tomordonez

Hackatrain: The 1st Hackathon Inside a CTA Train in Chicago

event details

June 16, 2012
from 9:00am to 7:00pm
address Chicago Brown Line
city/town Chicago
phone 3129857255
website or map http://hackatrain.co…
organized by Tom Ordonez of Marketaero.com and Code Academy
type Conference Launch Networking 

event description

The 1st hackathon inside a CTA train in Chicago

The Hackatrain is a one-of-a kind experience.

APPLY HERE

It is a software development event where teams build web or mobile applications.

The Hackatrain is not your typical hackathon. Development starts at the moment you register. You are free to choose an idea from a pool or submit your own. Promote your team to more participants and start building your app.

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Tom Ordonez

Why Do We Blog and What @BuiltinChicago Did Wrong

posted by Tom Ordonez
on 04/15/2012 12:19 am
  • 604 views
  • 3 comments

This was originally posted here.

What incentives sales people?

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Maria Christopoulos Katris
Maria Christopoulos Katris on 04/15/2012 10:03 am

Tom,

I think we are crossing signals. I agree it is evangelism, but if you do it in a vacuum it will never help Chicago. The hope is the site will continue to be organic-this will never change and our mindset has never changed, thus we need to be better about communicating with our members. As for featured members, I was referring to the ones on the home page. The ones on the inside pages are displayed and constantly changing to showcase all different members of the startup community in Chicago. As for featured startups, the rules have not changed at all. Like any social network, you will have a small percentage of very active members-it would not be right to only showcase these members. Our job on the site is to promote the entire Chicago digital tech startup community while showing deep gratitude to our most active members. If Code Academy or any other startup you mention below puts a blog up and gets more than 10 shares/likes they will get listed. Unfortunately, we cannot include 10 without a slight redesign to the home page but we will def take this into consideration and appreciate the feedback.

Maria Christopoulos Katris
Maria Christopoulos Katris on 04/15/2012 08:16 am

Tom,

Appreciate your blog, but let me respond to a few of the items on your list. In addition, more features will be added to the site with time, and the continued support of our members. We have a very limited budget with a lot to accomplish and will only grow this site with time.

1. Not promoting articles: This is incorrect as we do have external promotes via social sharing. The reason behind this transition is so we can fulfill our mission of telling the world about all the great digital startups growing in Chicago. On the ning site, promotes fed the ego, but they were held in a vacuum only for those who visited our site. With external social shares your startup and blog can be read by many more...

2. Featured members: Are they now hand picked? No, our members are based on contributions-you contribute, you get featured-same motivation!

3. No global recent activity-you are correct but this is on the list for a future enhancement.

4. Featured startups: I see 2 Excelerate Labs startups. Weird coincidence. Nope, not weird. Both Ethan Austin of Give Forward and Seyi Fabode of Power2Switch contributed blog posts which received over 10+ likes/shares-this is why they are listed under "cool new startups". You can too if your blog follows suit.

5. Startup of the month: It became a pitching contest. Not at all-visit the page to see how/why we select these companies.

Hope this helps to clarify some of your questions.

Tom Ordonez
Tom Ordonez on 04/15/2012 09:18 am

Hi Maria. Thank you for your reply. Our perspectives are a little bit different. You mention that "promotes feed the ego". There are about 3000 blog articles on this website. Maybe half are good quality content. A quick calculation (1500 x $200) is about $300,000. Which means people have contributed $300,000 worth of good quality content. For Free! A little recognition should be given to active members. Although you call it feed the ego. Other websites like Yelp, call it evangelism.
Featured members: I am sure these are great people, but they barely have 1 blog posting and yet are featured: Godard Abel, Glenn Robertson, Felix Jung, Jeana Anderson (no activity at all), Shradha Agarwal.
Featured startups: On the previous website, there used to be more startups that were active. Unfunded startups that worked their butt off to be on this list and are not there anymore. An example are Code Academy fellows Furnishly and LivebyTransit.
Before, the content and recognition was more organic, now it seems to have too many rules.

Tom Ordonez

2 Experiments of The Honor System in Chicago's Tech Community and @CodeAcademy

posted by Tom Ordonez
on 04/11/2012 11:34 am
  • 461 views
  • 1 comments

This article was originally posted in this super awesome blog.

 

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Mike McGee
Mike McGee on 04/11/2012 07:30 pm

Another great post! Thank you for using me as an honor system example!

Tom Ordonez

3 Ways To Find Out If You Hired The Wrong People For Your Startup

posted by Tom Ordonez
on 04/04/2012 01:44 pm
  • 535 views
  • 4 comments

This article was originally posted in this awesome blog.

 

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Alex Fedotov
Alex Fedotov on 04/07/2012 11:28 am

All these things are not important by themself. It's important whether the guy can do HIS job. And I assume that his job description doesn't include the skill of being nice to geeks, that's why he answered the way he did (a wild guess).

Adam Calica
Adam Calica on 04/04/2012 05:43 pm

Good stuff!

Mike McGee
Mike McGee on 04/04/2012 03:12 pm

Great blog post Tomas!

Arvin Dang
Arvin Dang on 04/04/2012 02:03 pm

Great points Tomas, all great criteria to keep in mind.

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