San Francisco-based Pole To Win America will establish a new Austin office next month to offer video game testing services.
Pole To Win America’s Austin office, which will focus on console and personal computer games, plans to hire 50 employees.
The company has more than 80 customers and plans to expand its North American presence with the new office.
Austin has the country’s third largest concentration of video game companies, according to the company.
Tag: startup (Page 2 of 4)
A startup software company, Jumpshot, has successful raised $98,255 on Kickstarter to create a software program to clean up the hard drive of PCs and combat malware and viruses.
Its Kickstarter program exceeded its $25,000 goal and still has more than 40 days to go.
The software comes on a really cute USB stick and once it’s inserted into a PC, the software goes to work cleaning up tracking cookies, killing viruses and fighting spyware and other unwanted programs.
The program gets smarter as more people use it, according to its founders David Endler and Pedram Amini, two former security research managers in HP’s TippingPoint division. They launched the company in mid-July with a Kickstarter campaign.
“We left our day jobs and created Jumpshot for a totally selfish reason.” co-founder David Endler said in a news release. “We were exhausted being PC tech consultants to our family and friends. Don’t get us wrong, we love to help. But we knew there had to be a better more enjoyable way to assist them. We truly wanted to build something that passed the Grandma test, a product we were proud to leave behind that also wouldn’t impact the quality of our holiday gifts.”
The company decided to launch Jumpshot on Kickstarter because its “a scrappy self-funded startup and we’ve gone pretty far on our own,” co-founder Pedram Amini said in a news release. “Our dream is to leverage the momentum and cash from our backers to truly ‘kick start’ Jumpshot into a viable standalone product. The money will feed directly into USB manufacturing, advancing the Jumpshot engine and driving future improvements. We also appreciate the fact that crowd funding will transform Jumpshot into a better product by listening to the feedback of our early adopters.”
It’s been awhile since I had a baby – 13 years to be exact.
And boy have things changed.
The Austin startup Belly Ballot puts a whole new twist into what’s in a name for baby.
Belly Ballot, which bills itself as a social startup, lets expecting parents survey their friends and family via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest on the name for their baby. They compile a list and their friends and family vote on their favorite name.
Tip of the hat to Taylor Benefield with TriNet. We met for coffee earlier this week at Juan Pelotas in downtown Austin and he told me about Belly Ballot.
I have to say I think it’s a rather clever idea.
“Parents today are very social beings,” Lacey Moler, co-founder of Belly Ballot said in a news release. “We love apps and sites that allow us to interact with friends on a daily basis. Important decisions are no exception.”
Moler, a mother of three and a former private equity analyst, got the inspiration for her company from her baby shower in 2009 in which she handed out a list of top five boys and girls names on cards to friends and asked them to mark their favorite ones and drop it in the “Belly Ballot Box.”
Since its launch earlier this year, thousands of parents have created a Belly Ballot, according to Moler.
And if you need some inspiration to compile that list of names, head on over to Nameberry, which aggregates lists of the most popular baby names. The number one boy’s name is Jacob and the number one girl’s name is Sophia.
George Royer and Jo Lammert, two of the founders of White Whale Games
But unlike the classic novel from which the founders chose their name, they’re likely to land their whale.
And their “whale” is a fantasy sword fighting game for IOS, Mac and PC platforms that they spent the last year creating called God of Blades.
In the game, players go on quests in an apocalyptic world and encounter sword fights as they defend their kingdom from all kinds of onslaughts. Throughout the game, players can earn better swords and other rewards. They also get special swords for visiting libraries in real life.
The creators say they took their inspiration from “pulp novel covers, classic Dungeons and Dragons modules, and 1970s rock.”
The game should be out next month. It’s in beta testing right now, said George Royer, co-founder and lead game designer.
“We don’t want to put it out before we’re totally happy with it,” Royer said. “It’s got a lot of stuff in it.”
Jason Rosenstock, creative director, and Jo Lammert, studio director, are the other founders. The three met at the University of Texas campus. Rosenstock was just finishing up work on BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. Lammert and Royer met at UT’s School of Information. Lammert earned her master’s degree from the school in 2011 and Royer is a doctoral student focused on digital media, archives, online communities and interaction design.
I recently met up with Lammert and Royer at Austin Java on Barton Springs Road to talk about their startup adventures as an independent game studio.
The game draws from all kinds of resources in Austin’s creative community. For example, White Whale hired a local composer to create a soundtrack for the game.
“Pretty much all of our resources for the game have been local,” Lammert said. “The valuable, wonderful brilliant people in this town have helped us every step of the way.”
To get the company started, Lammert attended every single mixer, meetup and event that could even remotely be valuable for the company.
“Through that we’ve gotten to meet a lot of awesome people here,” Lammert said. People have volunteered their time and expertise to help the new company, she said.
“This is one of the best towns in the country for independent game development,” Royer said.
In particular, Juegos Rancheros, a monthly meeting of independent game developers and fans created by Adam Saltsman, Brandon Boyer and Wiley Wiggins has been one of the best resources, Royer said.
White Whale Games is completely bootstrapped, Lammert said. They raised $4,851 from 112 backers during a successful Kickstarter campaign last year. They run a very lean operation. They work out of a rented garage space in Hyde Park. Altogether, they’ve spent $12,000. Lammert says they joke that they built the game and company for what a modest family sedan would cost.
The game, when it’s released should cost about $2.99 and be available for download from Apple’s App Store. They hope to recoup their expenses and earn enough money to launch their next game. The tough life of running a startup company has all been worth it, Lammert said.
“This has been one of the best experiences of my life,” she said.
Gazzang released its latest security software product: Gazzang zTrustee, a security management system.
The Austin-based startup says the software as a service offering provides companies with a “universal key manager that stores and manages all cryptographic keys, certificates, configuration files, tokens and any other “opaque objects” an enterprise maintains to secure its most sensitive data.”
Gazzang designed the product after receiving feedback from customers “who wanted to extend the 
reach of the Gazzang zNcrypt™ Key Storage System to manage other important IT objects alongside their Gazzang keys.”
With the increased popular of cloud, software as a service products and big data sites, companies are seeking ways to secure their data online and that’s what Gazzang’s products do.
Gazzang zTrustee helps companies restrict access to sensitive data and gives companies, not cloud or software providers, keys to access their information online in a secure way.
“The growing number of virtual images, cloud instances, servers, mobile devices and other connected systems in the enterprise has created an explosion of keys, certificates and other information objects,” Scott Crawford, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates, said in a news statement. “Getting this ‘key sprawl’ under control requires organizations to take a more holistic approach to the storage, management, tracking and access policies associated with those objects.”
Silicon Hills News Reporter Yasmin Ghahremani recently did this profile of Gazzang.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Richard Jalichandra, Chief Executive Officer of MapMyFitness.com
MapMyFitness has stuff other fitness apps have: You can count your calories and log your workouts, for example. And it has a stellar map function integrated with Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version). So users can not only plan, track, and share their routes with friends, they get real time info on traffic and weather.
But MapMyFitness is working to be a premier, deluxe site that integrates your social network so you can share what you ate and ran or biked or lifted—and plan workouts with others. Using the mobile app, you can see if a friend is jogging close by, and meet up. There are analytics for tracking your progress. Last week, MapMyFitness introduced gamification functions such as a leader board. You can use the app for free, or get a bronze, silver or gold membership for between $6 and $20 per month. And there’s a retail section for apparel and fitness accessories. It’s a gold standard fitness site.
Registering for a site and app like MapMyFitness is a no brainer for athletes. But the company is positioning itself as a solution to the nation’s obesity epidemic. Jalichandra said more than 50 percent of its users fall under the “overweight” category. (The app asks about your height, weight, age and gender when you build your profile.)For people trying to get in shape, he said, even adding 30 minutes of activity a day can dramatically improve health. The tracking and social sharing rev up your motivation to get out there and move.
“After you log your activity for a couple of weeks it becomes addictive,” said Jalichandra who said he lost 17 pounds since he joined the company a year ago. And he was fit to begin with.
David Middaugh, a doctor of physical therapy with Austin Manual Therapy, said he started using the app with MapMyRide when he commuted to work on his bicycle.
“I think it’s a great tool to use to track your fitness progress,” he said. “It gives you objective measures to see if you’re working out longer, going farther, burning more calories. You can see your progress over time. I think for a patient interested in weight loss it would really help them reach their goals.”
Dixie Stanforth, a personal trainer and lecturer in physical education, kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas acknowledged the motivation potential of the site.
“The goal setting aspect of the application could be helpful,” she said. “In the research world it’s called ‘setting intentions.’ When somebody actually makes a concrete intention and publicly commits to it, it can affect their behavior…. It’s a very simple thing but it has quite a bit of power.” She also thought the anonymity of being able to track your fitness and be—in a sense—part of a community without having to go to the gym or a class while you’re just starting out would be helpful.
For new exercisers who like processes and the idea of community support, MapMyFitness works as a solution. But there are barriers. The site, she said, obviously attracts fitness buffs who want to connect with other fitness buffs. They recognize and can connect with other members of their “tribe.” But for someone new to fitness, it might be overwhelming with myriad features and very little education. “I haven’t seen anything on the site yet that would draw that beginning person in and help them become a part of that tribe,” she said.
The app, however, is intuitive, according to Middaugh. “You just push a couple buttons and you’re good to go.” The app uses your phone’s GPS system to track and record your runs or rides.
MapMyFitness recently introduced a beta site that’s significantly more user friendly than its previous version which gave no explanation how to use it and only people who already connect exercise with data and track their workouts could follow. Jalichandra said he’s using the free version of the beta site, rather than the gold. He wants to share the interactive experience with the bulk of his customers so he can keep in touch with how it’s working.
MapMyFITNESS did start out as the collaboration of two fitness buffs: Kevin Callahan’s company MapMyRUN and Robin Thurston’s MapMyRIDE, both started in 2005. Callahan created his app to keep track of his progress while training for a marathon. Thurston conceived his idea while abroad on a cycling vacation. Callahan, Jeff Kalikstein, and Thurston joined forces in 2006 to form MapMyFITNESS. In 2010, the company received $5 million in venture funding from Austin Ventures.
The app’s new functionality benefits hard core exercisers and newbies alike. But MapMyFitness isn’t just aiming for individual registrants. Jalichandra believes they’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. With obesity costing the business world so much in medical costs and insurance premiums, he sees the app becoming a tool for whole corporations to make their businesses healthier by starting company leaderboards and other initiatives. He envisions insurance customers using it to lobby their companies to lower insurance rates.
He sees MapMyFitness being used by schools, corporations, enterprises with a vested interest in inspiring healthy lifestyles.
Each of the meeting rooms at MapMyFitness offices are named for sites where people practice fitness: Parks and trails. Jalichandra’s is called “Redbud.”
“I named it that because it’s a particularly steep, hard hill to bike up,” he explains. So far, with more than 9 million visitors, he seems pretty good with hills.
By YASMIN GHAHREMANI
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
Larry Warnock, CEO and president of Gazzang
Something was bothering Larry Warnock. It was 2010 and the former CEO of Phurnace Software had recently finished leading his company through a successful sale to BMC. His next challenge was advising two Houston entrepreneurs on how to realize their business idea.
Mike Umansky and Chris Gillan had come up with an encryption solution for open source software that filled a gaping hole in the cloud computing market. But Warnock felt the name they’d chosen for their company, Critotech, was all wrong. It wasn’t just that it sounded like a relic from a Cold War spy novel. It was that the name’s security connotations would hamstring the company’s growth outside the encryption space, a goal the startup veteran considered crucial to its long-term success.
“I didn’t want to be known as Encryption, Inc.,” says Warnock.
So when he joined the firm as CEO that year, one of the first things he did was look for a fresh web brand name. In a request that sounds like it’s straight out of Seinfeld, he asked his team to come up with a name that meant nothing. He didn’t want the company typecast as it continued to find itself. After some fruitless brainstorming, the team began to look through comic books for words used to denote sounds.
“Sure enough a guy went home and his son found in a comic book a picture of a good guy punching a bad guy and it said ‘Gazang,’” recalls Warnock. “And it was in a little cloud. So we said that’s it.”
Gazang.com was already taken, so they added another Z to make the name Gazzang.
Blank slate in hand, the team has since been writing its own story in the cloud. Management has narrowed the market focus to customers who need Big Data solutions. And it’s got two new cloud tools in the works – one of which will debut in July.
Encryption pays
Not that the founders are ashamed of their encryption roots. On the contrary, their flagship platform-as-a-service software, recently renamed zNcrypt, is turning heads. Gazzang was one of 10 vendors recently selected for the MIT Sloan CIO Innovation Showcase. What’s more, the company recorded its strongest quarter to date in Q1 and its customer base has expanded to 220, including Philips Electronics, the United States Department of Health and Human Services and Boston Children’s Hospital. Healthcare, finance and government are target sectors because they’re required to protect data.
“Compliance was a huge thing for these folks – PCI, HIPAA, SOX – all those guidelines were big challenges,” says Umansky.
He and Gillan first got the idea for zNcrypt while talking with people involved in grid computing and virtual machine automation – the predecessors of cloud computing. Users needed encryption that wouldn’t interfere with the performance of their databases and other applications.
“Chris and I did market analysis and realized that MySQL was the database of choice for these guys,” says Umansky. “It had such huge traction and really there was no way to encrypt that data at rest, so we went out and built our transparent data encryption platform and key management platform.” Transparent data encryption is a process that happens on the fly and behind the scenes so the developer doesn’t have to change the database or underlying application.
“It just happens auto-magically as the data goes to the disk,” explains Warnock. “Then when the data is requested back for processing, its magic key determines if that requester is authorized.”
Because zNcrypt secures the data instantly, it leaves less room for breaches than products that only encrypt periodically. The tool now protects all LAMP-based applications and data. Wendy Nather, research director of the enterprise security practice at 451 Research, says no one else is specializing in database security for the open source community, and it’s a problem that badly needs an answer.
“Every enterprise has open source software somewhere incorporated,” says Nather. “Even if they’re writing their own software, chances are a developer has incorporated some open source components in it. When you’re developing things and you need a lab to play with you’re generally going to turn to open source components because they’re cheaper and you can have as many as you want when you need them.”
Chasing Big Data
Gazzang has continued to refine its direction, shifting slightly when Big Data began to gain
attention. Big Data refers to huge data sets that are not well suited to be handled by current relational databases – usually petabytes or exabytes of information. Much of the data created today couldn’t be processed in a relational database anyway because it is unstructured. It comes from smart phones, tablet computers, cameras and numerous other connected devices.
Data and distributed file system technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB can turn these otherwise lost bits of data into valuable information that companies, governments,science organizations and the like can analyze for insights. Marketers use Big Data to understand aggregate buying behavior and computer scientists use it to analyze the interactions of thousands of nodes in a network.
Gazzang realized that its zNcrypt architecture would fit with technologies like Hadoop and decided Big Data is the way of the future. It’s a change from what the founders initially envisioned but Warnock says that’s par for the course in startup-land.
“Every startup I’ve been in, when we ultimately had great success it was different than what we thought it was going to be,” he says.
Investors are happy with the way things are turning out too. Austin Ventures provided Gazzang with Series A funding worth $3.5 million and has been pleasantly surprised by the turn of events.
“The customer set they’ve gotten has been a little bit different than we originally thought it would be but better in some ways because the deals are larger and the sales cycle is frankly a little bit shorter,” says Thomas Ball, general partner at Austin Ventures.
With all the hype around the cloud and Big Data, Ball concedes that Gazzang risks getting lost in a game of lingo bingo.
“I think positioning and rising above the clutter is the biggest challenge because everyone wants to use the term cloud now,” he says. “But when people see how good the product is and how easy it is to scale, it’s an easy sale.”
In the pipeline
Next up on Gazzang’s agenda: zTrustee, a universal key manager for a wide variety of applications. zNcrypt manages keys for data it encrypts but zTrustee will work with any kind of key, certificate or token used for a wide array of computing processes. It’s intended to be a “single point of trust” for keys and the policies around them, and it will launch in July.
Later this year the company will roll out zOps, a console to monitor and diagnose issues with cloud computing functions.
It’s all part of Warnock’s vision for market expansion beyond the encryption space.
“A lot of the data center tools that exist were never built for the cloud,” he says. “So there’s actually a market opportunity to rebuild all the tools people have been relying on but in this new architecture.”
If Warnock has his way, when people say the name Gazzang they’ll hear a bat hitting a home run.
“What we’re doing with Gazzang and what I think works best in early-stage is to swing for the bleachers,” he says. “We are going to be wildly successful or an epic disaster.”
Whatever the outcome, one thing is for sure. The game will certainly be interesting.
Mass Relevance announced Wednesday that it has closed a $3.3 million venture capital funding round.
Austin Ventures led the series A round and other investors included Battery Ventures, Floodgate Fund, Allegro Venture Patners and Metamorphic Ventures.
Mass Relevance plans to use the money to accelerate its growth. Sam Decker, the company’s founder and CEO, said the company planned to triple in size this year in an interview with Silicon Hills News late last year.
Mass Relevance has 120 clients that use its real-time social media curation platform. It also signed a deal with Twitter last November that officially made Mass Relevance Twitter’s first curation partner licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content.
“The financing comes as leading brands, ranging from Madonna and MTV through Target and Purina, turn to Mass Relevance to use real-time social content to drive engagement on television, web and mobile,” according to the company. Its clients include the “Big Four” television networks, 7 of the top 10 2011 cable networks, as well as top brands like Target, Cisco, Ford, Samsung, New York Giants, Pepsi, Purell and Victoria’s Secret.
“People around the world are actively participating in social conversations about brands, media and entertainment, and this content is passing us by faster than ever before,” Decker said in a news statement.
A year ago, Mass Relevance raised $2.2 million in a large seed stage round of funding from Austin Ventures, Floodgate and angel investors.
WhaleShark Media has acquired Miwim, an online coupon and deal site in France.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Austin-based WhaleShark Media connects consumers with multiple daily deal and coupon services like Deals.com and CouponShare.com as well as deal sites outside of the U.S.
Founded in 2010, WhaleShark Media has received $300 million from several venture capital firms including Austin Ventures, Google Ventures, and Institutional Venture Partners.
Last year, WhaleShark Media made more than $70 million in revenue as part of the $1.7 billion in sales generated for its merchant clients.
The company has 170 employees worldwide, including 120 in the U.S. It plans to hire another 50 employees this year.
The acquisition of Miwim’s web portfolio, which includes online coupon site Bons-de-Reduction and cash-back website Poulpeo, combined with WhaleShark Media’s existing portfolio of European websites, VoucherCodes.co.uk in the U.K. and Deals.com in Germany, positions WhaleShark Media to provide coupons to consumers that represent 70% of the ecommerce activity in Western Europe.
Olivier David and Francois Larvor, the founders of Miwim, will continue to serve as co-General Managers of Miwim and 20 other employees will join WhaleShark in France.
Calxeda, which makes energy-saving chips for servers that power data centers, has raised $20 million of a $30 million offering, according to a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Austin-based company, founded in 2008 as Smooth Stone, announced $48 million in funding in November of 2010.
Calxeda’s funders include Advanced Technology Investment Co., ARM, Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners.
For more on the company, read the profile Susan Lahey wrote last year.
