Category: Austin (Page 199 of 318)

SXSW Eco Announces Startup Showcase and Place by Design Finalists

August 29, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

South by Southwest Interactive attracts geeks from all over the world every March to find out about the latest technology.

But another SXSW conference, held every October, attracts companies worldwide to focus on innovative solutions for saving the planet from environmental destruction.

That conference is SXSW Eco and this week, its organizers announced the finalists for its third annual Startup Showcase and second annual Place by Design Competitions, which include three Austin-based startups. The conference takes place at the Austin Convention Center from Oct. 6 to 8th.

The Startup Showcase shines a spotlight on early-stage companies in the areas of greentech, cleanweb and social impact. The finalists, selected from a global pool of hundreds of applicants, “will compete in front of a live audience and panel of Judges from companies the likes of Target, Shell Technology Ventures, the Whole Planet Foundation, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Sprint,” according to a news release. “In the past two years, participating companies have gone on to raise over $27 million in funding and acquire global brands as clients.”

The Place by Design competition focuses on the reinvention of public space and features finalists in Transformative Design, Community Impact, Global Potential and Sustainable Innovation.

“All of the finalists this year have demonstrated the potential to change the world in breakthrough ways and we look forward to the excitement they will bring to the event this October,” Scott Wilcox, director of SXSW Eco, said in a news release.

This year’s Startup Showcase finalists include:

Greentech, presented by Hewlett Packard:

HEVO Power (New York, NY)
PAX Pure, Inc. (San Rafael, CA)
Watershed Materials, LLC (Napa Valley, CA)
Skyven Technologies (Dallas, TX)
PicaSolar (Fayetteville, AR)
Wetzel Blade (Austin, TX)
SiNode (Chicago, IL)
Photon8, Inc. (Brownsville, TX)

Cleanweb:

Curb (Austin, TX)
Gridmates (Austin, TX)
Lagoon (Cincinnati, OH)
Measurabi (San Diego, CA)
Valor Water Analytics (San Francisco, CA)
Wanderu (Boston, MA)
Comm-N-Sense Corp (Gainesville, FL)
CrowdComfort (Somerville, MA)

Social Impact – For-profit, presented by United Nations Foundation:

Harbor Biometrics (Boston, MA)
Elequa (San Antonio, TX)
Spend Consciously (Washington, DC)
Drinkwell (Boston, MA)
Emergence BioEnergy Inc. (Cambridge, MA)
Wilding and Co (New Zealand)
Underground Network, LLC (Glendale, CA)
Do Amore (Houston, TX)

Social Impact – Not-for-profit, presented by United Nations Foundation:

Accountability Lab (Washington, DC)
ORGANIZE (New York, NY)
pAge Drinking Paper (Pittsburgh, PA)
Pollinate Energy (Australia)
Open Water Foundation (Fort Collins, CO)
Kula (Marietta, GA)
Ecosia (Germany)
Urban Death Project (Seattle, WA)

This year’s Place by Design finalists include:

+Pool (New York, NY)
Bagby Street Infographics (Austin, TX)
Brooklyn (Williamsburg) Pop-up Bike Park (East Stroudsburg, PA)
HOPE Outdoor Gallery (Austin, TX)
Granby Park (Dublin, Ireland)
Libros Libres (Dallas, TX)
North Austin Community Garden (Austin, TX)
Pavegen (London, UK)
Poppy Seed (Shanghai, China)
Rabalder Parken (Roskilde, Denmark)
Resilient Modular Systems [RMS] (Cambridge, MA)
The ‘T’ House: Experiments in Microbial Architecture (Albuquerque, NM)
The Lowline by Raad Studio (New York, New York)
The Transformation of Waller Creek (Austin, TX)
Urban Skyfarm (Los Angeles, CA)

Interactions to Hire 1,000 Customer Service Workers in Austin

August 29, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Call Center workers, photo licensed from iStockPhotos.com

Interactions Corp., a Boston-area based company which provides virtual assistant services to companies, plans to expand in the Austin area by hiring 1,000 new employees by next year.

The company is hiring people who can provide customer service and do data entry jobs to support Interactions’ iCenters, an automated system for customer support. Interaction has had workers in Austin since 2007. The city hosts Interactions’ second largest facility.

“Austin has a dynamic environment fueled by a talented, bilingual workforce,” Mike Iacobucci, CEO of Interactions, said in a news release. “The business-friendly and progressive climate welcome growing corporations and foster a spirit of entrepreneurialism.”

Interactions’ largest location is in Indianapolis, where it is hiring 1,000 additional employees also.

For more on the jobs, visit Interactions website.

By Popular Demand, Mahana Expands Outside the Restaurant Industry

August 29, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

“An Estimote Beacon is a small, wireless device, sometimes also called a ‘mote’. When placed in a physical space, it broadcasts tiny radio signals around itself.”
Photo courtesy of Estimote.

One of the rules of startups is that you can’t always follow the rules of startups. Mahana was trying. After launching its technology that helped restaurants reach out to their best customers when they were in proximity of the establishment, it kept getting calls from hotels, sports teams, airlines and others who wondered whether Mahana could help them figure out how to use beacons with their customer base as well.

“I would always answer ‘That’s not what we do,’” said CEO Bryan Menell. “You know with a startup you have to focus, focus, focus. But after awhile of doing this in restaurants it was like ‘People keep calling. Let’s go figure out what’s going on with this.’”

They took two meetings in Dallas to see if they could help two publicly traded enterprise companies and left with plans to work on two pilot programs.

“It was this ‘Aha’ moment,” Menell said. “We need to look at opening this up to more people. We can’t open it up to just everybody…we need to pick industries that can leverage it. That’s hotels, restaurants, retail, casinos. Even that seemingly small slice is very deep. There are tons of ownership groups. We started to research verticals and it was really huge.”

Menell asked co-founder and CTO Richard Bagdonas whether he thought the technology could work with these other industries and learned that Bagdonas had built it as a larger platform that could accommodate all kinds of apps and businesses. Their advisors and investors were thrilled with the bigger opportunity. So they went for it.

According to an article in The New York Times, in October, 2013, ten to 15 percent of the customers comprise 60 percent of a hotel’s revenue. So repeat business is crucial. But few high-end hotels use standard “reward” programs because they’re too commoditized. Instead, most opt for a more personal approach to winning the most lucrative customers—frequent travelers, especially business travelers.

That’s where Mahana comes in. The beacons, and Mahana’s software can be used to notify a hotel if a guest has pulled into the parking lot so the desk staff can get his key ready. They can customize messages and offerings so that when he goes to the pool, someone brings his favorite poolside drink, that he learns about the latest gluten-free offerings from the menu and that, after a certain number of visits, he gets a free spa day or something equally tempting.
The software works with a hotel’s beacons and comes with a particular set of tools, Menell said. But it can be customized for each establishment.

The software has to be able to deal with huge amounts of data, Bagdonas said, so they used Amazon’s Simple Queue Service that’s used by Twitter, Facebook and Gmail.

“It’s a firehose,” he said. “It can handle a million beacon hits per second per app. If you want to be ready for prime time you have to build it like a tank.”

Joe Canterbury, senior vice president with Appconomy and an advisor for Mahana, said that’s one area where Mahana has shown its strategic competence. Geolocating and responding to customers is a fairly new technology which is evolving rapidly. Mahana has to make sure to stay ahead of the curve.

“The technology is all changing so quickly, it’s a challenge for anyone in the space, really keeping up and really choosing best technologies. I think they’re dead on.” Canterbury was one of the advisors who encouraged Mahana to broaden its focus. Both he and advisor Jack Tan, who has worked as director of IT for several huge hotel and resort companies, talked about the possibilities for the app in large malls and retail centers where shoppers can be lured in for a great deal when they’re already in the mall.

“This kind of technology is in a very early stage of adoption, of acceptance,” Tan said. But with more people using smart phones and tablets, they’re looking for more uses for them. With social sharing, he said, use should spread quickly. “It’s really about how the experience is from start to finish.”

With any technology that recognizes customers, Canterbury said, the company has to be careful not to make customers feel intruded upon. Bagdonas said there’s a certain amount of coaching that goes with deploying the software so as not to inundate customers. Bagdonas is fairly “touchy feely” for a CTO, Canterbury acknowledged, which may help Mahana’s ability to guide its customers to maintain the “human touch” and not rely too much on the technology. But it also is part of what makes Menell and Bagdonas a good balanced team.

“The team complements each other and they work well together. They’re insanely productive for such a small company. “
But another attribute of Mahana is that both founders have a lot of experience with starting companies and know it’s important to understand the industries they work with. That’s key as Mahana expands.

“One thing that I’ve observed and also participated in is that the team does a really good job of sitting down and spending time with industry experts to really get their input or feedback…they’re very clear that the kind of input and feedback they get is going to lead to a better product.”

Mahana has begun working with a hotel chain in Asia that has about 35 properties, Menell said.

“We’re choosing a little handful of early customers to work with,” he said. “We have to pick and choose, to be very careful, work with well-known brands doing interesting things…the enterprise class is very exciting to us.”

Mahana Welcomes You from Mahana on Vimeo.

Texas A&M Looks to Partner with Tech Entrepreneurs

August 28, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Roy Truitt, founder of Austin-based startup ScanSee, wants to tap into Texas A&M’s rich engineering resources.

Truitt, a serial entrepreneur who founded Truco Enterprises, which makes the On the Border brand of chips and salsas, created ScanSee four years ago. It makes an app, HubCiti, which can link all of a city’s businesses, departments, services and shoppers together.

On Tuesday, Truitt attended the Texas A&M Matchmaker Workshop in Austin at the Frost Bank Tower, it’s part of a series of programs called Spectrum focused on entrepreneurial mentorship, education and collaboration.

Truitt is interested in working on security software features for HubCiti in collaboration with Texas A&M. He credits the Texas State Small Business Development Center, which puts on the Spectrum series of events, for bringing a wealth of information to startup entrepreneurs.

“I had no idea this even existed and this is my business,” Truitt said. “I’ve started 17 companies so I should know this existed.”

Most people don’t know about all of the resources available to entrepreneurs at Texas A&M, said Dick Johnson, assistant director of technology at Texas State Small Business Development Center. Since Spectrum launched last July, the center has hosted eight events attended by more than 500 people on a variety of subjects from perfecting a pitch to understanding a term sheet.

“It’s all about sharing knowledge,” Johnson said. “It’s designed to increase awareness of some of the resources available for free, in most cases, to entrepreneurs.”

On Tuesday, five officials from Texas A&M gave brief overviews of their programs to assist companies with technology development and commercialization. The presentations involved a whole lot of acronyms representing the organizations including TEES, TCAT, TEEX, TTI, TTC and TAP. After the presentations, they met one on one with entrepreneurs to provide further assistance.

The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, called TEES, provides research, education, training and technology to companies and industries, said Dale Cope, director of industry assistance.

Texas A&M has 13,600 engineering students or 23 percent of the student population with more than 13 departments, he said. It’s one of the largest engineering schools in the country and its students and faculty work on tackling real-life engineering problems for industries.

TEES’ current research focuses on just about anything that has to do with engineering from energy to health care, national security, infomatics, infrastructure and transportation, Cope said. Its emerging research areas include robotics, sensors, imaging, advanced manufacturing and advanced materials for energy applications, he said.

E-Loo, photo courtesy of SWSLoo.com

George and Jeri Willa, husband and wife owners of Elgin-based SWSLoo, the American maker and distributor of Enviro Loo, a green toilet, attended the event to get some engineering help on their product. The Eloo, as it is known, is low maintenance and doesn’t require water, electricity or chemicals.

“We’ve been working on this project for six to eight years,” George Willa said. “We licensed the toilet from South Africa but we need to get more engineering in the product.”

They are also looking for more consistent market penetration through marketing efforts, Jeri Willa said. They are already selling products in 30 states and several countries including Canada, Mexico and Haiti.

“We’re still a small company and we’re still trying to improve our product,” Jeri Willa said. “That’s why we came here for engineering assistant.”

They were thrilled to have an opportunity to connect with Texas A&M’s engineering expertise, she said.

Nick Chremos, senior licensing manager for Texas A&M’s technology commercialization department, said it wants to partner with startups and industry to license technology developed there and get it into the marketplace.

The university has a whole patent portfolio of technologies it’s interested in working with companies on to build a product or service around, he said.

“There isn’t a single area of engineering where A&M doesn’t have expertise,” he said.

Some of the highway safety technology patents, created by Dean Alberson, assistant agency director of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, have generated the most revenue for the university, Chremos said. The university shares 37.5 percent of all royalties with the inventor, he said.

One of the most active industry partners at the university is the Texas A&M Transportation Institute with 700 employees. It is the largest transportation research group in the U.S. and it has worked in all 50 states and more than 20 countries.

Photo of the driverless freight system, courtesy of Texas A&M

Photo of the driverless freight shuttle system, courtesy of Texas A&M

Last year, the institute worked on 677 projects and did $53.6 million in contract research. The work at the institute makes highways safer, Alberson said. It has helped to create breakaway signs, crash cushions and barriers that save lives, he said.

The institute is currently working on a freight shuttle system, a private venture, that would take trucks off the highway and transport freight on an elevated system above them using driverless vehicles.

One of the emerging inventions the university is particularly excited about is in using polymer materials to convert heat into electricity, Chremos said.

“We’re looking to find licensees,” he said.

Caleb Holt, product development center manager for Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service, known as TEEX, works directly with companies to help them with product development, training and other services. It works in the areas of fire and rescue, homeland security, law enforcement and infrastructure and safety.

But it also tests systems, products and technology. Its product development portfolio includes responder tracking systems, weapon systems, environmentally friendly fire chemicals and more.

TEEX provides third party, unbiased testing for disruptive technologies, Holt said.

“We help to create standards for technology that don’t have standards yet,” he said.

“The Underwriters Laboratories testing takes place in a lab, but TEEX tests products in the most realistic scenarios possible,” Holt said.

It will take a Toughbooks rugged laptop computer and put it on black asphalt in the 100 degree Texas weather to make sure it really does meet military grade specs, he said.

Compare Metrics Rebrands and Launches as Edgecase

August 27, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Compare Metrics, which makes retail analytics software aimed at improving the online shopping experience for consumers, announced it has rebranded as Edgecase and officially launched its shopping platform.

The Austin-based company, founded in 2012, has created shopping software that allows people to browse online easily for clothes in a natural way, similar to window shopping in a store. Its customers include Crate & Barrel, Urban Decay, Golfsmith, Rebecca Minkoff, Wasserstrom and others.

“We’ve been incredibly pleased with the results our platform has driven thus far, and we have a bold vision to continue helping retailers create discovery experiences that feel modern, intelligent and relevant to every single shopper,” Garrett Eastham, CEO, of Edgecase, said in a news release. “We’ve heard directly from shoppers that even the best online discovery experiences today simply feel ‘old school’. We’re thankful to be working with innovative retailers to bring a fresh new approach to the market through our latest technology.”

So far, Edgecase has raised $8 million in funding from Allegro Ventures, Austin Ventures, Floodgate, Hurt Family Investments and Mack Capital. The company has 35 employees and is hiring.

Edgecase will debut its new platform at the 2014 Shop.org Summit on Sept. 29th in Seattle.

Austin-based Green & Grow Lands $6 Million in Funding

August 26, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Green & Grow, an agriculture technology startup, has raised $6 million in Series B funding and struck a new partnership with Otter Capital.

“Since our first meeting, we have been impressed with Otter Capital’s knowledge and commitment to the biological product space,” Alan Sobba President and CEO of GGI, said in a news release.

The funding will give Green & Grow the money and added expertise to “accelerate the commercialization of our Agriplier technology which can improve yields and early season vigor across multiple crop types,” according to Gregg Spivey, company spokesman.

Green & Grow recently relocated from Arizona to Austin.

“Relocating Green & Grow Inc. to Austin was an important step in taking the scientific research underlying our biologically derived agricultural products to the next level,” according to Spivey. “We were able to hire an excellent researcher from the University of Texas, Dr. Marsha Lewis, to head up our laboratory team and continue to partner with UT in our fundamental research as well as working with Texas A&M to conduct agricultural trials to demonstrate the benefits of our products in the field. GGI is proud to be a new member of the Austin start-up community.”

Green & Grow makes a line of Agriplier products to provide “non-living, nontoxic, microbe derived by-products.”

Astrotech Sells Assets to Lockheed Martin for $61 Million

August 26, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Astrotech Corp., founded in 1984, completed the sales of all of its Astrotech Space Operations assets and properties for $61 million to Lockheed Martin Corp.

The Austin-based company, formerly Spacehab, provides commercial space products and services to NASA, the Department of Defense and other customers.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank our shareholders for the continued support of our vision of the future for Astrotech,” Thomas B. Pickens III, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Astrotech said in a news release. “We are now better positioned to focus on building shareholder value as a worldwide leader in the application of mass spectrometry sensors to the security, process control, laboratory and environmental markets. We believe we have the fastest, smallest, highest performing and most economical miniaturized mass spectrometer solution that is versatile enough to be easily integrated within a wide variety of markets.”

Austin-Based Bearch Gets $2.1 Million in Funding for Photo Sharing App “Unseen”

August 25, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Snapchat is one of the most popular apps right now for young people.

The company turned down offers of $3 billion and $4 billion from Facebook and Google, respectively.

Snapchat lets its users send videos and photos and messages which disappear after a little bit. That privacy feature appeals to young people who don’t want pages of data stored about them in some database, easily accessible by future employers, colleges and marketers.

So it only makes sense that more of these type of apps might start to pop up.

Austin-based Bearch announced recently it has received $2.1 million in funding for Unseen, its anonymous photo sharing app aimed at college students.

The company raised the money from Dirk Elmendorf, co-founder of Rackspace; Rony Kahan, CEO/co-founder of Indeed.com; Doss Cunningham, CEO of Woodbolt International and several other angels.

Bearch plans to use the money to market its app to more colleges and to continue to develop its features.

“First released in May 2014 to Texas A&M University students, Unseen was created by Bearch Co-founders Michael Schramm and Munjal Budhabhatti,” according to a news release. “Unseen connects students by providing a safe place to share thoughts, experiences, and struggles without fear of repercussions or judgment. The app requires no sign in, logins or names – only that the user associate with a college campus – and can be downloaded for free on the iPhone app store.” It also offers an Android version.

Michael Dell Takes the Ice Bucket Challenge to Support ALS Research

August 16, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

Photo reprinted with permission from Michael Dell

Michael Dell took the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS research Saturday in front of the construction site for the new Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.

CNBC’s Jon Fortt challenged Dell.

In a posting to his Facebook page, Dell, in turn, challenged Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.com and Actor Samuel Jackson. He also announced he made a donation to the ALS organization to find a cure for the disease, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. ALS is a “progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Eventually, people with ALS lose the ability to initiate and control muscle movement, which often leads to total paralysis and death within two to five years of diagnosis. There is no cure and only one drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that modestly extends survival. Veterans are approximately twice as likely be diagnosed with the disease.”

Post by Michael Dell.

In accepting the challenge, Dell joined other tech titans who have also taken the icy soak like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

The Ice Bucket Challenge has raised more than $11 million in donations for the ALS Association. “The ALS Association has received $11.4 million in donations compared to $1.7 million during the same time period last year (July 29 to August 16),” according to a news release. “These donations have come from existing donors and 220,255 new donors to The Association.”

“Never before have we been in a better position to fuel our fight against this disease,” Barbara Newhouse, President and CEO of the ALS Association, wrote in a blog post on the nonprofit organization’s website. “Increased awareness and unprecedented financial support will enable us to think outside the box. We will be able to strategize about efforts in ways that previously would not have been possible, all while we work to fulfill and enhance our existing mission priorities nationwide.”

WiseWear Creates a Tiny Platform to Analyze Your Body’s Data

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

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Wearable companies all over the world are racing to create devices that tell you what’s going on in your body. They’re on sports bras, wristwatches, necklaces and even cocktail rings. They can be stuck on wounded areas to measure pain. And then there’s WiseWear, whose tiny platform promises to “See Inside” the body and “collect contextually aware data that is automated and derived from multiple sources.” WiseWear’s tiny sensor platform monitors heart rate, movement—including what your exercise regime is producing–and dehydration, and its Bluetooth device lets it communicate with other devices to monitor health.

“Sensor technology empowers individuals to live a happy, healthy and productive life,” said CEO and Founder Jerry Wilmink. “This lets you really see everything that happens in the body. The first generation of wearables only measured one or two things and in many cases it was highly inaccurate. This is a platform and there are several use cases ranging from a patch to a watch version…. It’s highly accurate monitoring captures and gives you a really good pulse on what’s happening inside your body.”

WiseWear plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign in August for pre-sales of its first wearable device, called “Evolve,” according to a company press release. The device “adheres directly to the user’s chest with ultrathin, ultra soft, transfer-printed micro-circuitry and sensors.” The device collects biometric data that is then transmitted wirelessly to a smartphone or tablet for data analysis.

Wilmink’s Background

Wilmink got his bachelor’s and master’s in biochemical engineering at Vanderbilt then, he said “Snuck into the Ph.D. program.” When he graduated, he was a research associate with the National Academy of Sciences and then moved to the Department of Defense where he founded the first Terahertz bioeffects research laboratory where he began to develop WiseWear. “I hand picked the talent and grew it from nothing to a pretty big laboratory. We were connecting the dots, being creative, finding the talent, building a rock star team with tremendous potential.” For the first time, he said, he wasn’t competing on pure IQ but on creativity. That became his prime criteria for teammates.

Wilmink also received his Executive MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, class of 2014.

Creating WiseWear

His interest in biotechnology, Wilmink said, came from growing up with his grandparents. Once his grandfather—a Sicilian with a black Cadillac who smoked cigars and listened to Sinatra—fell. He seemed fine on Thanksgiving and ended up dying the day after Christmas. The fall, it turns out, was because of a change in his grandfather’s gait, which is an indication of dehydration.

“If we had noticed he had changes in his gait, we could have prevented him from falling,” Wilmink said. “Our initial product was a line sensor system to pick up when a senior was dehydrated and his gait was changing. Fifty percent of seniors over the age of 65 who fall end up passing away in the next six months. And that’s not connected to the severity of the fall.”

Keeping track of what’s going on inside the body before it manifests in a negative way is a big step toward prevention, according to WiseWear advisor, Dr. David Katz Head of Yale Health & Preventative Medicine.

“WiseWear is designed to … provide personalized, real-time feedback about an individual’s daily activities fully integrated with accurate heart rate, respiration, hydration, and by providing direction, motivation, and even a kind of oversight and accountability. This kind of feedback is known to encourage healthy behaviors- and now you can get it from something that’s practically a part of you.”

“This allows a user to take a proactive kind of action to treat health and wellness rather than treat disease, “ Wilmink said. And running this company, after his long journey is “all, absolutely exhilarating.”

Founded in March of 2013, WiseWear is based in both San Antonio and Austin. The company recently moved into Geekdom, a coworking space and technology incubator in downtown San Antonio. Wilmink has raised more than $1 million in seed stage funding, and the company plans to raise a Series A round of funding next year. Wilmink has put together a team of experts including Ph.Ds, MBAs, C-Level executives and others. The company has also licensed its intellectual property from the University of Texas, according to a company release.

WiseWear plans to release its consumer products and then pursue clinical trials and FDA approval for a line of medical products. The company has plans for a device called WiseDoctor to accurately record a patient’s vital signs, hydration and activity in a hospital setting. Future products will be targeted at monitoring babies, seniors, diabetics and even pets.

Editor’s note: THis article appears in the Silicon Hills News print edition on the Life Sciences industry in central Texas.