Category: Austin (Page 222 of 318)

Randi Zuckerberg Navigates the “dot complicated” World

December 14, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Moria Forbes, publisher of Forbes Woman, interviewing Randi Zuckerberg, author of dot complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives

Randi Zuckerberg navigated the early years of social media at Facebook and remembers a pivotal moment while working on the 2008 election.
“We obviously were drinking the Kool-Aid of social media in Silicon Valley,” Zuckerberg said.
But she was shocked at how the presidential campaigns weren’t using Facebook and social media. She remembers calling the McCain staff and the Clinton staff and begging them to use Facebook and social media. But it was the Obama campaign that got onboard early and they did so without Facebook even reaching out to them. The Obama campaign’s site on Facebook contributed a significant part to that election, Zuckerberg said.
“For Facebook, people stopped thinking of it as just a college site and really starting thinking of it as a meaningful platform for political change,” she said.
From there, Zuckerberg started specializing in global politics, elections and media partnerships at Facebook.
At Dell World, Moira Forbes, publisher of ForbesWoman, interviewed Zuckerberg, now CEO of Zuckerberg Media, during a Thursday afternoon session. Zuckerberg is a former marketing executive at Facebook and author of dot complicated, a book on navigating the online world.

Zuckerberg launched her own media company

Zuckerberg got her start as a journalist working at Forbes on Fox.
Several years later, she launched her media company at Facebook, which held hack-a-thons every few months at its headquarters. People stayed up all night long and the only rule was that they had to work on a passion project outside their day jobs. And one of Zuckerberg’s passion projects was to start a television network inside Facebook. They had hundreds of millions of people using the platform at that time. She wanted to reach that audience with her own television show.
At one of the hack-a-thons, she launched her show from inside a broom closet at Facebook. She turned on a camera and began broadcasting live online. For the first show, she had six viewers and two of them were her parents.
About a week later, representatives from Singer and Songwriter Katy Perry contacted her and said Perry wanted to be on her Facebook television show.
“Then I had to pretend it was an actual television show,” Zuckerberg said.
During the next few months, she had so many celebrities and people who appeared on the television show that it showed her the power of social media and live content.
“So when President Obama asked if he could come on this Facebook television show and talk to all of America, I thought this is the moment and this is what I clearly love to do,” Zuckerberg said.
That’s when she quit her job at Facebook and launched her own media company. And she was pregnant, but she knew what she wanted to do and she wanted to take a big risk. She sold her house and put all her assets into the new company.

Navigating the dot complicated life

Forbes then asked Zuckerberg what dot complicated meant to her and why she decided to write the book.
“Ask any random person on the street if they’ve had a “dot complicated” moment recently, you don’t even have to describe what that means, and they’ll probably say yes, let me tell you about it,” Zuckerberg said.
It might be about posting something inappropriate or someone else posting something objectionable online, she said. Mobile devices have become pervasive in our lives and they have changed every aspect of it, from finding love to parenting, Zuckerberg said.
“I have a very complicated relationship with technology, if I have this very complicated relationship, surely millions of people around the world do too. They feel like their lives are a bit overwhelmed and maybe they can learn or laugh at my story and maybe we can navigate this world together,” she said.
Zuckerberg detailed many of the most dot complicated moments of her life in the book in hopes that people can learn from them.
For example, she recounted a time when she was playing with her six month old son, she was also answering emails and texting. Then she noticed her son pick up the remote control and act like he was text messaging on it.
That’s when she realized she needed to manage her relationship with technology so she wouldn’t teach her son that technology was competing for her time with him.

The quest for privacy in an increasing transparent online world

Forbes said Zuckerberg wrote a lot about privacy in her book. She asked Zuckerberg how she managed to maintain her personal privacy and keep it separate from her public persona.
Zuckerberg recounted that last Christmas she was with her family and they were all standing around the kitchen table texting on different devices and she took a picture. She posted it to her friends on Facebook. A few hours later she saw it on a bunch of tech blogs. One of her friends had leaked the photo. She was disappointed. She knew that she shouldn’t post anything online, if she wasn’t comfortable with it going viral, but she didn’t think her friends would betray her trust.
“In our real lives, we have three levels of privacy – we have things that are super private for us and our spouses, things that are super public like announcing a new career move, but most of our life, the vast majority, lives in the middle, it’s personal,” Zuckerberg said.
“But online you really only get private and public, you lose personal and we live so much of our lives in there,” she said.
In the book, she wrote about how to get that back and what happens when a person loses that.

Being a leader in a world filled with social media

Photo courtesy of Zuckerberg Media

Zuckerberg also discussed the different generations of management in the workforce. Older workers tend to be more conservative and don’t share as much and millennial workers feel comfortable sharing their lives online, Forbes said. But now more than ever, being authentic is increasingly important to building a following, to getting people inspired by your mission and to becoming an effective leader, Forbes said.
The professional and personal identities have been blended, Zuckerberg said. Companies need to provide social media training to their employees when they hire them, she said.
Millennials want to be posting all the time, Zuckerberg said
“It’s better to arm them with things that they should be posting about rather than letting their imaginations run wild,” she said.
Today, every single employee is an ambassador for your brand, Forbes said.
And every company is a media company, Zuckerberg said.
That can be quite a challenge, Zuckerberg said. She’s had some awkward conversations with people about things that they’ve posted that she never thought she would have to have.
“People have freedom of speech,” she said. “You can’t tell them don’t post things on Twitter, nor would you want to govern who they are. That’s why you hired them in the first place.”
But data does show that it makes you more likeable if you share personal things online and Facebook friend your boss, Zuckerberg said.

Etiquette lessons learned along the way

Forbes asked Zuckerberg about the toughest online social etiquette lesson she had to learn.
Zuckerberg recounted a time when she and her friends couldn’t get into a bar in New York because they didn’t look cool enough.
“I desperately wanted to be so cool even though I was a Silicon Valley geek and we got rejected from this really cool bar. It sucked,” she said.
Twitter had just launched as a platform. She took out her mobile phone and she tweeted wouldn’t it be bad if that bouncer’s Facebook profile went down.
“Wow, really bad thing to say, very irresponsible and the tech press really took me to storm about that,” Zuckerberg said. “It was ironic because I had been spending the last few years educating celebrities, politicians and business leaders about how all of our voices travel faster and farther than ever thanks to this megaphone of social media. But what I hadn’t realized, I hadn’t stepped back and thought, gosh, I have a megaphone too. All of us are sort of mini-celebrities in this world. All of us could go viral at any moment.”
Everyone needs to be very vigilant about their reputations and how they manage social media, Zuckerberg said.

Unplugging from technology

Forbes asked Zuckerberg about managing the constant flow of technology and doing “digital detoxes,” in which people disconnect from their devices.
People are connecting around the clock and people must set boundaries on their own personal time.
“Set some firm rules,” Zuckerberg said. “The more you start setting those rules, the more you’ll train the people around you to respect those times too.”
She has a rule in her house: no tech in the bedroom.
She also said studies show that people who don’t connect with technology whether it’s Facebook, their mobile phone, texts, email, voicemail, first thing in the morning, are happier. She said it’s best to manage the technology and not let it manage your life. She avoids her mobile phone for the first 40 minutes of every day.
“All devices have a curfew in our house for that reason,” she said. “You need that moment of clarity and unplugging in your day.”

Just Innovate, says Visionary Elon Musk

December 13, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

At Dell World, Elon Musk discussed how he’s changing the world through electric cars and space exploration.
Musk is a true leader, a risk taker and a visionary, said Michael Dell in his introduction.
“A passionate believer in technology and innovation to lead society forward,” Dell said.
Musk arrived for his keynote address at Dell World at the Austin Convention Center in a bright red Tesla with the song “Baby You Can Drive My Car” blaring from the auditorium speakers.
David Kirkpatrick, founder of Techonomy, interviewed Musk and asked him what motivates him.
Musk, cofounder of PayPal, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, said he likes technology and things that have the potential to change the world in a positive way.
“There needed to be an acceleration of electric vehicles,” Musk said. “If it was left up to the big car companies we wouldn’t see electric cars, at least not for a long time.”
The movie, “Who Killed the Electric Car” which documents how General Motors crushed the development of the EV1 in the mid-1990s, also motivated Musk to create Tesla, which almost led him into bankruptcy.
Musk recounted how he closed on the financing to keep Tesla in business in the last hour of the last day before he would have to file for bankruptcy. It was Christmas eve in 2008, he said.
“We would have gone bankrupt if we didn’t close the round,” he said.
Musk had put all of his money into Tesla and he even had to borrow money for living expenses from friends. Even though he believed in the company’s mission, he didn’t know whether the company would make it. But he saw a need for electric cars sooner and not later.
To reduce the impact of carbon emissions on the world’s atmosphere, people have to act early, Musk said.
Tesla manufactures about 600 vehicles per week, Musk said. It makes a sports car, which costs more than $120,000 and a luxury sedan.
“I don’t know a rich person that doesn’t have one or want one,” said Kirkpatrick.
Musk also showed a video of highlights from SpaceX, which designs and makes spacecraft and rockets. He splits his time between running SpaceX and Tesla Motors.
“You’re succeeding where governments have failed,” Kirkpatrick said.
Musk said he’s had some good fortune, which has helped him to pursue his ventures. He’s also worked with talented people, he said.
“If you can get a group of really talented people together and unite them around the challenge, and have them work to the best of their abilities, then the company will achieve great things,” Musk said.
Musk has money, which has helped him, Kirkpatrick said. But there are a lot of people with money who don’t have the vision and the will and who don’t apply themselves to change the world like Musk has done, he said.
“I think people self limit more than they realize,” Musk said.
The number one thing people should do is they should just try to innovate, he said. It’s also beneficial to cross-pollinate across different industries, Musk said. That can provide unique insights, he said.
Later in the interview, Dell joined the two on stage. He said the world needs more people like Musk out there taking big risks.
Dell also has a Tesla. He ordered it and one day it just showed up at his house. He enjoys driving it, he said. Dell also had a Tesla on display at its exhibits showcase at the event.
Tesla is a public company, but Musk said he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the stock price.
“It’s a distraction,” he said.
The stock market is “manic depressive,” Musk said.
Musk also said the public should collectively seek to advance the state of media today. He called mainstream, traditional newspapers, a “microscope on misery.” He said the media seem bent on finding and promoting the worst possible things that happen every day. The news is actually much more positive than what’s portrayed in the daily newspaper, he said.
“I get my news on Twitter,” Musk said.
Dell said he uses news feeds and alerts to stay on top of the news online.

Show, Tell and Tacos at Austin TechBreakfast

December 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Austin TechBreakfast is a little bit of everything. It’s a little “show and tell” as founder Ron Schmelzer describes it, with intervals for “I need a job…a developer….a cofounder….an investor….”
The monthly morning meetup, one of eight founded by Schmelzer in cities from Baltimore to Palo Alto, has a lighthearted format—inspired by Schmelzer’s wit—while companies network and get a chance to display what they do.

Ron Schmelzer, founder of Austin TechBreakfast

“There are a lot of demo format events,” Schmelzer said. “We’re different in that we’re stage neutral — which means that we’ll get large companies, hobbies…. We’re also industry neutral. At the last one we had a couple of bio companies, we’ll get energy, we’ll get robots…I mean who doesn’t love robots in the morning?”
There were, alas , no robots Thursday morning at DLA Piper’s offices, but four companies did “show and tell” on their products.

You Are Who You Say You Are

Mary Haskett, CEO and co-founder of BeehiveID talked about her company which verifies IDs largely using biometric facial recognition on social networks. BeehiveID will not only look at the social posts of the person in question but look to see if friends have posted pictures of themselves with the person in question. Haskett and her co-founder have both worked in biometric technology for the U.S. Department of Defense and were deployed in Afghanistan, among other places.
The system rates people in terms of their believable IDs and consumers can go on the site and get their ID “score.” “We’re trying to replicate the way you establish trust in the real world,” she said. “Online,” she said, “every time you post a photo you’re leaving little pieces of data all around. It’s like a tiny claim to your identity….it ends up being a massive amount of data that real people have that fraudulent accounts do not.”
Currently her main clients are dating websites which have a big problem with fraud. But she’s also looking to work with companies in the sharing economy whose customers would like verification of the IDs of their clients and industries like financial services.
It’s not foolproof, Haskett admits. One person seemed legitimate because of the quantity of data about her online. But the dating website Haskett was working for said “That’s a well-known porn star. We get a dozen profiles a day with her picture.”

International Solstice Music Festival

Matt Ford, photo by Susan Lahey

Matt Ford, who worked in business development and marketing Techstars first class, has co-founded Solstice—a platform to help the more than 700 cities around the globe that host music festivals on the Summer Solstice. Solstice, he said, can help cities with these festivals organize by letting musicians and venues enter their information into a website that aggregates all the performances happening during the festival. It also provides for a consumer-facing website cities can use to promote their festivals using 900dpi technology. Solstice is also working on a map of all the world’s festivals and hoping to bring a summer solstice festival to Austin.

Digital Advertising and Metrics for Everyone

Lloyd Armbrust of OwnLocal, photo by Susan Lahey

Lloyd Armbrust of OwnLocal explained how his company works, pulling data from print ads, radio and broadcast ads and using the metadata to create advertising campaigns, SEO and SEM campaigns and offering a syndication platform to sell other companies’ products.
Many of his customers, he said, are companies that know little about marketing. A few don’t even have computers hand rely on him sending information through a fax machine. But OwnLocal provides metrics that not only show how the company is climbing in search results but can quantify the ROI of the service by showing how many leads it brought in and measuring the lifetime value of those new clients.

Musical Collaboration Anywhere

Spout Software allows musicians to record and collaborate with musicians in different cities using a cloud based software that lets them preserve their performances digitally and combine them with other musician’s performances, publishing them to a single recording with no latency.
Founder Bruce Gardner said the company is working on an app that would even allow musicians to listen to and create recordings on their mobile devices. His Platform as a Service could save the music business $25 million a year in production costs. The market, he said, includes not only professional musicians creating recordings for general consumption but also the gaming industry, advertising agencies.
Austin TechBreakfast, which provides not only coffee but breakfast tacos and pastries free to participants, is sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank, ARC, DLA Piper, CBRE Inc. and 9Gauge.

Seven Companies to Pitch to Michael Dell at DellWorld

December 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Dell’s first Pitch Slam takes place Thursday afternoon at Dell World in downtown Austin.
Dell chose six companies from regional pitch events and a final company via an online pitch contest to pitch their businesses to Michael Dell, Shark Tank’s Daymond John and the UN Foundation’s Resident Entrepreneur Elizabeth Gore.
The event is being livestreamed by Dell starting at 2 p.m. Central time.
The companies include:

Guavus, won Dell’s online contest for the final spot in the contest. It is a Silicon Valley-based big data analytics company.

Neverware based in New York, creates a box loaded with special software that connect to a school’s network to allow old computers to run the latest applications. It is in 100 schools in the New York area right now.

Nebula, based in Silicon Valley, creates cloud computing solutions that allow companies to “easily, securely and inexpensively deploy scale-out private cloud computing infrastructures from racks of industry‐standard servers.”

SimpleRelevance, based in Chicago, has created social media software for companies that can distinguish sentiment in online posts.

ihiji, based in Austin, offers a “zero maintenance cloud-based remote network management solution for IT professionals and technology integrators.”

Bottlenose, based in Los Angeles, has created social media monitoring software for companies.

Fantoo based in London, has developed “software that turns mundane, cluttered inboxes into an interactive, pleasant environment.”

The New Dell is More Entrepreneurial and Innovative

December 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

At Dell World, Michael Dell unveiled his new, private innovative and entrepreneurial technology company.
The Round Rock-based company, which employs about 14,000 people in Central Texas, no longer has to adhere to the demands of the public stock market.
As a result, Dell said the company can invest in new startups and take a long term view on innovation.
Earlier this year, Dell took the company private in a $25 billion buyout deal which left him with a 75 percent ownership stake. Silver Lake Partners controls the rest.
And the “world’s largest startup” kicked off its new outlook by announcing a $300 million Dell Ventures fund, which will invest in early to growth stage companies. Already, Dell has invested in 14 companies. It expects to invest $60 million within the next three to five years.
Dell also announced new partnerships with Dropbox, Google, Microsoft Azure, Accenture and Red Hat OpenStack to develop new products for the Cloud.
Dell is not abandoning its hardware business, Dell said, during a press conference following his keynote talk at Dell World. This is the third year Dell has hosted Dell World, but its first time as a private company. About 6,000 people are attending the three day conference, which ends Friday at the Austin Convention Center.
During his morning keynote address, Dell outlined the company’s strategy as a private company. It’s a lot like the strategy he has outlined since 2008 when the company began acquiring software and other businesses to complement its technology and expand its services and solutions business.
“We’re disrupting and democratizing software, services and solutions, the way we did PCs and servers.” Dell said. “And we’ve seen the power of technology to enfranchise and empower people. And today the forces of cloud, mobility, social, big data, security are creating a new model for technology, in fact, a new model for society.”
“They’re the foundation of the modern infrastructure, the highways, the bridges, the telephone lines, the airports of the 21st Century,” Dell said. “Connecting and networking our world. And now we’re going to do what Dell does best. We’re going to innovate and make the technology behind these forces more accessible, more affordable, easier to own, easier to capture value from and easier to operate.”
Dell will focus on helping entrepreneurial ventures launch and expand, along with small businesses, and it also will focus on improving and supporting large enterprises. The company also plans to collaborate more and focus on the global economy.
Dell has been pursuing this vision with a consistent strategy for the last five years. It has invested $13 billion to diversify its business and to offer more software, services and cloud solutions to its customers. Dell has doubled its solutions business from $10 billion to $20 billion.
As a private company, Dell can accelerate its strategy and take a longer-term view of innovation.
Dell announced two new programs focused on innovation at Dell World.
The first program is an internal or organic innovation program through the Dell research division focused on disruptive technology, Dell said. It has a long-range focus of five to ten years out, Dell said. It will also collaborate with leading research institutions to harvest the latest technology.
The second announcement is the $300 million Dell Venture Fund focused on early to growth stage companies in core technology areas. Dell plans to make investments in its four core business groups: end user computing, enterprise solutions, software and services.
“At Dell our commitment to innovation has never been greater,” Dell said.
Despite all the changes, Dell is also still committed to its hardware business of PCs, tablets and servers.
The server is becoming the center of the data center and Dell plans to be number one in market share worldwide, Dell said.
“We’re in it to win it,” he said.
Beyond that, Dell has dramatically expanded its capabilities in storage, networking and security.
“The real innovation comes when you combine these together,” Dell said.
At the heart of Dell’s new initiatives is the cloud.
“The cloud is the new model for tech,” Dell said. “At Dell, we’re making sure you’re positioned to be in a Cloud-based world.”
Dell also announced a new partnership with Red Hat to co-engineer products for Openstack, the free cloud-based architecture.

Dell Partners to offer Dropbox for Business on Dell’s Cloud

December 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

Wonder why Dropbox expanded to Austin and opened an office here earlier this year?
One big reason could be Dell.
Dell and Dropbox announced a partnership Thursday at Dell World to create Dropbox for Business using the Cloud. Dell, which went public earlier this year, is hosting Dell World at the Austin Convention Center through Friday. The company is moving to become more entrepreneurial.
The customers that are succeeding are taking advantage of technology, said Michael Dell, CEO of Dell.
“The combination of Dell and Dropbox provides a great solution for customers,” Dell said.
Dell’s strategic partnership with Dropbox will help its commercial customers access data anywhere at anytime. That will help customers become more productive and promote greater file sharing and collaboration among remote workers.
“Dropbox is one of the most innovative and fastest growing start-ups and the most popular solution of its kind,” said Brett Hansen, executive director, end user computing software at Dell. “Now through Dell’s global sales team, Dropbox and Dell can help organizations of all sizes embrace consumerization of IT while protecting company data.”
Dell now offers Dropbox for Business plus Dell Data Protection Cloud, part of the Dell Data Protection solutions portfolio, to let employees use their favorite cloud storage application at work.
“Dropbox has always been about giving people a simple, elegant way to access their most important digital stuff, and today Dropbox is used in over 4 million businesses because it’s easy to use, easy to deploy and offers a secure, centralized location for company data,” said Marc Leibowitz, global vice president of partnerships, Dropbox. “
More than 200 million people and 4 million businesses including BCBG, Kayak, National Geographic and Rockstar Energy use Dropbox and 1 billion files are uploaded to Dropbox every 24 hours.

Apptive Raises $1 Million and Expands its Partnerships

December 11, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Apptive, a mobile app maker, announced it has raised $1 million in the last year.
The Austin-based company plans to use the funds to expand its partnerships with e-commerce platforms and online merchants.
“With close to half of time spent on e-commerce sites coming from smartphones and tablets, online merchants understand the importance of taking their stores mobile,” Chris Belew, Co-Founder and CEO of Apptive said in a news release. “Prior to Apptive, developing a native m-commerce app meant spending thousands of dollars and dealing with endless complexity.”
Apptive has struck partnerships with Bigcommerce, Shopify, Volusion and 3dcart. Those deals gives the company access to almost 160,000 online merchants.
Apptive currently has hundreds of merchants using its platform which had more than 28,000 end-customer downloads. It saw a big spike in usage following its partnership with Bigcommerce in June.

Tips on Pitching Billionaire Mark Cuban

December 8, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

At Longhorn Startup Demo Day last week, Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, co-founder of 3Com and professor of innovation at UT, interviewed Billionaire Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Cuban also stars on the popular TV show Shark Tank on ABC. This is some of the advice he gave on pitching him.

1. Know Your History. “The biggest error I see in startups that pitch to me is no sense of history” – Not everything is in Google. Companies fail and their servers are no longer online, Cuban said. He gets pitched from entrepreneurs who do not know that their idea has been tried before and failed. He suggests entrepreneurs put their idea in search engines with the word “fail” after it and see what comes up. He also suggests they talk to people who have been around and find out what they know and dig deeper than Google to find out as much information as possible. Cuban said it’s OK if you pitch a deal that has failed before, but just make sure you don’t make the same mistakes and you know how to make it work.

2. Know Your Product and Market Better Than Anyone Else. Cuban looks for “someone who knows their industry cold. Knows their product cold.”

3. What’s Special About Your Startup? “I always look to see what’s the special sauce,” Cuban said. They have to have something that differentiates them from everyone else. They need a “special sauce” that sets them apart from the competition. Superlatives don’t benefit the entrepreneur, Cuban said. Anything that ends in “er” or “est” like cheaper, fastest, better – are big red flags because the competition isn’t going to go away, Cuban said. They’ll just improve on their product. “I try to find entrepreneurs that aren’t lying to themselves and that’s very difficult.”

4. Don’t Ask for too Much. He doesn’t invest in deals that require $300 million in venture capital to succeed. His shares get diluted and the founders spend too much time just looking for capital.

5. Work Hard. He likes pitches from hard-working entrepreneurs. “You’ve got to grind, grind and grind” says Cuban. Entrepreneurs only fail because of lack of effort and brains.

6. Don’t be a Copy Cat. Everyone thinks the Internet is new. But bits are bits, Cuban said. The servers that YouTube uses are no different than the servers that Comcast uses. If 10,000 people are distributing something on YouTube, why do you want to be 10,001, he said. I try to look where people aren’t looking. I try to look where people think it’s archaic or wrong, he said. That’s why he put his movies made for Magnolia, his production company, on video on demand. For example, he thinks video on demand is growing much faster than Internet viewing of video. It’s going to grow even faster as the satellite and cable companies get their user interface perfected, Cuban said.

7. What’s the best way to pitch him? Send him an email to mcuban@gmail.com. He will at least glance through the first paragraph of them all. He is very quick on the delete button. But he has invested $10 million in companies he discovered through email and at least $6 million of that are entrepreneurs he has never met.

8. Don’t pitch him directly, if you want to be on Shark Tank. If he knows anything about the financial elements of your company, he has to recuse himself from the deal on Shark Tank.

Burpy Expands to San Antonio and Houston

December 7, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 5 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Aseem Ali, co-founder of Burpy.com, an online grocery delivery service in Austin, San Antonio and Houston.

Last Longhorn Startup class, Aseem Ali and a team of undergraduate students pitched Burpy, a grocery delivery service.
Now he’s running a quickly growing startup and finishing up his degree as a senior studying mechanical engineering at the University of Texas.
Burpy, which expanded into the San Antonio market on Nov. 25th, plans to launch in Houston on Monday.
That means Burpy will provide grocery service to all major markets in Texas with plans to expand to Dallas-Fort Worth and Bryan-College Station early next year.
Burpy, which used to charge a delivery fee ranging from $15 to $20, no longer charges for delivery. Since it made that move, Burpy has taken off, Ali said.
“We’ve seen amazing adoption,” he said during a recent interview.
In San Antonio, in the last few weeks, Burpy has fulfilled more than 300 orders, Ali said.
“Burpy delivers everything that you can find in a pantry or a refrigerator,” Ali said. “A lot of organic food and a lot of produce.”
The company, based in Austin, has 45 daily shoppers in San Antonio, 50 in Austin, 30 in Houston and 20 in Dallas.
In the next year, Burpy expects to do about $1 million in revenue, Ali said. He graduates in May and plans to work on the business full time.
Burpy gets its grocery items from Wal-Mart, HEB, Costco, Whole Foods. And it recently added office supplies and Office Depot.
Beyond Texas, Burpy plans to expand to Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Kansas City.
Although grocery delivery has been tried before on a large scale and flopped, Ali thinks his business will succeed where others have failed largely because the company crowdsources delivery and uses the latest technology tools to manage its workforce and orders.
Burpy doesn’t have any inventory, warehouses or expensive delivery vans. It taps into existing resources to maximize its efficiency, Ali said. The company does have a few competitors such as Greenling, but it focuses primarily on locally produced organic food.
“We can deliver Oreos and hot Cheetos,” Ali said.
Other Austin competitors include Couch Potato, Munchy Mart and Austin Grocer, but they don’t deliver an extensive inventory of items, Ali said.
Other national competitors include Peapod, Instacart, Amazon Fresh and Walmart to go, but they are not available yet in the Texas market, Ali said. He hopes to establish first mover advantage with the customer base here.
Ali attended the latest Longhorn Startup Demo Day and he said his biggest takeaway came from Billionaire Mark Cuban. It’s best to learn from history, Ali said. Webvan, one of the biggest dot com failures of all time, blew through $1 billion setting up a home grocery delivery network and then filed for bankruptcy. Amazon bought its assets in bankruptcy. It also bought out HomeGrocer, which had gone public and then its stock plummeted.
Burpy has learned from the mistakes made by others, Ali said. The company has raised some angel investment. Sai Ganesh, CTO of Audingo in Austin, is mentoring Burpy. The company is also hiring drivers.

Disclosure: Burpy is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News

Texas Venture Labs Expo Showcases Startups

December 6, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The eighteen companies demonstrating at Texas Venture Labs Venture Expo Thursday ranged from those that had found a better way to harvest antibodies to companies that could increase efficiency and reduce the cost of hybrid cars to a website that aggregates the products used by various celebrities. And one surprise presenter had invented an easy way to strap a grill into the back of your pickup truck.
Dry Vax addresses the issue of vaccines that are degraded by encountering freezing temperatures. Because most vaccines contain aluminum salts, they can’t be frozen without degradation, resulting in loss of nearly half of all global vaccine supplies. Dry Vax converts liquid vaccines to dry powder that isn’t affected by freezing temperatures. The team is looking to begin with animal vaccines and eventually use its technology on human vaccines.
pairfAb has devised a process to extract antibodies from human blood in a process that is much faster than the current system of extracting animal antibodies and “humanizing” it. Presenter Dr. Peter Allen said that six of the ten best selling drugs on the market use antibodies for their manufacture. pairfAb’s process speeds the use of antibodies for research and drug manufacture by eight months. The company is seeking a CEO and $425,000 investment to create an independent laboratory and cover IP costs.
Vobi enables contextual, unified communication that lets a company access the voice, images, text, video, social media and other modalities that may be necessary to successfully complete the call with access to all media.
Amatra has created a platform that automates communication—particularly crisis communication–for institutions. Amatra can manage communications not only for people on an existing network but also in the case of a dynamic workforce of people who come and go to respond during a crisis. The company is focusing at present on the oil and gas industry to facilitate communication in case of disasters including spills, fires and explosions. It is looking for a chief revenue officer and an investment of $600,000 for customer acquisition.
NCarbon has discovered a form of carbon with a surface area per unit of weight that triples the amount of energy that can be stored in supercapacitors. Supercapacitors can store 10-100 times more power than traditional batteries. But most hybrids require six of them. With the new NCarbon, only two are required, saving production costs and increasing fuel efficiency and acceleration power.
Water Lens has developed an easy-to-read, inexpensive, on-site system to test water that is being recycled for hydraulic fracturing. At present, fracking consumes 3 million-to-5 million gallons per frac and though more operators are recycling the water, it must be tested because it requires specific balances of various compounds to be useful and not damage a well. Water Lens can test in minutes what previously took days.
ihiji and Panopticon both automate systems protection. ihiji uses small boxes plugged into a system to remotely detect, diagnose and resolve system problems, often before users interface with the system. Panopticon automatically with systems break-ins when they occur, notifying the system manager that the problem after the intrusion has been dealt with.
Eduvant provides a data dashboard for K-12 teachers to track attendance, grades and other information without a giant, complex enterprise system that large school districts use, provided by companies such as IBM and News Corp.
When one company didn’t show up, it was replaced by The Grill Mobile, a customizable grill you can attach to your pickup truck.
Other companies that presented included TeVido, Aunt Bertha, Ride Scout—which threatened to take its business to Washington D.C. if it can’t find central Texas investors—Set.fm, Equipboard, Primizie, Ten4 Ads, and eyeQ.