Category: Austin (Page 230 of 318)

FBI Busts $1.2 Billion Silk Road Illegal Online Marketplace with Ties to Austin

October 4, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Ross William Ulbricht, alleged mastermind behind Silk Road, an illegal online marketplace for drugs, hacking software, forgeries and hit men. Photo from Ulbricht’s LinkedIn Profile.

The crazy tale of Ross William Ulbricht, also known as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” after a masked fictional character in the movie “The Princess Bride,” sounds like a HBO series on a renegade Internet entrepreneur gone wrong.
Ulbricht, 29, allegedly operated the Silk Road, a sprawling $1.2 billion black-market bazaar for drugs, computer hacking software, forgeries and hit man services. He founded the site, programmed its features and oversaw its operations on a daily basis, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
The FBI arrested Ulbricht earlier this week on charges of narcotics trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering, according to a sealed criminal complaint by Christopher Tarbell, FBI special agent.

A Native of Austin

Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin and graduated from Westlake High School in 2002, is now in jail in San Francisco facing charges that carry several hundred years of jail time.
The FBI arrested Ulbricht for owning and operating the underground website known as “Silk Road,” which provided a platform to sell heroin, cocaine, LSD and Methamphetamines. Ulbricht, under an alias “altoid” allegedly called the site “an anonymous Amazon.com.”
The complaint also alleges that the Silk Road provided a platform to trade “malicious software designed for computer hacking, such as password stealers, keyloggers, and remote access tools.” It also traded in other illicit goods and services through a payment system based on Bitcoins, an unregulated digital currency.
The FBI alleges that Ulbricht added a Bitcoin “tumbler” to the Silk Road payment system to “ensure that illegal transactions conducted on the site could not be traced to individual users.”
The two-year investigation of Silk Road, headed up by FBI Special Agent Tarbell, also involved agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and Homeland Security Investigations.

So who is Ulbricht?

Ulbricht’s Facebook page reveals that he liked beer pong and crazy hat parties. He enjoyed movies like The Matrix, Office Space, Time Bandits and Lord of the Rings. His favorite books included Be Here Now, Hyperion, The Power of Now and Shogun.
His interests spanned money, partying, yoga, dancing, drumming and strength training.
He also focused on entrepreneurship and participated in a 3 Day Startup program in 2010. His LinkedIn profile listed his occupation as an “investment adviser and entrepreneur” based in Austin.
But the FBI alleges that starting in January of 2011 through September of this year, Ulbricht ran a global platform for drug dealers to sell controlled substances online.
And the plot deepened even further this year when Ulbricht allegedly “solicited a Silk Road user to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site,” according to the complaint.
The Silk Road operated on the “the onion router” or “tor” network, which provides anonymity to users.
“Based on my training and experience, Silk Road has emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today,” according to Tarbell. “Silk Road has been used by several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to well over a hundred thousand buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions.”

All transactions took place using Bitcoins

The site generated more than 9.5 million Bitcoins and collected 600,000 in Bitcoin commissions, equivalent to about $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions, according to Tarbell.
As of Sept. 23, the Silk Road had 13,000 items listed for sale under categories such as “cannabis,” “dissociatives,” “Ecstasy,” “Psychedelics,” and “Stimulants.” The items were sold in individual dosages and bulk orders.
During its investigation, law enforcement agents purchased more than 100 items of controlled substances such as cocaine, heroin, LSD and more from sellers on the Silk Road.
The Silk Road charged a commission, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent, for every transaction on its site.

Hiring Hitmen

Tarbell also reported that Ulbricht took “it upon himself to police threats to the site from scammers and extortionists, and has demonstrated a willingness to use violence in doing so.”
In a second criminal complaint from the state of Maryland listed on the Baltimore Sun’s website, Ulbricht is alleged to have hired a hitman to kill an employee who he thought was stealing from Silk Road. He allegedly paid $80,000 to an undercover cop to execute the employee in January of 2013.
And in another case of hitman for hire a few months later, Tarbell outlines how Ulbricht allegedly sent messages to have a Silk Road user in Canada with a wife and three kids, named “FriendlyChemist,” killed for $150,000 or 1,670 bitcoins. The guy was trying to extort Ulbricht for $500,000 or else he would release the names and addresses of Silk Road users.

Ross Ulbricht, photo from Twitter

Ulbricht struck a deal with a user called “redandwhite.” After receiving his payment, that user messaged Ulbricht stating, “Your problem has been taken care of…. Rest easy though, because he won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Ever.” The user provided pictures to Ulbricht of the alleged dead body of the victim, but the police have been unable to find any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, when this incident allegedly took place.

How did Ulbricht end up in jail?

He graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 2006, according to his LinkedIn profile. Then he attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania School of Materials Science and Engineering.
On his LinkedIn profile, Ulbricht states that his goals shifted since graduate school and that he was focused on “creating an economic simulation” designed to “give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force” by “institutions and governments.”
Tarbell believed that system to be Silk Road. He also reported that Ulbricht, under the alias “altoid” posted on different online forums to market Silk Road.

The Social Media Trail

The FBI heavily relied upon social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google + to put together a profile of Ulbricht and link him back to Silk Road. For example, Ulbricht’s Google + profile listed his favorite YouTube videos, which included a number originating from Mises.org, the website of the Mises Institute, the world center of the Austrian School of Economics.
Ulbricht, under the alias DPR, had cited the “Austrian Economic theory” and the work of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard – economists closely associated with the “Misus Institute” as providing the philosophical underpinnings for Silk Road.
Ulbricht’s best friend is Rene Pinnell, founder of Hurricane Party and Forecast in Austin, which shut down in July of 2012. Pinnell moved to San Francisco shortly after that. Ulbricht was living at his parents house in Austin and moved shortly after that to join Pinnell in San Francisco.
In its complaint, the FBI reported that Ulbricht lived for a while with a friend who moved to San Francisco in September of 2012. That friend is believed to be Pinnell. They also made a YouTube video together interviewing each other for Story Corps, according to a posting on Pinnell’s personal website. The video shows Pinnell and Ulbricht in split screen talking about moving out to San Francisco, school friends, work, women and other interests. The two have known each other since sixth grade at West Ridge Middle School.

Josh, Frosty and other Aliases

In July of 2013, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted a package from Canada that contained nine counterfeit identity documents. Agents then visited Ulbricht at his house on 15th Street in San Francisco where he sublet a room for $1,000 monthly, which he paid in cash. He provided them with a copy of his real Texas driver’s license and said that his two other housemates currently only knew him by the fake name “Josh.”
He told the agents that “hypothetically anyone could go onto a website named “Silk Road” on “Tor” and purchase any drugs or fake identity documents the person wanted.”
“The agents also spoke with one of Ulbricht’s housemates at the address, who state that Ulbricht, whom he knew as “Josh,” was always home in his room on the computer.”
Tarbell concluded in his investigation that Ulbricht was stocking up on fake identities so he could rent multiple servers from hosting companies under false identities.
Ulbricht also used the alias “Frosty” posting in computer coding forums for help on programming his illegal underground website.
So how did a kid, who liked cliff jumping and snowboarding and grew up in Austin, got advanced degrees and studied to be an entrepreneur, go down such a bad path? That’s something that only Ulbricht knows. But one thing is for sure, this Silk Road didn’t lead to riches and the good life, but to the inside of a dingy jail cell. And if convicted, Ulbricht, a bright kid with so much promise, faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
At a hearing on Friday, Ulbricht’s lawyer denied all charges including that Ulbricht ran the Silk Road website, according to the Los Angeles Times.

MiniTrends Conference Spotlights Emerging Trends in Socially Responsible Businesses

October 3, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

If startups could see where the trends are headed and get ahead of them, their chances of building successful businesses would jump immeasurably. That was one of the points of the MiniTrends 2013 conference at the Holiday Inn Town Lake Wednesday and Thursday. The subject of the conference was The Integration of Profit and Social Responsibility.
Among the keynote speakers was John Vanston, chairman of Technology Futures Inc. which sponsored the conference and author of the book “MiniTrends: How Innovators and Entrepreneurs Discover and Profit from Business and Technology Trends.”

Where to Spot MiniTrends

Vanston’s presentation “The Importance of MiniTrends and Seven Ways You Can Find Them” gave ideas for entrepreneurs about where to search for minitrends:

Follow the Money. Government agencies like the Small Business Innovation Research Program and Small Business Technology Transfer Program give grants to federal agencies study areas of innovation that look promising. Those grants are public record, meaning businesses could look at places where the federal government sees an emerging trend worthy of investment.
• Follow the Leaders. Pay attention to the people who are changing industries. Examine their thoughts and intentions.
Examine Limits. Identify whether limits your idea faces are physical—meaning they can’t be changed; perceptual—meaning the limit is only a limit within current perceptions of the way the world works; or practical—whether the effort to exceed the limit isn’t worth the time or investment for the eventual gain.
Consider Human Nature. People are still driven by the same needs they’ve always had, need for love, connection, success, pride…but the way they’re manifesting those needs changes.
Take Note of Demographics.
Analyze Frustrations. Identify situations that frustrate people, such as long waits at restaurants, for possible solutions to alleviate the frustrations.
Look for Convergences. Breakthroughs often happen when technologies converge.

The conference attendees assembled into groups for the afternoon session where they diagrammed possible emerging trends in areas of social need by beginning with an issue, such as aging, and branching out into all the repercussions of aging, then the repercussions of those repercussions and so forth, looking for possible trends that could be turned into business opportunities. This exercise, according to Carrie Vanston, marketing director with Technology Futures, allows for building on diverse perspectives and revealing possible convergences.

Who in Austin Can Help

The final panel was called Help is Here: Digital Strategist Vicki Flaugher moderated the panel, which included Bijoy Goswami, co-founder of ATX Equation, Eve Richter, vice president of community and partnerships with Door64 and Joy Miller, marketing and outreach coordinator City of Austin Small Business Development Program.
The questions centered on what resources and people are available for entrepreneurs once they’ve got their business ideas.
Flaugher asked Miller what was the first thing entrepreneurs asked for when they came to see her at the city. Most of them, Miller said, are looking for capital—not loans as much as angel or VC money.
But both Richter and Goswami pointed out the fallacy that many new entrepreneurs have that if they just had investment money, their businesses would take off.
“You do need money,” said, Goswami, Austin’s chief evangelist for bootstrapping a business as part of a personal journey. “You need customers.” People do need support on the entrepreneurial journey, he said, but a lot of that can be found in the entrepreneurial community. He created one of several maps of the Austin entrepreneurial world, explaining how to find resources.
Richter pointed out that Austin Startup Week is next week and anyone an entrepreneur could hope to meet will be at the many events and parties. In addition, she said, the Central Texas Angel Network has office hours to help entrepreneurs get help shaping their ideas. The important thing, they both said, is to enter the startup world looking for relationship, not just handing out business cards and trying to close deals.
Once you’ve made personal connections, Richter said, many people, especially connectors who know everyone, will be happy to make introductions, direct you to events to meet the people you’re hoping to meet or connect you with resources.
“Social capital is a really intrinsic part of how Austin works,” Goswami said. “In other cities, your business identity is your identity. Here the question isn’t so much ‘What do you do?’ but ‘How are you?’ and the answer might be ‘Oh, I had a really hard yoga class today…..’ This is a small and loyal community and word travels fast.”

Full disclosure: Silicon Hills News was a media sponsor of the Minitrends conference.

Sparefoot and Sputnik Creative Make Best Young Companies to Work for List

October 2, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Turnstone, in partnership with Wharton management professor and human resource expert Peter Cappelli, has selected 15 Best Young Companies to Work for nationwide.
The list includes two companies in Austin: Sparefoot, an online marketplace for self-storage, and Sputnik Creative, a digital and branding studio.
Turnstone received more than 100 nominations in its inaugural contest.
Turnstone selected the companies based on positive culture, great leadership, business innovation, talent retention, community outreach and “an intentionally designed workspace,” according to a news release.
The companies had to be less than 10 years old with no more than 100 employees.
“These 15 companies have created environments which embrace the company’s personality by vividly representing their culture, fostering a tight community and exuding fun,” Kevin Kuske, general manager and chief anthropologist for turnstone said in a news release.
The other companies included: Chalkfly of Detroit, Cloudability of Portland, OR, Fanology of Los Angeles, Greatist of New York, Groove Commerce of Baltimore, MD, Hoopla.io of Kansas City, KS, Nexus IT group of Overland Park, KS, Parking Panda of Baltimore, MD, Privy of Boston, MA, SocialRada of Washington, D.C., Sparkhouse of Costa Mesa, CA, Sprout Social of Chicago, IL and Thanx Media of Glen Ellyn, IL.

AT&T Begins to Roll Out 1-Gig Fiber Network in Austin

October 1, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

AT&T Tuesday announced it has started to roll out its high speed broadband network in Austin, which can deliver speeds up to one Gigabit per second.
The service includes AT&T U-verse with GigaPowerSM, Internet services and more TV services and features in December.
“Austin embodies innovation and social consciousness, and is the heart of a vibrant, ever-evolving tech culture and entrepreneurial spirit,” Dave Nichols, President of AT&T Texas said in a news release. “With our all-fiber U-verse services, we are building the foundation for a new wave of innovation for Austin’s consumers, businesses, and civic and educational institutions. It’s about engaging the full community and empowering the city and its people with all that technology can offer us. This investment will help attract new business and new jobs to Austin.”
AT&T is encouraging consumers and business owners to vote to help AT&T identify which neighborhoods get the high speed network in the future. The company plans to further expand its network next year.
“This is an exciting time to live and work in Austin. We currently sit at the cutting edge of technology and this deployment will allow our businesses and residents to work, educate, create, invest, and build at faster speeds,” Mike Rollins, President of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce said in a news release. “Jump-starting the actual construction of GigaPower will add another reason for people to want to do business and innovate in Austin and call Austin home.”

PayPup Wins PayPal’s Battle Hack in Austin

September 30, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 6 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Jeff Linwood, winner of Battle Hack Austin with his app, PayPup, which allows people to adopt dogs from shelters and donate to their medical expenses.

Jeff Linwood, a software developer with Biscotti Labs, loves dogs. He and his wife even adopted one from the Austin Pets Alive shelter.
But helping one dog wasn’t enough, he said.
He wanted to do more, but he couldn’t adopt any more dogs. That’s where he got the idea for a mobile phone app to help match dogs with potential owners.
He signed up for the PayPal Battle Hack competition, held last weekend at TechShop in Round Rock, and he spent Saturday and Sunday working on the project.
It paid off.
On Sunday night, PayPal announced PayPup, Linwood’s app, won Battle Hack. The mobile phone app lists all dogs available for adoption from Austin Pets Alive along with a donation button for each dog to help pay for medical expenses.
Linwood, who also works as an adjunct professor in journalism at the University of Texas, received a laser-etched glass trophy and an 4.3 pound 21-inch solid steel axe trophy.
PayPal will fly him and nine other city winners to the world finals in San Jose in November for one last hack-off where one team will receive a $100,000 grand prize.
So far, PayPal has had competitions in New York, Miami, Seattle and now Austin in the U.S., said Jonathan LeBlanc, developer evangelist at PayPal. It has held international Battle Hack competitions in Tel Aviv, Moscow and Berlin. It still plans Battle Hacks in Washington, DC., London and Barcelona.
“We chose Austin for its innovative culture,” LeBlanc said. “The city is known as a place that is changing the technology industry and creating start ups.”
More than 150 people signed up for the Battle Hack. At TechShop, the hackers had access to laser machines, 3-D printers and all kinds of software and hardware throughout the weekend.
They also had plenty of food and many teams stayed up for days on end.
Tap to Pay, a hardware hack that turns a Raspberry Pi, a credit-card sized computer that plugs into a keyboard, and mobile phone into a mobile payment system, received second place. Lana Jones and Alejandro Vidal created Tap to Pay. They met at the event and worked until 4 a.m. Sunday morning to finish their hack.
“It allows for small transactions on the fly,” Jones said. A kid can use one at the lemonade stand to take payments from customers, she said.
Jones programmed a Raspberry Pi to communicate with a mobile phone to allow for payments anywhere with a simple tap of the phone on the device. It only costs $35.
Trust in Dragons, a crowdfunding platform for non-government organizations that ensures transparency and accountability with gamifaction features, received third place.
The focus of the Battle Hack competitions is to reconnect with PayPal’s developer community, said LeBlanc with PayPal.The company’s developer tools and API were focused primarily on web transactions until recently when the company began to focus more on mobile payments.
“What we are seeing with the Battle Hack competitions is a complete culture shift at PayPal,” LeBlanc said. “PayPal’s President David Marcus has made it clear that our goal is to fix and make better our infrastructure for the developer community.”
The sponsors of the event included Twilio, SendGrind, Microsoft and Nokia. They also gave out sponsor prizes to the teams.

The other teams pitching their projects at the Austin PayPal Battle Hack:

SafeWalk – an app that scrapes the latest crime data and mashes it up with Google maps to show people a safe route home.

TipTastic – an app that lets people tip food truck operators, musicians, street performers, artists or anyone. It’s geared at people who don’t carry cash but who like to tip.

Green Building – real time monitoring of energy consumption in a building, which charges people for over-use.

DoGooder – a mobile phone and web-based app that turns volunteering and donating into a game with levels, badges and the ability to achieve Superhero status.

Missing Hippo – a mobile phone app that integrates GPS with maps and enables people to find lost pets and collect rewards.

ForwardFundr – a crowdfunding app for donating money and volunteer hours to beautification projects in a community.

AUsome Carpool – a mobile phone app which makes chipping in for carpooling easier.

Team Chaos Launches Dragon Academy

September 28, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Team Chaos in Austin launched Dragon Academy, a puzzle adventure game, available on multiple formats including Apple iOS, Android and Facebook.
The free game adds role playing elements to a format similar to Candy Crush Saga and Bejeweled.
Team Chaos released the game last week. It’s available in the Apple iOS App Store and in the Google Play Store and at Facebook.
Serial entrepreneur Andrew Busey, who sold his Challenge Games startup to Zynga and served as its VP and GM in Austin.
Dragon Academy is the latest title from Austin-based Team Chaos, led
by serial entrepreneur Andrew Busey. He is a veteran of the online gaming industry. He recently served as vice president and general manager of Zynga Austin.
“We believe players will have a great time with Dragon Academy because we combine what players love most: a match-3 game with unique
characters: dragons each with its own great personality,” Busey said in a news statement.
In Dragon Academy, the six main character dragons activate special
powers when they are fed mystic runes as they make matches during a
game. Their job is to save the dragon Hatchlings that have been
egg-napped by the mischief-making Wobblins.
Team Chaos co-founder, Ben Lamm, is also CEO and co-founder of Chaotic Moon, a mobile development studio. Dragon Academy is the second title from Team Chaos, following Elements, a Collectible Card Game, that launched in April.

Crafting Brands and Pitching at the Nonprofit Tech Summit

September 27, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Bill Schley, author of the Unstoppables, talking about branding to the Nonprofit Technology Summit at Rackspace.

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Teaching nonprofit organizations to pitch, craft brands, harness social media, create effective presentations and use video to influence emotion and create action.
Those are a few of the strategies people learned Friday at the fourth annual Nonprofit Technology Summit at Rackspace.
The daylong event is focused on providing technology tools to nonprofit organizations, said Susan Thompson, vice president at the San Antonio Area Foundation.
This year, 275 people attended the event, up from 95 people last year.
“We do this to help build the capacity of nonprofits in our community so they can more effectively use these technology resources,” Thompson said. “This is really about helping them tell their story to donors, the people they serve and the whole community.”
The San Antonio Area Foundation, Rackspace, 3 Day Startup and the 80/20 Foundation sponsored the event, which took place at Rackspace’s new events center at its corporate headquarters in San Antonio.
“I think in the tech world the ability to have a good pitch is the difference between life and death,” said Lorenzo Gomez, executive director of the 80/20 Foundation. “The startup world gets so many resources to teach them to pitch and we wanted to bring those same resources to the nonprofit world.”
This year, five nonprofit organizations were selected to pitch their ventures at the conference. They went through a two-day version of the 3 Day Startup training at Geekdom. They are scheduled to pitch this afternoon.

Recipeas Launches Recipe Search App

September 26, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Nate McGuire and Tyler Hobbs, co-founders of Recipeas in Austin

Nate McGuire, co-founder of Recipeas, a recipe search app, recently answered a few questions about his startup, which is based at Capital Factory in downtown Austin.

Q. Can you explain your product in the simplest language possible?

A. Recipeas is an iOS recipe app that tells you what you should cook with the ingredients you have. We make it easy to search popular recipes by ingredient.

Q. What’s your secret sauce? What differentiates you from the competition?

A. The most significant difference between Recipeas and other recipe apps is our search process. We only ask you about a few ingredients and then give you recipe results that you can actually make from popular food blogs across the web. We determined each ingredient’s initial probability and decay rate so we are able to give users the most accurate search results possible.

Q. Who are your competitors?

A. There are a lot of great food apps out there; we are working to be the best in recipe search.

Q. Are you Bootstrapped, or do you have Venture Capital or Angel Investment?

A. We’ve bootstrapped Recipeas.

Q. Who makes up your team?

A. Nate McGuire (@natemcguire) and Tyler Hobbs (@tylhobbs)

Q. Who are your customers?

A. We built Recipeas for people who need to make something right now using the ingredients they have. It’s not for planning out elaborate meals, but rather someone making dinner on a normal night.

Q. What is your business model?

A. We offer in-app purchases to unlock your search results, and for unlimited results (1000+ recipes) we charge 9.99. We give you a few recipe credits to start so you can view recipes before you buy.

Q. What is the biggest win you’ve had to date?

A. It’s very early on, but we’ve been pleased with the initial launch. We’re working on a few updates, so that’s our main focus right now. We’re also adding new recipes for people to try every day.

Q. What are the most helpful Austin startup resources that you’ve used?

A. Our biggest resource has been being able to talk to people who have built and launched apps and food startups before. There are so many unknowns when you are building new software, if you don’t have the opportunity to talk to people who have done it before you can end up making a lot of mistakes.

Q. What are the advantages of being in Austin for launching your startup?

A. The biggest benefit is that we actually enjoy and can afford living here. That gives us a lot of freedom to work on things that we think are important.

Q. What are your plans for the future?

A. We’ve received really great feedback from users, and there are a lot of new features that we’d like to explore. We’re working on improving sharing recipes with your friends and being able to add and modify your own recipes.

Q. Anything else you’d like to add or say that I haven’t asked you about?

A. We really believe that machine learning can be used to improve and aid everyday activities. With Recipeas, we’ve done just that by applying some sophisticated probabilistic techniques to the very common problem of creating something delicious to cook for dinner.

At NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston for Expedition 37 Launch

September 25, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Expedition 37 crew members lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in the Soyuz spacecraft on Wednesday. Photo courtesy of NASA.

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

In July, I went to a NASA Social meetup at Johnson Space Center to learn about Astronaut fitness and wellness in space.

At that event, our group met the crew of Expedition 37, including Astronaut Mike Hopkins of NASA, a flight engineer, Cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, Soyuz Commander and Cosmonaut Sergey Ryanzanskiy, Flight Engineer with the Russian Federal Space Agency.

I grew up during the Cold War, in which we feared the Russians, so it’s nice to see the collaboration our space program has with Russia now. The Cosmonauts and Astronauts are not only crew members, but friends.

Astronaut Mike Hopkins of NASA, a flight engineer, Cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, Soyuz Commander and Cosmonaut Sergey Ryanzanskiy, Flight Engineer with the Russian Federal Space Agency. Photo courtesy of NASA

And on Wednesday at 3:58 p.m. Central Time, Hopkins, Kotov and Ryanzanskiy lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a five hour trek to the International Space Station.
I watched the launch from Mission Control Center at Houston’s NASA Johnson Space Center with my teenage son, Teddy. Astronaut Kevin Ford and others from NASA briefed us on Expedition 37 and the flight.

By the time we drove back from Houston from the event, the crew had almost made it to the space station. They docked at 9:45 p.m. Central Time, again without any problems. My son and I were able to watch it live from our computers on NASA Television.
Hopkins, Kotov and Ryanzanskiy will spend the next five and a half months on the International Space Station, which celebrates 15 years in space this November. The U.S. Mission Control Center for the International Space Station is at NASA Johnson Space Center.

Soyuz spacecraft about to dock with the International Space Station. Photo courtesy of NASA.

The crew joined Expedition 37 crew members who have been aboard the space station since late May: Commander Fyodor Yurchikin of Rosmosmos and Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency.
They will work on more than 1,600 experiments on the space station and they will add some new ones focused on human health and human physiology.

So even though NASA officially ended its 30-year space shuttle program in 2011, the U.S. still sends astronauts to space. NASA buys seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

And Johnson Space Center is still a hotbed for innovation in Texas and the United States.

E4Youth Wins Social Good Summit Fast Pitch

September 25, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Carl Settles

E4Youth won the Social Good Summit fast pitch competition Tuesday with its program that helps creative young people connect with mentors, internships and jobs in creative services. Rather than having a panel of judges, the participants at the summit voted for their favorite pitch among the six presented. The winner won $5,200.
Founder Carl Settles began his pitch by talking about how creative kids often have a difficult time fitting in in school and budget cuts to school sponsored programs in the arts has made it even tougher. E4Youth takes young people out to tour creative agencies and introduces them to job opportunities in various creative careers. They introduce them to agencies, help them build their resumes and help them raise money to attend events like SXSW. Over the last six years, he said, students helped by E4Youth have had numerous career successes including having a film premier at the Cannes Film Festival, working for congressional campaign and more. The majority of students who complete the program wind up with internships and later jobs. Settles said he would use the money to deepen the organization’s program and help more students. Currently E4Youth works with 400 students a year.
Dollar a Day also works to help kids with creative arts. Founder Cameron Gibson told the story of how sports, music and creative arts had been hugely important to him as a student. When he had to drop out of school to help with family issues, he became depressed. He decided, one day, that the rule of life is, whatever you hope to gain, you have to give it first. So he started giving away $1 a day. That was the advent of Dollar a Day. This nonprofit asks people to commit to spending a dollar a day toward kids who need help with lessons, instruments and other expenses of arts classes. Donors can create a giving team of 10 people who also give a dollar a day. Eighty percent of donations go toward helping kids.
Connect2Good is aiming to be an online marketplace wherein nonprofits can post their needs in terms of furniture and material goods and people can sell their extraneous “stuff.” Joshua Jake Vaugh said he founded the organization because of his own difficulties finding items—like furniture–he needed for another nonprofit he was starting. Fifty to 75 percent of the proceeds of the sale got to the nonprofit of the seller’s choice.

Frugal Innovations aims to be an online site for the various innovations companies and individuals have devised to solve problems faced in the third world such as lack of plumbing and electricity. Founder Jose Briones would like to bring together on one site solutions like the Easy Latrine from Cambodia, water purification systems from India and more so that organizations and nations can have one place to go to find solutions.
David Schwartz of NGO and Social Enterprise Hub wants to create a site, similar to a dating website, where organizations with similar missions can connect and host joint fundraisers or benefit from each other’s resources. An organization with a great meeting space, for example, might help out another organization with a similar mission that needed a meeting space. He hopes to make giving “social” rather than having so many organizations spend so much time fundraising and fighting for the same donor dollars.
Jessica Lowry of Key To The Street has been working with the City of Austin discussing her app-to-be which lets people take pictures of Austin streets and create animated streetscapes that would help start a dialogue about improvements to walkability. The conversation around how to improve Austin so that it is more walkable, she said, would eventually translate to policy changes.
The Social Good Summit pitch competitors were coached by several local experts including Eve Richter, Kevin Koym and Gary Hoover.