SiliconHills

By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News Women entrepreneurs must stop hanging back, letting fear win, believing that being partners and parents precludes them from being successful business owners. They must push themselves to create businesses with scaleable ideas that can grow into multimillion or billion dollar companies. Those were a few of the [...]

By ANDREW MOORE Reporter with Silicon Hills News Do you like music videos? Do you miss old MTV? If you do, then you’ll probably like Rockify. Created by Joel Korpi, the Rockify platform is designed to present music videos in a better format than other sites on the web. But there’s a twist, Korpi has [...]

By ANDREW MOORE Reporter with Silicon Hills News San Antonio’s medical technology industry can spur innovation and lead to new jobs in the local economy. The Texas Technology Development Center (T3DC) hopes to encourage that by focusing on research, entrepreneurship and investment. “Of all things, innovation is the single greatest economic driver in any economy,” [...]

By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News Spot On Sciences, a company that makes a device that enables patients to collect and store blood samples wherever they are, was the hands-down winner of the RISE Fast Pitch competition at the Belmont Hotel Wednesday night. Founder Dr. Jeanette Hill who has a PhD in organic [...]

At Google I/O 2013 on Wednesday, RetailMeNot was a featured partner for the new Google Wallet. The Google Wallet will be available to consumers later this year. “This is RetailMeNot’s first digital wallet integration, with more to come,” said Brian Hoyt, spokesman for RetailMeNot. “Once the new Google Wallet is publicly available, consumers will have [...]

At the RISE Austin opening night ceremonies, Culturebooster.com won the Royitos “Don’t Do Mild” award. Roy Spence, co-founder of GSD&M and creator of Royito’s Hot Sauce, awarded Culturebooster the top prize and a $5,000 check. Culturebooster is a free curriculum and crowdfunding platform for middle and high school students and their teachers to raise money [...]

The University of Texas at Austin announced that it has partnered with video game executives to create the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy. Warren Spector, a game designer with 30 years in the industry, and Paul Sams, chief operating officer with Blizzard Entertainment, will serve as instructors for the video game program. The academy kicks off in [...]

The next episode of Capital of Innovation shines the spotlight on “Austin’s Top Female Entrepreneurs.” The episode premiers on Thursday at 8 p.m. on KLRU-TV and it will be shown again on May 30th at 8 p.m. The episode introduces viewers to some of Austin’s most intriguing female entrepreneurs. Their accomplishments include a medical device [...]

Dell travelled the country and met with small business owners to find out what they need to succeed. The result, a report released this week by Dell and Intel, found that startups and small businesses plan to grow and plan to use technology to help them do it. But they need access to networks, talent [...]

By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News Shital Somani riveted the audience instantly, beginning her 90-second pitch at the Dell Social Innovation Challenge awards by announcing that 25 percent of farmers in India commit suicide. Because of lack of refrigeration, 20-to-30 percent of their harvest is spoiled, leaving them in perpetual poverty. Solar Conduction [...]

By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News As an investor, Brett Hurt, co-founder of Bazaarvoice and venture partner with Austin Ventures, wants to see a couple big changes in Austin startups in the next ten years. Both of them along the lines of “thinking bigger” as he explained in his Monday RISE session, How [...]

Damon Clinkscales, organizer of Founder Dating in Austin, is organizing AngelHack in Austin, which takes place on June 1st at Mass Relevance’s headquarters at eighth and Brazos. Clinkscales provided the post below and even included a discount to the event for Silicon Hills News reader. So don’t wait, act now. Ready to take your big [...]

By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News Brandon Knicely, managing director of Portico International and founder of Austin Innovation Partners, has started mid-cap companies and small companies, invested in developing nations and worked for non-profits in New York City. He’s served on advisory boards from New York to Silicon Valley and he’s almost never [...]

More and more women are starting up companies. Intuit, which sells QuickBooks accounting and financial software, ranks the best cities for female entrepreneurs and found that San Francisco ranks first, followed by Seattle and Washington, D.C. Austin ranks seventh and Houston earns an honorable mention. San Antonio is not on the list. For more on [...]

RideScout won first place in the Austin Technology Council’s Startup Showdown at the 2013 CEO Summit last week. RideScout is an app that lets people see all the options available to them to get a ride. It launched during South by Southwest and had more than 300 users sign up for the service, said Joseph [...]

I moved to San Antonio in 1989 from Beaumont, Texas. In San Antonio, I covered the nascent high technology industry including a pioneering, but now defunct company called Datapoint and about a half dozen spin off companies formed by former Datapoint executives. Back then, Michael Dell was still building his PC company, founded in 1984 [...]

With the explosive growth in Austin’s high tech industry, can companies find enough tech talent locally? That’s a big issue technology executives in central Texas are grappling with right now, said Susanne Bowen, CEO of PeopleAdmin and chair of the Austin Technology Council’s Community Foundation. She moderated a panel of experts on the subject of [...]

RISE Week 2013 kicks off on Monday! Are you ready for a week of fantastic sessions covering everything from how to juggle entrepreneurship and having a family to crowdfunding or finding angel or venture capital investment for your startup? This year marks the seventh year for RISE, which stands for Relationship and Information Series for [...]

A familiar compliant in Austin from tech startup entrepreneurs is that there’s never enough money to fund their ideas. Some say that good companies don’t have trouble raising money. But others disagree. On Wednesday, a panel of VCs and Angel investors talked about the money available for deals locally at the Austin Technology Council’s CEO [...]

Austin’s technology industry contributes $21 billion annually to the city’s economy. The city has 3,787 technology companies which employ 105,667 or 9 percent of the local workforce. Brian Kelsey, an economic development consultant and lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin, prepared this information for the Austin Technology Council’s CEO Summit on Wednesday. He [...]

To kick off a nationwide initiative focused on creating middle-class jobs and spurring the technology industry, President Barack Obama is in Austin today. First off, he visited students at Manor New Tech High School, an innovative six year old school focused on science, technology, engineering and math. “So this is the first stop that I’m [...]

BY SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News Beyonic, a company whose software connects major global finance sources with payment networks in the developing world to facilitate mobile payments, won the IBM Global Entrepreneur pitch competition Wednesday at the IBM campus on Burnett. Beyonic founder Luke Kyohere, from Uganda, said 20 percent of the $150 [...]

BY LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News Mike Maples Jr. wants Austin entrepreneurs to create a “Thunder Lizard,” a $100 billion company within 10 years. He explained that the idea for Thunder Lizards comes from Godzilla, the fictional giant lizard hatched from radioactive atomic eggs in Japan, that stomped on entire cities, spit fire, [...]

BY LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News No one disputes that Austin has become a major technology hub. But some say that Austin tech entrepreneurs don’t think big enough when it comes to launching startups. “Too many Austin companies are lifestyle companies not betting on world domination like Silicon Valley,” said Bob Metcalfe, professor [...]

BY ANDREW MOORE Reporter with Silicon Hills News This month at SA New Tech: Biovideo shows how it documents your baby’s first moments, SocialREST helps developers get their iOS apps on Facebook, and an Amazing JellyBean fixes your internet connection. The Amazing JellyBean The Amazing JellyBean is a physical device that plugs into both your [...]

Noah Kagan is the CEO and founder of AppSumo in Austin. He also blogs at OKDork and he moderates the Facebook Austin Startup Group. And that’s where I stumbled upon this post he made to Quora to answer the question “How do you start a business.” He starts off by advising people to get all [...]

Dell announced Monday the acquisition of Enstratius, Internet-based management software and services provider. Enstratius, founded in 2008 and based in Minneapolis, Minn., helps organizations manage applications across private, public and a combination of the two types of cloud hosting services, known as hybrid. It supports more than 20 public and private cloud platforms including OpenStack, [...]

How big an impact does the technology industry have in Austin? The Austin Technology Council’s Technology Economic Impact Report released on Monday puts the figure at $21 billion. And the bulk or 80 percent of the city’s technology companies plan to hire new employees this year resulting in the creation of 10,000 new jobs, according [...]

BY JOSHUA SCHECHTER Special to Silicon Hills News The maker movement is one of the hottest trends in the U.S. right now and no place was that more evident on Sunday than the Austin Mini Maker Faire at the Palmer Events Center in Austin. A family-oriented day of discovery, imagination and inventiveness, the Faire offered [...]

By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News What drove Andrew McFadden, director of innovation and business development at Press Enterprise crazy, was that the Riverside County newspaper company he worked for only saw the downside in readers’ shift to the internet. The publishers couldn’t see the tremendous opportunity that the shift afforded. “I’ve been [...]

Toshiba Lighting & Technology Corp. has bought GreenStar Products, which makes energy-efficient, long-lasting LED lights for roads and other outdoor areas. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Since February of 2012, Toshiba International Corp. has contracted with San Antonio-based GreenStar to make LED Lights. GreenStar’s LED lights last longer and require less maintenance [...]

MDI Group, an information technology staffing company based in Atlanta, has opened a new Austin office. MDI recently opened an office Fort Worth and has another Texas office in Dallas and seven other locations nationwide. The company decided to locate in Austin because Austin’s technology industry is booming and “Staffing Industry Analysts places Austin in [...]

The Austin Technology Incubator, known as ATI, in the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, reported its companies raised $35 million during the first three months of 2013. During the last five years, ATI companies have raised more than $250 million of investor capital. The ATI companies reporting funding in the first [...]

InCube Labs, a research incubator in San Antonio, Thursday announced it has launched two new life sciences companies. Those companies are Theracle, which has developed a treatment for brain cancer, and iBridge Medical, which is developing a technology platform to manage patient’s implanted medical devices. That brings to five the total number of companies at [...]

Providing further validation that Texas has a red hot tech market, Xconomy has launched its eighth bureau in the Lone Star State. Xconomy, based in Cambridge, MA., covers innovation hubs in Boston, Boulder/Denver, Detroit, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle. “Texans pride themselves on being independent, adventurous, and hard-charging: the same characteristics that [...]

Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, is known to say “the world’s problems will not be solved by another website.” The co-inventor of Ethernet, which celebrates its 40th anniversary on May 22, and founder of 3Com, should know. Metcalfe falls into the category of entrepreneur known as an innovator. [...]

By Ian Panchèvre Reporter with Silicon Hills News 3 Day Startup was a success! “How so?” you ask. Well, one of my takeaways from 3DS was an emphasis on using key metrics. In that spirit, I’ve developed a metric that I call the Active Sleep Debt Ratio (ASDR), which is the ratio of the number [...]

A year ago, TechRanch expanded its reach into Chile. It struck up a partnership with startups in South America to foster that region’s entrepreneurial base. Now, TechRanch, a coworking space and incubator in Austin, has expanded even further this time into Asia with a partnership in the city-state island of Singapore. TechRanch and Get2Volume announced [...]

By Andrew Moore Reporter with Silicon Hills News Two years ago, UT journalism professor Robert Quigley had an idea – put together University of Texas students from both the journalism and computer science schools with the goal of producing commercially viable mobile apps in a single semester. Recently, Quigley posted the following on Facebook: “This [...]

With the University of Texas cheerleaders kicking things off, student entrepreneurs pitched nine companies at Longhorn Startup Lab Demo Day Thursday night. It’s the fourth time Longhorn Startup Lab, formerly known as 1 Semester Startup, has held a Demo Day. And it was the highest graded crop of companies yet, said Josh Baer, one of [...]

In just 13 days, the Austin Technology Council and some of the biggest names in the central Texas technolog industry will gather for the third annual CEO Summit at the ACL Live at Moody Theater. The event takes place May 8th and features talks and panels with some of the movers and shakers in the [...]

RISE Week Austin is just around the corner. The conference, which was named a “Must Attend 2013 Conference for Entrepreneurs” by Forbes takes place May 13-17. This week is the deadline to apply for the RISE startup competitions and awards. RISE has tripled its cash prizes to $3,000 and will have some in-kind prizes from [...]

BY SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News Austin is entering entrepreneurial stage 3.0, where local startups will not only emerge, succeed and be acquired by bigger companies, but where they’ll be able to grow to serious scale, said Laura Kilcrease, entrepreneur-in-residence at the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at The University of Texas McCombs [...]

By Ian Panchèvre Reporter with Silicon Hills News The legal industry is facing disruption. Outsourcing legal services abroad is becoming increasingly common. Online companies such as Legalzoom and WireLawyer are making documents more accessible to casual legal consumers. And in the midst of all the change, a San Antonio law firm is blazing its own [...]

Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud program was featured recently on We Are Austin Tech. Seats, cofounder of Slicehost, a cloud hosting company, has helped countless entrepreneurs through the TechStars Cloud program. He is also an active angel investor. In 2008, Rackspace acquired Slicehost. Seats moved from St. Louis to San Antonio. For [...]

IBM Austin is having a day-long Mentor Day on May 8th at its IBM Innovation Center in Austin. The company is inviting startups from Austin and San Antonio to apply to participate in the program. Mentor Days are part of the IBM Global Entrepreneur program. The deadline to apply is Monday, April 22nd. IBM is [...]

BY ANDREW MOORE Reporter with Silicon Hills News Great tech startups need great developers – especially developers that are fluent in the latest coding languages used on the web. Unfortunately, the only way for companies to get such developers is to train them in house, or hope to find someone who has learned them on [...]

ZeroVM is creating the world’s first cloud hypervisor, which is a piece of software that creates and runs virtual machines. The team from Israel has created an open source platform for cloud computing that is fast and efficient. The open source program runs on Openstack, the operating system for the cloud, which Rackspace created along [...]

TechStars Cloud Demo Day is like a debutante ball in which each company is formally introduced into society in a formal “debut” presentation. On Thursday, the founders of 11 tech startups donned their finest hoodies, t-shirts, jeans and tennis shoes and took to the stage of Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in downtown San Antonio. More [...]

The TechStars Cloud company, Good.co, wants people to be happy in their jobs. The San Francisco-based company has spent the past three months at Geekdom in the TechStars Cloud accelerator program. Its founders will officially pitch their company during TechStars Cloud Demo Day on Thursday at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in downtown San Antonio. [...]

Soloshot took home first place at the Innotech San Antonio Beta Summit on Wednesday afternoon. “The first motion picture camera was invented over 125 years ago,” said Scott Taylor, co-founder of Soloshot. “And since then there have been tremendous improvements in camera technology from color film to video cameras, to digital cameras, to cameras that [...]

Instead of a one-size fits all Cloud, the Internet will have millions of specialized clouds. That’s the assertion of Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, the world’s largest hybrid cloud provider. He gave the keynote speech Wednesday morning at Innotech San Antonio at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. “This is a cloud that [...]

At the Innotech San Antonio Beta Summit Wednesday at 3 p.m. six startup companies will pitch their companies. The audience will select one startup as the winner of the 2013 Beta Summit and that company will receive the trophy pictured here. This is the sixth annual beta summit at the Innotech San Antonio conference. It’s [...]

Sponsored Post Like many other male dominated industries, the field of technology presents both challenges and opportunities for women today. InnoTech San Antonio is hosting a half day event that will provide better understanding of how women can be successful in this field. You don’t need to be a geek. Did you know women-led private [...]

Mike Davis, founder of StoryPress, has gotten a lot of traction for his free storytelling application since launching late last year. He got the idea for the company when he wanted to record some stories from his grandma, Bea, for future generations. Davis created an iPhone and iPad app that does just that. So far, [...]