THE DREAM IN ACTION

We’re almost ready for the first, CHICAGO TECH MEETUP and I hope you’re joining us January 20th at 7pm at OfficePort for guest speaker Jason Fried (37 Signals) and presentations from local startups and entrepreneurs. Our first event was a great opportunity to socialize. This time you’ll want to bring a notepad in addition to your thirst.

A few details dates for all attending the meetup on the 20th:

An advance and sincere thank you to our sponsors: Thinklink, RackSpace, FourSquare, Sprout Box & OfficePort! (links below) We’re able to put on this great event (and many more) free of charge to our members, thanks to these folks!

We’ll be starting promptly at 7:00. To get a good seat (or, just a seat!) please arrive early. We’re at capacity. Following the keynote from Jason, we’ll take a quick break to grab food and drinks before the Startup session begins. We’re keeping the place open for plenty of socializing and drinks afterwards (where should we do the after party?), so don’t worry about fitting it all in between sessions!

I also want to thank our Panelists who have volunteered for the Startup segment. Our goal is to give the startups lots of actionable feedback, suggestions etc. (it’s not a contest by any stretch). On the panel we have Tim Courtney (SocialDevCamp), Alex Wilhelm (TheNextWeb), Mike Trotzke (Sprout Box) and Nik Rokop (Illinois Institute of Technology) – an awesome panel for anyone to be getting feedback from :) There’s also some great press in attendance (one of them rhymes with Chzech Bunch).

The four startups presenting will be WinkVid, Toy Studio, Sprout Social and Tgethr.com. I wish we could have fit everyone in, but we’ll make more room next time around.

I hope everyone is excited! I’m still blown away by the talent and enthusiasm of our members. Our membership represents a vast mix of local high-profile tech companies, startups, investors, thought leaders, bloggers, entrepreneurs and developers. Good things happen when this many talented people get together!

I’m really really pumped about our sponsors for this first event!

ThinkLinkr is the webs first, real time fully collaborative outliner!

SproutBox is a new approach to venture capital that helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas into viable businesses.

OfficePort is a creative community of entrepreneurs, freelancers and small-business owners.

Foursquare turns the city into you’re playground.

Rackspace, dedicated servers, managed hosting, and web hosting, with top notch service.