Category: Austin (Page 180 of 318)

People Pattern Digs Marketing Data Out of Social Media

March 9, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

Photo licensed from iStockphotos

By TIM GREEN
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Twitter emerged with a splash at South by Southwest in 2007, unleashing an ever-growing barrage of tweets, posts, photos, and other social media interactions.

People Pattern, an Austin startup, is fittingly staging its coming out party at this year’s SXSW.

The company is developing software that mines the oceans of information embedded in social media to provide insight that companies can use to develop sharply focused digital marketing campaigns quickly and efficiently.

People Pattern applies data science to analyze indicators such as the words people use and the people they associate with – their patterns – to identify specific segments and sub-segments of customers. With that information companies can tailor messages for specific groups, develop content, generate sales leads and in media planning.

“We’re able to scale it, collapse the timelines and you’re able to take action directly,” Ken Cho, a People Pattern co-founder and chief executive, said of the market research process.

Cho, a founder and former chief executive of social marketing company Spredfast, brings the digital marketing expertise to People Pattern. The data science comes from co-founder Jason Baldridge, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Texas who conducts research in computational linguistics.

They started the company in early 2013. Now it formally launches at SxSW with an open house at its Pedernales Street offices in East Austin and an invitation-only party at Franklin Barbecue.

People Pattern looks to catch a rising wave of corporate spending on digital marketing. The Gartner Group reported that while digital marketing is still a fraction of traditional marketing spending, more companies are transitioning to digital channels and increasing spending to address them.

“Historically, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent annually on marketing, yet businesses had no real way to measure its true impact and return on investment,” said Bryan Stolle, a partner in the Mohr Davidow venture capital firm and an investor in People Pattern. “It was also very difficult to give attribution to which marketing program or dollar actually resulted in a sale.”

Using computational methods in marketing, called quantitative marketing, provides accurate feedback on what works and enables precise understanding of customers, Stolle said.

With a venture investment, he’s betting on Cho’s marketing and entrepreneurial acumen and Baldridge’s computational expertise. “I immediately saw them as a very powerful team that could build something game-changing in the quantitative marketing field,” he said.

Mohr Davidow invested $250,000 of seed money in early 2013 and came back at the end of that year with a $4.5 million Series A round.

In the past two years, the company has been developing its software, which involves natural language processing and analytics. And it’s putting together a track record serving a range of customers, including some Fortune 500 companies.

As an example, Cho and Baldridge recounted work People Pattern did for a large fast food company known for its hamburger restaurants arching across the world.

The company hired People Pattern to figure out switchers, a segment of customers who go back and forth between its restaurants and those of competitors.

Cho said that within eight days People Pattern pulled in 600,000 social media profiles, harvested relevant information from posts and tweets and other interactions, and analyzed it.

People Pattern found that the hamburger chain shared 25% of its switchers with a chain of sandwich shops. The switchers subbed in sandwiches for burgers because of health perceptions.

Cho said that the switchers should be targeted with messaging highlighting the hamburger chain’s healthier options.

Beyond that core task, Cho said People Pattern matched research about customer categories that the company had learned over 35 years of market research. People Pattern also uncovered a group of “breakfast only professionals” in Sacramento, which led to a market test of all day breakfast in the California capital.

People Pattern delivered validation and contributed to product development as well as fulfilled its assigned task, Cho said.

“All in eight days,” he said. “Their CEO was blown away.”

Cho can talk marketing, personas and market all day. Baldridge matches him step for step on the technology side. He researches computational linguistics, particularly natural language processing and machine learning. He’s on leave from UT Austin during the 2014-2015 academic year to work on People Pattern.

His boss at UT said Baldridge brings strong skills to People Pattern.

“Jason is doing fundamental work in machine learning and geo-temporal grounding of natural language, among other things,” said Anthony Woodbury, chair of the Department of Linguistics at UT-Austin. “There is therefore a very close connection between Jason’s research and teaching, and his work with People Pattern.”

Cho and Baldridge had met six years ago and Cho had kept track of Baldridge. (“He was stalking me,” Baldridge joked.) When Cho shared his ideas with Baldridge, the professor, as he’s called around People Pattern, was on board.

“This guy knows what he’s doing,” Baldridge remembers thinking. “He’s got a business problem that needs to be solved by Fortune 500 companies. Cool! That’s exactly what I was looking for.”

The program that Baldridge and the other data scientists at People Pattern have developed taps into social network databases to gather information, classify words, associate people in groups, and analyze the data.

With the databases and the tools of data science People Pattern can do in days what takes months for traditional marketing campaigns to do.

“We have the potential and have shown several times that within a week we can collect hundreds of thousands of profiles and run it all through this automated pipeline that then leads into something akin to personas,” Baldridge said.

Cho said other companies are working in a similar area but none possess People Pattern’s hard-core science approach.

Stolle, for one, is encouraged by the company’s progress. “The company is definitely tracking ahead of plan – always a good sign for long-term success,” he said.

Austin Hackney United Official Program Launches

March 5, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Texas Representative Tan Parker wants to make Austin the most competitive and easy place for any company in Britain to set up shop, according to UK Consul General Andrew Millar, speaking to a group of about 40 at the official launch of Austin Hackney United, a sister-cities program between Austin and a suburb of London that houses Europe’s fastest growing tech center, Tech City.

“It’s a steep hill to climb” Millar said, “but you’ve got an opportunity to get something really interesting and positive going here…. The US-UK relationship is writ large in Texas in the coolest city in Texas and in America in my opinion. You are an internationally connected city. You have an audience of 3.5 billion people with F1, SXSW is a world class event…. There are some things government does well and some things it does less well. We support wonderfully, but it takes people with passion and vision and appetite to accomplish what the people in this room have accomplished.”

Austin City Mayor Steve Adler also praised the group who had been working on the partnership since 2012. and has expanded it to relationships between Austin Community College and Hackney Community College and grassroots relationship building between startups and incubators on both sides of the pond.

“You get involved with city government and you realize that so much of what is important, in fact most of what is important is happening outside city government,” Adler said to the group at the invitation-only happy hour at Techstars offices on Congress. “At this point Austin aspires to be one of the truly great international cities. We may not be able to knock on the door of the mayor of London just yet but we’re not far from having, I think, that kind of position in so many areas

Perks Help to Attract and Retain High Tech Talent

March 4, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By Laura Lorek
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

BigCommerce photos courtesy of the company.

Back in the highflying dot com days, the perks at high tech companies flowed as freely as the beer from onsite kegs on Fridays.

Today, the competitive landscape for tech workers has meant another resurgence of perks to lure employees and keep them happy. And whiskey Fridays and beer bashes are back.

The perks have gone as high-tech as the companies. Last year, Apple and Facebook added egg freezing to its employee benefits package.

An informal survey of tech workers in Austin, shows some of the popular local perks include flexible work hours, comprehensive healthcare benefits programs, free lunches, fully stocked refrigerators and pantries full of snacks, telecommuting, gym memberships, pets in the workplace, standing desks, free parking and liberal vacation policies.

With more companies setting up shop in Central Texas every year, the demand for high-tech talent continues to grow.

In Austin, high tech workers make up 9 percent of the workforce or about 100,000 jobs, but the tech industry supports more than one third of all jobs in the economy, according to the Austin Technology Council. The ATC reports the tech sector contributes $21 billion annually to the local economy and tech workers, with average salaries of $155,000, are a big part of that.

BigCommerce, which provides websites and services to more than 55,000 stores, has been growing like gangbusters in Austin. It now has 280 employees

Anna Thoni, manager of enterprise accounts, joined BigCommerce two months ago from Rackspace.

One of her favorite perks is breakfast in the company kitchen. She bonds with her co-workers over oatmeal and coffee.

“It’s like being at home and being productive,” she said.

Throughout the day, she’ll pop into the snack room for Topo Chico water, nuts, fruit, cheese and little things that keep her going.

And when she needs to de-stress, she goes to the “Chillax,” relaxation room equipped with a massage chair, noise cancellation machine and dim lighting.
When she wants a little more activity, she might hop on one of the swings suspended from the ceiling near the game room.

The employees decide what kind of perks BigCommerce offers, said Steven Donnelly, its human resources director. And perks do help attract talent, he said.

“If you look at any high tech company in Austin they are touting perks on their website,” he said. Employees expect them, he said.

Yet not all wishes get granted. When BigCommerce raised its latest funding round, some employees suggested the company get a helicopter, but that didn’t seem like a good use of investor money, Donnelly said.

BigCommerce also offers good medical insurance coverage, an open vacation policy that lets people take as much time off as they wish, maternity and paternity policies, Tuesday catered lunches, scooters and skateboards to get around the office and happy hour on Fridays and the swings.

“We wanted to bring the playground into the office,” Donnelly said. “It’s OK to have a little fun when you’re at work.”

At its headquarters in San Antonio, Rackspace has a two-story spiral slide that’s quite popular with employees. It also has four Gondolas from Breckenridge Park that workers use for meeting places. The company also has food truck days in which employees can dine outside at picnic tables.

One of the popular perks at SpareFoot in downtown Austin is bring your pet to work day, said Cathy Guthrie, the company’s human resource director.

“Perks absolutely play a big role in how we are able to recruit in a hot market,” Guthrie said.

And another popular perk is its food. Everyday, the company has a chef prepare a hot meal. Recently, the chef prepared Italian sausage; herb roasted chicken, roasted new potatoes and a squash casserole for vegetarians.

SpareFoot also pays 100 percent of its employees’ health insurance premiums and offers an overall competitive benefits package and gym membership. And every employee is a stockholder.

“We have a no vacation policy, policy – you take what you need and schedule it as an adult – you self-manage,” Guthrie said. “We believe that you can balance your real life and your work life in a harmonious way.”

SpareFoot is also active in the Austin Startup Games, which it has won several years in a row. It hosts game nights and has more than 30 social and service events on its calendar for employees to participate in outside of work.

The company is hiring and expects to have 280 employees by the end of the year, Guthrie said. In the face of tremendous growth, SpareFoot also strives to maintain its fun-loving company culture, she said. Its CEO Chuck Gordon has fireside chats with employees about every six weeks.

At Capital Factory, the downtown incubator, accelerator and coworking space, employees get four weeks of paid vacation, a parking spot and a benefits package. But the real attraction is the opportunity to meet people like Peter Thiel, Slash from Guns & Roses and President Barack Obama, said Josh Baer, Capital Factory’s founder.

Capital Factory has 25 employees. But many more employees work at its startups based there. And they all get Capital Factory’s premiere downtown location, inspiring space and great views along with a stocked kitchen and catered meals twice a week, Baer said.

Perks are important in attracting talent, but companies ultimately don’t compete on perks, he said.

If a company doesn’t have a great workplace and culture, it will be hard to attract and retain employees in Austin’s hot tech market, Baer said.

“The big attraction of working at Capital Factory is you are plugged into this energy and all of this stuff going on,” he said.

Correction: the original version of this story misspelled Cathy Guthrie’s name

Ways to Get Startup Bucks in Silicon Hills

March 3, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By Laura Lorek
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The funding landscape for startups in Central Texas has changed dramatically in the last five years.

New firms have launched like LiveOak Venture Partners in Austin and the Geekdom Fund in San Antonio.

And old firms have faded away like Austin Ventures, the big daddy of Austin’s venture capital firms.

Earlier this year, Austin Ventures reported it would not be raising another fund.

And Fortune Magazine published an article titled “The Death of Austin Ventures.”

“For decades, Austin Ventures was more than just the largest and most powerful venture capital firm in Texas. It was one of the largest and most powerful venture capital firms in the world,” according to the Fortune article. “But now it’s a zombie, slowing decaying into little more than a memory.”

Austin Ventures raised its last fund of $900 million in 2008.

And while overall venture capital deals in Austin have been on the rise, Austin Ventures’ participation has been on the decline, according to CB Insights, a venture capital research firm.

“In 2010, Austin Ventures accounted for 15% of new investment deals in Austin but, five years later, that figure had fallen to 4%,” CB Insights reported.

Despite Austin Ventures’ pullback, overall, venture capital funding is on the rise. Venture Capitalists nationwide invested $48.3 billion in 4,356 deals in 2014, up 61 percent in dollars and 4 percent increase in deals, compared to 2013, according to the MoneyTree report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

Austin had 114 deals, which raised $620.5 million in venture capital last year, and San Antonio had nine deals with $109.5 invested.

“The change at AV isn’t failure, it’s evolution,” Joshua Baer, founder of Capital Factory, wrote in a post on Medium.
Other funding diversified sources have taken root in Austin to fill the needs of tech entrepreneurs looking to launch ventures. A few of those sources are listed below.

Equity-based crowdfunding – The Texas State Securities Commission has approved several new portals that allow entrepreneurs to raise money directly from the public for their ventures. Mass Venture in San Antonio is the first portal to receive approval. It focuses on real estate investment. The state has approved two other portals: Crudefunders and TruCrowd, both are based in Houston.

Central Texas Angel Network – one of the nation’s top five most active angel investment groups. CTAN’s investments range from $250,000 to $2 million or more. CTAN has invested more than $45 million in more than 100 companies since 2006.

LiveOak Venture Partners – Focuses on early stage tech startups throughout Texas with its $100 million fund. Its minimum investment is usually $250,000.

Silverton Partners – an Austin based company that mostly invests in tech companies. It has a partnership with Capital Factory to provide select Capital Factory accelerator startups with funding. Silverton generally invests between $200,000 and $2 million.

Geekdom Fund – a new fund, launched this year, has raised nearly $3 million to invest in early-stage tech startups in Austin and San Antonio.

Robert Langer Takes Innovations from the Lab to the Marketplace

February 28, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin with Dr. Robert Langer, Koch Institute Professor at MIT.

Known as a modern-day Thomas Edison of biotechnology, Dr. Robert Langer visited the University of Texas at Austin on Friday to inspire others who wish to emulate his success.

Langer gave UT students, faculty and guests advice on how he has started 18 companies, has written nearly 1,300 scientific research papers and received more than 1000 patents.

A Koch Institute Professor at MIT, Langer has conducted research in his lab that has led to drug discoveries resulting in billions of lives saved worldwide. He has also created more effective treatments for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia and alcoholism.

On the lighter side, through collaboration with Hollywood Actress Jennifer Aniston in a company called Living Proof, his chemical research has invented hair care products to add more body to dull and lifeless hair and to treat frizz.

Bob Metcalfe, Nicholas Peppas with UT and Robert Langer with MIT.

Langer shared some of his experiences in an hour-long discussion with Bob Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation at UT Austin and Nicholas Peppas, Chair of the UT Biomedical Engineering Department, during a talk to about 200 people at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. He later gave another talk with Metcalfe and Dell Medical School Dean Dr. Clay Johnston on spurring innovation at the new UT medical school.

Peppas gave a lengthy introduction of Langer listing many of his accomplishments and awards. Langer has won more than 220 major awards including this year the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, one of the most influential engineering prizes in the world. Peppas concluded with the quick assessment of Langer as a man who solves problems and helps others solve problems too.

Next, Peppas asked Langer: “How do you do it?”

“Now it almost seems kind of natural,” Langer said.

Langer’s Lab at MIT focuses on biotechnology and materials science. His major interest is in drug development and delivery. In the lab, his students do thesis and postdoctoral projects and experiments that often lead to breakthrough patents and products. Langer wanted to get those discoveries out of lab and into the marketplace.

For a time, he thought that if they did the work, people would use it.

“It happens some of the time, but very rarely,” Langer said. “I found that if you’re not your own champion very few people use it.”

That really was the initial motivation for Langer to spin startup companies out of his lab.

“Some of it goes back to the early ‘80s,” Langer said.

The companies could do things Langer said he and his students couldn’t like manufacturing, clinical trials and create products that get out into the world.

“These companies magnified the impact of what we were doing in the lab tremendously,” Langer said.

But the process to commercialize technology was very hard.

The Patent Process

For one thing, Langer couldn’t get a patent issued. The patent examiner turned down his patent application five years in a row and the lawyer he was working with wanted to quit pursuing it because it was costing a lot of money. He finally convinced the patent examiner to allow the patent “on polymer systems for controlled release of macromolecules” after he provided affidavits from scientific experts that the work his lab was doing was against conventional wisdom.

“Having that patent was important,” Langer said.

But it was still painstakingly difficult to get a product to market. Multi-billion dollar companies licensed his patents. But the companies would do an experiment or two a year and when the experiments failed, they gave up, Langer said. That’s when he decided to start a company and he was able to get the patents back.

“It took a long time.” Langer said. “And even then when we did it we ran into problems. Our first CEO wasn’t very good. There were all kinds of issues. You keep learning, mostly by making mistakes.”

Working with Venture Capitalists

Metcalfe recounted the first time he first met Langer at Polaris Partners, a venture capital firm based in Boston. Metcalfe, a rookie venture capitalist, was just learning the ropes.

“That first week on the job, Terry McGuire (co-founder of Polaris) invited me to a meeting with you,” Metcalfe said.

Langer presented five PowerPoint slides on sugar sequencing tools and he was seeking a $1 million investment. At the end of the meeting, McGuire gave Langer the $1 million and Metcalfe kicked $100,000 in the deal.

Polaris and Metcalfe got a handsome return on that investment, Langer said.

The story of Momenta and creating the first bio-generic drug approved by the FDA

“Momenta is a good example of the kind of things we do,” Langer said.

No one had ever sequenced a polysaccharide, which is a complex chain of carbohydrates, until Momenta, a startup Langer co-founded, tackled the problem.

“We came up with a combination of technologies using enzymes and mass spectrometry that allowed us to sequence polysaccharides,” Langer said.

Momenta focused on creating generic versions of complex drugs, in particular, the researchers created Enoxaparin, a generic version of the $4 billion drug Lovenox, which is used to prevent blood clots.

“They didn’t think we could sequence it,” Langer said. “But we did. What happened is that led to making what’s called a bio-generic. The FDA allowed the approval of this. We could show a chemical identity with the techniques we had – so the FDA gave us the approval in 2010.”

Momenta’s generic version of Lovenox made more than $1 billion in its first year, Langer said.

But Langer’s work isn’t just about making money, it’s about saving lives.

In 2008, Langer worked with the FDA during the Chinese heparin crisis. Heparin, a widely used blood thinner, became contaminated and led to the deaths of people in 11 countries, Langer said. Momenta worked with the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control to identify the contaminate and to establish new standards by which heparin could no longer kill people, Langer said.

“The deaths went to zero,” Langer said. “That would never have happened without these sequencing technologies.”

Taking products out of the lab and to market

Peppas asked Langer how he comes up with his breakthrough ideas and when does he know it’s time to commercialize them.

Fundamental research in his lab or with a collaborator has sparked almost all of the companies, Langer said.

“We’re always doing the next project,” Langer said. “We’ve been working on a number of things for many years. Something reaches a point of maturity and makes sense to have a company.”

Timing is crucial when launching a company out of the lab.

“Sometimes people start too early or too late,” Langer said. “If you start too soon, investors get tired.”

He advised students and researchers to file a patent before they publish their paper in a scientific journal.

“An early draft of a paper for me is a good time to file a provisional patent,” he said.

Peppas asked Langer when should inventors approach investors?

“What I like do, if it’s possible, is go in with a bang,” Langer said. “Have a really powerful paper in Nature or Science. Know that we filed the patent and that we have good data. Go in before that paper is out.”

The story of Living Proof

Metcalfe asked Langer how he got involved with creating Living Proof, his hair care company in collaboration with the Actress Aniston. He recalled Amir Nashat, a managing partner at Polaris, walking into a meeting and his jet black hair was shiny and beautiful and he was promoting Living Proof’s new hair care line.

“Amir was one of my graduate students,” Langer said. “He got his PhD with me. But he ended up choosing a career in venture capital at Polaris.”

“Most of my research has been kind of basic engineering and science, if anything, applied to medicine,” Langer said.

One day, Nashat and John Flint, a partner at Polaris, visited him and asked him to tackle the problem of frizzy hair.

The science on hair wasn’t very good, Langer said. Out of the 50 products on the market to treat frizzy hair, all of them had silicone as their active ingredient, he said.

Researchers in Langer’s Lab took a material science approach to the problem. They wanted to find a material more hydrophobic than silicone to keep the moisture out. They discovered PolyfluoroEster and used it to create no-frizz shampoos and conditioners, which are one of Living Proof’s best-selling products at Sephora Stores. They also used fundamental chemistry and tapped into a library of polymers they had created to find polymers that could create more body for the hair, Langer said.

“It’s been quite exciting,” Langer said. “It’s been an interesting application of science to hair care.”

Langer also said he invests his own money in companies, but not that much. He usually does it to boost investment in a company he likes, because others follow his lead.

And although Langer has had a lot of failures in the lab, none of the companies he has started have failed.

Metcalfe asked Langer how he measures success?

“To me, the metric is helping people,” Langer said. “If you do that, and you make an impact, everything else flows.”

Six Women Run Tech Startups to Watch in Austin

February 27, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Laura Bosworth, co-founder of TeVido Biodevices, photo by John Davidson.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The stats don’t bode well for women-run tech startups nationwide. Less than 3 percent of venture-backed startups have a woman as a CEO.

But things are changing. Groups like Women@Austin, Women Who Code and Women in Technology are shining a spotlight on female tech entrepreneurs locally. And crowdfunding, bootstrapping, government grants and angel investors are helping more women entrepreneurs to launch and grow their ventures.

In fact, Nerd Wallet named Austin as one of the top 10 places for female entrepreneurs. And here’s six women run technology startups in Austin to keep an eye on as they expand their ventures:

Spot on Sciences – Dr. Jeanette Hill founded her medical device startup in 2010. It creates a blood collection device called HemaSpot. It lets people take a blood sample safely, securely and easily from a remote location and send it to their doctor for analysis. The company is bootstrapped but has received about $2 million in research grants.

TeVido Biodevices – Laura Bosworth is the co-founder and CEO of this life sciences startup that is making nipples from human cells using 3D printers. The company recently completed a successful crowd-funding campaign and received a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health and a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Fashion Metric – Daina Linton is a CEO and co-founder of the startup that acts as a virtual tailor. Her husband, Morgan Linton, is also a co-founder. They founded the company in Los Angeles and moved to Austin last year to participate in Techstars. They decided to permanently relocate and they recently closed on $1 million in financing. The company makes software and has a special algorithm to help people find the right-sized clothes online.

Testlio – Kristel Viidik is one of two co-founders of this startup that is a community of test engineers that test mobile apps to find bugs. The company, originally from Estonia, relocated to Austin to participate in the first Austin Techstars program in 2013. The company has raised $1 million.

Wisegate – CEO Sara Gates founded the company in 2010 and has since raised nearly $9 million. Wisegate has created a platform for IT leaders to interact and share information.

Double Line Partners – Zeynep Young founded the company in 2009 and has since grown it to $20 million in revenue and 120 employees. The startup makes software, data system dashboards and other tools to help schools improve the performance of their students in grades K-12.

Sprinklr Acquires Austin-based Pluck

February 26, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Sprinklr announced Thursday its acquisition of Pluck, an Austin-based social media company.

This is Sprinklr’s second acquisition of an Austin company. A year ago, New York-based Sprinklr acquired the Dachis Group in Austin, a social media and brand analytics company.

Financial terms of the deal were not announced.

“First party and third party social experiences have been historically disconnected, resulting in incongruent brand experiences and confused customers. Sprinklr’s strategic acquisition of Pluck solves this long-running problem for the enterprise,” Ragy Thomas, founder and CEO of Sprinklr said in a news release. “Over the last five years, we have built a fully extensive platform to comprehensively handle third party social experiences. Acquiring Pluck is the next logical step for us, as it extends these capabilities to include first party experience management.”

Demand Media acquired Pluck, founded in 2003. The company makes social community platform software. Its customers include Walgreens, Mattel and L’Oreal.

HackerRank Event Explores Latest STEM Recruiting Strategies

February 25, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Whole Foods’ Global Talent Recruiter Andres Traslavina

About 30 recruiters gathered on the 17th floor of the Hyatt Tuesday evening for the HackerRank second annual Re-engineer event focusing on improving tech recruiting outcomes.

HackerRank representatives talked about their platform that replaces job fairs with hackathons and code sprints. And Whole Foods’ Global Talent Recruiter Andres Traslavina gave a keynote about connecting with work that reflects your life’s purpose. But the recruiters present still seemed convinced that the most effective way to bring in talent was to pay employees to refer their friends.

According to the Chamber of Commerce, Austin has roughly 7,000 unfilled IT jobs. One strategy to fill them is to sponsor a code sprint, where hiring companies have hackers compete to solve engineering problems online and then use the results to choose people to recruit. Founded in 2012, HackerRank provides these code sprints for various skill levels and in various languages. There’s a game element, including leaderboards, for the million plus hackers the company says have joined.

HackerRank lists among its customers Facebook, Yelp and Evernote and contends it reduces the time to hire by 50 percent to 80 percent.

Eric Anderson, Austin sales manager of Jobvite said company’s research shows nearly 70 percent of STEM job seekers use Facebook compared to 40 percent on LinkedIn and having a mobile optimized engagement experience helps elevate a company’s brand in the eyes of engineers. He also said 40 percent of STEM employees come into a company through referrals.

But Anderson, like most of those present suggested referral bonuses. “The company needs to really push out those referral bonuses,” he said. “There are things you can do to dangle a carrot….You should get employees engaged early on and use it so that your job postings go out to their networks automatically.”

Whole Foods Traslavina talked about how he moved from a job that was just about money to a calling when he signed on to Whole Foods. He admits that the Whole Foods hiring process is arduous, involving an interview process with a panel of 10-to-20 executives. For Whole Foods, the three questions are:

Can you do the job?

Why do you want to work at Whole Foods?

Will we enjoy working together?

Some people, he admitted, do drop off during the hiring process but Whole Foods considers that a positive kind of self-selection. Whole Foods also recruits by pushing out jobs on dedicated social networks frequented by the kinds of developers it is looking for, and through LinkedIn, he said. While many of the people he emails get bombarded with recruiters emails, Traslavina said Whole Foods’ brand is so positive people generally respond right away.

The event included a workshop in which teams were charged to identify their chief obstacles to sourcing and recruiting the talent they needed and coming up with a product or strategy to overcome those obstacles.

Strategies included:

• A platform with predictive analytics that monitored signs that a person was getting ready to change jobs, such as updating a LinkedIn profile and targeted that person with interesting and engaging content about the recruiting company on channels such as YouTube.

• Sharing resources—what one participant called “black market recruiting” such that if one candidate didn’t fit a particular position recruiters passed that candidate’s information on to other recruiters.

• Having parties and upping financial incentives to get employees reaching out to their friends, especially if they have contacts with people involved in events like the International Math Olympiad.

The event concluded with a panel in which various companies discussed how they used HackerRank.

HomeAway Reports Increase in Revenue and Slight Profit for Latest Quarter

February 24, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

One of the print ads for HomeAway’s new marketing campaign

HomeAway, the world’s largest online marketplace for vacation rentals, Tuesday reported revenue for the fourth quarter increased nearly 22 percent to $109.7 million compared to the same quarter a year ago.

The Austin-based company reported a profit of $162,000 or less than a cent a share for the fourth quarter compared to a loss of nearly $1.6 million for the same quarter a year ago.

HomeAway also reported its results for 2014. Its total revenue increased nearly 29 percent to $446.8 million and it had net income of $13.4 million or 14 cents per share.

“We’ve had a terrific year, delivering strong financial results and meaningful improvements in the traveler experience on our sites,” Brian Sharples, chief executive of HomeAway, said in a news release. “HomeAway recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Over the past decade, the company has experienced tremendous growth but what we’re most proud of is bringing friends and families together in vacation rentals around the globe.”

HomeAway also introduced a new global marketing campaign this week focused on “the whole family” traveling together and staying in a house.

Sharples has also done a series of high profile interviews recently with Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News talking about the difference between HomeAway’s business model and its competitor Airbnb.

Crowds Gather in Austin to Play Ingress, a Mobile Game Aimed at World Domination

February 23, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Amanda Saunders from Houston reacts to getting a rare card in the Ingress game

Dressed in blue, the color of the Resistance, Amanda Saunders flew in from Houston to do battle against the Enlightened in Austin on Saturday.

Saunders joined more than 1,200 people who gathered Saturday at the historic American Legion Charles Johnson home for the Shonin XM Anomaly, a real life battle in the Ingress augmented reality game.

Saunders, a level 11 Agent in Ingress, is a leader in the Ingress Houston community and the game has taken her around the world. She wears pins on her dress from the other anomaly Ingress events she has attended.

“It’s given me the ability to explore and to continue to help people,” Saunders said.

Her older brother introduced her to Ingress in December of 2012, shortly after it launched. It came at a time in her life, when she needed something to fill the void left from an injury that put an end to her job as a paramedic. She began to play Ingress to get out and meet people.

Niantic Labs, a subsidiary of Google, launched Ingress as an Android only app in November of 2012. The company released an iPhone version last year. It has quickly gained in popularity. People have downloaded the app more than 8 million times and it’s played in 200 countries.

A Niantic Labs representative hands out patches to Ingress Shonin Anomaly players

So what exactly is Ingress? One player described it as a real life version of capture the flag. It’s also been described as a massively multiplayer augmented reality game. To play Ingress, people download the app onto their mobile smartphone and then they chose an agent name. Next they are told an elaborate science fiction backstory that involves physicists at CERN discovering something called “Exotic Matter” or XM. The Enlightened faction wants to help spread XM and believe it benefits mankind. The Resistance wants to save mankind from XM and wipe it out entirely. Players must decide which faction to join – the Enlightened is the green team, known as frogs. The Resistance is the blue team, known as Smurfs. The two factions battle for control of portals, which can be statues, artworks, historical markers, monuments and other important sites. A scanner in the game helps to detect the portals. The players then must walk to them to deploy resonators to capture them. They earn points playing the game and they can level up from Agent one, the lowest level, to Agent 15, the highest.

The Austin anomaly event lasted about six hours with most of the time spent hiking or biking around the city to fight for control of portals. It concluded with a happy hour on the lawn of the Johnson House. Some players wore masks to keep their identities a secret. Many of the players wore green or blue T-shirts to identify with their factions. Some carried flags. Players also received special pins and badges for attending the event.

Bill Kilday, marketing director for Niantic Labs, maker of Ingress is based in Austin

Bill Kilday, known as agent BillyK in Ingress and also marketing director for Niantic Labs, presented awards to players who walked the most kilometers in a week and other milestones. And a player from India, who travelled the farthest to attend the event, received a box containing everything he needs to put on an Ingress event back home. Another guy from Iceland claimed second place. Others flew in from Boston, Wisconsin and Canada.

Kilday also announced that the Enlightened Faction won the overall Austin Shonin Anomaly.

In addition to the Austin Anomaly, Ingress held Shonin Anomalies in Atlanta and Las Vegas in the U.S. and in Medellin, Colombia, Florence, Italy, Brno, Czech Republic, Alexandria, Egypt and Bilbao, Spain. In Egypt, authorities detained Ingress players after they mistook them for protesters, according to a Slash Gear article.

Bill Kilday announcing the winners at the end of the Austin Shonin Anomaly

Two years ago, Niantic held its first Ingress Austin event in connection with South by Southwest in March with just 35 people attending, Kilday said. Last year, 300 people attended, he said. Saturday’s event was the largest Ingress event in the U.S., he said.

Austin has an active Ingress community. Groups often meetup on the weekends to go on tours throughout the city to capture portals. Niantic also has three employees in Austin including Kilday. It has 50 overall with most of them based at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

The game has grown in popularity through word of mouth and organically among the players and their friends, Kilday said.

“Ultimately it comes down to people having fun,” he said. “They are making a lot of friends and exploring their city.”

The game has taken Saunders to far-flung places she would not have gone otherwise, she said. She’s travelled to Finland, Bermuda and Canada to play Ingress. In the U.S., she’s visited Atlanta, New York, Florida, California and Alaska to play the game.

“With Ingress, I see a city in a whole different way,” Saunders said.

When she gets to a new city, she opens up the app and starts to explore by discovering new portals. The app acts as a guidebook of places to visit and as a journal of places she’s been.

The app identifies things that someone might know about even if they’ve lived in a city for years, Saunders said. It also gets people walking. Video games are often associated with sedentary activity like a person sitting on a couch playing for hours. But with Ingress, the app actually instructs the player to walk to discover portals and to capture them.

“You become much more in tune with your environment and your life,” Saunders said. “Underneath what you’re really doing is exploring culture and history.”

For example, Gettysburg has more than 1,000 portals, Saunders said.

“You’re really exploring where you came from,” she said.

It’s also about meeting new friends, Saunders said. The people she has met have been very friendly and helpful and she’s never felt afraid because they’re strangers, she said. In fact, she is sharing a house in Austin with 20 people and she’s only met five of them before the weekend.

“There’s a whole different level of trust because of the game. I’m meeting friends for life,” she said. “And I get to see some incredible things that make me appreciate the world a lot more.”