Category: Austin (Page 224 of 318)

Dell is giving one lucky startup an opportunity to pitch their company to Michael Dell at Dell World next month.
Dell has already selected six startups including ihiji in Austin to present at Tech Innovation day: Pitch Slam at Dell World.
The online contest kicks off today to find the final technology startup to participate. The deadline for submission is midnight on Nov. 29th.
The Pitch Slam is part of the initiatives Dell is taking as the world’s largest startup. The company went private earlier this year.
During Global Entrepreneurship Week, on Thursday, Dell announced a global expansion of its Center for Entrepreneurs Initiative with a U.K. Centre in the United Kingdom. It plans to open another center in Ireland later this year and other centers next year.
“For Dell, supporting entrepreneurs isn’t just a business strategy, but a corporate philosophy. Since launching in the United States a year ago, the Dell Center for Entrepreneurs has been a true testament to the collaborative win-win of startups and corporations partnering for growth,” Ingrid Vanderveldt, entrepreneur-in-residence at Dell, said in a news statement. “Today, we’re excited to be taking big steps forward in expanding this footprint globally.”
Dell also has a $115 million Dell Innovators Credit Fund to provide financial and technology resources to startups. And its Founders Club, is a hand-picked group of 150 funded startups that Dell has invested in to help scale quickly.
The companies participating in the pitch slam include Neverware, a New York-based startup that improves schools’ access to working computers through software. The other startups include Nebula in San Francisco, Simple Relevance in Chicago, ihiji in Austin and Bottlenose in Los Angeles.
Dell also announced an entrepreneur in residence global advisory board made up of experts including Ashish J. Thakkar, founder of Mara Group and winner of the 2013 Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the World Entrepreneurship Forum. Other members include “Ido Leffler, co-founder of Yes To Inc., the No. 2 natural beauty brand in the U.S; Marcelo Sales, founding partner of 21212, a digital business accelerator headquartered in Rio de Janeiro and New York City; Catherine Graham, president and co-owner of RIGHTSLEEVE, and co-founder and CEO of commonsku, and Elizabeth Gore, resident entrepreneur at the United Nations Foundation.”

HomeAway announced Wednesday that it has expanded its partnership with Interhome AG, a leading managed vacation rental company in Europe, to add more listings to its network.
Austin-based HomeAway expects the partnership to add tens of thousands of online bookable vacation rentals to HomeAway on its European sites, FeWo-direkt and HomeAway.co.uk and later on Arbitel.fr in France.
“To date, this is the largest distribution partnership enabled by HomeAway’s pay-per-booking product for property managers, which launched earlier this month,” according to HomeAway.
“We’re excited to have a close integration with one of the largest and oldest companies in the business that enables our customers to receive quotes and book vacation rentals online,” HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples said in a news release. “We expect this is the beginning of many relationships with leading property managers, like Interhome, that will ultimately provide family and group vacationers with a high level of service.”
Interhome’s operations focus on France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.
“Working with HomeAway is a great fit because both companies passionately believe that vacations are not just about where you go, but where you stay,” Interhome CEO Simon Lehman said in a news release. “We look forward to helping even more families and groups create lasting memories with a level of service and comfort they’ll never forget.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Serial entrepreneur Bryan Menell and speaker Thom Singer knew each other in seventh grade back in Los Angeles. But they’ve made a pact never to tell anyone anything about those days, so there’s no point in asking. Monday night, they celebrated the launch of their book at Umami Mia on Barton Springs Road: The ABC’s of Entrepreneurs. It’s the tenth edition of Singer’s ABC series which includes The ABC’s of Networking and The ABC’s of Speaking.
Singer had wanted to write the book for a while, but got stuck.
“I’m a solo entrepreneur,” he said. “I’ve never taken money, never had employees, never had a co-founder, so a lot of the topics I couldn’t really write about first hand. So I killed the project. And Bryan came to me about a year later and said ‘What happened?’ and I said ‘I didn’t have the street cred.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but I do. Why don’t I help you write the book?”
ABC’s of Entrepreneurs covers topics like E is for Equity: “The most common pitfalls in equity distribution are undocumented and poorly defined promises of it. Imagine that you’re just about to close on a round of investment capital for your business when the investors figure out that you promised Cousin Clyde three percent of the company in exchange for office space. The first problem is that it’s not backed up by any signed documentation and the second problem is that you haven’t defined the equity. Is three percent of the company in options, common stock, preferred stock or warrants?”
For someone who has been studying the entrepreneurial world for a while, the points might be rudimentary, as the title suggests. But it might bring up some new thoughts, too. Singer plans to offer the book, along with his others, at his speaking engagements.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Austin’s accelerators and incubators could use a virtual design and testing system like McLaren Applied Technologies uses during the F1 racing season.
“Every day of the racing season, beginning to end, we manufacture a new part every 17 minutes,” said Ben Heatly, spokesman for McLaren. “That includes coming up with the idea, testing it in the virtual world, testing it again and adding it to the car.”
Talk about an accelerator.

Tech Transfer from racing cars to healthcare

The second annual U.S. Grand Prix for F1 racing takes place this weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin.
The event emphasizes the strong ties between Austin and the United Kingdom.
“F1 has a strong British heritage – the UK is, in fact, the cradle of modern motorsport. Given that the US Grand Prix in Austin is already massively popular with the F1 teams and drivers, it’s obvious Texans share our passion for motorsport,” according to British Consul General Andrew Millar.
Technology being developed for the automotive industry also generates advancements for healthcare, energy, transportation and other industries.
Geoff McGrath, McLaren’s managing director, Naresh Chouhan, marketing director for Truphone and Edgar Farrera, director of sustainability for the Circuit of the Americas, spoke Thursday in a presentation led by tech entrepreneur and mentor Fred Schmidt about the technologies involved in making the F1 races the high performance events that they are and how those technologies are spun out to other applications.
Among the applications McLaren is trying to proliferate is expanding the biometrics it uses to help drivers improve their personal performance to predict illness, as well as optimize performance for athletes and executives.
“People don’t care how many steps they took. They don’t care how many calories they burned. Most people don’t know what a calorie is,” McGrath said. “The challenge we’re trying to address here is, when you get up in the morning, what would you have to do to get into optimum condition for that meeting?”
In addition, he said, the company is working with GSK on technology to help predict health problems in later life and to identify issues in bodies before symptoms of illness manifest. Right now, he said, the technology is not in a form most people will adopt.
McLaren worked with many athletes for the London Olympics on their physical and mental performance as well as their performance in the vehicle they competed in. For example, they built sensors into oars of Olympic rowing teams during training to help rowers understand the precise angle and force at which athletes should put their oars in the water for the best results.
“Athletes don’t like gimmicks,” he said. “But if you can give them an edge in sport, they’ll work with you.” That includes designing a bicycle with chassis similar to a high performance car’s that not only recognizes the size and shape of the person using the bike (McGrath compared the composition of the rider to a bag of fluid) but also the terrain the bike is navigating.
In other arenas, McLaren has partnered with data center company IO in Phoenix, to reduce data center energy consumption. Part of that, McGrath said, is applying predictive and prescriptive analytics used in designing racecars to adapt to track conditions and other circumstances.
“We need to be able to measure what we want to manage,” McGrath said. “If there’s a spike in energy what’s causing it? Is it the Goldman Sachs trading floor kicking in—a real example? And if so how can we make that intervention, what will be the outcome of our intervention?”

Can You Hear Me Now?

Naresh Chouhan of Truphone spoke about his company’s revolutionary mobile phone system used by the Caterham F1 team. Truphone has a global network but also works via Wi-Fi and automatically finds the best channel through which to funnel communication, anywhere in the world.
“F1 teams actually transmit roughly 200 gigabytes of data each day for each car, then they make changes, tweaks during the night,” Chouhan said. There are more than 100 mobile users on the team and in a typical month they would transmit 4,300 texts including 3.3 GB of data. If a part wears out, for example, they need to be able to send a photo, fast. To be able to communicate quickly is crucial to improving performance. But since they travel to so many different countries, they previously had to deal with exorbitant roaming costs, changing numbers depending on what country they were in, or being unable to get on the network in places like Singapore, where the networks are flooded.
With Truphone, a user can have several international numbers on one phone that will all be routed to a single number, and the system will find the best network to use. “It’s the same in Spain as it is in Poland. I don’t have to change my behavior wherever I go.”
The phone has saved the team 30 percent on its global, mobile phone bills—money it has pumped back into development.
The final speaker was Edgar Farrera, Circuit of the America’s director of sustainability who talked about the challenges of “greening” F1.
When asked whether it was important for F1 to pioneer growth in green technologies, Farrera said, 64 percent of F1 fans surveyed said yes. When they asked if they supported green technologies that would change that F1 rumble of the engines to be like the much quieter Formula E cars, only 39 percent said yes.
There are many ways that F1 designers could continue to improve performance while making more environmentally friendly choices, and F1 has already moved toward hybrid engines that consume half the fuel their predecessors did, Farrera said. But part of the issue is evolving the Formula 1 fan base.
“We don’t believe that being green compromises performance. We’re seeing that the use of hybrid technology is producing race winning cars,” McGrath said.
The goal of F1 is to inspire through innovation. And being green is part of that. But with all these minute tweaks, is perfection attainable?
“I suppose we always aspire to perfection but in most real world examples you never get there,” he said. “ You reach what is called an asymptotic curve here’s the bar of perfection at the early days of innovation make great strides every year or with every attempt. Then as you get closer you reach what is called in laymen’s terms, the area of diminishing returns. You make marginal gains. But that’s exactly where we’re competing right now in racing, in Olympic sports–those tiny incremental gains. Now, when you talk about self care and health…we’re right at the bottom.”
And that’s what the F1 Tech Rally is all about.

OneSpot, an advertising company, announced it has landed $5.3 million in funding during a Series A round.
The Austin-based startup reported Mohr Davidow Ventures led the investment round with participation from Mack Capital, RSL Ventures, Capital Factory and Brett Hurt, an angel investor and co-founder of Bazaarvoice.
Since launching, the company has raised $6.8 million to create its content advertising platform.
The latest funding will help the company expand its sales and marketing and further develop its product.
As part of the funding deal, Mohr Davidow Ventures General Partner Bryan Stolle will join OneSpot’s Board of Directors.
OneSpot’s customers include Johnson & Johnson, Rackspace, Domo and Remington.
“OneSpot’s offering is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for solutions that extend the reach of a brand’s content and drive business results,” said Stolle, General Partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures, said in a news release. “We believe the market will continue to see a shift of brand dollars to both content marketing and programmatic advertising as brands increase their reliance on content-centric programs and look to scale those efforts. OneSpot is a powerful solution for the industry and we are excited to collaborate with and support them as they work to build a great company in an exciting category.”
OneSpot has created a platform that allows companies to combine text and video into ad spots which are displayed to customers through its “proprietary content sequencing engine.” They then place those ads on websites. It also provides an analytics dashboard to track the ad’s performance.
“As an industry we’re just scratching the surface of how powerful content marketing can be when it’s combined with the massive scale offered by the global online advertising ecosystem,” OneSpot Chief Executive Officer Steve Sachs said in a news release. “Having the financial support and domain expertise of Mohr Davidow Ventures will help us execute our vision even more rapidly and broadly – and with the benefit of experience, perspective and relationships of a leading ad tech investor.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

When Cameron Crake of Raven and Lilly discovered that she, not the company’s founder, would be pitching at Incubation Station’s Demo Day, she was nervous. To begin with, she’s the background person, not the public face of the company. Also, she was the program’s youngest member and desperately didn’t want her youth to be what the audience remembered.
“I said ‘like’ a lot,” she recalls. “I also would get high pitched at the end of sentences…I had a tendency to cock my hip. A lot of women do that. It’s how we carry our weight. I had to practice standing with my feet planted, looking confident and unshakeable.” She also had to practice her pitch as if she were speaking to a kindergarten class, to overcome the monotone she’d adopted to sound more mature.
Her coach to recognize and overcome all these quirks was Monique Maley, founder of Articulate Persuasion, a company that helps leaders speak more confidently and effectively. A former actor and theater management veteran who worked as a production coordinator for a theater in London as well as an international talent firm, Maley understands the myriad subtle ways a tone, a posture and a gesture can communicate to an audience. But most startup founders don’t. So she’s been hired by Austin Technology Incubator and other groups to help the developers, engineers and other startup founders transform their nervous energy into effective pitches. She works with them on everything from messaging to delivery.
“Until your content is clear in your head, it will not be clear to anyone else,” she said. “You have to articulate it so clearly to me that it’s clear in my mind. It’s like somebody teaching someone to paint over the phone.”
Part of that, she said, is understanding your audience. Frequently, engineers struggle to communicate their ideas to groups of investors who lack their technical knowledge.
“A lot of times I’ll work with scientists and engineers who are going out to talk to VCs on the West Coast and they have a hard time getting it across,” Maley said. “One guy said ‘I really have to dumb it down for them,’ and I told him ‘If that’s your attitude they’re going to feel an air of condescension in everything you say.’” Sometimes, she said, it’s necessary to use jargon or technical terms. But if you’re talking over the heads of the people in your audience, don’t expect them to be moved by your pitch.
“Monique helped me with aspects of communicating more complex concepts simply,” said Stuart Rench, president of ihiji. “I tend to go very detailed, open too many doors during a conversation, leave too many people stuck behind trying to figure out what I’m talking about.”
Regardless of how polished your pitch is, Maley said, you have to connect with the audience. If someone is nervous while pitching, for example, that’s going to come across. The question is, is that person nervous because he lacks confidence in his idea or ability to carry it out? Or did he just have too much coffee?
“Nervous energy is the same as every other kind of energy,” Maley said, “it’s just about where your mind is choosing to take it. Being excited about a first date causes nervous energy but you tend toward positive thinking…it creates outgoing energy that makes a connection. But if your energy is negative because you’re worried about getting funded, that’s internal energy that’s spinning around in your head. I can’t connect with you if your thoughts are spinning around in your head.”
Maley’s life and career path have given her a broad tool set to help her clients. She grew up splitting her time between Houston, where her father was from, and Mexico City. Her mother’s family, originally from Spain, fled to Morocco after the Spanish Civil war, and then to Mexico when the U.S. invaded northern Africa during World War II. Her parents were cultured, supporters of the arts. Her father listened to opera, loved languages and taught her how to cook soufflés. They had such a different sensibility, it always left her feeling out of place among her peers. Her time in Mexico City suited her better. At the time, she said, the city was more cosmopolitan. Her cousins and many of her friends went to the French lycee where the children of the French diplomats studied.
Maley was drawn to the theater and did a summer program at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Afterward, she went to Tufts in Boston and studied English and clinical psychology. She did no acting in college but was involved in an a capella group and choir at the New England Conservatory of Music.
After graduation she moved to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. That’s where she got heavy duty training in how people could use their bodies and movement to express the physical lives of their characters.
“We studied why you would move this way, based on your age, or height or humps or corsets and what does that embodiment tell the audience that the text doesn’t. The physical and visual image of you is often more telling than what you’re actually saying to me.”
That’s a crucial piece of teaching people who pitch how to convey confidence to their audiences, like making sure you take up enough space…but not too much.
Engineers often come across very soft spoken and may not take up enough room. “At the end of the day the institutional investors will eat you for lunch if they think you’re soft and mealy. So how do you sound stronger? It’s a transformation over time. As you start sounding stronger, you start feeling stronger and that’s where the power is. If you have a great idea but you can’t articulate it, investors don’t feel wholly confident in you…they have to have trust in the individual and the team.”
But the main problem with most pitches, Maley said, is lack of practice. No one would come out to see a theater performance where the actors hadn’t rehearsed. They wouldn’t go to see a football team that hadn’t practiced. So why should they be expected to watch a pitch that hadn’t been practiced over and over?
Maley returned to Houston and acted at the Alley Theater. Afterward she joined a project in a warehouse at the University of Houston. That group of actors afterward formed the Urban Theater Company. At the Urban Theater, Maley not only acted but worked as managing director which threw her into the business end of theater and put her in a position to start soliciting sponsors for the company. After she’d been at the Urban Theater for close to five years, Maley said, she decided to return to London. She had no job but just started going to theaters to check them out and decided she wanted to work for the Almeida. One day she stopped in and said “I want to work here.” There was an opening. And she was in.
At Almeida, she acted and also worked as a liaison to corporate sponsors in New York and London to plan special VIP events and negotiated contracts with agents to hire designers, actors, and guest directors. Her next role was working with International Creative Management, a talent agency.
Maley, an only child, eventually decided she was too far from her aging parents and returned to the U.S. She was ready to try something other than acting, which she calls “a young person’s game” and opened a spa, Daya, which she closed just before the nation’s economy hit the fan.
After that she ran a marketing agency and worked for a leadership firm before founding Articulate Persuasion. Initially Maley worked with attorneys to improve their performance in front of juries. But soon she got a client who was an entrepreneur and needed help doing everything she had learned in the theater industry. Acting and pitching to raise funds.
The startup world, she said, is a lot like the theater world. People are close knit and collaborative and there’s instant gratification for what you do.
Both Rench and Crake said they felt like Maley cared about them as people.
“I’m a very protective person, I don’t like sharing my faults,” Rench said. “given my personal limitations on things like that, Monique was very thoughtful in what she had to say and knows how to boil things down very quickly. That keeps me from letting the ADD get very far down the road.”
“She really knew what she was doing and had a lot of great advice to offer,” Crake said. “She really cared about me being able to do a good job. She wanted me to represent my company well and I felt like she was on my team, wanting to see us succeed. She was a big part of making us succeed.”
Working with the startups, Maley said, “is a place where I feel needed, appreciated. The work I do is rewarding. Whatever you do, that’s so important. At least it is for me.”