is a weekly report on Chicago tech news and newsmakers written by Crain’s contributor Steve Hendershot.

Share your ideas and news tips on the local tech startup scene with Steve via email: stevehendershot@gmail.com. Check out Steve’s blog here. And follow him on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Fippex, maker of ‘client enablement’ software, snares $1.4M in funding

By Steve Hendershot

Fippex LLC, a Chicago-based software company whose web-based portal provides businesses with a way to communicate with clients such as advertisers and investors, announced today it raised $1.4 million in capital. Fippex will use the money for marketing (it is sponsoring Chicago’s Techweek conference in June) as well as adding sales and software development staff.

The new funding comes from a network of angel investors including the company’s two co-founders, Bill Burnett and David Pessis, as well as the three outside members of Fippex’s board of managers, Jacques Gliksberg, Kevin O’Hara and Mark Bjerknes. Messrs. Gliksberg, O’Hara and Bjerknes also participated in a $500,000 seed-stage investment in Fippex. The company launched in 2009.

“We want to expand in the verticals we’ve established, and also grow into new verticals, as well as to evolve the product,” says Mr. Burnett, 32, Fippex’s president.

Fippex began in the financial industry by enabling fund managers to communicate with investors; its focus broadened last year and, in January, Sun-Times Media Group Inc. struck a deal with Fippex to power a portal between the publisher’s sales staff and outside advertisers.

Steve Hendershot writes “Silicon City,” the weekly column on tech news and newsmakers, for Crain’s entrepreneurs blog. Follow Steve on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

TechNexus marks 5-year anniversary — and looks ahead to growth beyond Chicago

By Steve Hendershot

TechNexus turns five Thursday. The co-working space for tech companies at 200 S. Wacker Drive has housed about 130 companies since its founding, and those companies have raised about $75 million in investment capital and created 400 jobs, according to the company.

Terry Howerton and Fred Hoch co-founded TechNexus LLC in 2007 as a 25,000-square-foot “clubhouse” to complement the Illinois Technology Assn., a tech trade group that the pair also founded.

By housing tech companies such as online parking-reservations startup SpotHero and supply-chain management firm ArrowStream at TechNexus, and connecting those companies with investors and mentors, Messrs. Howerton and Hoch pioneered an all-in-one approach for startups in Chicago.Although Mr. Howerton says TechNexus was intended more “as a place for the tech community to coalesce and collaborate, and where we could all hang out and play” than as an incubator, he and Mr. Hoch quickly discovered its potential. Now, Mr. Howerton contends TechNexus “is the most successful incubator Chicago has seen.”

The co-working-plus-mentorship model is now in vogue, as startups work side by side in several clusters through the city including at Lightbank, the incubator launched by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, as well as Excelerate Labs, a three-month accelerator program that offers year-round office space to participating companies. In addition, Chicago tech leaders including Viewpoints Network founder Matt Moog and the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center’s Kevin Willer announced Wednesday they will open a 50,000-square-foot co-working space for tech startups, dubbed 1871, in the Merchandise Mart this spring.

“All this other action coming is very much welcome,” says Mr. Howerton, who says that TechNexus stands apart from other area tech incubators in its breadth of focus beyond Internet companies (green-tech groups such as the Clean Energy Trust are based at TechNexus) as well expansion into additional cities.

“We’ve created this collaboration ecosystem,” Mr. Howerton says. “Now, let’s expand that ecosystem beyond Chicago, in a controlled way.”

Steve Hendershot writes Silicon City, a weekly column on Chicago tech news and newsmakers. Follow Steve on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

Chicago’s Channel IQ gets backing from Silicon Valley bank

By Steve Hendershot

Online pricing intelligence firm Channel IQ announced late Tuesday it secured a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank, part of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SVB Financial Group.

Channel IQ helps manufacturers monitor their products’ pricing and promotions online, tracking consistency and performance among approved retailers and identifying unapproved online sellers. Channel IQ began in 2009 as a division within Chicago-based manufacturing logistics firm Channel Velocity Inc.; Channel IQ spun out of Channel Velocity in 2010 and launched officially in April 2011. It has about 80 customers including brands such as Panasonic, LG Electronics and Toys R Us.

Channel IQ is also nearing completion of a separate investment round, but the line of credit “means we have use less equity,” said Wes Shepherd, CEO of both Channel IQ and Channel Velocity. “I like setting up multiple moats to make sure we have our bases covered; you have to be careful until you turn profitable.”Mr. Shepherd wouldn’t disclose specific revenues or say how soon Channel IQ will be profitable, but said the company’s revenues are already more than several million dollars a year. He said a new “Dealer Verification Badge” for third-party retailers was a hit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, and rounds out Channel IQ’s offerings.

“We don’t see any competition of significance when it comes to what we do,” Mr. Shepherd says. “We are rather unique. When it comes to large deals and big brands, people who have the budget and really care about their brand and their retailers and their product, they pay good money and look for the best. And that’s where we are— we’re the best now. We’ve almost created a whole new business category, and we just have to keep building on that.”

Mr. Shepherd declined to disclose the size of the line of credit, other than to say that it is more than $500,000. He plans to use the money to expand his staff from 40 to 60 over the next 12 months, and enhance Channel IQ’s sales operation.

Channel IQ is known legally as OnRamp Technologies LLC and is based in the same building as Channel Velocity, 350 W. Ontario St. Click here to read a Crain’s interview with Mr. Shepherd from May 2011.

Steve Hendershot writes Silicon City, a weekly column on Chicago tech news and newsmakers. Follow Steve on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

Chicago’s Channel IQ gets backing from Silicon Valley bank

By Steve Hendershot

Online pricing intelligence firm Channel IQ announced late Tuesday it secured a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank, part of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SVB Financial Group.

Channel IQ helps manufacturers monitor their products’ pricing and promotions online, tracking consistency and performance among approved retailers and identifying unapproved online sellers. Channel IQ began in 2009 as a division within Chicago-based manufacturing logistics firm Channel Velocity Inc.; Channel IQ spun out of Channel Velocity in 2010 and launched officially in April 2011. It has about 80 customers including brands such as Panasonic, LG Electronics and Toys R Us.

Channel IQ is also nearing completion of a separate investment round, but the line of credit “means we have use less equity,” said Wes Shepherd, CEO of both Channel IQ and Channel Velocity. “I like setting up multiple moats to make sure we have our bases covered; you have to be careful until you turn profitable.”Mr. Shepherd wouldn’t disclose specific revenues or say how soon Channel IQ will be profitable, but said the company’s revenues are already more than several million dollars a year. He said a new “Dealer Verification Badge” for third-party retailers was a hit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, and rounds out Channel IQ’s offerings.

“We don’t see any competition of significance when it comes to what we do,” Mr. Shepherd says. “We are rather unique. When it comes to large deals and big brands, people who have the budget and really care about their brand and their retailers and their product, they pay good money and look for the best. And that’s where we are— we’re the best now. We’ve almost created a whole new business category, and we just have to keep building on that.”

Mr. Shepherd declined to disclose the size of the line of credit, other than to say that it is more than $500,000. He plans to use the money to expand his staff from 40 to 60 over the next 12 months, and enhance Channel IQ’s sales operation.

Channel IQ is known legally as OnRamp Technologies LLC and is based in the same building as Channel Velocity, 350 W. Ontario St. Click here to read a Crain’s interview with Mr. Shepherd from May 2011.

Steve Hendershot writes Silicon City, a weekly column on Chicago tech news and newsmakers. Follow Steve on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

Chicago’s Channel IQ gets backing from Silicon Valley bank

By Steve Hendershot

Online pricing intelligence firm Channel IQ announced late Tuesday it secured a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank, part of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SVB Financial Group.

Channel IQ helps manufacturers monitor their products’ pricing and promotions online, tracking consistency and performance among approved retailers and identifying unapproved online sellers. Channel IQ began in 2009 as a division within Chicago-based manufacturing logistics firm Channel Velocity Inc.; Channel IQ spun out of Channel Velocity in 2010 and launched officially in April 2011. It has about 80 customers including brands such as Panasonic, LG Electronics and Toys R Us.

Channel IQ is also nearing completion of a separate investment round, but the line of credit “means we have use less equity,” said Wes Shepherd, CEO of both Channel IQ and Channel Velocity. “I like setting up multiple moats to make sure we have our bases covered; you have to be careful until you turn profitable.”Mr. Shepherd wouldn’t disclose specific revenues or say how soon Channel IQ will be profitable, but said the company’s revenues are already more than several million dollars a year. He said a new “Dealer Verification Badge” for third-party retailers was a hit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, and rounds out Channel IQ’s offerings.

“We don’t see any competition of significance when it comes to what we do,” Mr. Shepherd says. “We are rather unique. When it comes to large deals and big brands, people who have the budget and really care about their brand and their retailers and their product, they pay good money and look for the best. And that’s where we are— we’re the best now. We’ve almost created a whole new business category, and we just have to keep building on that.”

Mr. Shepherd declined to disclose the size of the line of credit, other than to say that it is more than $500,000. He plans to use the money to expand his staff from 40 to 60 over the next 12 months, and enhance Channel IQ’s sales operation.

Channel IQ is known legally as OnRamp Technologies LLC and is based in the same building as Channel Velocity, 350 W. Ontario St. Click here to read a Crain’s interview with Mr. Shepherd from May 2011.

Steve Hendershot writes Silicon City, a weekly column on Chicago tech news and newsmakers. Follow Steve on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

Giving Siri a run for her money

By Steve Hendershot

Seventy-seven thousand users have downloaded the free Android app Cluzee since it was introduced on Nov. 28. Cluzee, from Port Barrington-based Tronton LLC, is a digital personal assistant that responds to voice commands — in other words, a lot like Siri, the showstopping feature of the latest iPhone.Siri’s technology was developed and refined using $24 million in venture capital; Apple Inc. then purchased Siri Inc., in April 2010, before including the software in the iPhone 4S. Cluzee, in contrast, is the property of Ashish Patwa, the founder and sole employee of Tronton. Mr. Patwa spent a decade eyeing the space, and in 2010 decided to leave his job as a project leader at GE Healthcare to found Tronton. He used freelance programmers to build his first version, and is now looking to raise money and expand his team. He tells Silicon City about his product and his plans.

Crain’s: Give me a sense of what’s possible for digital assistants in the next year or two. What are some of the tasks they’ll be able to execute on our behalf?

Ashish Patwa: Every personal digital assistant’s goal is to augment a user’s memory and capabilities. That means software that can carry out certain tasks we don’t like to do, or that are too difficult to do.One of them is checking all the electronic updates we receive — all the emails and social-media updates. We get so many of these every day and don’t want to go through all of them but at the same time don’t want to miss the important ones. So if we have an assistant who can do it for us, a machine smart enough to process all that information, then that assistant can help us with information overload.

There are other things like travel. If (an assistant) could prepare a travel plan that saves me time and money because it is applying deals and other information, that could be really useful. That’s the idea we have, and that’s what we’re going to build.

You’ll be able to just say, ‘Cluzee, I’m planning to travel next month, between theses specific dates and to this location. Please help me prepare the trip.’ Cluzee has access to so much information on the Internet, it can very quickly show me an itinerary. If I OK (the potential itinerary), Cluzee will make all the bookings and keep records for me. All with a voice command.

Crain’s: You’ve been eyeing this space for a decade. How did Apple’s inclusion of Siri in the iPhone 4S affect your plans?

AP: I had wanted to start my own company for a very long time, and I had already had a good idea it would be in this space, but it took a few years to have a concrete idea about what I wanted to do. I wanted to build a product that could help people and also build a good business; it was about looking for the right opportunity.

When smartphones or the iPhone first came out, I started trying to find out how we could build a personal assistant with that technology. I couldn’t find good voice-recognition software at that time to put on the iPhone, and I had been searching other products and technologies to find a good combination of software that I could use to build a good personal assistant. As I was searching different companies, I saw Siri, and at the time the company just had one (webpage) saying that this interesting thing is coming — they were working on a pre-alpha version. I put it in my bookmarks for a very long time, and followed them as well as other things happening in the labs at Microsoft and IBM. And also MIT has been doing some very good work in this area.

Finally, Android came out and had this voice-recognition technology (included) so we used that and many other technologies, too, to make this assistant intelligent. IT was a perfect market opportunity, so I left my job (in October 2010) and tried to build my own.

Crain’s: What does all that mean for your prospects of building an iOS version?AP: Initially, I planned to build an iPhone version (of Cluzee) before building the Android version. I changed to Android because of the market analysis — because it looked like Apple was making similar capabilities part of their core platform with its (release of the iPhone 4S). I then decided to move to the Android platform.

Apple has a clause that no apps for its platform should compete with its core features, so potentially we’ll face some legal complexities if we plan to put Cluzee on the iPhone later on. I’m not worrying about it right. We may have a version with greater capabilities that we can put on the iPhone one day, but there are a lot of things that need to be worked out before we start working on that version.

Crain’s: You’ve built this first version of Cluzee on your own, with the help of freelance software developers. This space is likely to evolve quickly enough that you’ll need a larger team to iterate your product and stay competitive. What are your plans?

AP: Having a core team is very critical at this point, so I’ve been talking to investors. Many of them are interested, so we just need to get a commitment. I have also talked to people who are interested in joining Tronton. These are people who have great skills and we can make a great core team.

I’m working on logistics right now, and clearly the first step is to build a great team. Then we have very big plans for Cluzee for the next many months.

IN OTHER LOCAL TECH NEWS:Chicago’s latest tech-related startup launches Thursday. The company, Clearstream, aims to vet online videos to ensure their content and quality is suitable for advertisers. Founder Brian Mandelbaum was a contestant on season four of the NBC show “The Apprentice.”

“Silicon City” is a weekly report on Chicago tech news and newsmakers written by Crain’s contributor Steve Hendershot.

Share your ideas and news tips on the local tech startup scene with Steve via email: stevehendershot@gmail.com. Check out Steve’s blog here. And follow him on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

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