Category: Austin (Page 200 of 318)

Spot On Sciences Makes Taking Blood Samples Easy

August 15, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The most remarkable thing to Dr. Jeanette Hill about the evolution of her company, Spot on Sciences, is the myriad ways her blood collection device, HemaSpot, is being used. It has proven invaluable in research being done in Spain that shows taking blood pressure medication at night rather than in the morning can mean the difference between life and death. It is being used to collect blood samples from Himalayan snow leopards, to check blood among people with diabetes in the Scottish Isles and for AIDS testing in remote parts of Africa.

While Hill’s team is focused on the device itself, making it as practical and responsive to researcher’s needs as possible, scientists all over the world are discovering HemaSpot and asking whether they can use the device in their research. “I’m almost weekly surprised by someone wanting to use it for medical research, different tests that are taking place all around the world,” Hill said. “It’s surprising and exhilarating.”

Taking blood samples has always been messy and fraught with potential for contamination. It also creates a big problem for people like Hill’s mother who lives 20 miles from the nearest clinic.

“It’s such a burden for her to go in and get her blood tested,” Hill said. “It’s such a hassle to drive all that way…then the labs are only open during certain hours, and she feels lousy for days afterward. I thought isn’t there a better way to do this?” For decades, hospitals have used dried blood sampling to collect blood from newborns requiring only a small stick in the heel and then preserving blood on filter paper. Hill wondered whether she could use the same technique for adults. But that presented problems. Even with trained nurses taking the samples, there was a 20 percent rejection rate. It took hours for the sample to dry—longer if the weather was rainy. And while the paper was exposed to the air it was also exposed to numerous contaminants.

Hill began to work on HemaSpot, a small, plastic container in which sits a “flower” made of filter paper. The device comes with a lancet and alcohol wipes for cleaning the finger for a blood sample. The device only needs three drops of blood. Once the blood dries, researchers can perform up to 50 different experiments just by taking a tiny punch from the paper.

Hill is a rare combination of a research scientist and businesswoman. She received her Ph.D. in bio-organic chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis and did post-doctoral research in auto-immune diseases at Washington Medical Center. While in grad school, she founded Biochemical Resources, an Internet database source for research products and chemicals. It lasted a couple years and was beginning to get traction until the World Wide Web and companies such as Lycos and Yahoo came along and “did it a lot better.”

Afterward, she worked as a director for various small companies. She loved the variety and “chaos” of working for a small company, but when her last employer was bought by a larger company, she decided that was the time to go out on her own.

“We started in February of 2010 with just an idea,” Hill said. “By the end of that year, we had a prototype and some models. It took us another year to get our manufacturer.” Every time they ran up against a problem, like uneven blood flow over the filter paper, which would alter test results, Hill said, they thought “We can fix that.”

“That’s kind of cool,” she said. “This is an opportunity for us to make that a lot better….how can we make that very easy to use, a simple device where you understand immediately how to use it?”
They’ve been through a dozen iterations. Her biggest breakthrough, she said, was creating a design with eight blades fanning out so that the blood would flow evenly to all parts of the paper. With HemaSpot, each part of the paper has identical amounts of blood.

“Whenever you get a roadblock you either go around it or pivot and go the other direction, sometimes a couple times a day.” Hill said. “It’s my personality do a lot of different things…I don’t like where there’s a very narrow path and have to get permission to do things, and sometimes many layers of permission.”

Ironically though, with any medical device, there are many layers of permission. Currently, the device is only approved for medical research through laboratories. Hill would love to see it available on the shelves for people like her mother, but getting devices approved as diagnostic tools in the U.S. is a lengthy process. It’s moving faster in Europe.
In the meantime, HemaSpot is enabling scientific breakthroughs.

Dr. Michael Smolensky is one of the world’s foremost experts in chronobiology—natural physiological rhythms such as circadian rhythms–and always wanted to understand better how to apply them to medical conditions. “I’ve been frustrated because I know that certain constituents of the blood that are important inaccurate medical diagnoses show very great predictability. They reach peak levels or lowest levels at times when appointments can’t be scheduled, and blood can’t be withdrawn. There was not means of getting blood samples from patients at those particular times of the day or night when they would be most valuable in getting accurate determination of the value of medical interventions.”

Smolensky has been working with Dr. Ramon Herrera, Director of Bioengineering & Chronobiology Laboratories at the University of Vigo, Spain. They discovered that patients who take their blood pressure medication at night are five times less likely to suffer a heart attack than those who take it in the morning. But they weren’t able to isolate why. They knew there was a change in some levels, such as cortisol, at different times of day. But what else was going on in the interactions between the medications and changes in the blood over a 24-hour period? With HemaSpot, they can get patients with hypertension to take their blood at three-hour intervals from home to look at all the factors.

“One of (Hill’s) strengths is that she is very open minded to criticism about her product designs and development, unlike many other that companies just want to get on the market and see financial flow,” Smolensky said. “She’s just very inquisitive and open minded, not a typical business personality. She certainly has the business acumen, but she’s also very science oriented.” And as a person, he said, Hill is “just delightful.”

Most of Spot on Science’s funding has come from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Small Business Innovation Research Program. Their phase II grant was for $1.5 million, and they recently received an additional $750,000. Hill has been pitching—and winning pitch competitions—since she joined Avinde accelerator for women entrepreneurs building scalable businesses.

“I had done a lot of talks but scientific talks,” Hill said. “The very first time I got up to pitch I was so nervous. It wasn’t a very good talk at all. I had just developed the company and came up with a name for it which was Spot on Biosciences. Someone said ‘You’re going to want to shorten that name. For one thing, it’s too long. For another, you don’t want to be the S.O.B. company.”
Hill did a lot of things right from the beginning, said Terry Chase Hazell, director of emerging tech at Avinde. “She made a clean break from her employer, protecting her IP, built a great team, she’s fully participating in the entrepreneurship scene and most importantly she picked a business model that could scale.”

Right now, Hill said, HemaSpot is being used in pilot studies but they’ll need to hit a certain critical mass to scale up. A study starts with a few patients. Once it’s determined that the device works, a research project increases that to 100 patients, 1,000 patients, 10,000…once it hits 100,000, Hill said, it will be time to scale up. She’s building relationships now to determine who would be a good investment partner for Spot on Sciences.

But what brings her to work every day, Hill said, isn’t growing the company. “We can see that this can make a difference in the world. This is going to change the way we do blood tests. This is going to advance clinical science. That’s what I love to hear.”

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in Silicon Hills News’ print magazine on the Life Sciences industry

The Pioneers of 3D Printing, an Industry Invented, In Part, at UT in Austin

August 13, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 14 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

3D printed sugar art, photo courtesy of 3D Systems’ Sugar Lab

The applications of 3D printing seem only limited by an inventor’s imagination.

Today, 3D printers can make dental parts, hip replacement joints, food, toys, jewelry and more. The futuristic technology can even print human tissue and recreate human organs.

But few know one of the technologies behind the 3D printing industry began at the University of Texas in Austin.

The pioneers of 3D printing met in Austin last week for the 25th annual International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, the world’s leading research-focused summit on 3D manufacturing.

For 25 years, the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas has hosted the group.

Only 40 people attended the first meeting in 1989, which was held in a conference room instead of an auditorium, said Carl Deckard, one of the inventors and developers of “Selective Laser Sintering,” the technology at the forefront of 3D printing.

Deckard developed “Selective Laser Sintering” with Joe Beaman, a professor at UT. Deckard was working on his undergraduate degree and later his masters and Ph.D. in the UT Mechanical Engineering Department.

“SLS has grown to be one of the world’s most advanced and promising manufacturing methods in use today,” according to a UT Mechanical Engineering blog post detailing the birth of the 3D printing industry. “The SLS patents were the highest revenue generating intellectual property out of UT Austin for many years,” and even though they are set to expire soon, UT continues to be highly involved in the 3D printing industry, according to the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT.

Deckard eventually spun out a company, DTM, to commercialize the technology.

Meanwhile, Chuck Hull, co-founder and chief technology officer of 3D Systems, now based in Rock Hills, South Carolina, invented a competing technology called stereolithography.

“I worked at small company and developed the first additive manufacturing technology in a back lab by myself,” Hull said. The owner wasn’t interested in investing in the technology so Hull spun out a company and licensed the technology, founding 3D Systems in 1986 in Valencia, Calif. Hull invented the first stereolithography (SLA) rapid prototyping system.

Hull’s company, 3D Systems bought DTM in 2001 and remains the industry leader in additive manufacturing today. 3D Systems had a record $513 million in sales last year, up 45 percent. It is the fastest growing tech company on the New York Stock Exchange, Hull said.

Its main U.S. competitor is Stratasys, based in Minneapolis, inventors of fused deposition modeling, a technique used by the popular MakerBot consumer-focused 3D printers, which Stratasys acquired in 2013. Lisa Crump and her husband Scott founded Stratasys in 1988.

The Pioneers of 3D Printing: Terry Wohlers, industry expert, Chuck Hull, co-founder of 3D Systems, Carl Deckard, inventor of laser sintering, Lisa Crump, co-founder of Stratasys and Dave Bourell, professor of mechanical engineering at UT.

Hull, Deckard, Lisa Crump, Terry Wohlers, an expert on the 3D printing industry, and Dave Bourell, professor of mechanical engineering at the Cockrell School, who organized the event, sat down with Silicon Hills News last week to discuss the evolution of the industry.

The industry has changed dramatically in 25 years and these pioneers have been on the forefront of those changes.

Today, 3D printers have produced more than 90,000 titanium hip replacement devices, half of which have been implanted into humans, Wohlers said.

Every week, 3D Systems machines produce 20,000 dental coping devices, the main structure of a crown or a bridge, Wohlers said.

Three-dimensional printing has transformed entire industries like aerospace, automotive and especially healthcare.

“It’s used in so many different fields it’s hard to characterize,” Wohlers said. “Today, you’ve probably touched 25 products that have been touched by this technology. Jewelry, the cars you drive in, the planes you drive in have benefited from prototyping.”

Boeing has 16 different aircraft that use tens of thousands of parts created with 3D laser sintering technology, Wohlers said.

The Automotive Industry Adopted 3D Printing Early

The first 3D Systems machine using stereolithography, the SLA 250, made a ten inch by ten inch part for a large automotive company that needed rapid prototyping, Hull said. But the technology quickly spread to other industries like medical and aerospace, he said.

“It’s a down and dirty industry machine that the general public doesn’t know about,” Hull said.

Today, the “maker” movement, which has hobbyists building toys, tools, parts and more in their garages with 3D printers, has popularized an industrial technology used for decades in plants for prototyping.

Consumers can readily buy 3D printers from companies like MakerBot, which sells its latest model for $2,800 at Staples, Home Depot or on Amazon.com.

“Things didn’t look quite this way 25 years ago,” said Crump with Stratasys.

The Influence of 3D Printing on the Medical Industry

Stratasys’ first customer, Biomed, made custom hips and knees.

“We went from zero in sales in 1988 to $487 million in revenues for 2013,” Crump said.

The medical device companies were early adopters and leaders in this field, she said.

The 3D printing technology is not just making products, but changing people’s lives, Crump said.

Emma, a six-year-old girl, suffers from a degenerative muscular disease that doesn’t allow her to use her arms, but with an exoskeleton made using Stratasys’ 3D printing technology, she can use her arms.

“It’s awe inspiring seeing this little girl – she calls them her magic arms – because now she can color and do things that a normal six year old can do,” Crump said.

The technology has also successfully helped doctors separate conjoined twins, Hull said. Doctors have used 3D Systems printers to create models of the patients before an operation to do practice exploratory surgery.

And one of the emerging areas of medical applications is the printing of organs and human tissue using 3D printers.

The 3D printing technology allows manufactures to create customized products affordably. With conventional manufacturing, a mold can cost $50,000 and 3D printing does away with the need for that, Wohlers said.

3D Printing On Demand

3D printed plug and cord, photo courtesy of Stratasys

With 3D manufacturing, companies can create digital inventories and produce products on demand, he said. It cuts down on storage, wasted products and unnecessary production.

“When this area first started we were mainly making parts that were designed to be made some other way,” Hull said. “Now people are designing for these processes and are taking advantage of the process.”

The 3D Printing Impact on Aerospace

The 3D printing process has transformed the airplane manufacturing industry.

“Weight is so important in aerospace,” Deckard said “If you take one pound off a commercial airliner, you save $100,000 in fuel over the lifetime of the plane.”

Airplane makers like Boeing and Aerobus expect to have hundreds of 3D Printers to make plane parts within five years, Wohlers said.

Efforts in 3D printing date back to the 1950s but the machines needed Computer Aided Design software that didn’t exist until the 1980s. And the computing power wasn’t sufficient back then either.

Faster computers, better software and cheaper storage make 3D printing accessible to more people now, said Bourell with UT. That accessibility has ignited the interest of kids, he said.

“Five years ago to get students involved in manufacturing you had to do a sell job,” he said. “Now the students are coming in and saying they want to do 3D printing.”

“They don’t see it as product development,” he said. “They see it as making stuff.”

During the last few decades, the U.S. has become a nation of consumers, Wohlers said.

“We have to bring back the nation that was once famous for making stuff,” he said.

3D Printing is igniting that inventive spirit, especially in young people and creating excitement about engineering and manufacturing this country hasn’t seen since the space race in the 1960s, Wohlers said.

Other factors bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. include the availability of cheap natural gas, Deckard said.
“In a lot of areas, the cost of the product isn’t as much driven by labor as it has been in the past,” he said. “When the labor content goes down there’s less reason to go off shore.”

The momentum for 3D printing is just going to continue to build, Hull said.

Now it’s about targeting certain applications and perfecting them and increasing production speed, Hull said.

“Transition from using it for modeling, prototyping and tooling to using it for manufacturing,” he said.

A Booming Multi-Billion Dollar Industry

Overall, the 3D printing industry grew 35 percent last year and has averaged 32 percent for the last five years, Wohlers said.

“The industry is going to be in the tens of billions of dollars,” he said.

If it captures just two percent of the $10.5 trillion worldwide manufacturing industry that translates into a $210 billion industry, Wohlers said. Last year, the worldwide industry for 3D printing topped $3.1 billion.

Eventually, everyone could have a 3D printer in their house just like they have a computer printer, said Crump with Stratasys.

Later this year, 3D Systems will begin selling its Chef Jet, a 3D confectionary printer aimed at professional chefs, Hull said. The printer can make 3D chocolates, cake toppers, sugar skulls and more.

“Some of the products are so exquisite you don’t want to eat them,” Hull said.

A 3D Printed Sugar Skull, photo courtesy of 3D Systems

In Los Angeles, 3D Systems operates the Sugar Lab. They bring in chefs and let them use the 3D printing technology to create edible products, he said. Food printing is becoming a huge industry. Just about anything that can go through a nozzle such as peanut butter, frosting, chocolate and more can be used in 3D printing.

The first 3D printer is also going to space soon. Made In Space, a Mountain View-based startup, has created a 3D printer that will allow astronauts on the International Space Station to print parts and tools and other stuff in space. The printer will be included in the SpaceX CRS-4 launch to resupply the ISS, scheduled for September.

Already, 3D printed parts have made it off the earth. NASA used 3D printed parts on the Mars Rover.

“All of us have been in this since the ‘80s, but what we are experiencing now, we’ve never seen it before in our lives,” Wohlers said. “The government and states are supporting it. But the big brands are investing – Amazon has a store with 3D printed products. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, GE, Home Depot, some of the biggest brands in the world are getting into this. Some are motivated, right or wrong, by the fact that other big brands are getting into it.”

With all this money being invested that can really accelerate the development of transitioning ideas into products and services, Hull said.

“Now it’s just applications development,” he said. “I talk to young inventors a lot and my conclusion is, clearly, much of the future has not been invented yet.”

LawnStarter Launches in Austin to Simplify Lawn Care for Consumers

August 9, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 12 Comments

Ryan Farley, co-founder of LawnStarter, a Techstars company in Austin

When the temperatures hit triple digits in Austin, many homeowners don’t want to mow the lawn.

A new startup, part of Techstars in Austin, has a solution.

LawnStarter, founded in August of 2013, wants to take the pain out of lawn maintenance by hooking up homeowners with lawn care crews. The company officially launched this week and provides service to all of Austin and many outlying areas from Marbles Falls to San Marcos and Round Rock.

LawnStarter is taking a “highly fragmented, old school industry” and bringing it into the digital age, said Ryan Farley, one of the founders.

“The bar for the customer experience is extremely low,” Farley said.

That’s why it’s ripe for disruption, he said. Farley and Steve Corcoran founded the company originally in the Washington, D.C. area with $110,000 in seed stage capital they raised from a group of angel investors. This summer, they relocated to Austin for the Techstars accelerator.

“Texas is one of the biggest markets for lawn care,” Farley said.

A few guys have become millionaires doing lawn care but that that’s a small fraction of the market, Farley said. In fact, the top 50 lawn care companies account for just 15 percent of the market, he said.

“There’s lots of small companies out there that need help,” Farley said.

While Farley didn’t grow up mowing lawns, he did work on grounds maintenance during the summertime and for a golf course. His co-founder, Corcoran ran a lawn mowing business.

In studying the industry, they found some lawn service companies are completely offline and don’t even have a website. They typically are one to two person companies, Farley said.

“They are at a point in their business where managing the business is becoming hectic,” he said.

LawnStarter wants to take the pain and paperwork out of the process, Farley said. The company takes 15 percent to 20 percent on each transaction, depending on the job. The average price for lawn service is $48 for half-acre lots, Farley said. And typically, homeowners get their lawns mowed every few weeks.

LawnStarter’s platform matches consumers with lawn care providers and lets them get an estimate for any yard work with a few clicks.

LawnStarter is working on developing partnerships with national chains. The company wants to scale to provide service to the entire Southwest region of the U.S. by next summer, Farley said.

“The shared economy is doing well right now,” said Brandon Marker, analyst with Techstars in Austin.

Companies like HomeJoy have found success matching cleaners with consumers.

“But this does not exist for lawn care,” Marker said. “People have tried to make this work for lawn care but they haven’t succeeded so far. I don’t believe that’s because there isn’t a need or a market for it. It’s just difficult to do.”

But the LawnStarter team has got all the ingredients to make it work, Marker said. And now people are more comfortable with the shared economy.

The LawnStarter founders taught themselves how to code and gave up good jobs on Wall Street to do LawnStarter.

“They turned a great deal of financial experience into coding experience,” Marker said. “They found out how to do this successfully in the Washington, D.C. market. And now they’re replicating that success in the Austin market.”

Dropbox Cultivates an Austin Culture and Continues to Hire and Expand

August 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Sherry Birk with Dropbox in Austin

In December of 2011, Facebook bought Austin-based Gowalla and relocated a bunch of its workers to Menlo Park.

Sherry Birk, director of recruiting at Gowalla, moved with them. She later left Facebook to join another startup: Dropbox, based in San Francisco. But Birk longed to get back to Texas.

Her wish came true last year when Dropbox announced plans to put an office in Austin.

Birk joined about ten Dropbox employees who left California to relocate to Texas and set up the Dropbox Austin office. Dropbox also has offices in New York, Dublin, Ireland and Sydney, Australia.

Today, Birk serves as the director of recruiting for Dropbox in Austin. The company now has 50 employees with plans to hire another 150 by the end of next year.

“I love the Bay Area but I love Austin more. I just couldn’t wait to get back here in general,” Birk said. “I’m just excited to build something here.”

Dropbox Austin Office, photos courtesy of Dropbox

And Dropbox is doing just that. It’s going to move into a five-story building at Fifth and Congress, which is under construction. The company plans to occupy three of the floors or approximately 58,000 square feet. Move-in date is set for next January.

“It’s an anchor for downtown,” Birk said.

Meanwhile, Dropbox occupies two floors in the skyscraper next door.

“I think being downtown is just another thing that attracts people. People don’t want to spend a lot of time in their cars,” she said. “We’re recruiting top talent and they have a lot of choices. We want to make it an easy choice for them.”

Increasingly, in Austin, tech companies put their offices downtown so their employees can live, eat and play within walking and biking distance of their workplace.

Dropbox has hired experienced people as well as new college graduates from the University of Texas with liberal arts degrees, Birk said. The company is looking to fill sales and operations jobs. The office handles Dropbox for business customers and serves as the gateway to Latin America. About 70 percent of Dropbox’s customers are outside the U.S.

Dropbox is an online storage site that allows people to share photos, documents and videos from anywhere easily. The company offers a free consumer version of its service. It also charges for its business features and professional features.

Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, two MIT students, founded Dropbox in 2007 to share large files online.

Today, Dropbox has more than 300 million customers including four million businesses ranging from photographers to construction companies. Some of its customers include Vita CoCo, Kayak, Foursquare, National Geographic, Spotify, Eventbrite, Paul Mitchell and Under Armour.

Last December, Dell announced a partnership with Dropbox. Dell offers Dropbox for Business to its customers via its global sales team.

Dropbox focuses on maintaining its corporate culture in Austin, Birk said. One of the company’s core values is being humble, and hiring humble people, she said. The company also has big ideas for outfitting its new headquarters with Austin artwork and other amenities. Its workers host Ping-Pong and tabletop shuffleboard tournaments. They have regular Yoga and bootcamp sessions at work and a running club. Cater2.me brings in meals from local eateries to their fully stocked kitchen. They also have flexible workstations that allow them to either stand or sit at their desks. And a group of employees spent a hackathon weekend crafting a custom wooden bar. It is now in a corner of the office where they host cocktail Fridays. They also have lots of musicians on staff and plan to enter the Austin Technology Council’s battle of the bands contest during Austin startup week.

Earlier this summer, Dropbox ended its incentive package agreement with the City of Austin worth $244,500 during the next 10 years. It also received a $1.5 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant to expand in Austin. Despite ending its incentive agreement with Austin, Dropbox is continuing to expand and hire locally.

“We’re really excited to be in Austin,” Birk said. “We definitely have plans to get to that 200 number. We’re here to stay.”

SpaceX to Build a $85 Million Rocket Launch Pad in Brownsville

August 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 12 Comments

Photo courtesy of Gov. Rick Perry’s office.

Texas is set to play a major role in the new space race.

This week, Gov. Rick Perry announced Texas would offer $15.3 million in incentives to bring SpaceX’s commercial rocket launch facility to Brownsville, on the southern tip of Texas. The facility will launch commercial satellites.

SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, plans to create 300 jobs at the site.

“Texas has been on the forefront of our nation’s space exploration efforts for decades, so it is fitting that SpaceX has chosen our state as they expand the frontiers of commercial space flight,” Gov. Perry said in a news release. “In addition to growing the aerospace industry in Texas, SpaceX’s facility will provide myriad opportunities for STEM education in South Texas, and inspire a new generation of Texas engineers and innovators.”

Texas is providing the incentives from a $2.3 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant and $13 million from the Spaceport Trust Fund, earmarked for developing the infrastructure for the spaceport.

SpaceX is a private maker of rockets and spacecraft founded by Musk. The company has already launched a spacecraft and delivered cargo to the International Space Station. Since 2003, the company has operated a Rocket Development Facility in McGregor, Texas with more than 250 employees.

“SpaceX is excited to expand our work in Texas with the world’s first commercial launch complex designed specifically for orbital missions. We appreciate the support of Gov. Perry and numerous other federal, state and local officials who have partnered with us to make this vision a reality,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a news release. “In addition to creating hundreds of high tech jobs for the Texas workforce, this site will inspire students, expand the supplier base and attract tourists to the south Texas area.”

Charles Schwab Expansion in Austin to Create 800 Jobs

August 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Austin’s financial services industry is expanding right alongside the growth in its high tech industry.
And this week, The Charles Schwab Corp., a securities broker, investment services, money manager and financial advisory company, announced plans to expand in Austin, creating 800 jobs and investing $196 million.
Charles Schwab plans to build a new 250,000 square foot to 300,000 square foot building in the Domain area as well as occupy an existing 187,000 square feet.
“We are pleased that Charles Schwab is expanding its operations in Austin, which further highlights the strength and future potential of our burgeoning financial services sector,” Pete Winstead, shareholder at Windstead PC and Chairman of Opportunity Austin, a five county economic development initiative aimed at fostering job-creating investment in the Austin region, said in a news release.
“We’ve been building our presence in Austin since 1982, when we opened our first branch here, and we’re very pleased to continue investing in the community – not only through our real estate plans but also through volunteerism and philanthropy, our employees contribute to local nonprofit organizations. Austin is a great place to live and work, and it offers a skilled, well-educated workforce for our recruiting needs,” Ben Sheppard, vice president of Schwab Corporate Retirement Services, said in a news release.
The Austin Chamber of Commerce, Travis County and Opportunity Austin helped the company pick Austin for its expansion. This week, Travis County approved economic development incentives worth an estimated $3.3 million. The State of Texas gave the company a $4.5 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant.

Facebook Reaches Out to Small Businesses in Austin

July 24, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of small business at the Facebook Austin Fit event.

Facebook, with more than 1 billion active users, has become the digital main street for small business owners from plumbers to jewelry stores.

They can hang their shingle, a Facebook business page, and reach their small town customers or a global audience.

And just a fraction of Facebook’s 30 million small to medium-sized businesses are active advertisers. In the last month, 1.5 million businesses spent anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, said Dan Levy, the company’s director of small business. But it’s growing. And the growth is coming from mobile customers.

Of the small businesses using Facebook, 19 million actively manage their page from a mobile device, Levy said.

“If you’ve got a mobile phone and a Facebook page, you’ve got a mobile strategy,” he said.

Levy spoke at the first Facebook Fit Austin, a boot-camp style event to educate small business owners about how to use Facebook effectively to grow their companies. The sold out event drew more than 1,000 people to the morning and afternoon sessions at the Austin Music Hall. It featured a keynote speech from Levy, a small business panel discussion with local businesses and training sessions led by Facebook and its partner companies, QuickBooks, Square and LegalZoom.

It’s the first time Facebook has held these kinds of events in communities across the country, Levy said. The Austin event was the largest of five events, he said. Facebook also has an office in Austin with a few hundred employees. It handles North American small business sales from here, he said.

Small businesses have contributed to significantly to Facebook’s revenue growth. The 10-year-old company Wednesday reported revenue of $2.91 billion for the second quarter, up 61 percent from the same time a year ago. And mobile advertising revenue represented 62 percent of all its ad revenue, up from 41 percent for the same quarter a year ago.

Facebook’s advertising has gotten more sophisticated in recent years with more targeted ads. The company offers small businesses the chance to upload email lists and target their current customers using Facebook’s platform. They can also get really specific in targeting customers by location, gender, interests and other factors. Facebook also lets business owners “boost” their daily posts to reach more people for a few dollars or $50 or more.

“We want to be the solution that helps them reach their customers,” Levy said. “It’s really important for us to make ads that are relevant. Our goal is for the ads to be as good, if not better, than the content you see on Facebook.”

During his morning keynote, Levy said even plumbers have grown their sales using Facebook. He gave the example of Morgan Miller Plumbing in Kansas City. Jeff Morgan, owner, has landed new customers and hired employees on Facebook. He has seen a 39 times the return on the $2,000 he’s spent on Facebook ads.

The key is being authentic, Levy said. Morgan has built his brand and expanded his business by telling who he is. Trust is a major issue when it comes to hiring a plumber and Morgan provides information about his employees along with pictures of them on the Facebook site.

The Austin small business panel at Facebook Fit

To illustrate how local small businesses are using Facebook, Rhonda Abrams, author and USA Today columnist, moderated a panel featuring Chi’Lantro, Korean infused Tex-Mex food, Allens Boots, Yeti Coolers and Kendra Scott Jewelry.

Chi’Lantro, with more than 10,000 likes on Facebook, spends about $400 to $500 a month on Facebook ads to promote its food trucks, said Jae Kim, its owner. He started Chi’Lantro with $28,000 in savings and financed it with his credit cards. He now has five trucks in Austin and Houston, 25 employees and he plans to open a brick and mortar restaurant this year.

Yeti Coolers, founded in 2006 in Austin, makes high-end durable coolers for hunters, anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts. The company has 150 employees and more than 212,000 likes on its Facebook page. Yeti uses Facebook to communicate with its customers and to build brand loyalty and awareness, said Harrison Lindsey, its digital content coordinator. Authenticity is key to building the brand on Facebook, he said.

“We have to be very authentic and understand what our customer needs are,” he said.

Allens Boots, which has a location on Congress Avenue and a store in Round Rock, doesn’t do traditional radio ads anymore, said Kirsten King, marketing manager. It has also created two Facebook pages updated for the different customers in the separate stores, she said.

“The good thing about it is it’s cheap,” King said.

She estimates Allens Boots gets seven times return on its ad spend on Facebook.

Kendra Scott Jewelry, with more than 51,000 likes on Facebook, uses online analytics and tailors its posts to its targeted customer base, women between the ages of 18 to 34, said Lara Schmieding, spokeswoman. Its market research on Facebook has also helped the company decide where to open its next store in 2015, she said.

The Techstars Cloud Program Returns to San Antonio in 2015

July 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 12 Comments

I am very excited to have the opportunity to restart and lead the Techstars Cloud program: http://t.co/jMnKZomSuq cc @techstars

— Blake Yeager (@blake_yeager) July 23, 2014

Blake Yaeger

The Techstars Cloud program launched in San Antonio in 2012 with 11 companies and the next year another 11 startups participated in the 2013 program.

But the program, launched by Graham Weston, CEO and Co-Founder of Rackspace at Geekdom, went on hiatus in 2013 when Jason Seats moved to Austin and launched the Techstars Austin program.

Now it’s back.

The Techstars Cloud program will return to San Antonio in 2015 and will be led by Blake Yeager, who served as a mentor to the first class when he worked for HP Cloud Services. He later quit to join ZeroVM, a 2013 Techstars Cloud company acquired by Rackspace.

“I am extremely excited to be taking over as the Managing Director for the Cloud program,” Yeager wrote in a blog post on the Techstars website.

“The roster of alumni from the first two Techstars Cloud programs includes some great companies and even better founders,” Yeager wrote. “I don’t want to name names, because I know I will leave someone out, but these companies have raised serious money and are doing amazing things. I am excited by the opportunity to continue to build on the legacy that Jason and these first two classes have pioneered.”

“The next Techstars Cloud program will be kicking off in San Antonio in early 2015 with applications opening up this Fall, according to Yeager.

Zach Dell’s Startup Thread is a Dating Site Just for College Students

July 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Lander Coronado-Garcia – CEO , Zachary Dell – Founder and Chairman,
Patrick Adiaheno – Head of Product

Michael Dell never pushed entrepreneurship on his son, Zach, which may be the reason Zach started asking about business, reading tomes by people like Warren Buffet and playing stock simulators by the age of 12.

“My dad and I are extremely close,” Dell said. “When I started asking him about starting his business and what it meant to be an entrepreneur, he started telling me more and more. He would give me little lessons every time we were in the car and use real world examples, like the Bernie Madoff scandal, to teach me about insider trading. We’d talk during car rides, dinners…we spend a lot of good time together.”

At 17, Dell is founder of a new online dating service for college students called Thread—not the same as a former Facebook effort to get into online dating by the same name. The idea, according to CEO Lander Coronado-Garcia, is that college students are safer and more likely to find good matches dating other college students, rather than being on sites like Tinder where anyone can view their profiles. The company intends to launch this fall with University of Texas organizations—like fraternities and sororities—and restrict membership to people with utexas.edu email addresses. In the future the company hopes to expand by adding other area colleges, and spreading from there.

To test the market, Thread created a fictional profile of an attractive UT student on Tinder. Of those who responded, 13 percent were UT students, 17 percent students of other schools and 70 percent “who knows?” Coronado-Garcia said. Moreover, some of the comments left by prospective “suitors” were obscene, bordering on threatening.

“Thread is about classy dating,” Coronado-Garcia said. “We’re going to be very explicit about the kind of behavior we deem acceptable.” In other words, a dating website even Mom would like.

Thread will tackle some of the other weird issues that crop up in online dating, too. With “hookup” sites, people can make 100 matches in an hour—clearly not the behavior of somebody looking for a substantive dating relationship. Thread will limit the number of potential matches presented each day to 10. If both parties say yes to the match, they can keep that match among 12 on a list. If someone adds another match, one falls off.

“That way,” Coronado-Garcia said, “You have to be a little more judicious in who you choose to match with. Each match is a little more important than if you just keep everybody in a bucket and keep storing them.”

A Junior Entrepreneur

Dell’s first business venture was hatched when he was playing golf on vacation in Hawaii at the age of 10. He had a friend along and they realized that golfers who hit balls into the lava fields never went to retrieve them. This was a high-end course. The abandoned balls were expensive. So Dell and his friend began collecting them to sell.

“We built up this huge inventory,” Dell said. “I had just finished reading about leveraged buyouts and selling your business and I thought ‘I want to sell my business.’ My business was the inventory so I decided to find someone to buy all my golf balls.” A friend of his dad’s, who was less than a stellar golfer, routinely lost golf balls. Dell offered to sell the golfer his entire inventory for a reduced price. It was the sale of his first business.

Another opportunity came along when his cousins started a summer camp in Dallas, Camp Spark. Initially, it was held at the cousins’ home. Then, as it grew, expanded to a local school. In recent years, the company has expanded to Austin, San Francisco, Boulder and Boston. By and large, it’s a camp where kids do all kinds of sports.

“If you’re a middle school kid, you’re happy to hang out all day with high school kids,” Dell observed.

Dell started Thread on his own. He had the advice of his dad’s network, but he refused to take money from his parents. Longtime family friend Brett Hurt introduced him to Coronado-Garcia who had been part of the founding team of Meritful—the winner of Capital Factory’s first annual “Move your Company to Austin” competition during SXSW Interactive. Thread is also in Capital Factory’s Incubator and Capital Factory is an investor in the company.

Getting Thread Up and Running

Coronado-Garcia, who has a degree in mechanical engineering, said he suffers from “career ADD.” He worked as a consultant for Accenture IT Systems but decided to go back to school for his MBA. He graduated from Wharton in 2011. He moved to Austin as part of Meritful but when that company folded, Coronado-Garcia was almost immediately tapped for Thread.

Eric Simone, CEO of ClearBlade had been a mentor of Meritful and also serves as a Thread mentor. Initially, Dell hired some developers to build the product and wound up with an unusable app. So he had to raise more money and Thread hired ClearBlade to build a software solution at a flat fee that could add functionality and scale.

“We said ‘Tell us how many hours it’s going to take and how long it’s going to take and we’ll hold you to that deadline,” Simone said. “That way we can control the scope of work and effort and not shove too many features in. So far the team has worked incredibly well together.” ClearBlade will also, for an additional fee, serve as Thread’s CTO until the company is ready to hire one.

“At first I thought, ‘Another dating app? Is that really what we need?’” said Simone. But the team convinced him that the absence of sleaze and protection of college students were huge differentiators. Also advisor Sam Decker has encouraged the team to involve Thread is women’s empowerment and safety programs as part of its brand, Coronado-Garcia said.

Max McKamy with the Tau Deauteron Chapter of Phi Gamma Delta at UT, otherwise known as FIJI, will be coordinating its first part of the year with Thread to make it a launch party. The main point of the app, he said, is to make dating sites safer for girls and if the girls are signing up, that’s where the boys will be.

Thread is close to completing its seed round of around half a million dollars, Dell said.

“My dad has been a huge help on the advice side,” Dell said. “What he understands is that for me to learn I’m going to have to make a lot of mistakes. If I make a decision, he’ll tell me what he thinks but he will never tell me I have to change it. He’s never invested a dime in my company and he never will. My mom is a very smart woman. She is an entrepreneur herself and she wanted to invest immediately but I knew I wouldn’t be learning as much if she did. And it’s been such a learning experience.”

SXSW Panel Deadline is July 25!!!

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

July 25 is the deadline for SXSW Interactive Panel submissions. Interactive Director Hugh Forrest said only a few hundred submissions have come in so far, though thousands are expected at the last minute. In 2014, there were 3,000, most of which came in the final week.

The deadline also applies for SXSW Music, SXSW Film and SXSW Eco speaking proposals.

“I think we will see a lot more wearable-related proposals this year,” Forrest said. “There will probably be lots of stuff on self-driving cars. And, I think privacy & security will also be pretty heavy this year. As always, we’re looking for creative and original ideas.”

Forrest posted this blog on “How to get rejected by the SXSW Interactive Festival.” Submit your idea here.

SXSW Interactive PanelPicker Themes for 2015

AI and Intelligent Devices
Art and Inspiration
Branding and Marketing
Content and Distribution
Design and Development
Diversity and Emerging Markets
DIY, Hacker and Maker
Entertainment and Immersion
Entrepreneurialism and Business
Fashion, Style and Wearable Technology
Food and Dining
Gaming and Game Development
Health and Med-Tech
Non-profit and Activism
Policy and Civic Engagement
Privacy and Security
Science and Space Exploration
Smart Transportation and Cities
Social and Relationships
Sports
Work and Career
WTF and Beyond