Crain’s Chicago Business

Google is hitting the pause button, rethinking the scale of its ambitious plans to become a major provider of low-cost high-speed internet as it weighs options beyond laying expensive fiber-optic cables. The company said it would “pause” rollouts of Google Fiber to new cities. But it will provide some service in Chicago—one of the cities that was on the bubble—because it's served by Webpass, a wireless broadband provider that Google acquired in June. “In Chicago, Google Fiber and Webpass will work together to extend and accelerate deployments via point-to-point wireless,” a Google spokeswoman said. Google also has a stake in telecom provider RCN, which serves Chicago, where Google employs more than 600.

Jack Ryan's 22nd Century Media suburban news business just keeps growing -- the 20th century way. Ryan is about to launch two more newspapers on the North Shore, with a Glencoe (IL) paper arriving in September and a weekly for Lake Forest and Lake Bluff starting by February.

Tech talent never has been cheap. But salaries of skilled coders are shooting even higher, crossing the $100,000-a-year threshold, as everyone from Chicago startups to Silicon Valley giants scrambles for more workers. And employers have little choice but to pay up.

Tribune Publishing CEO Jack Griffin isn't selling off newspapers. He wants to acquire more of them. Despite all the speculation about a sale of Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and/or the other Tribune dailies, Griffin is setting his sights -- at least at the start of his tenure at soon-to-be-independent Tribune Publishing -- on buying smaller newspapers in or near his existing markets.

“We think there are more of these opportunities around the country that are geographically adjacent to where we run big papers and big brands, and that over time we can achieve similar kinds of consolidation and acquisition opportunities that are going to add meaningfully to our footprint and our revenue and our profit,” Griffin said.

After Apple introduced a kill switch last fall for iPhones and iPads, law enforcement officials in New York and San Francisco say the number of mobile-phone thefts and robberies dropped about 30 percent, respectively, during the first five months of the year.

Without saying that Apple's Activation Lock was responsible, police in Chicago and Washington report similar double-digit drops.

Dennis Roberson, vice provost for research at Illinois Institute of Technology and a wireless expert, is leading a Federal Communications Commission effort to come up with an industrywide plan by year-end for “kill switches” and “remote-wipe” technology that would allow victims to render stolen phones into useless bricks. In essence, he wants to turn smartphone theft into a dumb crime. Roberson is looking to carriers to take the lead on creating an anti-theft tool that works across all platforms and products.

“The first person to call has to be your carrier, not your insurance or police,” he says. “No one wants a unique role from Apple, Samsung or whomever. You don't want 20 different solutions.”

Hyperlocal news coverage on the Web has been touted as conventional journalism's best hope in the digital era. One big problem: No one has figured out how to make money from it.

In metro Chicago, the suburban Patch network has shrunk to a sixth of its former size to stem losses. Startup news organization DNAInfo Chicago has been pumping out neighborhood coverage on its website since 2012, while losing millions of dollars. And EveryBlock isn't even trying to make money.

No matter how compelling the news next door is, readers don't want to pay for it and local businesses -- the universally hoped-for sponsors of local content -- can't afford to advertise, or they pay so little that sales reps can't earn a living. As a result, when the starry-eyed backers of hyperlocal ventures get a grip on the mounting labor and overhead expenses, the experiments often end badly.

Led by the deep-pocketed campaign of Bruce Rauner, more than $10 million was spent on Chicago-area television ads for and against GOP candidates for Illinois governor leading up to the primary election.

The bulk of that was spent by Rauner, a wealthy private investor who raised more than $8 million and injected another $6 million of his own money into his race. Since last fall, his campaign bought more than $7.1 million of advertising time on Chicago TV stations, according to market sources, and about $1.1 million on Chicago-area cable television. Figures for downstate were not available.

The next closest campaign advertiser was State Sen Kirk Dillard (R-District 24), who spent less than $175,000 on broadcast TV and about $250,000 on cable, sources said.

But outside groups advocating for Sen Dillard's election, or Rauner's defeat, pushed total ad spending well over $10 million. Led by Illinois Freedom Political Action Committee, a labor-backed super PAC that ran ads opposing Rauner, more than $1.7 million was spent on television advertising time by independent expenditure groups, according to the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a Chicago-based watchdog group.