Category: Austin (Page 190 of 318)

Everyone can be a creator now on the Internet, said Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.

It doesn’t take anything but an idea and an Internet connection, Ohanian said during an afternoon keynote address at Dell World held at the Austin Convention Center.

When Ohanian and his University of Virginia roommate, Steve Huffman, pitched their idea for MyMobileMenu to Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, they got rejected. But later, Graham called Ohanian and invited them to join the first Y Combinator class.

They didn’t like their idea for MyMobileMenu, an application that would allow people to order and pay for their food in advance of pickup, thereby skipping lines and saving time, but they liked Ohanian and Huffman.

“It was an idea ahead of its time,” Ohanian said.

Instead, Graham asked them to think up a problem they faced regularly. They both liked to read news online but had a hard time finding it and organizing it in one place. They decided to build a way to find out what’s new and interesting online.

Graham told them to “Build the front page of the Internet.”

At 21 years old, Ohanian said why not? In June of 2005, three weeks after joining the program, they created the first version of Reddit, a news aggregation site that allows users to up vote and down vote posts and add comments. Today, Reddit has 175 million registered users from all over the world. Conde Nast bought the site in 2006.

“This is less a testament of what Steve and I were able to do,” Ohanian said. “It’s a testament to the age we live in.”

There is so much more innovation to come, he said.

Today, at 31, Ohanian meets 18 year olds that have already shipped their first apps.

“And we’re still just getting started,” he said.

In the last year, Ohanian visited 85 universities and more than 200 places overall all across North America on a book tour to promote his book “Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed.”

“Starting from your dorm room, you can build something that can change the world,” Ohanian said. “Everyone is thinking of themselves as an entrepreneur.

And that’s a good thing, Ohanian said.

“The more of us who can be entrepreneurs, the better off we’re going to be,” he said. “This generation coming up doesn’t just consume stuff but creates it.”

Software, technology and the Internet are affecting everything, Ohanian said. Software is affecting every single industry, he said.

“We’re all here with front row seats to this change,” he said. “Whatever it is you go off and end up doing, just please push forward this idea we are all creators now, not just consumers. It’s going to change the world.”

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

One of the most compelling statements at the Morning TechTalk Leadership Series and Breakfast Wednesday was made by a newcomer to Austin.
Candice Hahn of R/GA Digital Advertising moved to town from the Bay area in July.

“What I observed in San Francisco is that the city has really changed, not necessarily in a good way,” Hahn said “Technology has become very polarizing…I want us to focus on how we make sure that what brings people to Austin in the first place—innovation and creativity for the sake of building something amazing—isn’t going away. The authenticity isn’t going away.”

The event, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce and SXSW was hosted by Graves Dougherty Hearon and Moody. There were about 20 participants including Pike Powers, CEO of Pike Powers Group, Michelle Skelding, senior vice president of global technology and innovation for the Chamber, Hugh Forrest , Director of SXSW, and Jan Ryan, founder of Women@Austin as well as people from tech companies and representatives of the U.K. investment board and the Irish Consulate. The point of the breakfast is to discuss strengths and weaknesses in the Austin tech ecosystem that the community can address.

Making Business Easier

Hahn was responding to the comparison between Austin and Silicon Valley in terms of investment money. Some participants, including Jacqueline Hughes of Startup Week and Techstars, pointed out that one of the issues the city needs to tackle is the question of capital. Of the many Techstars companies in the current class that have received investment, Hughes said, only six percent of that money came from Austin.

Similarly, Max Hoberman of Certain Affinity—a game development studio that has worked on games including Halo and Call of Duty, said the city needs to focus more on growing its own businesses.

“Even though Austin has a huge number of game developers, it’s deficient when it comes to strong locally based companies,” Hoberman said. “Typically the gaming industry is binge and purge. A lot of people liken it to the movie industry. I actually believe that that’s a wrong business model. I’ve never laid a person off. I believe what Austin needs is to focus on strong, locally based companies. What I’ve found is that the environment is exceptionally focused on drawing in outside companies to create satellite offices. I’d like to see Austin become a true center for gaming sustainability and profitability and see more homegrown success stories.”

Many participants said they’d like to see the city and the state close the gap between the innovation that they encourage in the emerging tech world and arcane bureaucratic red tape that slows the granting of permits, filing for city tax incentives and following business regulations. Aimy Steadman of BeatBox Beverages, a boxed wine producer that just won a $1 million investment from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank, said the regulations required for companies that deal with alcohol haven’t changed since prohibition.

Steadman said that, when most companies want to iterate a product, they do so and can launch it. When BeatBox invents a new flavor or wants to change the wording on the box containing its beverages, the process takes months. As a result, BeatBox is going to become a marketing company and let another company manage the headache of production.

Growing the Focus

Several other members of the group talked about the need for Austin to think more internationally, not only in terms of bringing in companies from other countries and opening offices abroad, but in looking at who competitors are outside the 50 states.

“Most of the good brands are international. Most of the GDP growth is international. Startups who don’t see a path where someone conflicts with them domestically think they’re good to go. They don’t look to see if there are companies already doing that in China…,” said Harvey Frye of Tokyo Electron.

Bill Blackstone, Rackspace Austin site executive, quoted dire numbers from the Chamber of Commerce about the challenge of finding talent in Austin.

“This presents a great danger to the technical scene,” Blackstone said. One of the problems is that, with the University of Texas only taking the top seven percent of every graduating class, great students wind up leaving the state for their education, and staying gone.

Other suggestions brought up by the group included one that Austin become more design centric. John Fremont, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Chaotic Moon Studios said that design attracts investment.

Josh Rubin, executive producer and managing director of video for the Daily Dot, said he wants to build up the Austin media scene.

“We punch well below our weight in terms of media,” he said. The Daily Dot is talking about a media incubator and co-working space where “every graphic designer, shooter, editor” can have a place to work from. “There’s a lot of talent here,” he said, “but it’s siloed.”

Skelding concluded the meeting, the second in a series, by saying it was the organizers’ intent to take all the suggestions and perceived opportunities and begin crafting actions around them, rather than just conversation.

Krimmeni Technologies, a cyber security firm, announced Thursday it has received $11.7 million in Series A funding from Third Point Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners.

The startup makes ultra-secure communications technology for Cloud-based data centers and focuses on the Internet of Things market.

As a result of the deal, Third Point Ventures Managing Partner Robert Schwartz and Pelion’s Managing Director Carl Ledbetter will join the company’s board of directors.

The company previously raised an angel investment, bringing its total investment to $12.9 million. It plans to use the money on product development, marketing and sales and to hire additional employees.

Krimmeni Technologies is tackling the market to provide security for a wide range of devices from thermostats to wearable fitness devices to car sensors that will beaming information up to the cloud-based data centers as the Internet of Things market takes off.

“Security solutions based on software alone are insufficient to protect against pernicious attacks from highly sophisticated hackers,” David Lundgren, CEO of Krimmeni Technologies, said in a news statement.

Krimmeni Technologies is a cyber-security company founded by veterans of Apple and Broadcom, with offices in San Francisco and Austin.