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Famigo lets families play together safely on small screens

November 17, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Cody Powell, "Matt Sullivan" and Q Beck of Famigo. (Matt was out sick)

By Susan Lahey
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News

When people write about Austin start-up Famigo’s new tool, the Sandbox, they focus on the benefit: Parents can pass their mobile phones to children, touching the Sandbox icon, and restricting that kid to a safe world of age-appropriate games. In the Sandbox, he can never dial Mom’s boss, delete all her email or send a personal photo to her best client.

And really, that is a great benefit for an app. But that’s not what’s groundbreaking about Famigo. What sets this company apart is that, unlike many developers focused on doing cool stuff with smart phones, Famigo is committed to transforming mobile devices to something that works with families, the way families work. From its apps to its website, written in regular English, its focus is on the organic, dynamic, diverse, messy ecosystem known as a family.

“Most developers aren’t thinking about the individual,” said Bart Bohn, formerly lead advisor at the Austin Technology Incubator and currently co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ravel Data. “Famigo is focused on a family solution, not a specific piece of content. That’s really unique. Q (Beck, Famigo cofounder) talks about the four quadrants: If you can engage both young and old, men and women, that’s a home run. That’s approaching a family as a family.”

Q Beck (and yes, it’s Q, like Harry S Truman was just S) learned about engaging families from the masters. A Texas native, he studied at Columbia University in New York and at Columbia College and worked in film for companies such as Nickelodeon and Dreamworks. He worked as a product development executive, choosing films to make as well as picking directors, casts and more.

He loves the family as an audience; loves how a movie like The Princess Bride or E.T. can draw family members into a powerful shared experience.

Then, one day, he was staring down at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef from a helicopter. His boss’s kids were sitting behind him, playing games on mobile devices, oblivious to their surroundings. And Beck had an epiphany. Just like great media can pull families together, sometimes media can isolate people. That’s when the seed of Famigo started to germinate.

Beck was a little disillusioned with the film industry: Too little opportunity to produce really original work; too many remakes and predictable plots. He wanted to instigate something powerful for families and push back against forces dividing them. He wasn’t sure how, but he could see that smart phones played a big role in people’s lives.

“These aren’t just phones,” he said, indicating his smart phone. They’re computers. For people born after 2000, they’re the first computer they’ll ever own. I knew I wanted to do something to make this emerging technology work with families.”

He pursued an MBA at the University of Texas. And in his second year, met cofounder Matt Sullivan who had just earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Both of them were interns at the Austin Technology Incubator. Beck and Sullivan knew what they wanted to do, but they needed a software developer to make it work: At a speed-dating event for start-ups at Capital Factory, an Austin-based tech startup accelerator, they met Cody Powell, a Dallas native who had been making “horrible websites” for his dad’s friends since he was 14.

They launched in 2009. At first Famigo created family friendly games for mobile devices, but then the founders saw that game apps were proliferating like kudzu. So they evolved to become the company that helps families find the best apps, the right apps for their kids’ age, the family culture. Famigo has programs that cull apps for various attributes. The good ones are then tested, evaluated and rated by actual human beings working for the company—often interns. Famigo keeps track of what games kids play and the more popular ones rise to the top of the parental review list. Famigo also sends parents a weekly email telling them what games—educational or otherwise—their kids are playing and recommending other games based on what kids already play.

Then, a few weeks ago, Famigo introduced the Sandbox.

As far as Keith Gaddis—father of three-year-old Francis is concerned—the Sandbox is a godsend. A software developer, Gaddis is usually in heavy demand from clients. So he couldn’t quite get why, suddenly, he just stopped getting calls and emails. Turns out Francis had gotten hold of the shiny phone with the colorful buttons and blocked everything. Gaddis was one of the 3,000 or so Beta customers for Sandbox and he chose an android phone partly because he could use Sandbox on it. (The Sandbox doesn’t currently work with iOS though Famigo’s other services do). As of about 10 days after launch, Gaddis is one of about 10,000 Sandbox parents.

“Francis will grab the phone, open it up– he knows what the icon looks like–so he just pushes the button because he knows that’s where his games are…..” Gaddis said. “Once he’s in there, he’s locked in (until a parent releases the phone with a special code).” Nor can kids click on ads on any of the apps. Pushing the ad icon takes them right back to the opening of the Sandbox.

“We supervise what he plays very carefully. This is big win for anybody who has kids who know how to use your phone.”

Most of the Famigo team is young and kidless. Cody Powell has one-year-old August. So the company has created a parent advisory board. Beck sees this as a plus. Back in the movie business, he said, if an executive’s six-year-old fell in love with dinosaurs, there was suddenly a directive from above to make lots of dinosaur movies. With Famigo, they’re not structuring the products and services for one family, but for all families. Families can decide what apps are appropriate or not for their own kids.

Famigo’s working on customizing the experience so each family member can have his or her own profile and set of games, creating a “virtual living room.” The important thing, Beck said, is creating a shared experience, the way Angry Birds has in many families, or Princess Bride did when he was a kid.

Some day, Bohn of Ravel Data said, Famigo’s focus on the customer may become a best practice in the industry, rather than a distinguishing characteristic: “They have that kind of brand potential.”

Hurricane Party reinvents itself as Foreca.st

November 16, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Eric Katerman, one of the founders of Austin-based Hurricane Party, spoke at Austin Startup Week at the Tiniest Bar in Texas. He said the team at Hurricane Party spent a year building a product that no one really wanted. They’ve since created Foreca.st, which is in Beta testing.
Hurricane Party was party of The Capital Factory’s startup class of 2010. The founders, Rene Pinnell and Katerman received $20,000 in seed stage funding to develop their idea.
At South by Southwest 2010, Hurricane Party generated a lot of buzz. It’s free app for smart phones that helps people plan parties on the fly.
But as Katerman explains in the video, they created something that didn’t gain enough traction in the marketplace.
So they went back to the drawing board to look at what worked and what didn’t work. (The whole adage about failing and learning from it in a startup environment.) That’s when they came up with Foreca.st, an app that lets a select group of friends know where you’re heading for lunch or a party or any kind of get together.

MyLocalReporter connects companies with the media

November 15, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Dave Manzer started Austin-based PROverCoffee.com in 2010. He arranges monthly meet ups with members of the media and the business community.

This interview with Manzer is from Startup Week at the Austin Startup Bazaar. He recently launched MyLocalReporter to help companies in Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth pitch their companies and products to the right local reporters. The service is primarily aimed at small businesses that might not have their own public relations representative or firm. It costs $89 for a basic pitch up to $189 for a professionally crafted pitch.
“Getting in the news, half the battle is knowing which news reporter to pitch to,” Manzer said. “We connect small business with the news media with hopes of getting more media exposure for small businesses.”

Comic Con works its magic in Austin

November 14, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By Isadora Vail
Special contributor to SiliconHillsNews.com

Wizards, video game characters, sci-fi villains, super heroes and superstars attended the 2011 Wizard World Comic Con, a local spin off of the world-famous San Diego comic book convention.

Hundreds of pop-culture fans gathered at the Austin Convention Center to trade comic books, buy action figures, and listen to panels with their favorite stars. Perhaps the most impressive, and extensive part of the Austin Comic Con this year, was the artist and creators section. Famous artists such as Phil Ortiz from The Simpsons and Greg Capullo from Batman signed autographs and sold rare pieces of artwork. Dozens more decorated the large ballroom of the convention center with their intricate drawings. The convention ran Friday through Sunday, and drew big names like Kevin Sorbo from “Hercules,” Hayden Panettiere from “Heroes,” as well as James Marsters and Juliet Landau from “Buffy.”

For 24-year-old Cheryl Ball, Comic Con is about sharing a love of “cause play,” dressing up as a favorite character, and acting as that character — think of theater, she says. She was dressed as a Quest Giver from the popular video game “World of Warcraft.” With a yellow icon bobbing above her head (an exclamation point that means a new quest in the game) and a satchel full of prizes, Ball wandered through the convention on her own. Thankfully, she said, a few people caught on to her costume and asked for a quest.

“I love cause play and this is my excuse for actually do it all weekend,” said Ball, who attended last year’s Austin Comic Con. “This year seems like it has a lot more of a Sci Fi draw more than comic books, but I’m quite happy with that.”

A wrap up of 3 Day Startup San Antonio

November 14, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Entrepreneurs hope to launch the next big thing at 3 Day Startup San Antonio

November 13, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

In 72 hours, a group of strangers met, brainstormed ideas and then built working prototypes for six companies.
The companies included Spear Guard, an e-mail security firm, Renew Couture, a recycled clothing line, Stride Sync, a music sharing app, Golf Average, a statistical analysis app to improve golf performance, SimpLingo, a browser plug-in to learn a foreign language and Approachab.ly, a professional networking app made for conference attendees.
The newfound entrepreneurs took part in 3 Day Startup weekend in San Antonio at Geekdom, a downtown co-working and collaborative workspace.
“This is the best one we’ve had in San Antonio by far,” said Cam Houser, one of the founders of 3DS. “The crop of ideas were really strong. The execution was just great.”
That’s impressive praise considering the last two 3DS weekends in San Antonio created at least two companies that are still running and that have received venture funding. One of those is FanDash, a site for band promotion and Console.FM, formerly known as HelloWorld.Im. Console.FM, created in the Spring of 2011, is now part of Dave McClure’s 500Startups incubator.
The 3DS weekend teaches students and young professionals about entrepreneurship and creates real ventures that go on to further develop their products and services, said Cristal Glangchai, a professor of entrepreneurship at Trinity and one of the organizers. Trinity, Rackspace, TechStars and Geekdom sponsored the event.
Successful entrepreneurs also lent their expertise to the various groups throughout the weekend. The mentors included Pat Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, Jason Seats, founder of SliceHost, Nick Longo, founder of CoffeCup Software, Todd Morey, founder of Mosso, a cloud company within Rackspace and Alan Weinkrantz, a public relations expert who runs his own firm.
In addition, several members of 3DS, a nonprofit organization which puts on the events worldwide, helped. The next 3DS is next weekend in the Netherlands.
Throughout the weekend, participants experienced “a lot of extremes,” Houser said. Some entrepreneurs got their ideas extinguished early on. Others discovered, after a lot of work, that their idea wouldn’t work. One guy stayed up for 27 hours straight to work on programming a new site. Some people never left the building except to interview potential customers.
On Friday, the groups voted on the best ideas and decided who they wanted to work with to develop the idea into a company. But on Sunday, some of the original groups no longer existed like Hole in the Wall, a local restaurant review app. After doing some research, they decided the market was too saturated with similar apps so those team members went to work on other projects, Houser said.
And a new company emerged on Saturday.
Vyjayanthi Vadreavu originally pitched the idea for a documentary on homeless people and a recycled clothing line. Her idea did not get enough votes to make the final projects.
But Saturday morning, she found some people who wanted to work on it. She talked to Glangchai, one of the organizers of 3DS San Antonio, who encouraged her to pursue the idea, but with a different focus.
On Sunday, Vadreavu pitched Renew Couture with a new team. The group collects gently used clothing, delivers the items to student clothing designers at local universities and then sells the clothes made from recycled material.
An estimated four million tons of clothes get discarded every year, Vadreavu said. The opportunity to take some of the clothes and make them into new garments is huge, she said. The company would work with five local fashion schools to create the clothes.
“The clothes get a second life and the customer gets a one of a kind item,” she said.
This was the first time Vadreavu, 26, who works at Rackspace, participated in a 3DS. She plans to continue to work with her group to get the company launched and funded.
“I think it’s such a fantastic experience,” she said. “I wish I knew about it earlier in my career.”
Another woman-led venture, SimpLingo, started out as Babbling on Friday, but changed its name and refined its focus after doing a lot of research and talking with mentors, said Amando Wolf, a junior majoring in Chinese language studies at Trinity.
SimpLingo is a simple way to learn a foreign language, particularly Spanish. It’s a browser-based plug-in to translate portions of text online based on a person’s level of proficiency.
“You don’t have to deviate from your daily routine to learn the lingo,” Wolf said during her pitch.
SimpLingo was the only company to ask for money outright.
“I did the last 3 Day Startup,” said Cassie Robinson, a sophomore at Trinity studying religion, entrepreneurship and business and a team member of SimpLingo. “One of the ideas that did really well, they asked for money.”
So Robinson put up a slide requesting $10,000 and provided a bank account and routing number.
The panel of judges liked the idea and the fact they asked for funding. The panel included Jay Campion, a venture capitalist, Sheridan Chambers, one of the founders of The Denim Group, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, Suizo Mendler, a former Rackspace executive and now TechStars mentor and George Karutz, an investment banker.
SimLingo has a lot of potential, said Alex Butler, a senior majoring in engineering at Trinity and one of the team members. “It’s really scalable.”
After the pitches, the various groups worked the crowd to talk to potential investors.
Luke Carriere, head of Approachab.ly, started out pitching the app as a dating app and then switched to a professional networking app after researching the market.
“The problem was adoptability,” Carriere said. “Partnering with events organizers was a way to ensure there was a critical mass of users.”
Approachab.ly is planning a beta launch of its product in the Spring of 2012, said Carriere, a graduate business student at Fordham University who is doing a internship at the Austin Technology Incubator. He says he has $10,000 in funding from an angel investor to pursue the idea.
“It’s a way to reach out and meet new people at the same events,” Carriere said. “We think there is a market for that. And this is just the beginning.”

Prepping for the pitch session at 3 Day Startup San Antonio

November 13, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

At 7 p.m., members of the 3 Day Startup San Antonio weekend will demonstrate their new companies and pitch to a group of investors.
The group, mostly students from a variety of universities, have been working all weekend to create their startups. They’ve rarely left the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown, home to Geekdom, a new co-working collaboration space aimed at technology companies.
For a peak at what they’ve been going through, check out Nick Longo’s Flickr stream. Longo, an entrepreneur who founded Coffeecup software, heads up the Geekdom and served as a mentor to the group.
Stayed tuned. I’ll be heading to Geekdom shortly to listen to the pitches and report on the new companies.

Five companies under development at 3 Day Startup San Antonio

November 11, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

About 40 aspiring entrepreneurs gathered Friday afternoon at Geekdom downtown for 3 Day Startup San Antonio.
They brought sleeping bags, backpacks, computers and tents.
They had plenty of fuel to get them through the weekend with two refrigerators filled with Red Bull, sodas, gatorade, juice boxes, water, beer and fruit. An entire shelf held dozens of different kinds of snacks including Cheez-Its, Oreo cookies, Snickers bars and granola bars.
They spent an hour getting to know one another before breaking into eight color-coded groups to brainstorm ideas to create a new company. From 3:30 p.m. until 7:30 p.m. they worked in different offices hashing out their ideas on white boards. More than a dozen mentors and organizers also helped the participants formulate their ideas.
Luz Cristal Glangchai, associate director of Trinity University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, oversees the program.
Nick Longo, who founded Coffeecup Software, and now heads up the Geekdom, and Todd Morey, who helped create Rackspace’s cloud business, would pop in and out of the offices, offering advice.
Longo told the green team to keep in mind “what problem am I trying to solve? How large is my market? And can I execute it?”
He told them that there are a lot of sites like Prezi, Woofoo forms and Chargify that already exist that could help them mock up a website.
Morey told them to keep in mind the cost of acquiring customers.
“Going viral is not a strategy,” Longo said. “Google Ad words is not a strategy.”
The green group came up with an idea for putting a friendly face on a computer repair service targeted at the elderly and people with learning disabilities.
Longo recommended googling “The Pirate Metrics” on acquiring and retaining customers and to follow advice articulated by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup.
“If it takes too much money upfront it’s non-executable,” Longo said.
The yellow group listed a bunch of problems on a white board and then brainstormed solutions for them. They included a parking app to reserve a parking space, a grocery list helper app and a language app to help learn a foreign language.
Ryan Kelly, owner of Pear Analytics and a mentor, suggested the group gamify the language app.
“Make learning a language more fun,” he said.
Around 6 p.m., the groups broke for a catered dinner of Dicky’s barbecue brisket sandwiches, potato salad and beans. And then they went back to their offices to create powerpoint presentations and solidify their ideas.
At the pitch session, the groups presented their ideas on a giant screen. The pitches ranged from a dating app to cloud computing platform. The first pitch was for GolfAverage.com, an in-depth statistics site for golfers, which keeps track of a current game and past performance, followed by Penny for Your Thoughts, a documentary on homeless people and a sustainable clothing line.
Other ideas included BookZingo.com, a marketplace for college students to sell their textbooks, Transparent Mortgages, a site for first time homebuyers and those with credit issues, Clan, an app for music sharing, Spear Phishing, a virus and malware prevention platform, Hole in the wall, a local restaurant review site, Approachab.ly, a dating app, Kudotree, a personal recommendation site and Babbling, a program to learn a foreign language intuitively.
In the end, the group voted by putting their heads down with closed eyes and raising their hands for the idea with the greatest chance of success and the idea that they most wanted to work on. Each member had two votes.
Ideas around the hot trends of mobile, social and location garnered the most interest. The final five ideas with the most votes included GolfAverage.com, Approachab.ly, Babbling, Clan and Spear Phishing. The group leader stood before the crowd and told them what kinds of skills were needed to build out the company and then people decided whether they wanted to work for them. The largest groups formed around Approachab.ly and Babbling. Around 10 p.m. they headed for offices to get back to work. Meanwhile, Clan bit the dust. And Hole in the Wall re-emerged as a company with five people wanting to work for the idea.
“That’s going to happen,” said Rachit Shah, one of the original founders of 3DS.
“Another company will probably fail before the night’s over,” said Cam Houser, another original founder of 3DS. Four University of Texas graduate students in business, computer science, engineering and law started 3 Day Startup in 2008 and now they run it full time as a nonprofit organization.
“It’s an entrepreneurship education program for university students,” Houser said. “We were grad students and didn’t feel like the student potential for entrepreneurship was being met. More could be done to help students start ventures.”
The idea is a popular one. 3DS has put on programs around the world including China and Germany.
“You have to apply, submit a resume, pitch an idea and get interviewed,” Houser said. “Most of the people who want to participate in a 3DS are pretty passionate.”
The San Antonio program was the 17th 3DS.
“It’s free to participants,” Houser said. “We’re giving them a scholarship.” It costs around $500 per person which includes catered meals, snacks and drinks and place to hold the event. Corporate sponsors contribute the bulk of the money.
“The only time they leave the building is to talk to customers,” Houser said. “On Sunday, their eyes are bloodshot and they smell bad but they’re really fired up.”
The 3DS organizers do have rules. They don’t let pre-existing companies pitch and they don’t allow anyone to pitch porn sites.
“It ranges from an idea on a napkin, up to they’ve done a lot of market research and they have a site in mind,” Houser said. “We provide an exciting and high energy environment that resembles a startup with long hours and overlaying order onto chaos.
So far, 16 companies have spun out of 3Ds that have raised $4 million, Houser said. They include Hoot.me, FanDash, Console.FM and Famigo.
FanDash, formerly BandDemand.com, is one of the startups to spin out of the San Antonio 3DS program.
The founder of Hurricane Party pitched his idea but no one wanted to do it, Houser said. But he did meet five of his six members of his team at 3DS, he said. The company is now called Foreca.st and is doing well.
Christian Salmagne from Aachen, Germany, brought 3DS startup to his hometown last summer. Forty students met at the RWTH Aachen University and at least one of the companies is still up and running, Salmagne said. The company is Tamyca.de, which stands for Take My Car. It’s a peer to peer personal car sharing site.
Salmagne attended the San Antonio 3DS. He’s currently doing a three month fellowship at the Austin Technology Incubator to learn about entrepreneurship so he can take his knowledge back to his hometown to help with Germay’s startup community.
“I’m helping people and observing,” Salmagne said. “I like to experience this energy. You get addicted to it.”

Austin-based Mass Relevance partners with Twitter

November 10, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Twitter wants to harness the power of TV to encourage people to log on to the micro-blogging site.
To that end, it struck up a partnership with Austin-based Mass Relevance today. Mass Relevance created a content curation system for an estimated 250 million tweets each day.
For example, NBC’s The Voice used Mass Relevance’s platform to feature tweets about its show during its live broadcast. The ability to get real-time feedback from viewers during the show made it edgy, fresh and plugged in.
Mass Relevance also worked with E! Online during the Oscars to publish the best and most relevant tweets to a microsite the broadcaster created for the show.
The startup works with companies to curate Twitter streams about their brand, product or show and display the content on TV and other devices.
Sam Decker, CEO of Mass Relevance, left another Austin startup Bazaarvoice, to found the company in 2010.
Twitter published this blog post about the partnership saying it extends Twitter’s reach and fills the need from brands, publishers and TV networks looking to expand their content. Twitter also announced a partnership with Crimson Hexagon, which created a social media monitoring and analysis system for brands.

San Antonio’s Three Day Startup kicks off Friday

November 9, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

For three days, 40 people will meet, brainstorm and create companies during San Antonio’s Three Day Startup Weekend.
The action takes place this Friday at the Geekdom at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
Luz Cristal Glangchai, associate director of Trinity University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, oversees the program. She held a bootcamp last night at Trinity for the participants to brief them on what to expect during the weekend and what to bring with them.
The weekend kicks off at 2:30 p.m. on Friday and concludes with the newly-formed companies pitching their ventures to funders and others on Sunday. That portion is open to the public, but the rest is closed.
About half the participants are students from Trinity, the University of Texas at Austin and at San Antonio, St. Mary’s and even as far away as Rice and Iowa State.
“It’s really about education,” Glangchai said. “It’s kind of a really intense hands on lesson in entrepreneurship.”
This is the third Three Day Startup Weekend in San Antonio. The first took place at the Molina Healthcare building last November, followed by another one at Rackspace in May, Glangchai said.
Three Day Startup Weekend, fashioned after the original Startup Weekend, took place in Austin. Some University of Texas students held the first one in 2008. Since then, companies spin out of the Austin startup weekends have raised $4 million. Some of them include Famigo and Forecast.
The biggest success story in San Antonio is BandDemand, Glangchai said.