Technology news about Austin and San Antonio
By LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News At Dell World, Elon Musk discussed how he’s changing the world through electric cars and space exploration. Musk is a true leader, a risk taker and a visionary, said Michael Dell in his introduction. “A passionate believer in technology and innovation to lead society forward,” Dell said. […]
By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News Austin TechBreakfast is a little bit of everything. It’s a little “show and tell” as founder Ron Schmeltzer describes it, with intervals for “I need a job…a developer….a cofounder….an investor….” The monthly morning meetup, one of eight founded by Schmeltzer in cities from Baltimore to Palo Alto, […]
Dell’s first Pitch Slam takes place Thursday afternoon at Dell World in downtown Austin. Dell chose six companies from regional pitch events and a final company via an online pitch contest to pitch their businesses to Michael Dell, Shark Tank’s Daymond John and the UN Foundation’s Resident Entrepreneur Elizabeth Gore. The event is being livestreamed […]
At Dell World, Michael Dell unveiled his new, private innovative and entrepreneurial technology company. The Round Rock-based company, which employs about 14,000 people in Central Texas, no longer has to adhere to the demands of the public stock market. As a result, Dell said the company can invest in new startups and take a long […]
Wonder why Dropbox expanded to Austin and opened an office here earlier this year? One big reason could be Dell. Dell and Dropbox announced a partnership Thursday at Dell World to create Dropbox for Business using the Cloud. Dell, which went public earlier this year, is hosting Dell World at the Austin Convention Center through […]
Converting a historic building into a modern-day tech coworking space to incubate hot new startups in downtown San Antonio isn’t an easy task. But Irby Hightower of Alamo Architects and his team have managed to do just that. They took a former bank building and are transforming the seventh floor into a modern day workplace […]
Apptive, a mobile app maker, announced it has raised $1 million in the last year. The Austin-based company plans to use the funds to expand its partnerships with e-commerce platforms and online merchants. “With close to half of time spent on e-commerce sites coming from smartphones and tablets, online merchants understand the importance of taking […]
TrueAbility Monday released its predictions for hiring trends for technology workers in 2014. The San Antonio-based startup, founded in 2012, has analyzed data on more than 5,000 IT workers in the past year. It makes a cloud-based platform that evaluates the technical aptitude of IT employees by testing their skills online for job openings. TrueAbility, […]
John Engates, the Chief Technology Officer with Rackspace, has made some predictions for cloud technology trends in 2014. The cloud ushers in a new era in wearable technology. Under Armour’s late 2013 acquisition of mobile workout app MapMyFitness and Nike’s continued sponsorship of TechStars Nike+ Accelerator validates that wearable technology is heating up and here […]
By LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News At Longhorn Startup Demo Day last week, Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, co-founder of 3Com and professor of innovation at UT, interviewed Billionaire Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Cuban also stars on the popular TV show Shark Tank on ABC. This […]
By LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News Last Longhorn Startup class, Aseem Ali and a team of undergraduate students pitched Burpy, a grocery delivery service. Now he’s running a quickly growing startup and finishing up his degree as a senior studying mechanical engineering at the University of Texas. Burpy, which expanded into the San […]
By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News The eighteen companies demonstrating at Texas Venture Labs Venture Expo Thursday ranged from those that had found a better way to harvest antibodies to companies that could increase efficiency and reduce the cost of hybrid cars to a website that aggregates the products used by various celebrities. […]
By LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News The fifth Longhorn Startup Demo Day at the University of Texas drew the largest crowd ever. Close to 1,000 people registered to attend the event and most of them showed up despite the cold front and blustery weather that blew into Austin on Thursday. The evening featured […]
By LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News Since selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999, Billionaire Mark Cuban has invested in 80 startups. But his entrepreneurial ventures began as a kid growing up in Pittsburgh. “As long as I can remember I was an entrepreneur,” Cuban said. At the age of nine […]
Claire England, former executive director RISE Austin, has joined Tech Ranch Austin. While England has resigned the full-time executive director role at RISE Austin, she will continue to work with the organization in an advisory role and is leading the planning of next year’s conference. In her new role at Tech Ranch Austin, England will […]
In another move to expand its reach into the Asia Pacific Region, HomeAway announced its acquisition of Stayz Group, the leading online vacation rental marketplace in Australia. Austin-based HomeAway paid $198 million to Fairfax Digital, owner of Stayz Group, which publishes Stay.com.au, Rentahome.com.au, TakeABreak.com.au and YesBookIt. Stayz reported revenue of $25.4 million for its fiscal […]
By GREGORY WISE Expert Contributor to Silicon Hills News Focus, discipline and taking the long view are hallmarks of Michael Wilson’s leadership at Small World Labs. The Austin-based Software as a Service (SaaS) company he founded in 2006 provides an online community platform that helps nonprofit organizations connect, collaborate, and engage with their supporters and […]
By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News If you, as an entrepreneur, email a VC firm, it’s a crapshoot whether they’ll even open it, much less read it. If you’ve got some heavy hitter, celebrity entrepreneur or investor making the introduction for you, your chances improve astronomically. So start making friends with the right […]
By ANDREW MOORE Reporter with Silicon Hills News At SA New Tech Tuesday, Pressable’s Founder Vid Luther shared tough lessons learned as a CEO. Originally named ZippyKid, Pressable, a WordPress hosting startup, got a new name following an eight hour meeting, scheduled to last 30 minutes, in June with Rackspace Hosting founder Dirk Elmendorf and […]
By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News Kevin Callahan, co-founder of MapMyFitness recounted his entrepreneurial journey at Austin Startup Grind at Capital Factory Monday night–two weeks after his company announced it was being acquired for $150 million by Under Armour. The acquisition will bring together a company that has never been sold before with […]
Nick Longo, founder of Coffeecup Software and co-founder of Geekdom, grew up in New York, really, really poor. He shoveled snow. He also sold briefcases from a warehouse on a corner in New York at the age of 13. He was hustling and making money. That’s where entrepreneurship started with him. He also served in […]
David Spencer is an advocate for San Antonio’s technology community. Spencer was a founding board member and co-chair of the now defunct San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative, known as SATAI. He also served a two year term as chairman of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, which invested in early stage technology companies in Texas. Aside […]
At the age of five, Patrick Condon, co-founder of Rackspace, remembers stocking the shelves at his parents video rental store. It was his first memory of seeing how business works. He also walked dogs, mowed lawns and threw papers. In college, he would buy computer parts cheap and then sell them on America Online and […]
Jason Seats loved playing with Lego blocks as a kid and even did college projects with Legos as a young adult. His heroes were Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman growing up and the fictional Indiana Jones. At the age of eight, he thought he wanted to be an archaeologist. But even as a little kid […]
Bob Metcalfe is the Professor of Innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught an undergraduate course on entrepreneurship called Longhorn Startup for the past two years along with Joshua Baer and Entrepreneur in Residence Ben Dyer. Metcalfe was also inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame […]
Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace Hosting, grew up in the greater San Antonio area. At his first job, he worked in his dad’s cookie plant balancing the books from delivery drivers and occasionally packaging cookies. His dad owned Grandma’s Cookies and later sold the company to Frito Lay. Weston’s first venture into entrepreneurship […]
By ALAN WEINKRANTZ Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News I have been traveling back and forth to Israel for just about twenty years. Most of what I worked on with my Israeli clients has been focused on platform technologies such as the commercialization of VoIP, the rise of computer security, the birth of rapid prototyping […]
By LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News The demand for high tech workers outstrips the supply. So Rackspace Hosting came up with an innovative solution. The San Antonio-based company launched the Open Cloud Academy last year to put people through a rigorous training program that equips them to do jobs as network systems administrators […]
By ANDREW MOORE Reporter with Silicon Hills News Five startup teams pitched ideas at the latest 3 Day Startup San Antonio event last weekend. Cristal Glangchai and the Venturelab team ran the event, which was the ninth 3DS San Antonio. Trinity University sponsored the event hosted at Geekdom. Thirty-five students participated in the 3 Day […]
By ANDREW MOORE Reporter with Silicon Hills News Despite the 40 degree weather and high wind, two turkeys and the Roosevelt Rough Rider mascot continued to dance to the music in front of Rackspace Hosting’s San Antonio headquarters. The normally hot and stuffy mascot suits now failed to keep them warm. “The thing that kept […]
San Antonio-based Xenex Disinfection Services announced Thursday that is has received $11.3 million in funding. The funding comes from Battery Ventures, Targeted Technology Fund II and continued investment from existing investors including RK Ventures. The company will use the funding for product development, international expansion and increasing its U.S. sales force. An estimated two million […]
