Get Ready for TechWeek in Chicago; We’re Kicking Things Off July 21st

Jen Consalvo July 16, 2011 Tweet

This coming week is a very special week for us and the city of Chicago. If you haven’t heard, it’s TechWeek, and to get you in the mood, we’ve crafted our very own list of highlights and top reasons to get involved in the weeks events. Modeled after other successful technology and innovation festivals like South by Southwest Interactive, Internet Week New York and Digital Capital Week aka DCWEEK (which we co-produce) the TechWeek festival in Chicago will include such highlights as:

• Aneesh Chopra, CTO of the United States, is traveling in from Washington, D.C. to keynote at TechWeek. Aneesh will speak on July 22 at 9:30 a.m. at the Merchandise Mart. What a great opportunity to hear from the country’s Chief Technology Officer.
• 150 speakers across 60 panels and 10 tracks – wow.  Some of the highlights?  Craig Newmark, Penelope Trunk, Jory Des Jardins, Matt Maloney and Jason Fried just to name a few.
• Tech Cocktail’s own Frank Gruber will be part of the festivities leading up a discussion on Saturday at 3:30pm CST about mashups! He’ll be joined by folks from Twilio and Freshbooks and the discussion will cover some aspects of cloud computing, APIs, SaaS and more. Details here so be sure to join.
• midVenturesLAUNCH is back. As part of it, 35 companies will compete for over $100K in a pitch competition, a number of others will launch new products on stage and still more will be demoing their new products as part of this event.
• A number of community events such as Entrepreneurs Unpluggd, S.P.A.R.K. Women, Lean Startup Circle Chicago , TiE MidWest, Ignite Chicago, Tech in Motion and more.
• Kicking off TechWeek on Thursday, July 21st is Tech Cocktail’s 5th anniversary Birthday Bash mixer! You won’t want to miss this event. It’s been 5 years and we’re excited to be celebrating it with this special gathering.

So get away from your computer (you can still bring your phone or iPad and tweet to your heart’s content…) and celebrate the fact that Chicago has a rich and vibrant technology community.

Register now and get a special 15% off for Tech Cocktail readers.