Category: Austin (Page 237 of 318)

CSC, based in Falls Church, VA, has purchased Austin-based Infochimps.
“Infochimps Inc., with offices in both Austin, TX and Silicon Valley, becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary, reporting into CSC’s Big Data and Analytics business unit led by Sashi Reddi, VP and GM,” according to this blog post by Infochimps CEO Jim Kaskade.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Infochimps has received $2.5 million in venture capital from the DFJ Mercury Fund, ff Venture Capital, Dundee Venture Capital and MFI Capital, according to its CrunchBase profile. Infochimps, which began as a data marketplace, provides data management products to companies.
“This acquisition aligns directly with CSC’s focus on next-generation technology solutions and services,” Sashi Reddi, CSC’s vice president and general manager for Big Data and Analytics, said in a news release. “Infochimps’ expertise in building industrial-strength data platforms on open source technologies will advance CSC’s big data capabilities significantly.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

You too, can make your own robot, using Artoo, a micro-framework for robotics using the programming language Ruby. Mike Ford, a software engineer at Trion Worlds, spoke Monday night to a group of around 30 people at Austin RB meetup at Capital Factory about the Artoo technology and its uses in education.
Ford programmed a Sphero, robotic ball, to roll around in random directions using Artoo. At first it was just to mess with his cat, he said. But after spending time with his toddler niece, he realized that robotic technology could be used as a novel approach to teach Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, known as STEM, concepts to kids of any age.
You can, for example, program the ball to change colors on command. Kids could not only learn the words for colors in English, but you could program the ball to change colors when the commands were given in another language “rojo” or “rouge.”
It could be used to teach about the light spectrum. It can be programmed to outline specific geometric shapes, a fun way to teach kids geometry. Ultimately, kids can be taught programming languages so they can program their robots to do whatever they desire.
Artoo has a domain specific language that interfaces with all devices in the same way and supports multiple hardware types, he said, It’s also extendable to support new hardware.
It works with Arduino, AR Drone, Roomba vacuum cleaner to name a few, programmers can define their own “work” for the Artoo enabled robot to do.
“Of course,” Ford said, “When when you show this off to a one year old, all she wants to do is chase the ball. “

What is Sphero? from Sphero on Vimeo.

Dropbox, based in San Francisco, plans to open its second U.S. office in Austin and is hiring.
The company, founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, has more than 175 million customers. The Austin office will focus on Dropbox’s growing business base, according to this post.
The company has raised $257 million and acquired Mailbox for $100 million this year, according to its CrunchBase profile.
Dropbox is a free online file sharing application. The company launched out of Y Combinator.
“When we began looking for our second US location, Austin was an obvious choice,” according to Dropbox’s post. “The city has a lot going on in tech and art, paired nicely with a healthy dose of Texan hospitality. Also, the food is pretty legit.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

There were entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs, mentors and advisors at Open Coffee for Entrepreneurs at Houndstooth Coffee downtown Thursday. About 50 people showed, the largest group ever, according to Damon Clinkscales who organizes the event.
There was a large Techstars contingent including Brandon Marker, Techstars analyst who will be working with the newest Techstars Austin class on financial issues such as pitching for VCs. The class begins Monday.
Keith Casey Jr., software developer with Twilio, will also be an advisor for Techstars, he started going to Open Coffee events in Washington D.C. before he moved to Austin.
“The way it worked there is every other Friday we’d get together and the question was ‘What have you built since last we met?’ So it was really good, it was peer pressure but it was a lot of support as well.”
Clinkscales, who started Austin on Rails and Friday Hack Night along with other meetup groups, started Open Coffee in fall of 2010.
“I basically want to provide a place where entrepreneurs can help each other along,” he said.
Jonathan Placa, co-founder of a cloud-based 3D printing service called Proto Exchange was fresh in, having moved from New Jersey 48 hours before.
“Everybody’s so friendly here,” he said. “New York City is just, you’re very much in your own world and you just pass people without making eye contact. You bump into someone and you may never see them again. Whereas here you may run into someone again and it’s a little more relaxed.”
Emily Brouillet, a writer and brand strategist recently moved from Boston and is looking to connect more with the entrepreneurial community. Stephanie Kreml, who got her engineering degree before entering med school is a staff physician at Concentra and also is a principal of Popper and Co. which consults on bioscience issues for companies including venture capitalists investigating investment opportunities.
But there was also a group of regulars like Casey and Mark Phillip, founder of Are You Watching This? which contacts sports fans who can’t watch a game and lets them know when the game starts getting exciting. Many were just “hanging with friends” without any specific business objective.
For the last few years, Clinkscales has doing a North group as well as the one downtown but is thinking of centralizing all the Open Coffees downtown because of the growing startup presence there.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Historically speaking, law is a tangled mess of arcane language wrapped around a maze of pitfalls and risk, and lawyers were the only ones who could safely wield it. But a new Austin startup wants to change that. Lawful.ly, founded by Chris Murphy and Bradley Clark, a couple of entrepreneurs who are both attorneys and IT guys, is a law crowdsource website. Users can get free legal documents as they can on other sites, but instead of just blank forms, the documents will be explained by commentary about what they mean and how to use them from lawyers and other experts.
“Having done my own startup a couple years ago, it’s amazing how much money I spent on the legal fees,” said Tony Frey, a product management and strategy executive who is advising the Lawful.ly team. “It’s easy to go find various resources, you can find these documents but if you’re not versed in legal issues you think ‘This sounded right to me.’ Then you go back to your legal advisors and they come unglued because they’re like: ‘You found this document? It’s a great document if you’re in California but you’re in Texas and you really screwed yourself with this.”
Murphy, started out in IT and then got his law degree, and now serves as an attorney at Dell. He doesn’t want to abolish lawyers but instead have them serve the function of counselors on complicated legal matters, not filling out forms.
“People who use contracts should be able to interpret them without having to go to a lawyer,” he said. “It should be understandable to you what is and isn’t allowed…. If you’re looking for auto mechanic advice you can go to a forum and find all sorts of great information. But it’s really hard to find that going on around legal advice. The other question is, ‘How much can I trust this advice?’ One thing we do differently is add that level of verification and trust. Explanations on documents will have been voted up, similar to Quora.”
Clark said he believed the legal profession was at a tipping point. The old guard protected the legal profession through language the deliberately obscured the meaning, so that only lawyers could interpret it. It was a kind of job security. Young people, he said, prefer more open source information. “There’s a distain among the younger generation of closed systems…. Wikipedia is a huge success; I think that’s exactly what this generation wants.”
The founders plan for the information on the site—including such documents as NDAs and series certifications of incorporation—to be free for the public. Business owners could use it. Lawyers, too. Murphy said that, as a corporate attorney, he’s familiar with corporate transactions but “I’m not a lot better than Joe-up-the-street at writing wills. Attorney’s tend to specialize.”
“When you go to law school they give you free access to Westlaw and Lexus, it’s like crack cocaine,” said Clark. But if you’re in private practice, those services cost a fortune. Last time they priced it, Lexus was about $2,000 a month.
The founders plan to monetize Lawful.ly through institutions like government agencies and law schools. Law schools, they said, give students access to expensive services like Lexus Nexus, but students could use even more.
Kyle Mitchell, a UT law student and open source coder who met Murphy through the site GitHub, is one of the beta users. As a law student, he said, he has access to all kinds of legal information through the library. “They give you a lot of information but it’s still rare and hard to find documents that explain themselves,” he said. With Lawful.ly, he said, it’s: “Here’s a form. Here are some comments that explain kinda sorta what these parts mean, what these words mean and not just the blanks for you to fill in. There are other services online that provide ‘Come and Take It’ legal services, Rocket Laywer, Legalzoom. They’re just providing forms with blanks to fill in and the ability to send them around and get them signed electronically.”
Lawful.ly is Murphy’s second company and he pitched at DEMO and applied with Tech Stars.
“When it comes to pitching I just tell him, make sure you don’t sound like a lawyer,” Frey said. “VCs are the farthest thing from a lawyer. They’re all seat-of-your-pants, all about what you feel. You’re going to want to make sure you have all your arguments lined up and they’re looking for your passion.”
“He’s making the transition very well. He’s articulate, comes across knowing what he’s talking about in this space and that’s paramount over everything. Legal scares everybody. Listening to Chris talk, he’s very even-toned…. Some of his success in the early beta is that he is good at connecting with people. People can grab onto that and make this community grow big, fast.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Former Microsoft senior executive and current investor and rancher Mike Maples Sr. answered questions ranging from what he looks for in investments to what it was like to work closely with Bill Gates Monday night at Austin’s Startup Grind at Capital Factory.
After his retirement in 1995, Maples said, he began investing partly because “I’m kinda driven by the concept that life dealt me an overly lucky hand. It had little to do with how smart I was. I was at the right place at the right time. Maybe you owe part of that back. You can’t just spend every day in Hawaii looking at sunsets.”

Investing to Stay in the Game

He picks companies with ideas that interest him, he said, because he wants to be part of the game. He’s not as worried about customers and revenue as people who invest more money. He’s not interested in “hockey stick charts” showing projected revenues 15 years out because, at 69, he said, he’s not going to be around to see any of that. “If all my investments hit home runs, I’m not going to change my lifestyle. If they all go to zero, I wouldn’t change my lifestyle. I’m just fat, dumb and happy.”
“Three days a month, I’ll talk to anybody who wants to talk for half an hour. I have an hourglass and I turn it over when you come. When it runs out you get to leave.”
What he wants to know is “What do you need besides money? What do you need besides an advisor? I might invest if I think the idea is interesting. There are certain things I know something about. My question is, ‘Do I know people to connect you with? Do I have experiences that will help?’ If the idea seems interesting and I can be of value, that filter works for me.”

Entrepreneurship is About the Struggle

Maples asked how many of the people in the audience had advanced degrees and many hands went up.
“Most of you voted out of being entrepreneurs,” he said. “If you look at the major tech companies, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, they didn’t waste time going to college getting advanced degrees. They went out and built a company. The fact that you went to college means you may be a little conservative on the risk side…that’s not to say a PhD isn’t useful to running a company.”
Many incubators and accelerators he said, excessively baby entrepreneurs.
“There’s something about the struggle, adversity, the trial and error and worrying at night about things that makes the entrepreneur better and stronger. Of course, you can appreciate that more when it has passed than you do now.”
Lack of focus, he said, kills more startups than anything else.
“Good ideas without passion and execution never work,” he said. “A lot of companies that fail, they didn’t believe with all their hearts that this was the most important thing to be doing and they didn’t focus…any time you have pivots 4-or-5 times a year you haven’t got enough focus. If you don’t give ever give x a chance to work out, it never will.”

Among his suggestions for business success:

• Hire people smarter than you, and trust them to do their jobs.
• Don’t partner with a big company hoping “the magic will rub off.” Likely the big company will use you and your ideas and wind up with the credit and the money. But if you do link up with bigger partners, find those who need your solution more than you need their money.
• Ignore the advice to forget your competition and focus on your product. If you ignore the competition you’re losing a learning opportunity.
• You can put your product out if it doesn’t have full functionality. “No good idea is solved with one release.” And you can put it out late. But don’t put it out with poor quality.
  “What you need to know is what does the customer expect?” he said. “When we came out with Word the fact that it would even print was important. That was back in the days when Word first came out and it barely worked. That was okay because the customer didn’t expect much more than that.”
• Don’t focus on VCs until your company is ready to expand to the hundreds of millions. Look at “how can you get to revenue faster? How can you get by with less?”

On Microsoft and Bill Gates

Maples addressed questions about a recent Microsoft restructuring around devices and services. Structuring a company like Microsoft is a challenge, he said. When he was responsible for a restructuring, they tried to put teams around each of the products so each was like its own little company.
“The Word guys talked about the Word customers and the Excel guys were thinking about Excel and there was not a lot of talking about Microsoft Office. It got to be extreme so in 2005 they had a reorganization,” he said. There was a focus on bringing the company back together as a whole. A developer wasn’t an Xbox developer, but a Microsoft developer. That reorganization didn’t really work either, he said, because it sacrificed knowledge of specific customer bases. “Tradeoffs for the good of the whole are not very effective.”
Maples worked closely with Bill Gates as part of a “presidential office” team. Gates, he said, was one of the smartest men he’s ever known and he gets credited with both technical and business acumen. But what he believes accounts for Gates’ success is a near-perfect recall or photographic memory and an ability to synthesize information and analyze leading indicators to know what’s on the horizon. He can look at a sheet of statistics and recall the numbers perfectly months later.
“He’s an extraordinarily interesting person and he can be very emotional and get very loud but you never have a feeling that anything is personal,” he said.
Each year, Gates would ask his key people to suggest books or write white papers on topics they felt he should know about. Then he would take “think weeks” where he would consume all the material and return with a letter stating “I think these are the areas we want to look into.”
When asked what entrepreneurs should read to understand the direction of the future, Maples said Gates got it right about 65 percent of the time but other people get it right 40 percent.
“I’m opinionated about everything,” Maples said. “The advice I’m giving you is probably worth what you’re paying for it. I don’t think you’re learning any grand wisdom. The only thing you’re learning is a lot of experience.”

At a birthday party in Aspen, Colorado, Paul Boukadakis and Chris Shaheen couldn’t find a good way to capture all the moments around them.
That’s where and when they came up with the idea for a social video sharing application called Ferris.
“This app was born out of frustration for us,” said Boukadakis, CEO of Ferris. “A few of us were hired to film a friend’s birthday party and to capture the moments of the birthday party. We quickly realized as we were shooting there was no way to capture all the moments we wanted to capture.”
They would see a cool scene across the room, but by the time they got there the moment was gone.
“We were missing all of these incredible things that were happening,” he said.
But a lot of the guests were just shooting moments on their iPhones.
“That’s when the light bulb moment happened,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great if there was an app to bring all these moments together.”
The Austin-based startup has raised a very small angel round of investment and today Ferris launched its app in a public beta at the Apple iTunes App Store. It’s available for free download.
“We want to create a great community of users,” Shaheen said.
Ferris has four founders and they’ve been working a year on the project. In addition to Boukadakis and Shaheen, the team includes J.B. Hager and Brian Daugherty.
“This app to us was created because there are too many missed moments in life,” Shaheen said.
Ferris works by joining together user-created video clips into a stream of content.
Ferris’ users can record video directly with the mobile interface and share clips up to two minutes in length. Once a video is posted to Ferris, it self-updates, joining any number of streams based on user, location, date and time, hashtag and category. The app allows multiple people to contribute to video story with little editing required. The result is a collaborative story told through video.

Austin-based SolarWinds announced Monday that the software company plans to repurchase up to $50 million worth of its common stock.
“This share repurchase reflects the confidence of our management team and board of directors in the long term growth strategy that we have laid out and are executing on for SolarWinds,” Kevin Thompson, the company’s President and CEO, said in a news statement.
The company plans to buy the shares during the next 12 months but it did not disclose the exact timing and number of shares to be purchased.
SolarWinds plans to finance the program through cash from its operations and currently in its bank account.
“The program may be extended, suspended or discontinued at any time without prior notice,” according to a news release.
SolarWinds makes information technology management software to big and small businesses.
The Motley Fool reported last week that SolarWinds “stock fell off a cliff” after the company failed to meet analysts expectations for revenue growth in the second quarter.
The company’s stock, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol SWI, closed at $35.67 a share on Monday, down 19 cents from the previous close, according to Yahoo Finance.