5/19/2016 Doug Peterson, ECE ILLINOIS
Written by Doug Peterson, ECE ILLINOIS
The Second City is second-to-none when it comes to Chicago-style pizza, famous around the world. So it’s only fitting that an innovative new mobile commerce website, Pizza Mogul, emerged from a collaboration between a Chicago-based software development company called ThoughtWorks and Domino’s Pizza Enterprises Australia.
Pizza Mogul took Australia by storm in 2014, allowing Domino’s customers to create pizzas online and share their ideas with others—a fusion of social media and e-commerce, said ECE ILLINOIS alumna Joanna Parke (BSEE ‘00), managing director for ThoughtWorks. Customers created roughly 130,000 different customized pizzas in the first year, and they shared a slice of the profits, with one pair earning $52,000 for their creation.
ThoughtWorks is one of the companies that’s made Chicago a growing force in the tech world—and one of many with a strong ECE ILLINOIS presence.
“Chicago is a rising star,” said Joseph Beatty (BSEE ’85), who has been working in Chicago for 30 years. “So many engineers come out of Illinois, and so many stay in the Chicago area. That helps to explain why we’ve taken off as a tech startup area in the last five to 10 years.”
The CBRE investment firm ranked Chicago “as the fifth-largest and 11th fastest-growing tech market in the country,” reports Inc. magazine. One of the reasons, the magazine continues, is the “bevy of tech talent,” and it cites Illinois as a rich source for engineers and computing experts.
Nathan Laurell (BSEE ’98, MS ‘00) said if you compare what’s happening in Chicago today with what it was like when he came to the Windy City in 2000, “it’s a night-and-day difference.”
Today, Laurell said, more investors are willing to sink money into early-stage companies in Chicago. In addition, startup incubators have sprung up all over the city, such as the Chicago Innovation Exchange, which is operated by the University of Chicago but draws many ECE ILLINOIS students. ECE ILLINOIS students also partner with MBA students at the University of Chicago, where alumnus Sunil Kumar (PhD ’96) is the dean of the Booth School of Business.
To get a sense of this high-tech resurgence in Chicago, the following is a sampler of ECE alums who are doing tech, Chicago-style.
Rocket ship rides
The timing couldn’t have been better. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the floodgates to competition, and that’s when alumnus Beatty and his partners jumped into the telecom fray.
According to Beatty, fellow alumnus John Barnicle (BSEE ’87) noticed roughly 80 percent of the telecom revenue was in the switches used to connect phone calls, and “no one is going after that. Why don’t we?”
So Beatty and Barnicle teamed up to form Chicago-based Focal Communications, raised $25 million from venture capitalists, bought their own switches, and obtained regulatory certification. The company immediately took off.
“It was a rocket ship ride,” Beatty said. “We went from four guys with one idea to $240 million of annual revenue and 1,200 employees four years later.”
After the Focal startup, Beatty left to take the reins of Concourse, a company they moved from Massachusetts to downtown Chicago. Their specialty was putting in shared wireless systems in airports, and once again the timing was right. When he became the CEO of Concourse in 2003, Wi-Fi was just taking off.
Then in 2007, he joined Telular as the chief financial officer, and he became CEO nine months later. Over the next six years, Telular’s profits increased from $4 million $25 million annually.
Among their “Internet of Things” services was a sensor that monitors fuel levels in oil tanks. When a tank needs refilling, the sensor alerts Telular, and then Telular alerts the fuel service company. This saves considerable money because instead of routinely going out and filling tanks, refueling trucks are only sent when sensors indicate a real need.
Today, Beatty said, the startup mentality in Chicago is much stronger than when he began, which is one reason the city’s tech community is thriving. In the past, the Midwestern attitude was to be more cautious, but startups and risk-taking have become the new normal.
“It also helps that the University of Illinois sits only a couple of hours from Chicago, chock full of technologists,” he said. “Chicago can change every industry because every industry is represented in Chicago.”
Democratizing data
When the new Affordable Healthcare Act website was launched with highly publicized flaws, the Obama administration initiated several “tech surges” to fix the ailing site. In October of 2013, Gabriel Burt (BSCompE ’05) was one of five experts brought in to put the site in order, and their team managed to repair it in two months.
Burt already had connections with the Obama administration because he was part of the technology team that developed a revolutionary new software platform that helped with the 2012 election.
“Once Election Day was over, we realized many of the technologies and techniques we developed were applicable to all sorts of organizations,” Burt said. About 15 members of the Obama tech team started a new company, Civis Analytics, bringing the same tools to companies, non-profits, and other organizations.
Civis located in Chicago, and it has expanded to a staff of about 100. Burt is vice president of engineering and the chief technical officer, responsible for the platform on which the tools are used.
One popular tool is the “media optimizer,” which does sophisticated machine learning to target TV advertising in novel ways, combining the precision of digital with the reach of television. The media optimizer uses survey information to determine good targets for a product. Then, the model uses viewership data to predict the likelihood that certain TV programs will include a significant number of these potential customers in their audience.
In the past, “most media buys were either based on intuition or coarse demographic targeting,” Burt said. The Civis model is more individualized and precise.
“We’re trying to democratize access to data, and part of the way we do that is through the Civis platform,” he said. “This platform helps analysts and developers and folks of all skill levels to collaborate on data science.”
Cow power
The slogan for some dairy farms could just as well be “Got Tech?” as “Got Milk?” For example, a herd of 12,000 cows on a farm in Indiana powers a fleet of semi-trucks that roars down the roads from Chicago to Orlando.
Alumnus Laurell said he is always on the lookout for startup tech opportunities in which to invest, and that’s how he came across Mike McCloskey, an Indiana dairy farmer using anaerobic digestion technology to create fuel from cow manure. Gases from the manure are captured to create compressed natural gas, or CNG, which can be used to power trucks.
However, the farm operation provides only a portion of the compressed natural gas that Laurell’s company, ampCNG, uses to power specially equipped trucks for corporations such as Frito-Lay and PepsiCo. Chicago-based ampCNG has created 20 fueling stations in five states throughout Texas, the Midwest, and the Southeast. It has eyes on eventually building a national network that could fuel trucks travelling from one coast to the other.
Compressed natural gas cuts carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent compared to diesel fuel and virtually eliminates sulfur oxide and nitrogen oxide pollution. It is also about 50 cents to $1.50 per gallon cheaper than diesel. CNG is a small piece of the trucking fuel market, but even a small percentage is significant when you have 2.5 million semi-trucks on the road in the U.S.
Laurell started his career at a trading firm in Chicago, eventually becoming a partner. He left in 2010 to start New Frontier, a holding company from which he makes investments. He co-founded Energy.me in 2011, a company that sells electricity to energy brokers, and in 2012 he co-founded ampCNG.
He loves to work on companies in their early days, when you can become a problem solver “across a diverse set of situations,” he said. “To me, that’s engineering.”
Disruptive thinking
At first glance, it might seem odd that Joanna Parke looks to a 19th-century countess as an inspiration for software development. But it makes sense when you realize that this countess is Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician considered to be the first computer programmer in history.
Not just the first female programmer. The first programmer.
Parke was accustomed to being in the minority as a woman in her engineering classes, working toward her ECE degree in 2000. Today, she is the North American managing director for ThoughtWorks, based in Chicago—a company that is strongly committed to bringing aboard more female technical employees, as well as minorities.
When Parke joined ThoughtWorks in 2003, the percentage of women on staff was low, which is typical in the tech world. But a concerted effort increased the percentage of women in their North American offices to 34 percent. Even more unique, the percentage of women in technical positions is almost the same at 33 percent.
“You do have to try harder” to increase diversity, she said, but ThoughtWorks is committed to putting in the extra effort.
ThoughtWorks is also committed to innovation in software, both for major companies and non-profits. As their company banner reads: “Ambitious Missions Need Disruptive Thinking.”
Parke is proud of the work she did on the website for Southwest Airlines, which revolutionized and streamlined the way that people buy airplane tickets. On the nonprofit side, she said ThoughtWorks created software for tablets used in West Africa in the “red zones” of treatment centers for the deadly ebola virus.
A red zone is where confirmed ebola patients are kept, and doctors must suit up in protective equipment and cover all exposed skin before entering. Any object used in the red zone must be disinfected or destroyed, which limits the use of electronic equipment and makes communication challenging. Doctors couldn’t write down dosages given to patients and struggled to remember the information.
ThoughtWorks solved this problem by developing an application that could work on waterproof tablets, allowing the equipment to be disinfected. The application was intuitive and as simple as possible with large buttons, large font, and one-click actions. Doctors could enter data on the tablet even while wearing big, bulky gloves, and as a result had an electronic record of treating patients.
Parke started at ThoughtWorks writing code, and said she never pictured being a leader for a company that does $300 million of business annually and has a staff of 4,000 in 13 countries.
“Being on that journey has been life-changing,” she said.
This story first appeared in the spring 2016 issue of Resonance, ECE ILLINOIS' semi-annual magazine.