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Sandra Guy biography

Sandra Guy, a 28-year veteran journalist, has covered business, politics, education, technology and peace issues, and served as a former president of the Chicago chapter …

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Your phone can find you a parking space

Web design team leader Nathan Henry turned to technology to save nearly 50 percent on his regular parking downtown — and he has no contract tying him any single garage. He uses ParkWhiz, a free web and mobile site that tells motorists in real time …

Motorola Solutions’ 3-D headset aids work

Motorola Solutions, the Schaumburg-based maker of walkie-talkies and bar-code readers, is selling a headset computer worn under a hard hat that calls up and displays complex drawings just below the worker’s line of sight.

Evanston entrepreneur’s ‘mercy’ card helps the needy

If you feel a twinge of guilt in the worst of a Chicago winter when a homeless person begs for food, an Evanston entrepreneur may have come up with an answer. Jed JohnHope, 30, whose family has seen hard times, is creating a “Mercy” gift …

Sourcebooks ebook app puts children in starring roles

Sourcebooks, the nation’s largest woman-owned independent book publisher based in Naperville, has launched an app and an e-book series aimed at transforming the iPad’s use for tweens, teens and young children. A story app lets parents personalize the book by inserting a child’s name, and photo, into the story. Another app enhances the classics with at-your-fingertip background and context.

Entering new waters via tiny chip

Swimmers will know in real-time this summer whether their neighborhood lake is safe from high bacteria, thanks to a test developed by a Chicago biotech startup. The startup, FCubed, LLC, invented the detection technology, which works with technology created at the University of Notre Dame …

Startup pins down locations

An Evanston startup’s breakthrough technology that identifies Tweets, YouTube videos and photos from Flickr, Instagram and Picasa by their locations helped emergency responders find Hurricane Sandy victims and is giving federal authorities a new way to identify human trafficking.

Chicago entrepreneur helps struggling female artists abroad connect with retailers

Chicago entrepreneur Kathleen Wright counts model-turned-activist Lauren Bush Lauren and fashion designer Rachel Roy among her clients for handbags, scarves, jewelry and other accessories that struggling female artists make in Guatemala, India and West Africa. The impressive client backing goes on: Upscale women’s fashion designer …

Sharing mobile wireless networks

As wireless telephone companies and their suppliers meet in Chicago this week to talk about how to serve poor neighborhoods while competing with tech giants Google and Apple, a grass-roots model for high-speed access is popping up — a mobile wireless network shared among friends, …

Wheaton startup’s shirts blend art, tech, charity

A Wheaton startup is touting its “Made in America” label with a twist: It leverages new fabric technology and independent artists’ crowdsourcing to make fitted and fashionable T-shirts on demand. “We have the belief and the commitment that we can do good locally by investing …

Empowering entrepreneurs

While Chicago’s startup cheerleaders trumpet rapid-fire business launches, South Side native Aaron Gray is working to empower the underserved, overlooked and unconventional businessperson to think about a variety of options. Gray, 31, has started The Legacy Movement to upend the conversation about business startups: He …

Women’s history gets digitized, organized

A local historian is digitizing and organizing rarely seen documents that will open whole new areas of on-line research in women’s history. Kristen Gwinn-Becker, founder and CEO of HistoryIT (HistoryIT.com) in Evanston, has leveraged her creative and humanities background to advise the National Women’s History …

Apps for truckers on a roll

Technology is turning the old-school system of trucking goods from Point A to Point B into a sophisticated process that relies on interactive and real-time web capabilities. Chicago — the national transportation hub — has become the focal point of a battle among start-up and …

Social media aids polio fight

Social media is playing a key role in Rotary International’s quest to make up for increasing costs and recession-wracked countries’ funding cuts to eradicate polio — just as the goal reaches a tipping point. “We are 99 percent of the way to making polio the …

$5 get resume to top of stack

Jaclyn K. Hogan discovered a new career when she used a Chicago-based job board, HiredMyWay.com, that lets job seekers pay a $5 fee upfront to ensure their resumes are seen for jobs they’re serious about, or their money back. People who post their resumes with …

Dreams of 1-stop transit-map app

Chicago has a traffic jam of transit apps created by independent software developers, offering everything from transit stop data to real-time parking-space availabilities. A home-grown startup, Greater Good Studio, is using crowdsourcing to research and rally support for an all-in-one transit-map app that would give …

Seeing Braille into 21st century

A Lake Zurich company has played a key role in redesigning a 1950s-era Braille writer into a ‘talking’ LCD-screen device intended to make it easier for people to learn Braille. The new Perkins Smart Brailler, with a “brain” developed by Product Development Technologies, addresses a …

Web savvy draws big for college

Ornis Mala honed his computer skills developing databases, specialty apps and software systems at Lake Forest College, a liberal-arts school whose digital media design studies, specialized website portals and Loop-residency internship program reflect the changing needs of today’s workforce. Mala, 23, a native of Kosovo …

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