Bytes Over Bagels

This week's featured interview is with Michael Anthony Salvatore, Owner Heritage Bicycles. Mike knows bikes - he's been building them for years in NYC and now at his shop here in Chicago. He also knows a thing or two about tech and building a Lifestyle Brand. The latter has provided him with a platform to dominate across numerous streams of media in the social web space, physical retail, and online commerce. This week's music feature is Chicago's own Best Witches.

This week's featured interview is with Chris Brown, Group Vice President of Mobile at Orbitz Worldwide. Chris shares intriguing stats on mobile adoption for booking travel and Orbitz's mobile growth over the last 3 years. Chris led his team to build Apple's editor's choice app allowing users to book a flight in as little as 3 minutes and travel packages in the neighborhood of $1,200...that's a $1,200 purchase on your phone. Creating large behavioral shifts in purchasing travel, introducing localized, real time travel planning once you reach your location and managing a happy crew of coders and designers is Chris' passion. And he makes it sound easy... This week's music feature is Chicago's own Pink Frost.

This week's featured interview is with the Divvy duo, Elliot Greenberger, Deputy General Manager at Divvy, and Scott Kubly, Commissioner, Chicago Department of Transportation. If you haven't seen Divvy bikes somewhere around the city in your peripherals...you are a hermit...and probably need to get out of the house, in general. Divvy is the newest form of city supported public transportation that lets users pick up one of over 4,000 bikes from over 400 stations around town and drop them off at a station near their destination. There are 24 hour passes as well as annual passes, which provide access to all the bikes in 30 minute increments between stops. Elliot and Scott talk to us about expansion of Divvy, Divvy mobile apps, bike safety (including new bike lanes), and putting Divvy in the same sentence with the El or Bus when you are trying to figure out how to arrive at point B.

This week's featured interview is with Chicago's very own, Jeff Hyman, CEO of Retrofit. Retrofit is a web-based weight loss program that combines wearables (think Fitbit), wireless scales and regular skype calls with your personal registered dietitian, exercise physiologist and behavior coach. Jeff himself, has been around the block, worth $51 million dollars before the bubble - and $51 after it burst. Jeff didn't fall easily and went on to build 2 more successful businesses (selling 2 of them) until he landed on a passion project - Retrofit. He started the business manually tracking people's weight loss using a handful of Fitbit's, a weight loss support team and no web or mobile app. Let's just say people liked it...and Weight Watchers is scared.

This week's featured interview is with Tracey Wiedmeyer, CTO and Co-Founder of InContext Solutions. InContext Solutions creates simulated shopping experiences for manufacturers and brands to test their product and retail experiences in a virtual 3D environment. Its like a video game but its not. Challenges for users testing package recognition and shopping experiences may need to charge down a simulated store aisle with a mission to find a specific product in a specific time. The platform has revolutionized the business of product and retail testing, which was previously required a building an actual physical environment. Tracey talks about getting checks from gramps and signing early contracts with the likes of Wrigley. It ain't easy...