Category: Austin (Page 196 of 318)

NASA’s Mission to Mars Goes Through Mississippi

September 19, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

The historic B-1/B-2 Rocket Engine Test Stand at Stennis Space Center, photo by Laura Lorek

NASA doesn’t get to Mars without first testing its rocket engines in Mississippi.

About an hour bus ride from New Orleans, Stennis Space Center, near Bay St. Louis, is the nation’s largest rocket engine test facility comprising 13,800 acres with another 125,000 acres serving as a perimeter buffer zone. The government relocated 660 families to create the site back in the 1960s.

“Stennis has a rich history of testing, aside from the Apollo 8 rocket, every American built rocket or engine that has ever put humans into space has been tested here at Stennis Space Center,” said Richard Gilbrech, its director.

A giant hunk of metal and concrete almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty is getting a lot of attention at the site these days. The historic B-2 rocket engine test stand, built in 1966, has tested Saturn V and Space Shuttle main engines.

Now it’s being refurbished to play a huge role in NASA’s mission to deep space and eventually Mars.

The 264 foot tall stand will test NASA’s Space Launch System core stage by simultaneous firing four RS-25 engines, generating two million pounds of thrust. The test will last 550 seconds or just over nine minutes, the same time required for a regular launch, said Rick Rauch, manager of NASA’s B-2 Test Stand project. That testing is scheduled for 2016, he said.

The rocket testing has an Austin connection too. NASA is working with a team of industry and academic partners, including University of Texas Cockrell School of Engineering assistant professor Charles E. Tinney, to learn about the performance of the RS-25 engines upon launch.

The Stennis rocket engine testing area is vast and desolate. A series of canals snake throughout the land linking all of the stands, which are connected with underground tunnels, to the Pearl River. And a lock and dam system allows the transport of large rocket stages on barges. The Pegasus barge, which once carried external tanks and other hardware for the space shuttle, will ferry the SLS core stage from the Michoud Assembly Center in New Orleans to Stennis for testing.

Rick Gilbrech, Stennis Space Center Director, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot at Stennis, photo by Laura Lorek

Last Friday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s associate administrator and Gilbrech, held a press conference at Stennis for an update on the refurbishing of the B-2 test stand. That project is about 40 percent done, Gilbrech said.

In the last few years, NASA’s SLS and Orion spacecraft have made tremendous progress on NASA’s path to Mars, Lightfoot said.

“We’re going to go to Mars,” he said. “It won’t be next week. It won’t be next year. But we’re putting the capabilities in place to take folks to Mars and we’re pretty excited about it.”

“The overall goal for us is to get to a position where we are Mars ready, the other phrase I like to use is we’re earth independent,” Lightfoot said. “If you think about going to Mars, it’s a two to three year mission. The return time, because of the way orbital mechanics works, is months. We don’t get to come home in a day or two. We have to put all the technologies in place. We have to really understand our systems before we take off and go to Mars with humans. That’s our goal.”

The first stage is earth-reliant with a mission that lasts six to twelve months and returns to earth in hours. That’s the International Space Station missions. That has already been accomplished.

The B1/B2 Rocket Engine Test Stand at Stennis Space Center, photo by Laura Lorek

The ISS also lets NASA test technologies routinely, Lightfoot said. It gives NASA information on how humans will deal with microgravity. It has also allowed NASA to bring in commercial companies to provide services in the lower earth orbit area. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences provide cargo shuttle service now. And earlier this week, NASA awarded a $6.2 billion contract to Boeing and SpaceX to provide crew shuttle services.

“Jumping from earth reliant all the way to Mars ready is a pretty big step,” Lightfoot said.

So for NASA the next stage for human exploration is the proving ground. The missions can be one to twelve months and they can get back to earth in days, Lightfoot said.

“By the 2025 timeframe, we want to be actively in the proving ground, testing our technologies whether it’s going to the asteroid, whether it’s just proving out the technologies we need,” he said. “And, hopefully by the mid-2030s we’re Mars ready and we’re heading that way with humans.”

Editors note: I attended a #NASASocial at Stennis Space Center last Friday with a group of space enthusiasts and NASA staff. We traveled to Stennis after a tour of the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

Able’s New Approach to Collaborative Lending

September 19, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Evan Baehr, co-founder of Able

With nearly a decade of experience as a hairstylist, Hayley Groll has a loyal clientele and proven styling chops.

But she just turned 27 and her credit score is just okay. Securing a small business loan to open her own shop looked like a no-go until a friend pointed her toward Able.

Launched in July, Able’s mission is to “empower main street entrepreneurs” like Hayley, to get a loan to build their businesses when traditional lenders have prohibitively high borrowing standards or sky-high interest rates.

Able offers a lower-cost loan by sharing the risk with backers that are sourced by the entrepreneur. In essence, Able amplifies what small business people are capable of doing with loans from friends and family: Applicants must source 25 percent of the loan amount themselves, and then Able provides the other three-quarters and manages the interest and repayment. Annual percentage rates for Able loans start at 8 to 16 percent, where other private lenders might charge 30 percent or more to the same borrower.

With the loan Groll received from Able, combined with contributions from two family members, a friend and two clients, she was able to purchase Shag Salon on South Lamar Boulevard in Austin when it went up for sale.

‘The whole process is really simple. I don’t have to deal with my clients or friends or family calling me every month wondering, ‘Where’s my money?'” Groll said.

Will Davis, co-founder of Able

Able’s founders are Will Davis and Evan Baehr, formerly of the high profile though unsuccessful “mail disruptor” Outbox. Outbox collected mail from its users’ mailboxes, scanned and digitized it, trading in the perceived annoyance of physical mail in favor of digital convenience. Ultimately, Outbox ran afoul of the USPS and proved prohibitively expensive.

Davis and Baehr had raised $5 million for Outbox. Some of their investors, which include Pay Pal cofounder Peter Thiel and Mike Maples of Floodgate, told them to reinvest the remaining funds to build something new.

The partners set their sights on the finance sector, which as they saw it, had yet to be transformed by the ethos of collaborative consumption in the way that companies like Uber and AirBnB have changed their respective sectors.

Their loan product is designed for growth financing. So entrepreneurs who have yet to generate revenue do not qualify. “We sit in the middle zone between start up and those that need a million-dollar loan,” Davis said. “There are all kinds of companies in that gray area.”

And they’ve retained their big-picture thinking from the Outbox days: Baehr says that they’d like to change the culture of secrecy around debt raising.

It’s easy to find entrepreneurs on Twitter trumpeting the equity they’ve raised, but Baehr questions whether that should really be such a cause of celebration. “It should have a frownie-face hashtag,” he joked. “Kudos to venture capitals for tricking people into celebrating losing part of their company.”

Baehr and Davis see the backers who participate in their loans as people to be celebrated for helping build businesses in their communities.

There’s a social media component to Able’s lending approval process as well. Applicants share their business’ social media profiles with Able so that it can get a sense of the loyalty base and enthusiasm the prospective borrower possesses. Over time, Able’s algorithms will predict the likelihood of business success based on their social presence.

Baehr equates this to the pre-Internet era when a small-town banker would go and eat in a restaurant several times, and also at its nearby competitors, in order to determine if the borrower had a good chance of success.

If there are two hair salons, for instance, and one has way more reviews and five stars on Yelp and the other has fewer reviews and three stars, betting that the first one will be successful is, in Baehr’s words, “not that crazy of a hypothesis.”

Presently, Able has 15 people on staff but is looking to expand. Their offices are located on the back side of the McGarrah Jessee building in downtown Austin, and the setup is not your standard, drab lender’s office. It’s open-plan with high office chairs and a hammock and there’s a “creative” meeting room with brick façade and a funky shag rug.

So far, Able has made 50 loans, most of them to Austin-based businesses and with an average loan amount of $100,000. To date, a majority of their customers have been women, and loans have gone to supporting a whole variety of businesses. They have a handful of clients in the consumer goods space, whose businesses revolve around packaged food, clothing or cleaning products. They also have restaurants and retail spaces and, in keeping with Able’s Austin’s roots, several food trucks.

OneSpot Brings Relevance to Internet Ad Space

September 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

BY LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Matt Cohen, president and founder of OneSpot

Matt Cohen is an old-school content guy.

Two decades ago Cohen built the Houston Chronicle’s first website and developed the paper’s digital strategy. At the paper, Cohen noted that whenever they did reader surveys, subscribers always ranked the paper-edition advertisements among the top three things they most appreciated. Those ads were useful. They let people know when sales were happening.

But somehow the utility and appeal of print ads doesn’t translate easily into the digital space. And what works on a highway billboard can seem annoying and irrelevant when directly translated to a website masthead.

“There’s no reason at all I shouldn’t be seeing things that are interesting to me,” Cohen said of web ads. “I buy things all the time.”

With the rise of social media, companies are placing more emphasis on delivering substantive value in their digital communication. This is happening alongside a long-term trend toward greater authenticity and ‘real’ interaction between brand and customer. The result of these two trends is that businesses are creating more articles, blogs and videos that are entertaining and/or informational, often entirely sans sales pitch.

“It’s not, ‘Buy, buy, buy right now.’ It’s about creating a relationship with the brand.” Cohen said.

But there’s a pipeline problem. Once that corporate content is created – how to get it to people beyond those visiting the company’s website? That’s where Matt Cohen’s idea for OneSpot comes into play: Put ads for corporate content into traditional web ad spaces, but make the placement decision based on an advanced understanding of the intended individual.

OneSpot’s proprietary technology helps companies build their brand’s audience by using advanced, multi-level audience targeting to improve media placement decisions.

OneSpot’s system has access to about 94 percent of the American Internet audience, chief marketing officer Adam Weinroth explained. The company analyzes a wide range of user behavior and leverages that data using its technology, which is based on machine learning and predictive modeling, to determine when a certain person should see a certain ad. So someone who is perusing recipe sites might see a link to a cooking article produced by Whole Foods (one of OneSpot’s clients) in the recipe site’s ad space.

“A lot of money goes into content creation,” Cohen said. “What we have is a value proposition: take a fraction of that budget to drive a multiple of the results companies are already seeing.” It’s a way to make the whole online publishing ecosystem work better, he says: Consumers get content that’s relevant to them, advertisers reach the right people, and publishers get money for ads that are more than just a necessary annoyance.

Programmatic advertising and real-time bidding on digital ad space has built up over the last five years. Once that infrastructure was cemented, Cohen’s idea coalesced and he founded OneSpot in early 2012. Previously, he’d been a partner at Austin venture capital firm G-51 Capital.

Steve Sachs, CEO of OneSpot

The first year was mainly spent building the software and enrolling a few beta customers. It was clear to Cohen he needed to bring on someone with marketing experience and connections to the advertising world. In February 2013, Steve Sachs came on as CEO.

Formerly an executive vice president at Time Inc., Sachs used to oversee the Real Simple, Cooking Light and Southern Living brands. Since he became CEO, OneSpot has worked to expand its offerings and clients. Many of its current clients come from the food, health and beauty sectors. Since all of these categories routinely roll out new products, they also tend to produce a lot of brand-related content for their markets. Companies that produce a lot of branded content have the most to potentially gain from using OneSpot.

In November 2013, OneSpot held a series A and raised $5 million led by Mohr Davidow Ventures, a leading Silicon Valley VC firm investing in the digital marketing space.

Adtech is a nascent addition to the Texas startup scene. “We’re bringing a piece of New York to Austin,” Sachs said. Cohen and Sachs are excited to be leading local development of the sector.

The company has a sales presence in Chicago and New York. Engineering and customer care is based in Austin. Over the next year, Sachs and Cohen plan to continue building their client roster and improving the capabilities of their software. In late August, OneSpot unveiled its new Facebook sequencing capabilities. The company can now use Facebook’s real-time ad exchange to place its clients’ content into Facebook users’ news feeds.

BeHome247 Strikes Partnership with Kaba to Make Products for the Vacation Rental Market

September 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

BeHome247, an Austin-based maker of automated controls for the home, has struck a partnership with Kaba Oracode, a maker of keyless door locks.

Together, the company are going to work together to provide products for property managers active in the vacation rental market. The companies made the announcement at HomeAway’s RezFest 2014 in Nashville, the vacation rental industry’s technology conference for professional vacation rental managers.

Kaba Oracode makes keyless door locks that let property managers issue time-sensitive codes to access a home without a key or keycard. And BeHome247, founded in 2006, sells property control software that lets homeowners monitor and control their property remotely including door locks, thermostats, pool systems and more from a tablet, smart phone or computer. Its the prefers home automation and energy control system for HomeAway Software Enterprise Control.

“Partnering with BeHome247 is a natural extension for us to provide best in class service to our growing base of vacation rental customers,” Stephen Pollack, vice president of marketing for Kaba, said in a news release. “To be able to include the Oracode application on the BeHome247 dashboard and mobile applications is a major step forward in the convenience of generating and managing lock user codes.”

Behome247 and Kaba share the same vision for the property management market, Michael Walther, CEO of Behome247, said in a statement.

Kaba, based in Switzerland and founded 150 years ago, has 7,500 employees in more than 60 countries.

BeHome247, an Austin Technology Incubator company, launched in 2006 and makes software so homeowners can control devices hooked up with sensors in their home via the Internet on a dashboard. Its software controls more than 125,000 homes.

Intel to Host Internet of Things Workshop at TechShop in Austin

September 16, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Intel will be hosting its Internet of Things Roadshow at Techshop in Austin on Saturday and Sunday.

The roadshow is one of ten events the company is doing worldwide and the only one in Texas. Other events in the U.S. are in Mountain View, Calif. and New York. Other events globally are being held in Europe, South America and Asia.

Intel is looking for makers, IoT startups, developers, students and even hardware novices to join them at the event. Participants get a free developers kit which includes an Intel development board.

The event will feature food, onsite giveaways and prizes for the best IoT solutions.

“Come by and tinker with the Dev Kit – which is based on Intel® architecture and designed to be hardware and software pin-compatible with Arduino,” according to an Intel release. “Plus it includes lots of cool sensors, software and accessories to stimulate your creativity.”

The event kicks off with training on the technology and developer’s kit, followed by a hackathon. People can work solo or in teams. And Intel will be giving the first 100 attendees who have registered a free Intel Galileo Board.

The event starts Saturday at 9 a.m. at Techshop. But you’ve got to register to attend.

Full disclosure: Silicon Hills News will be one of the judges at the Hackathon event

NASA’s On Track to Build the Most Powerful Rocket Ever

September 16, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Inside the Michoud Assembly Facility, photo by Laura Lorek

NEW ORLEANS – In a former sugar plantation on the eastern outskirts of New Orleans sits one of the city’s hidden gems.

NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility is known as the gateway to space.

Although most people know New Orleans for Mardi Gras, great Jazz music, art, Bourbon Street, gumbo, hurricanes, beignets and chicory coffee, it’s also a hub for rocket scientists. Yet tourists rarely get to see this site. Some of the best and brightest in the space program work at Michoud. But even some of the locals don’t realize the important role this place has played throughout the nation’s space history.

“Every rocket that has taken humans to space since the ‘60s has come through Michoud,” said Malcolm Wood, the facility’s deputy chief operating officer.

“During the Apollo program in the 1960s, Michoud built the first stages of the Saturn 1, 1B and Saturn V rockets,” according to NASA. Later, Michoud designed and built the 15-story tall external tanks for the space shuttles. One of the last tanks, a bright rust colored mammoth sits behind a building onsite, a monument to its past.

But Michoud is preparing for the future.

Major components of the Space Launch System (SLS) NASA’s most powerful rockets that will send astronauts into deep space and eventually Mars, are being built at Michoud, said Roy Malone Jr., director of the facility. Michoud is building the core propulsion stage for the SLS, and they are also building the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, he said.

The 832-acre campus, which houses one of the nation’s largest manufacturing plants, is about 20 minutes from the French Quarter. The plant has more than 43 acres under one roof. It’s so vast that workers use bicycles to get around.

And it’s evolving, Malone said.

Michoud escaped major damage from Hurricane Katrina thanks to its employees working around the clock to pump water from the grounds, which like most of New Orleans sits below sea level.

At Michoud, Malone is like the mayor of a small city with 3,500 employees based at the facility, only 300 of them belong to NASA. The rest are contractors, employees of other federal agencies or private companies.

“We’re really changing the way we do business with a NASA facility,” he said.

NASA has nearly one million square feet for lease on the site. Its tenants include military contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but also Big Easy Studios, a film company. Big Easy has 250,000 square feet of studios and has filmed the sci-fi flick Ender’s Game, and Planet of the Apes and plans to film the upcoming Jurassic World here.

The site includes the Port of Michoud, which connects to the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. NASA recently gave the U.S. Coast Guard half of the port. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture with more than 2,600 employees is one of the largest tenants on site.

Despite its transformation into a multi-purpose facility, Michoud still plays a major role in the space program. And all eyes last Friday were on the site for the dedication of a new facility.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, photo courtesy of NASA

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Louisiana Senator David Vitter and Mississippi Congressman Steven Palazzo and other dignitaries gathered to cut the ribbon on the brand new Vertical Assembly Center, the largest spacecraft welding tool in the world.

“Right here we begin the next great march to the next great exploration to space,” Mayor Landrieu said. It’s a symbol and concrete example of New Orleans’ innovative future, he said.

“This is the beginning of the trip to Mars,” Bolden said. “This is not for any of us sitting here today. What we’re doing and what we’re about is for the young people of this nation. We are on our way to Mars and I really mean that. The state of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans along with neighboring states are key parts of building the core stage of the SLS.”

The Vertical Assembly Center at Michoud, photo courtesy of NASA

The Vertical Assembly Center is 170 feet tall and 78 feet wide and will be used to build the core stage of the SLS.

“The SLS Program continues to make significant progress,” said Todd May, the SLS program manager.

The NASA SLS rocket is expected to launch in 2018.

“At a fundamental level, space exploration, the mission of NASA, is about inspiration,” Congressman Palazzo said. “This inspiration fuels our desire to push the boundaries of the possible and reach beyond our own pale blue dot. The Space Launch System will be the most powerful rocket ever built and will carry humanity into the next phase of the exploration of our solar system.”

Inside the VAC, photo by Laura Lorek

The SLS isn’t just drawings on a sketchpad, it’s real, Palazzo said.

“You can see the hardware being built and the components being assembled,” he said.

This is all progress on NASA’s goal of sending humans to Mars, he said.

Editor’s Note: This is a field trip outside of the Silicon Hills. Occasionally I will visit another pocket of innovation that relates to all the work being done in Central Texas. I attended a NASA Social last Friday for the ribbon cutting on the Vehicle Assembly Center at the Michoud Assembly Facility. We also travelled to the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. I will be writing another story from that trip.

Acxiom Opens Austin Office with 150 Jobs

September 15, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Acxiom, a Little Rock-based software company, announced Monday that it will be opening an Austin office and hiring 150 new employees.

Acxiom is a data mining, analytics and marketing company. It recently launched a site, Abouthedata.com that lets consumers view the details the company has collected about them, according to this story in the New York Times.

The company is looking for people with technology skills such as network engineers, security engineers, system engineers, security architects, network architects, infrastructure architects, software engineers and project managers.

“We are excited about opening new job opportunities for the local market,” Janet Cinfio – Austin site leader and VP of infrastructure and technology operations said in a news release. “There is an incredible amount of technology talent in Austin which we hope to tap into as our operations continue to grow and expand.”

Acxiom will be hosting a recruiting event on Sept. 25th from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Steiner Ranch Steakhouse. For more information on the event or job openings, contact Acxiom recruiting at jobs@acxiom.com.

“Acxiom is an industry leader that invests deeply in its communities, its decision to expand operations into Austin is great news for our region and residents,” Pete Winstead, Shareholder at Winstead PC and Chairman of Opportunity Austin, a five-county economic development initiative aimed at fostering job-creating investments in the Austin region, said in a news release.

“Acxiom’s announcement serves as a testament to Central Texas’ supportive business climate, strong technology sector and talent pipeline. We are pleased to welcome Acxiom to Austin, and look forward to working together to build a strong future for our community.”

Acxiom’s new offices will open in late November and will be located at River Place Corporate Park on 6500 River Place Boulevard.

Cratejoy Builds a Better Box Subscription Service

September 15, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Alex Morse and Amir Elaguizy, co-founders of Cratejoy in Austin, photo by Devaki Knowles

In our era of multitudinous, fragmented e-commerce, there’s a box subscription service for just about anything – baby clothes, lingerie, gluten-free food, gourmet candy. But until Cratejoy, there was no one-stop platform where box curators could get their businesses off the ground.

Cratejoy founder Amir Elaguizy sold his Internet poker data-mining startup to gaming company Zynga in 2011. He continued to work at Zynga for a couple years. After that, the next thing he wanted to do was make a company that could help small businesses and put people on track to becoming their own bosses.

“I thought honestly I was going to be starting a little hobby,” says Cratejoy user Amber Golightly who is the founder of The Austin BatBox, which curates local products. She started in May, and thanks in part to the host of services she receives through Cratejoy, box curation is now her full-time endeavor.

Back in 2012, Elaguizy started a new venture with his long-time business partner Alex Morse. They went through several iterations before honing in on the idea that would spur Cratejoy.

In summer of 2013, they were accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program with an idea for a “push-button” solution that would make it easier for entrepreneurs to start small businesses. At the program, Elaguizy met another entrepreneur who was selling women’s clothing through a box subscription service.

Elaguizy and Morse started doing research, calling about 200 people who were in the box-subscription business. Quickly they realized just about everyone was facing similar basic business problems.

“We were on a hack of a bunch of e-commerce platforms – a little bit on shopify, another recurring billing system,” recalls entrepreneur Dan Scudder who runs Root Bizzle, a necktie subscription company. Scudder was one of the people Elaguizy initially talked to for research purposes and is now a Cratejoy client.

Subscription box curators are often people who are passionate about a particular area of commerce. For instance, one entrepreneur in Elaguizy’s beta test is a former art student who curates boxes full of sample supplies so that artists can more affordably try out new products. In other words, box subscription providers aren’t necessarily e-commerce masters or people who are equipped to code.

If you run a box subscription service, you can either pay someone to build out your website and e-commerce functions, or you can cobble together existing services – one for payment, another for subscription collection, another for analytics – that don’t work quite optimally and are not integrated. The first solution can be expensive, the latter is cumbersome.

With what they’d learned, Elaguizy and Morse began coding in fall of 2013. They kept their heads down through the end of the year and by January they had a prototype of Cratejoy, a one-stop service that would make it easy to begin a box subscription. Cratejoy’s offerings include, web hosting and page templates with mobile integration, a subscription billing management system and business analytics.

By the time they were ready to start their private beta test, Elaguizy says they already had a waitlist of 800 merchants, despite not having done any advertising.

What happened was during the research phase Elaguizy had told box subscriptioners what he planned on creating, whom then in turn told others box entrepreneurs. They quickly collected $50,000 in pre-payments from merchants eager enough to pay to enroll in the private beta. At the moment, Cratejoy has 120 companies enrolled and its waitlist has climbed into the thousands.

Elaguizy says they’ll be ready for public beta within the next six months. He says that he and Morse bucked the “fast and crappy,” get-it-out-as-fast-as-possible startup model. He wants the service to be near perfect before it’s fully unveiled.

One of the most rewarding developments so far, Elaguizy says, is that since the private beta began he’s seen three of his users quit their day jobs to be full-time box subscriptions business people.

One surprising development has been that 30 percent of demand for Cratejoy has been for subscriptions services rather than boxes. One user is The Fox Society, an Austin-based service that plans date nights for couples. Elaguizy said he’s fielded interest from a guy with a lawn maintenance business: He has the same clients all the time, but wants to streamline his business process online.

Within the next year, Elaguizy has plans to build a marketplace where people can shop for different kinds of box subscriptions. To date, Cratejoy has facilitated 22,000 shipments and deliveries in 52 countries.

Elaguizy subscribes to every merchant who is using his platform, so his office has plenty of goodies lying about – vitamins, tea, paintbrushes, and a high-quality plush child’s toy. He likes working with box curators: They tend to be people who are passionate about their product and committed to delivering quality since every month they must continue to impress their customers. He says his engineers like receiving immediate feedback from their merchant community and the boxes themselves are fun, but what keeps Elaguizy most excited about Cratejoy?

“I’m interested because of the people who quit their jobs.”

Bob Metcalfe Tells Startups to Build Their Networks to Succeed

September 15, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation at the University of Texas, spent some time talking with Jason Seats, managing director of Techstars, during a virtual fireside chat at Foundercon in Austin recently.

Metcalfe has held many careers including educator, publisher and columnist, venture capitalist, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. He has spent the past three years in Austin at UT and has pledged to make this area a “better Silicon Valley.” He works closely with startups as one of the instructors at the Longhorn Startup program at UT, which teaches undergraduates how to form and run a startup successfully.

In this Techstars video, Metcalfe tells the Techstars founders and staff “You are my favorite people. You are entrepreneurs.”

His advice to startup entrepreneurs is to build their networks to cultivate the success of their startups.

“Building your networks is the most important thing you can do to ensuring the success of your company, your customer networks, your networks of possible employees, your supply networks, your investor networks” Metcalfe said.

“One of the mistakes you can make is to not grok what it means to build a network,” Metcalfe said.

The important thing is that a rolodex must contain trusted sources, Metcalfe said. Entrepreneurs’ networks must be built by exchanging value with those people, he said.

“The first thing that can happen to a network is that you fail to build one,” Metcalfe said.

“The second thing that can go wrong is that your network can be junk,” Metcalfe said. “Some correlation of Metcalfe’s law is that a junky network isn’t worth shit.”

Build your networks and take care of the people in them, he said.

WigWag Begins Taking Pre-Orders for its Smart LED Light Bulb Sets

September 11, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

WigWag hit a nerve with consumers last year when it launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $50,000 for a device to connect and control everything in the home from lights to temperature to soil moisture for watering plants.

The Austin-based startup ended up blowing way past it goal and raising more than $454,000 from 1,694 backers. The company expects to begin shipping products over the next few months, said Ed Hemphill, CEO and co-founder.

“Kickstarter helped prove there was a demand for what we’re creating,” Hemphill said. “We learned a ton from Kickstarter. And the product we’re going to deliver is an even better product.”

And on Wednesday, WigWag announced it has begun taking pre-orders on Amazon for Filament by WigWag, a smart, dimmable and full-color LED light bulb.

The company’s light bulb sets are controlled using a smartphone app with either an iOS or Android mobile phone or by a classic wall switch. The WigWag Relay, which plugs in an Internet router, provides the gateway to the Internet to control the lights and other devices to create a smart home. The starter sets with WigWag Relay and four, eight or 12 bulbs cost $99, $199, $299 and $399 respectively. The company plans to deliver the products in the fall.

WigWag’s Relay device works with all kinds of devices in the home including Belkin WeMo, Sonos, Nest, Philips Hue and more. It also works with different adapters such as ZigBee, Bluetooth and Z-Wave.

“We take different devices and protocols and glue them together,” Hemphill said.

WigWag, founded in 2012, has raised $650,000 to date, according to papers filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company has 12 employees, including four in China.

For more on the company, please read this Q&A from a year ago with Hemphill and Silicon Hills News.