People Pattern announced it has received $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Mohr Davidow Ventures.
The Austin-based company also received additional participation from private investors.
People Pattern plans to use the money to market its software as a service platform which automates the collection and analysis of audience data. The company has built a data-driven analytics marketing platform. It lets marketers get more information about how to engage active and prospective customers.
The product is still being Beta tested and plans to go live soon.
Ken Cho, who previously founded Spredfast, and Jason Baldridge, associate professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, founded the company.
People Pattern’s platform identifies high impact audience segments based on social and enterprise data, moving beyond simple demographic and psychographic data. Marketers are empowered with advanced, predictive segmentation data in real-time to better understand, target and engage active and prospective customers. With People Pattern, social marketing can be a science, not just an art.
“The next, critical wave of marketing is to leverage the massive amounts of data collected and interactions happening every minute of every day,” Bryan Stolle, general partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures, said in a news release. “People Pattern has an entirely unique approach of applying science and predictive analytics to uncovering who is saying what about your company or brand. These insights lead to the creation of actionable personas and microsegments, powering companies to engage directly with their audience in a real-time, in meaningful, targeted ways.”
As part of the financing round, Stolle will join People Pattern’s board.
Category: Austin (Page 220 of 318)
Bee Cave Games has closed on a $1.9 million round of debt financing, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Austin-based casino, social and mobile game developer previously raised a $1.3 million seed round of funding last summer.
Founded in 2012, the company makes Blackjack Casino, its initial title, which is available to play on Facebook.
CEO Erik Bethke heads Bee Caves Games, which has employees who previously worked with Zynga, Electronic Arts, Blizzard Entertainment and Multimedia Games.
The company’s investors include Erich Schaefer, co-creator of the Diablo game series, Melissa Guzy, founder of Arbor Ventures and Peng T. Ong, entrepreneur and founder of Match.com.
By SHIR EVEN ZOHAR
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
In July of 2011, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro led a delegation to Israel on an economic study mission. The mission included signing an agreement with BioJerusalem to promote further cooperation between Israel and San Antonio’s biomedical ecosystem.
Last month, I had the honor to make a mission from Tel Aviv to Geekdom in San Antonio where we held a series of market research and user feedback studies on a new diabetic management platform known as Dario that will soon be launching in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand.
I also had the pleasure to meet BioMedSA President Ann Stephens who was in Israel with Mayor Castro, Mary Japhet with San Antonio Sports Foundation and the Mayor’s Council on Fitness and serial medical device entrepreneur Ruben Zamorano. In meeting with Ann, I learned that she and the Mayor had visited with Prof. Itimar Raz at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on diabetes. Prof. Raz is a member of our company’s board of directors and often speaks fondly of Ann and your forward thinking Mayor.
San Antonio Feedback Session
In addition to the feedback sessions and meeting just a sampling of your health and diabetes related community leaders, I also spoke at Health 2.0 and mentored a health related startup.
While three days is not enough time to truly experience San Antonio, I want to thank everyone who was so welcoming and helpful during my stay. Aside from “work,” I was able to experience egg tacos at Taco Haven and Mi Tierra, heard some wonderful live music and experienced fish tacos at the car wash/Laundromat/restaurant/beer hall: The Cove, and enjoyed the outdoor dining experience as I was covered in a Mexican serape at The Monterrey. I loved having barbecue on the San Antonio River at The Country Line with JDRF board member, Dennis Stephen and Health 2.0’s Cynthia Phelps.
Prior to San Antonio, I conducted a similar feedback session in London and of course, Tel Aviv, where our company is based. From San Antonio, I went to Cleveland to conduct another series of feedback sessions and then home to Israel.
We are entering an age where the mHealth and empowered self movement is taking hold in areas such as diabetes where our company is currently focused.
Be it in Israel, the UK, or my recent visit to San Antonio and subsequently Cleveland, we’re discovering a global community of diabetics who want to better manage their condition, share their information with family and healthcare providers and hold themselves more accountable for their health. I’m hearing from people from all over the world who want to join our community and be part of sharing their data in hopes to help advance the world’s collective knowledge of the diabetic condition.
San Antonio and Texas at large represents the future demography of your country. Prior to my trip, Time Magazine, put Texas on the cover of its magazine, taking the position that Texas represented the future of the United States.
A changing demographic and the increase in diabetes pose many challenges for the people of your wonderful city and state. After visiting and experiencing San Antonio, it’s my belief that you can rise to the challenges before you and embrace new technologies and platforms that will bring a healthier and increasingly fit community to observe as an example of what’s possible.
Shir Even Zohar is Business Development Senior Manager of LabStyle Innovations, the makers of the Dario Diabetes Management Platform.
Austin and San Antonio are the number one and two respectively, metropolitan areas with the most momentum going into 2014, according to this Forbes story.
In fact, the entire state of Texas fared well in the data which Forbes commissioned the Praxis Strategy Group to crunch on 52 major metropolitan areas in the U.S. Houston claimed the fourth spot and Dallas took the sixth spot on the list.
By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Paul Snow, co-founder of the Austin Bitcoin and Crypto-currency Meetup
They are pioneers in the crypto-currency marketplace, founded in 2009 with the birth of Bitcoins.
The industry is in its infancy, but gaining in popularity.
People all over the world use crypto-currencies to pay for goods and services using computer codes, instead of paper money. The crypto-currencies are not backed by any government, but rely on peer-to-peer computer systems to complete the transactions.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous creator of the first Bitcoin in 2009 but little is known about him, including his real name. He left the project a year later.
“That’s part of the mystery that surrounded Bitcoins initially,” said Paul Snow, one of the co-founders of the Bitcoin and Crypto-currency Austin meetup, which has 189 members. They held their first meeting this summer. As Snow explains the industry, other developers took over where Nakamoto left off and Bitcoins have become a widely adopted virtual currency.
“It’s the first global currency that has ever been introduced into the economy,” Snow said.
But Bitcoins are not without their controversy. They have attracted the interest of the Federal government, which held the first Congressional hearing on the risks and promises of virtual currencies last month.Bitcoins also entered into the global spotlight when the Federal Bureau of Investigations shut down the Silk Road, an illegal online marketplace in October. The Silk Road, which traded in guns, drugs and other illegal goods, ran solely on Bitcoins. Some thought the end of the Silk Road would be the end of Bitcoins. But while the currency took a dip in value, it went on to soar to new heights in value.
Bitcoin Startups in Austin
Sunday night, about 40 people attend the Austin meetup, held just a few days before Christmas, to find out more about the popular, yet highly volatile digital currency. 
Some of them run their own Bitcoin startups, while others just wanted to learn more about this emerging currency. A Bitcoin “tipjar” sat at the bar with a QR code for people to scan with their mobile phone to donate money to support the meetup.
Others at the meeting handed out Bitcoin buttons for people to wear to create awareness about the new industry. One woman handed out sheets of “Bitcoin accepted here” stickers. One of the organizers held up a T-shirt, which he had created to generate buzz about the new currency.
In 2013, Bitcoin started off around $19 a coin and soared as high as $1,200 before losing half its value a few weeks ago. Bitcoin currently sells for around $730, according to Coinbase.com, an international Bitcoin exchange marketplace.
Dozens of websites online offer information about Bitcoins. Online magazines cover the industry and Bitcoincharts.com tracks the history of the coin’s trading value and the number in circulation.
Governments have attempted to regulate it
Earlier this month, China attempted to shut down the Bitcoin industry in its country. The government blocked Bitcoin exchanges from accepting China’s currency Renminbi from Bitcoin buyers.
China’s crackdown on Bitcoins sent the price plunging. It has since recovered.
“The real problem is people look at Bitcoin like it’s a stock, but it’s not a stock, it’s a currency,” Snow said.
The focus of the Austin meetup group is to foster the development of this new industry by supporting Bitcoin startups, Snow said. About a half-dozen entrepreneurs plan or have launched Bitcoin companies in the Austin area, Snow said.
Chief among them is CoinTerra, which designs and produces Bitcoin mining computer systems. The startup launched last summer with $1.5 million in angel funding. It sells “GoldStrike” processors and 2/TH/s TerraMiner IV Bitcoin miner rigs – both representing the highest performance Bitcoin miner hardware,” which costs $5,999 per machine.
The richest companies in the California Gold Rush supplied the pickaxes and other tools to mine for the gold. That may be the same trend in the Bitcoin industry.
Bitcoin miners create new Bitcoins by solving complex computer algorithms. For each equation solved, a certain number of new Bitcoins are created. Early on, people could mine Bitcoins relatively easily with a home computer. But now more than 12 million Bitcoins exist and it’s become increasingly more difficult to mine Bitcoins, Snow said. The process requires super-computer capacity and a lot of electricity, he said. Only 21 million Bitcoins exist, Snow said. So it has becomes increasingly difficult to mine for new coins, he said.
Retailers Accepting Bitcoins
David Johnson, one of the founders of Bit Angels, an investment group targeting Bitcoin and crypto-currency startups, is based in Austin. It has made several investments into Bitcoin startups.
Other startups like Bitstein Consulting, founded in 2013 by Michael Goldstein, a University of Texas computer science student, help businesses adopt Bitcoins. He has helped Brave New Books, which now accepts Bitcoin as payment for merchandise.
Other retailers in Austin plan to begin accepting Bitcoins too, said Snow. He accesses his Bitcoins, which are stored online in a digital wallet, through his mobile phone. He’s the only person who has the code to his wallet.
That’s how Bitcoins work. It’s essentially a computer code online that people exchange to pay for goods and services. It’s really popular for making micro-payments online, Snow said.
Bitpay, which is an Internet application that processes Bitcoin transactions, completed more than $100 million worth of transactions this year, according to Coindesk.com. It has more than 15,000 merchants in its network. Overstock.com announced it would begin accepting Bitcoins for payment next year.
Snow says his dentist plans to begin accepting Bitcoins in 2014 and Scholz Garten, where they hold their meetups does too, he said.
And next year a few conferences are planned to shine a spotlight on the local industry even more.
Snow is one of the organizers of the Texas Bitcoin Conference to be held at the Circuit of the Americas on March 6th.
Darrel Malone Jr. is also working with a group to produce NextEcon.org on Jan. 25 at Austin Community College Eastview campus. The conference focuses on alternative currencies and it includes a bazaar run exclusively on alternative money.
James Rubino, Joshua Schechter and James Jones, the founders of CryptoTrustPoint.com
“There’s a difficulty in exchanging between Bitcoins and dollars at this point,” Schechter said. “We’re here to solve that problem.”
On Dec. 10-11, Schechter attended Inside Bitcoins, a conference and expo on virtual currencies at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
The currency appeals to Libertarians and others who believe governments should not have so much power, he said.
“Some think that 2014 is the year of the Bitcoin,” Schechter said.
Isaac Barchas, director of the Austin Technology Incubator, penned a blog post titled “This Sucks” in response to news of the closing of Calxeda this week.
“Recent ATI graduate and rock star, Calxeda, will be shutting its doors,” Barchas wrote. “Investors unexpectedly pulled the plug on the company, which developed a novel architecture to allow low-power ARM chips to drive servers.”
Calxeda, founded in 2008 by Barry Evans, started out at ATI as a dream. Evan’s project also received investment from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, which allowed him to go from concept to prototype.
Calxeda’s technology garnered widespread praise. In 2012, Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Calxeda one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world. (Google, IBM and Facebook also made the list.) Calxeda also partnered with Hewlett-Packard to test its chips in its servers.
Calxeda graduated from ATI in 2012 and it grew quickly.
At the ATI graduation ceremony in January of 2012, Evans gave the keynote speech.
“I thought Calxeda would be big, but I didn’t know what that would look like,” Evans said at that time.
He talked about the company going big.
“Big, when you find it, is awesome,” Evans said. But he also mentioned that the company didn’t focus on its success, but instead its mantra was “TSBW – This Shit Better Work.”
“When you are running a marathon and you finish two miles, you don’t say wow this is great, you think I’ve still got 24 miles to go,” Evans said at the time. He said his company was in “corporate puberty.”
ATI plugged Evans into Austin’s startup ecosystem and other successful entrepreneurs, Evans said at that time.
The company employed 120 people and raised more than $100 million in investment capital.
“Those people just got pink slips,” Barchas wrote. “That’s awful. So is the fact that Calxeda won’t be the company that exploits the beachhead that they made in the ultra-low power server market.
But Calxeda burned bright. It brought a lot of really talented people (and a lot of money) to Austin,” Barchas wrote. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the core IP or to the core team, both of which are massively valuable assets. I’m pretty sure, though, that this won’t be the last really interesting chip architecture company that’s made in Austin.
To Barry and his team, we raise a glass in sorrow, but also in deep appreciation.”
By GREGORY WISE
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Scott Harmon, CEO of Noesis Energy
As part of the leadership team at Tivoli Systems, the poster-child for Austin tech-business success, Harmon helped guide the company to a 1995 IPO and $750 million acquisition by IBM. Not long after, he co-founded Motive, where as president and CEO he led another IPO and grew the company to $100 million in revenue. After leaving Motive, Harmon became CEO of AlterPoint, leading that company to a strategic acquisition.
Today, he seems completely in his element as CEO of venture-backed Noesis Energy, a position he’s held since February 2011. “We’re heavily focused on the opportunity to save $50 million in energy that’s wasted in commercial buildings every year,” Harmon says. “We want to help people reduce that waste.”
Think of Noesis as a match-making service, Harmon says. “We connect building engineers, facility managers, real estate managers, real estate portfolio owners, building owners – anyone who owns a building and pays an energy bill – to energy saving technologies.” Put another way, Harmon jokes, “we’re a dating website for energy efficiency.”
According to Harmon, about a third of Noesis’ customers are public sector institutions, primarily state agencies and municipalities, with the other two-thirds being private-sector. But in both cases the customers’ goal is the same, to reduce spending. Often customers will come to Noesis with a specific energy-saving goal in-place.
“Many businesses will set an annual energy reduction target and it’s usually about five percent,” said Harmon. “Customers look for guidance, counsel and solutions from Noesis. We want to be a trusted partner to the customer. People aren’t confident in sourcing directly from the vendors.
“There are 8,000 companies in the US that sell technology related to energy consumption or efficiency. Talk to their VP’s of Sales and they will commonly say, ‘our technology is too complicated and we’d love a better way to get our technologies into the market.’”
When it comes to acting as a partner, Noesis puts its money where its mouth is. The company makes money as a percentage of customers’ energy savings. The more successful Noesis is at helping a customer reduce energy expenses, the greater the revenue potential.
Executive Q&A with Scott Harmon
Q. What does a “typical” day look like for you?
A. As one of the founders I wanted a scenario where it was possible to work from home. We’d all seen Office Space (Mike Judge’s 1999 workplace satire) enough; we were tired of the cube race. Today I split my time almost evenly between working at the office, from home and on the road. It’s made the lifestyle of this industry better for me; much better than being in an office from 7:00AM to 7:00PM then seeing your family only after that. I embrace a more flexible and connected way of working. I think if you want to kind of keep doing it (working in the start-up/early stage environment) you have to achieve some balance.
Q. What part of your job gives you the most satisfaction?
A. I’m still a technology geek. I graduated from Iowa State, where I went on a wrestling scholarship, earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. I like the building process and interacting with people who build things. The whole process of building has always given me a big charge. I love to build things.
Q. What are the qualities that make someone good at your job?
A. Competitiveness. I’m competitive. I think competition brings out the best in people. It tells you what you’re good at. Tells you what you’re not good at. It’s invigorating.
Q. What the most difficult part of your job?
A. I think for me it’s always wishing you could go bigger and faster. In a perfect world you could have the scale of a larger company with the nimbleness of a start-up.
Q. What experience, or experiences, best prepared you for your job?
A. The way I grew-up in Iowa. I grew-up 50 miles from the Field of Dreams cornfield. It was a very rural, very-Midwestern upbringing. That, wrestling, and majoring in Computer Sciences all prepared me.
Q. Why do you choose to live and work in Central Texas, as opposed to other tech-centric parts of the country?
A. It has the best blend of the various lifestyles. You’ve got the tech community, it’s affordable, and it’s a good place to raise a family. Honestly, I don’t think there’s even a close second. If you want to do the “All-Tech” thing, go to Silicon Valley, but you’ll be back.
Q. Outside of your current position, what’s your dream job and why?
A. It would be another start-up.
Q. What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?
A. Always know what can kill your business versus what can only hurt you. As a CEO I feel a really strong sense of personal responsibility and care for the people who work for me. It’s really heavy, in a good way, it’s a big motivation.
Q. Who is your role model?
A. Bob Metcalfe. He is about great technology first. Bob is a great example.
Q. What’s the first electronic gadget you remember owning?
A. A cell phone. The cell phone collapsed distances more than anything that came before it.
Q. What’s the one piece of technology you couldn’t live without?
A. My laptop. It’s still the most productive thing I have. The laptop crushes the tablet, iPhone, any other piece of media I have. It’s far and away my favorite.
Q. What do you think is the most important technology in-use today?
A. Search is the most important; it’s how anybody can know anything. That’s huge. The personal cost of search approaches zero, yet you can know anything. You can know the biology of your cancer if you’re a cancer patient, for example.
Q. What do you think is the most underrated technology in use today?
A. Meters, all types of meters. Meters are going everywhere. Google Traffic has individuals metering the distance they’ve traveled in a certain amount of time, establishing traffic patterns. Energy meters are measuring energy at points in time. The interval for energy metering used to be a month. A Meter Reader would come around and read total consumption and peak consumption. Now energy is read every five minutes. This is the flip side of analytics.
And I think peer-to-peer connectivity is underrated; we’re just beginning to see the power of crowds. Noesis is a strong peer-to-peer example. People in the Noesis community advise each other on energy efficiency. I was just reading about peer-to-peer funding. A cool company called LendingClub that allows people to lend to other people. There’s Airbnb and others. The power of people to deal directly with each other. That scale, that enormity, is pretty fascinating.
Q. What do you think is the most overrated technology in use today?
A. The concept of the Smart Home is the most overrated. There’s no such thing as a Smart Home! And do you really want webcams throughout your house? That’s horrifying on so many different levels!
Gregory Wise, vice president with Weber Shandwick
Editor’s Note: Gregory Wise will write the Innovator’s Insights column for Silicon Hills News on accomplished technology experts in Austin. To be considered for the column, please contact him at Gregory Wise.
MapMyFitness announced Thursday a redesign of its mobile app with new features optimized for Apple’s latest operating system, iOS7.
The Austin-based company reports that the new app has a “clean, intuitive interface for more engaging workout experience.”
“2013 has been a busy and productive year so far for the MapMyFitness community – starting the year off with our MVP launch, new partnerships, reaching a major milestone with our 20 millionth member, joining forces with the Under Armour team and now a complete overhaul of our mobile iOS apps,” Robin Thurston, CEO, MapMyFitness said in a news release. “We listened to our users, took advantage of the new iOS 7 design features and revamped our mobile app to provide an even more complete, easy-to-use health and fitness experience.”
The new features include a 3D interactive map, map pins, updated sensor bar, primary stats view and a slide to finish way to end a workout.
The app also includes new routes, music and a new activity feed and enhanced social features such as live tracking, sharing and commenting and new profile displays among other features.
In November, Under Armour announced its acquisition of MapMyFitness for $100 million. Under the deal, the company, and its 100 local employees, maintains its operations in Austin.
Barry Evans, CEO of Calxeda
The company, which is part of the Austin Technology Incubator, has raised more than $100 million since its inception in 2008.
In October of 2012, the company closed a Series C round of funding of $55 million from Austin Ventures, Vulcan Capital and its existing investors.
Calxeda has been a big proponent for the low power server processors. Its chips power servers in giant data centers that require peak efficiency. The chips are based on ARM technology, the same technology used for low-power, highly efficient processors used in smartphones and tablet computers.
The article reports that the company executives were unable to raise a fourth round of investment capital and “ran out of runway.”
Below is a statement from Barry Evans, CEO of Calxeda and Karl Freund, Calxeda’s vice president of marketing.
“Now it’s time to tackle the next challenge. Carrying the load of
industry pioneer has exceeded our ability to continue to operate as we
had envisioned. We wanted to let you know that Calxeda has begun a
restructuring process. During this process, we remain committed to
our customer’s success with ECX-2000 projects that are now underway.
Calxeda is proud of what we have accomplished, the partners who have
collaborated with us, the investors who supported us, and the
visionary customers who have encouraged us and inspired us along the
way.
We will update you as we conclude our restructuring process. In the
meantime, we want to thank you personally for your interest and
enthusiastic support. Its been an amazing journey.
Energy, matter, and innovation are never lost, just reassembled. We
look forward to the inevitable application of our ideas.”
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Capital Factory had a bang-up 2013: A visit from the president, the arrival of Techstars, adding another 25,000 square feet on the fifth floor of the Omni Building, incorporating live streaming of the myriad events that take place all week on the 16th floor.
Now the incubator is cogitating more great additions for 2014: A device lab, an interference room, a pitch room, a video lab and a user experience room, in addition to maybe taking over more of the Omni. And they’re trying to figure out how to make their new features available to the public as well as the companies in the incubator.
“My job’s super fun,” said Josh Baer, executive director and founder of Capital Factory. “I get to sit around and think about what awesome things we could do that would make it better for these companies. It’s a virtuous circle to make them want to come here so we can do more awesome things.”
The device lab aims to have nearly every kind of mobile device—various smart phones, tablets, notebooks–so that developers can experiment with migrating apps from the web or their iPhones to a different device.
Vitorio Miliano, a user experience design expert who works out of Capital Factory and advises some companies there, is helping develop the device lab. One of the goals, he said, is to discover how responsive the design is. Another is that many companies who developed an app on one device start getting requests from customers to get the app on their platforms and “they can see how much work it will take and see if it augments their business plan without detracting from their original goals.”
Eventually they’d like to include novel devices including the Oculus Rift, Google Glass and other experimental hardware that most startups wouldn’t get the chance to play with.
The interference room will be a room—probably with metal walls—where developers can test how well their products work in basements, parking garages, elevators, giant concerts like ACL and other places where apps are likely to meet considerable interference.
Capital Factory is also working on a video lab complete with professional cameras and lighting, where startups can film pitch videos, kickstarter campaign videos and interviews. The incubator this year started live streaming its many events, like Startup Grind and Lean Startup, through LifeSize video conferencing.
Other projects maybe a little farther down the road include a User Experience room with a one-way mirror where companies can watch people interact with their apps, and a pitch room. The pitch room would simulate the experience of pitching in front of an audience including bright lights, a virtual audience and interruptions.
Baer is hoping to make all these resources available to the public and inexpensive, but hasn’t figured out the revenue model yet. He’s working with several companies on sponsorships.
“What we’re interested in is ‘What are the things every startup should be using but can’t afford to do on their own?’” he said.