By Luke Carrière
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
The Austin Forum on Science, Technology and Society hosted a free event Tuesday evening to help nonprofit organizations get the most out of South by Southwest Interactive 2012.
The event attracted non-profit professionals, start-up founders, and University of Texas students. Several people tweeted throughout the evening using the hashtag #austinforum.
To kick things off, Hugh Forrest, director of the SXSW Interactive Festival showed a video by SXSWi, which is an example of how nonprofits can use technology to engage their followers. He advised nonprofits to create dynamic videos, rather than videos featuring their executive director speaking into the camera for 12 minutes, which would not communicate their mission as well. He also invited the audience to attend a free event on March 11: The 2012 Dewey Winburne Community Service Award Ceremony, which honors one of the co-founders of SXSWi, who “believed that the new media revolution could help level the playing field between the haves and the have-nots in our society.”
Next, Heidi Schultz Adams, senior director of engagement at LIVESTRONG, pointed to the power of social media in managing communications with seven time Tour de France Champion and Philanthropist Lance Armstrong’s 3 million followers. Lynn Freehill tweeted Adam’s advice on how to handle the debates that surface on social platforms, “Leave in negative comments, leave in positive comments–let the conversation unfold.” The bottom line about using social media was summarized by Ronald McDonald House Charities Austin, “Social media costs you, but it can also save money for a nonprofit. Be smart about it.” Yes, you will need to dedicate time and resources to ensure you do it right. Giving the task to an unpaid intern is not the way to manage and cultivate constituent relationships effectively.
David J. Neff, founder of Lights. Camera. Help said his nonprofit, like many in Austin, is constantly exploring ways to generate revenue. He said it can often be difficult for a nonprofit to reach the point where they can afford to hire their first full time employee. In contrast, startups have it easier than nonprofits because of the huge upside of potential profit they offer investors and employees. SXSWi can be a resource for nonprofits to stay on top of emerging technology and tools, he said. He recalled SXSW 2005, when he learned about the growing field of online video. That is now central to his nonprofit, which connects nonprofits with videographers to help them convey their mission in a video form. “SXSW Interactive is where I go to find out what’s going to be hot in two years,” Neff said.
Overall, the take-away from the event was that nonprofit leaders should stay aware of the powerful social media tools being developed every year. If SXSW Interactive is not within your budget, there are many free events to attend and affordable options like SXSWedu and SXSWeco.
Sara Peralta, a student at Texas State University, covering all things SXSW at SXSTXSTATE. Filed this Storify post on the event.
GameSalad Founders Dan Treiman (seated), Tan Tran (center) and Michael Agustin
Supporters of an Indian activist on a hunger strike created a computer game “Angry Anna” in his honor last year.
Fashioned after Angry Birds, the game features a slingshot to fling caricatures of protestor Anna Hazare and others at Indian politicians. The game took just three days to make using the GameSalad creation platform.
“Angry Anna speaks to games as communications tools,” said Michael Agustin, co-founder of Austin-based GameSalad.
In its first week, people played the game more than 250,000 times. The viral game, created on HTML5, the web’s publishing language, allowed it to reach an audience quickly. Players could log on to the game using their computers without downloading additional software or plug-ins. They could also easily share the game by embedding it on websites or posting it to Twitter or Facebook. It’s just like a YouTube video and that’s what the GameSalad founders set out to do when they created the company. They wanted to develop the “Youtube” of game creation platforms online.
“We wanted to democratize the creation of video games,” Agustin said, during a recent interview at the company’s new headquarters at 9600 Great Hills Trail.
Michael Agustin, co-founder of GameSalad
And that is what the GameSalad Creator does. It lets anyone design, publish and distribute games online, regardless of their skill level, with easy to use, drag and drop tools that require no coding. GameSalad games can be published to all kinds of platforms including iOS devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Mac desktops, or to the Web.
So far, people have built and published 30,000 games with the GameSalad Creator. That includes more than 40 top 100 games in Apple’s App Store.
“We see 1,000 new games a month,” Agustin said.
The GameSalad Creator tools are easy to use and that appeals to everyone from professional game developers to kids.
Abdulrahman Al Zanki, a 15-year-old in Afghanistan, created Doodle Destroy in three days using the GameSalad tools. It has been downloaded nearly 1 million times. He’s since built eight other games for the iPhone and iPad.
Conner Haines, an 11-year-old CEO of FlipFlopGames, builds games for kids with cancer using the GameSalad platform. He creates the games for free and any proceeds from the sale of a game goes to the Make A Wish Foundation.
“I really like to think of game or app ideas and just bring them to life and let the whole world play or use them,” Haines wrote on his website.
Agustin formed GameSalad, formerly known as Gendai Games, with Tan Tran, and Dan Treiman in 2007.
“We wanted to enable people to create content easily online,” Agustin said.
It’s working. GameSalad is the number one platform for iOS development and boasts 300,000 developers, Agustin said. The company has 42 employees in Austin, San Francisco and Los Angeles and 20 contractors and it is hiring.
“We are always looking out for top folks,” Agustin said. “We’re one of the largest game companies in the world.”
Initially, Agustin and the other founders bootstrapped the company for three years. That is they put their own money into it and ran it off the revenues generated from the business. They joined the Austin Technology Incubator in July of 2009 and worked out of its offices until recently. GameSalad graduated last month from ATI.
ATI’s former IT and Wireless Director Bart Bohn met the GameSalad founders at a 2008 Texas Funding Symposium. He then invited them to the 2008 Wireless Seed Stage Forum and the 2009 Entrepreneur’s Lounge at SXSW.
Michael Agustin, co-founder of GameSalad at ATI graduation
“Michael, Tan and Dan and the rest of the crew are extremely passionate about what they are doing,” said Bohn, now CEO and founder of AuMANIL. “The time they spent working on GameSalad early on has really paid off.”
The founders got a product up early, sold games and funded their company with the proceeds, Bohn said.
“It let them progress farther in the maturation process,” Bohn said. “It gave them a better vision of their company and they could move faster when they raised money.” They could also hold on to a larger ownership stake, he said.
The GameSalad founders also saw the potential early on in the mobile space, Bohn said.
Venture Capitalist Aziz Gilani with DFJ Mercury in Houston first met Agustin at SXSW in 2009.
“I knew he was going to do something great, but was unconvinced about the market he was going after (desktop casual games.) We still kept in touch, and spent some time together at SXSW 2010,” Gilani said. “He had shifted his focus to iOS which was an area that I was much more excited about. After SXSW I went back to Houston and bought a Mac so that I could install and play with the tool. I was floored by how easy it was to create games and knew we had a hit on our hands.”
Houston-based DFJ Mercury led a $1.1 million seed investment in GameSalad in July 2010. Then in March of 2011, the firm participated in the $6.1M Series A financing led by Steamboat Ventures, Disney’s venture capital firm.
With the venture investment, Disney Executive Steve Felter, who previously worked as chief operating officer of DigiSynd, a social media marketing company Disney acquired, became the chief executive officer. He works out of San Francisco along with Agustin, who became the chief products officer.
Frank Coppersmith, GameSalad COO
Frank Coppersmith also joined GameSalad last year and he oversees the Austin office as the company’s chief operating officer. Previously, he served as vice president of finance and administration for Austin-based Challenge Online Games, which Zynga acquired in 2010.
The competitive advantage GameSalad has is its intense focus on making game design accessible, Gilani said.
“GameSalad was designed from the ground up to be a code-free, yet insanely powerful game design tool that anyone can use,” Gilani said. “That is an extremely hard feat to accomplish, and is only possible because of Michael’s heritage from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.”
At Carnegie Mellon University, Agustin studied with Randy Pausch, professor and founder of the Entertainment Technology Center. Pausch died in 2008 from pancreatic cancer. He wrote The Last Lecture, which became a New York Times bestseller.
Pausch pioneered the non-profit Alice project, an innovative 3-D environment that teaches programming to young people via storytelling and interactive game playing.
Pausch made quite an impression on Agustin and his quest to democratize the game development and distribution industry. Agustin received his master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon and his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas in computer programming.
“GameSalad was also blessed by making several smart strategic decisions early on,” said Galini with DFJ Mercury. “They were building games with HTML5 before it was trendy. They also decided very early on to deeply engage with their community of developers, enlisting their biggest contributors as “Sous Chefs” and having an extremely open dialogue with them about the company’s direction. GameSalad understands that it can’t be successful unless its game creators are successful, so their opinions have a huge impact on the direction of the company.”
In 2012, GameSalad is focused on its game developers and looking for more ways to generate profit for them, Agustin said. It is also going to expand the feature set of its existing tools and focus on distributing games internationally. Europe is the second largest market behind the United States for GameSalad and it’s looking to expand into Asia. On Austin’s North side on technology row, the GameSalad offices, outfitted with IKEA furniture, are filled with game developers. Posters of its games developed by its own programming team, hang on the walls.
“They are very focused and very dedicated,” Bohn said. “They went out and learned a bunch from a lot of people in the industry. Their passion and their ability to listen and evolve and take feedback and incorporate that into what they are doing has helped lead to their success. I’m so excited for what they are doing. I end up being a huge cheerleader for them.”
Who’s got $47.6 million in new financing?
That would be Apollo Endosurgery Inc. The Austin-based medical device maker announced that it has landed a big round of funding to develop its line of minimally invasive, scarless surgical procedures.
Apollo Endosurgery’s investors include Novo A/S, Remeditex Ventures, CPMG, Inc., PTV Sciences and H.I.G. BioVentures.
The company will use the money to launch its OverStitch Endoscopic Suturing System and other flexible surgical tools that allow surgeons to perform numerous procedures without making incisions into the patient’s skin.
Who knew Microsoft made movies?
Microsoft will screen its new movie on entrepreneurship, Ctrl+Alt+Compete tonight at 6 p.m. at Geekdom, a collaborative workspace in downtown San Antonio.
“Ctrl+Alt+Compete is a new documentary that takes a revealing look at the startup and emerging business scene through the eyes of 5 founders and their teams and tells a story of the passion, fortitude and insanity that is bringing a startup to life,” according to Microsoft.
The first TechStars Cloud program kicked off in San Antonio on Jan. 19 with 11 companies that all moved to the city from outside the state. Jason Seats and Nicole Glaros, managing directors, run the TechStars Cloud program at Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre. The three-month incubator and mentoring program ends with a demo day in April.
Microsoft has been at Geekdom all day teaching the TechStars Cloud entrepreneurs about Microsoft Azure, said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom.
Austin Ventures announced that Andrew Busey, a well-known Austin entrepreneur, has joined its firm as a venture partner.
Busey formerly served as vice present and general manager at Zynga, makers of Farmville.
“In his new role, Andrew will help the venture team identify and attract very early-stage companies,” John Thornton, general partner of Austin Ventures, said in a news statesman.
Busey built Challenge Games into large social gaming company which Zynga acquired. He also co-founded Pluck, which DemandMedia acquired.
He is a graduate in computer science and marketing from Duke University and holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lori Hawkins, technology reporter with the Austin American Statesman, has covered Busey for a long time and has written a good story on his latest move.
Tech startups looking to get a high-quality video to publicize their business might be interested in the Austin Video Marketing Marathon.
LocalizeAustin and UPG Video Marketing are hosting a video shoot for Austin small business on Thursday, Feb. 16th at Center61, a co-working community for social entrepreneurs and nonprofits.
Up to 15 businesses can register to make a video on the spot to promote their business. The entire process takes about an hour.
Got some IKEA furniture that needs assembling?
No worries.
In March, TaskRabbit launches in the Austin and San Antonio markets and people will be able to post all kinds of tasks on the site for others to perform for a fee.
The most popular task in San Francisco is assembling IKEA furniture, said Johnny Brackett, TaskRabbit spokesman.
TaskRabbit, which launched in 2008 in Boston, is now available in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, New York City and Los Angeles.
“Austin makes sense as the next step,” Brackett said. “We look for urban cities and tech-savvy cities.”
TaskRabbit saw a lot of demand from people in the Austin and San Antonio area requesting the service, Brackett said.
Nationwide, TaskRabbit has more than 3,000 people who work as TaskRabbit runners. Anyone over the age of 21 can apply to run errands.
“It’s sort of like a college application,” Brackett said. The site does federal, county and other background checks to license its errand runners. The whole process takes around five to seven days but it can also take up to four weeks. TaskRabbit is accepting applications now for the Austin and San Antonio market.
“Some of our most active Taskrabbits are running two to three tasks a day and cashing out $5,000 a month,” Brackett said.
In addition to furniture assembly, other popular tasks include cleaning, grocery delivery and lunch delivery. The site provides a platform for micro-entrepreneurship, Brackett said.
“We even get some unique ones like paint a mural on my wall or help me prank my colleague by wrapping everything in cellophane,” Brackett said. “We’re saving people time. It’s all about living more efficiently.”
Trust and security are really important to TaskRabbit, Brackett said. It has built in a reputation engine into its system so that errand runners are reviewed on a task by task basis. They’ve also built some game features into the site to reward so-called Taskrabbits for completing tasks.
“We’re all about transparency and ratings and reviews,” Brackett said.
Joshua Baer, founder of the OtherInbox and founder of a gazillion startups, has a new venture he’s heading up. He has joined with a handful of people in the Austin technology community to create WeAreAustinTech.
Each week the site will highlight an “icon” in the Austin technology community in a video interview posted to its site.
“The past two Saturdays I’ve been huddled under hot camera lighting with Toyin Akinmusuru, Ruben Cantu, Rene Lego, and Austen Trimble interviewing some of the top movers and shakers in the Austin tech community who also happen to be many of my idols,” Baer wrote in his weekly Startup Digest. “It’s been an incredible experience and we’ve captured unique and moving content. We will be unveiling the site soon, but for now you can follow us on Twitter @weareaustintech and Like us on Facebook.”
South by Southwest Interactive announced today the 48 companies that will participate in its SXSW Accelerator program this year.
SXSW received applications from more than 670 companies and selected 48 companies to present in the fourth-annual SXSW Accelerator, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark.
The SXSW Accelerator competition takes place on Monday, March 12 and Tuesday, March 13 at the Hilton hotel in downtown Austin.
Six Austin companies made the cut including SceneTap, Hoot.me, Umbel, Foreca.st, Toopher and Tugg.
