Author: LauraLorek@gmail.com (Page 342 of 352)

LauraLorek@gmail.com

Give As You Get provides a painless new way to donate

January 7, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A new Austin-based startup, Give As You Get, wants to make it easy for people to support their favorite nonprofit organization while shopping for items online.

“We’ve gotten a great response from the community,” said David Sandal, who launched the site late last year.

More than 50 organizations have signed up and Give As You Get has raised more than $2,200. Sandal keeps a running total of all funds raised updated on the site.

So far, Emancipet has raised the most money with $349.37. The nonprofit organization provides free and low-cost spay and neuter services throughout Central Texas from mobile and regular clinics.

Give As You Get operates through what’s known as an affiliate program with a variety of online retailers. That means when a shopper makes a purchase through one of the retailers like Amazon or Expedia, Give As You Get receives a percentage of the sale for referring the shopper to the site. The referral fee varies depending on the retailer, but can be as much as 1 to 4 percent of the sale. Give As You Get receives a payment from the retailer and sends 50 percent to the designated organization.

Give As You Get has affiliate programs with BestBuy, Amazon, iTunes, PetSmart, Barnes and Noble, Sears, Sam’s Club and others.

The organizations signed up include Austin Partners in Education, Austin Planetarium, Austin Police Operation Blue Santa, Cancer Connection, Central Texas SCPA, Colin’s Hope, Family Eldercare, Girl Scouts of Central Texas, Girls Rock Camp and others.

Dara Quackenbush, board member of the Austin chapter of the Association of Women in Communications uses Give As You Get to buy goods on Amazon.com so that the proceeds will go to the organization’s scholarship fund.
http://giveasyouget.com/Default.aspx?p=Shop

“Shipping Wars” featuring Austin-based UShip

January 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Tip of the hat to Bryan Menell at AustinStartup for bringing this new “Shipping Wars” show to our attention. The reality show debuts on Jan. 10 at 8 p.m. on A&E and it features a competition among some of the best haulers with UShip, an Austin-based company that created a global marketplace for shipping items.

“From rookie haulers to seasoned veterans, no shipment is too big or bizarre for these carriers, who compete in a high-stakes, deadline-driven race where any setback can cost big bucks,” according to UShip. In the first episode, the haulers compete to get a “4,000 lbs., 22-foot steel horse and an oversized 7-foot-long Venus Flytrap” across country on deadline or lose money.

You’ve got 18 seconds to shine at TEDxAustin

January 4, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Ever dreamed about giving a TEDxAustin speech?
This year, you’ve got a chance. Stacy Weitzner, one of the TedXAustin organizers, has dreamed up a way to let more people participate by presenting their idea in an 18-second post to Youtube.
TEDxAustin, an invitation-only event, which sells out every year, is being held at the Austin Music Hall on February 11th.
I’ve embedded their video below for the instructions. But it sounds easy.
This year’s TEDxAustin’s focus is titled “Beyond Measure” to ponder “the implications of an ever-accelerating pace of innovation in technology, information and the way we live our lives.”

“Think about what BEYOND MEASURE means to you, and then use your phone, camera or web-cam to record an 18-second TED talk and post your video to youtube. VERY IMPORTANT: make sure to tag or title your video with the keyword tedxaustin18, and we’ll make sure to feature it either on our website or at our live event!”

Hoover’s “Art of Enterprise” at Tech Ranch

January 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Tech Ranch Austin is working with serial entrepreneur Gary Hoover to deliver his “Art of Enterprise” course
It’s the fourth time he has delivered the course with TechRanch.
The first class is free. He’s offering it at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 11 or Saturday, Jan. 14th at 1 p.m. at Tech Ranch’s offices at 9111 Jollyville Road. You can RSVP for the first class at Eventbrite.
Hoover has run four startups and a is a former entrepreneur in residence at University of Texas McCombs School of Business.
During the 11-week course, Hoover covers all kinds of skills needed to run your own business.

Mass Relevance plans to triple in growth in 2012

December 30, 2011 / / 2 Comments

In the old days, people yelled at their TVs.
In the digital age, people can tweet their opinion to a television show.
And the show just might tweet back with a special offer or advertisement.
That’s the sweet spot of an Austin-based startup called Mass Relevance.
“It’s a growing trend to integrate social conversations into content streams and advertising,” said Sam Decker, the company’s founder and CEO.
Recently, Mass Relevance worked with Paramount Pictures for the release of Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol movie with a “Flock to unlock” social media campaign. People who shared content about the movie on Twitter or Facebook earned a reward. They got to watch a special clip of the movie in advance of its release. That kind of campaign can increase brand awareness while engaging an audience, Decker said.
Mass Relevance, which has 20 employees, now has 100 clients that use its real-time social media curation platform. It also signed a deal with Twitter in November that officially made Mass Relevance Twitter’s first curation partner licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content.
“We’ve been working with them over the years, working with them in parallel,” Decker said. “For us, it just formalized the relationship.”
In addition to publishing Twitter content, content publishers working with Mass Relevance can earn money from the content through sponsorships and advertising.
“Media companies are tied to creating and curating an audience,” Decker said. “Twitter can be part of their audience to drive advertising dollars.”
Mass Relevance’s platform allows content publishers to create new revenue streams around curated and integrated experiences on TV, web, mobile and large screen displays. Mass Relevance’s platform allows publishers to aggregate; filter and moderate content in real time and then broadcast it to an audience.
Mass Relevance’s clients include NBC Sports, NFL Football, Cisco, Samsung, and Pepsi and media companies like CNN, Boston Global, New York Times and Washington Post. Sports teams using the platform include the New York Giants, San Francisco Giants and the Boston Celtics.
President Obama even used Mass Relevance’s platform when he did his Twitter Town Hall last July. And television shows like NBC’s The Voice and Fox’s The X-Factor used Mass Relevance’s platform to get real-time feedback on air from the at home audience.
“The whole idea here is there are more and more people participating and creating real-time content,” Decker said.
But the advertising networks have not kept pace with new ways of delivering content, Decker said.
“This is just the first inning for media companies to create much more integrated social experiences for their audiences,” Decker said. “They haven’t maximized the potential of the platform yet.”
Working after hours in Austin coffee shops, developers Barry Cox, Brian Dainton and Eric Falcao started TweetRiver, a social media curation platform, in 2009, according to Mass Relevance’s “Our Story.” Then Decker, who had left his job as chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice, joined them. All of them became founders of what evolved to become Mass Relevance except Cox who remains a strategic advisor.
A year ago, Mass Relevance raised $2.2 million in a large seed stage round of funding from Austin Ventures, Floodgate and angel investors.
In 2012, Mass Relevance plans to seek another round of funding, but Decker declined to state the amount. The funds will go to expand Mass Relevance’s business.
“We’re looking to roughly triple in growth,” Decker said.
Mass Relevance plans to hire 20 to 30 people in 2012 including developers, sales people and client account managers.
“We’re nearing profitability and forecast to be so next year,” Decker said. “We’ve proven out the model and now it’s about scaling it and growing it much bigger.”

Innovation in Austin: Sam Decker from Springbox on Vimeo.

Austin Startup OtherInbox zeroing in on 2 million users

December 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Joshua Bear, CEO of Other Inbox

By ISADORA VAIL
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

While boasting the free solution to endless and unwanted emails, Austin startup OtherInbox, has had nearly 2 million users since the service began in 2008.
Founded by Austin entrepreneur Joshua Baer, the company offers two ways to instantly organize and prioritize email. The Organizer product looks for lower priority messages, such as newsletters, e-receipts, social media notifications or coupons, into one folder. An email summary is sent to the Organizer user each day, summarizing important and unimportant emails.
The second free product, Unsubscriber, is named quite literally for the product’s duty of automatically removing your personal email from a mailing list. The service works with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and other email providers.
OtherInbox didn’t start with organizing emails, said Hoon Park, client services manager. At first, the company helped protect emails by using other emails to sign up for sites online while protecting the main address.
Park said some email unsubscribe lists create a lot of hoops to get your email removed, and some even require a login. But OtherInbox users place the unwanted emails into an unsubscribe folder and the rest is history. “You will never receive an email from them again,” Park said.
Since 2009, the company has generated revenue by selling market data two different ways: to email marketing companies, and by advertisers who pay to target OtherInbox users that receive specific coupon deals. Park said all user identification is kept private.
OtherInBox has also raised $4 million in funding during two rounds of venture financing, according to its Crunchbase profile.
“It was just a very powerful way to protect emails, but as a startup company that creates products for clients,” Park said. “We think we can be very useful for clients who are getting a ton of unimportant or unwanted emails everyday.”
After the company reached a landmark earlier this year of 1 million users, the numbers continued to quickly rise. Park says they expect to have 2 million users by the first quarter of 2012. Customers of OtherInbox primarily use it personally rather than for business or large corporations.
The company grew from six people when it started in 2008 to 10 employees by 2010, and Park says there are plans to add at least two more to their team. The diverse group of workers have ranging backgrounds from linguistics to human biology to political science majors. There are no plans to move the team from their office space in downtown Austin.
Their operation not only runs concise, but inexpensive — everything is done in The Cloud, Park said. Having servers purely online can also be the source of unavoidable technical issues.
“Sometimes we’ll have a hiccup in our service and we just have to figure out a way around it,” Park said.
With three people for customer support, including Park, he says it is important for them to communicate about the customer’s issues. “That is where we find out something is wrong and through day-to-day collaboration we have to fix the problems,” he said.
One of Park’s favorite perks of working at OtherInbox is the company’s compassion for other startups. He said found Baer reaches out to newbie startups to help them, and often ends up being somewhat of a mentor by offering advice on public relations, branding, marketing, and how to network.
“For about three years we’ve done this thing where we team up with startups, sometimes even letting them work out of our space, and incubate them until they can stand on their own feet. I just enjoy being able to help out the community of my peers,” Hoon said.
As for future email products that may further de-clutter your inbox? Stay tuned. While Park said there is nothing to “officially announce,” he assured us that OtherInbox programmers are always experimenting.

Greenling wants to change the way you eat

December 27, 2011 / / 0 Comments

At the Capital Factory’s Demo Day, Mason Arnold gave a quick pitch on Greenling, the organic grocery delivery service.
“Our food system is broke,” Arnold said.
He estimates more than half the population in the U.S. will die from food-related disease, primarily obesity-related illnesses. He founded Greenling to change the way people eat. And he says Greenling “makes it easy, fun and delicious to change the way you eat.”
If you’re making resolutions for the new year to eat right and exercise, you might want to check them out. The Austin-based startup has more than 5,000 customers. Some of their most popular products are their seasonal veggie boxes and complete meal kits. Greenling recently partnered with Austin-based Whole Foods, which also works with local and organic farmers to bring fresh produce to customers in the Austin and San Antonio region.
This video is from the Capital Factory’s Demo Day.

And if you still want to know more, check out Greenling’s video.

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