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The 9 Biggest Chicago Tech Hires in June

June 30, 2016 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

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Northwestern University

Motorola’s long-time design head Jim Wicks announced this month he’s leaving Motorola for Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. Wicks was the former SVP of consumer experience design at Motorola and was influential in designing flagship products like the Moto 360, Motorola’s DROID franchise, and the RAZR. Wicks will be a full-time faculty member at the Segal Design Institute, which is housed in the McCormick School of Engineering.

Rithmio

Snigdha Sinha, a former senior engineer at Motorola, has joined Chicago startup Rithmio as the company’s Sr. software principal engineer. Sinha spent more than 10 years at Motorola working on a variety of projects, including leading a team to integrate and implement the 720p video capture and playback feature on the DroidX, the first Motorola phone to have the 720p capability.

SpotHero

This month Chicago on-demand parking startup SpotHero announced that Anthony Broad-Crawford has joined the company as its chief product officer. Broad-Crawford joins SpotHero from Fooda, where he was the company’s CTO. He’s also held executive roles at GiveForward, StartupBus, and Within3. At SpotHero, Broad-Crawford will be responsible for product strategy and will focus on product design, user research, user experience, and data science, the company said.

VISANOW

VISANOW, a Chicago tech company that helps expedite the immigration process by automatically gathering required paperwork to make getting a Visa more efficient, announced that it has hired Mahi Inampudi as vice president of product and technology. Inampudi comes to VISANOW from DRIVIN, a data and technology company that helps automotive dealers source and acquire used vehicles. Prior to that, he was head of technology at Apartments.com.

Cars.com

Cars.com announced that it has hired Tony Zolla as its chief product officer. Most recently, Zolla was the senior vice president of product and customer experience at Redbox. Prior to Redbox, Zolla was the vice president of digital product management, user experience, and technology at Ticketmaster. Zolla will be responsible for defining the company’s product strategy for both consumers and customers, overseeing the development and launch of new products while guiding the innovation of existing properties, the Cars.com said.

SpringCM

Chicago cloud-based document management software company SpringCM announced that it has hired Salesforce veteran Dan Dal Degan to its Board of Directors. Dal Degan was one of Salesforce’s first 100 employees and started the company’s central region. He’s also held positions at Oracle, Siebel Systems, Sybase, Ensighten, and Synchrony. He was added to the SpringCM Board to help “accelerate the pace of innovation and guide the company’s rapid growth within the Salesforce ecosystem,” the company said.

Shapiro+Raj

Chicago marketing firm Shapiro+Raj has hired Lauren Tucker as its new Senior Vice President of Strategy, Research and Analytics. Tucker joins Shapiro+Raj after having started her own company, Cooler Heads Intelligence, a marketing intelligence consultancy. Prior to that, she was the SVP at The Martin Agency, where she developed marketing strategies and campaigns for brands like Penske, Experian and BFGoodrich Tires.

Label Insight 

Label Insight, a Chicago startup that provides CPG brands with software to help them more easily aggregate and analyze data from their product labels, resulting in more transparency for both retailers and consumers, announced two C-level hires this month. The company announced that Paul Schaut, who was serving on Label Insight’s Board of Directors, has moved into the role of CEO. And for his first hire as chief executive Schaut brought on Patrick Moorhead as the company’s chief marketing officer. Moorhead previously was a senior account executive at Twitter and led the company’s relationship with a “major retailer,” handling things like paid media advertising, sharing and leveraging proprietary data and managing customer relationships.