The Chopping Block just sent out an announcement about The Chicago Best Baker competition. I was so excited to see that there was an amateur beginner’s pie category. A long time ago, after seeing the movie Waitress, I had begged the owner of Hoosier Mama to let me do a brief stint as a baker’s assistant at her restaurant in Evanston. So when I saw the announcement, I knew immediately that I wanted to apply. I’ll be testing out different recipes for filling in the coming weeks, but I started thi

On finding the memorable character within the cluster of users. We all have our type. For some, the one we seek is the hip account executive with a room in the West Village and a ticket to Burning Man. For others, it’s Bob the middle management safety engineer with the ranch house and twins on the way. I’m speaking about company personas. A persona represents a group of users who share behaviors, motivations and attitudes. Common methods of segmentation such as gender, age, or other demographi

Lisa Brown is a sales and marketing associate for ShopCorporateHousing.com. She has been with the company since it launched. ShopCorporateHousing.com is an advertising website that serves the needs of both corporate housing providers and property owners by providing everyone with the opportunity to receive the lead, and for the shopper to receive multiple quotes with the click of a button. ShopCorporateHousing.com offers 16 years of expertise in the field of corporate housing. In addition to our ezine articles and blogs, we intend to arrange several business teleseminars on relevant topics each year to share with our membership at no additional charge.

Mind x Motion will launch a Kickstarter campaign January 23, 2013. The campaign will fund development of Plak, a design productivity app for iPad. The goal of the campaign is $60,000. Backer rewards include a limited edition poster by David Carson Design. There will be opportunities for corporate partnerships, including the support of development on other platforms and in-app purchases of services. Nicholas Paredes, cofounder of Mind x Motion, was inspired to create the app after studying typog

Learning how to tattoo is a graduated process that begins with being an artist and continues its evolution into becoming an entrepreneur as well. All tattoo artists who have established a career with longevity have learned to balance their artistic integrity with a successful business model. If you want to tattoo, you will need to learn to draw, immerse yourself in tattoo culture and history, study blood borne pathogens and sterilization techniques, serve an apprenticeship, and then find employment as an artist. The steps below highlight the matriculation of a tattoo artist, but you will need to build on these instructions as you discover your own career.

Virtualization is consolidating computing services into an easy to provide and support solution masked away from the user. Think of Virtualization like a prism. A prism is one piece of glass that can split up many different colors and wavelengths of light. In the same sense, Virtualization can partition your computer so that one piece of hardware can support many different operating systems. And not just operating systems, but applications as well. This becomes useful if, for example, you want to run different versions of the same piece of software simultaneously on the same machine. In this course, we are going to discuss the three main types of virtualization: operating system, hardware emulation, and paravirtualization. The key piece to virtualization is that the user never knows where or how these services are being provided. Virtualization creates a curtain behind which the average user never thinks to look. Just like in the Wizard of Oz, Virtualization allows you to create impressive IT solutions to your client’s needs, and no one ever pays attention to what’s actually going on behind that curtain.

The Bio Assembler cultures cells in three dimensions by magnetic levitation. It uses a nanoparticle-based Nanoshuttle PL to deliver magnetic nanoparticles to the cells. Preparation time and cell manipulation are similar to that of 2d cell culture technology, but the end result allows for a more accurate representation of in vivo tissue. The technology is compatible with any media, diagnostic technique or cell type. The product also comes in a single well and a 6 well technology.

These mobile personas were created as part of a larger entrepreneurship project, named in the top ten entrepreneurship courses in the country by Inc. magazine in 2011, held through the McCormick School of Engineering and Kellogg School of Management.

If Mad Men were set in contemporary society, what would it look like? No doubt Don Draper would be spending more time getting cozy with linear regression models than with cute Beatniks in the Village. And wasn’t it David Ogilvy, the maddest mad man of them all, who said that marketing executives should rely on judgment and not on research? He’d be laughed out of his own agency today.