Category: Austin (Page 239 of 318)

The deal to take Dell private just got a little more lucrative.
Today, Michael Dell, the company’s founder, issued a letter to shareholders asking them to the approve the deal when they meet on August 2 to vote on the buyout.
“I believe that taking Dell private is the right thing to do for the company. We need to transform, and we need to do it quickly,” Dell wrote in the letter. “The transformation is not without risks and challenges, and I believe that we can do what we need to do better as a private company than a public company.”
Dell also reported that he and his partner, Silver Lake, have increased their buyout offer to $13.75 per share, up from $13.65. The increase provides an additional $150 million to shareholders.
He also reported it was “our best and final offer.”
“I believe this offer is in the best interests of the company and our shareholders,” Dell wrote. “Certain other parties have been proposing alternatives such as leveraged recapitalizations, sales of assets and other steps that I believe would be destructive to the company and that I do not and will not support.”

Resignation Media, which runs theCHIVE.com, announced it’s moving its corporate headquarters to Austin from Los Angeles.

The company plans to move by the end of August and is renovating a 12,000 square foot building downtown, that once served as the Shoreline Grill. Resignation Media plans to spend $8 million during the next five years to transform the building into its new headquarters and hire more than 40 employees.

“With the growth Resignation Media has seen in the last five years, we needed to find a location that could support the expansion of our brand. After a nationwide search, Austin’s pro-business climate, decent cost of living, tax structure and dedication to its growing technology community are what drew us to the city,” Leo Resig, co-founder and CEO of Resignation Media, said in a news release. “The Austin Chamber of Commerce was a great resource as we explored the idea of relocating to Austin and know the city will be a great fit for the company.”

The company is also ramping up its e-commerce site, TheChivery.com this fall and plans its own microbrewery, Resignationa Brewery, with KCCO Beer later this year. And Chive Films plan to produce a feature film in Austin, starting in 2014.

Brothers John and Leo Resig created Resignation Media in 2008. They now own several websites including theCHIVE.com, theBERRY.com, theTHROTTLE.com, theBRIGADE.com and the e-commerce site, TheChivery.com.

A fast-growing online banking company, Q2ebanking announced Wednesday plans to hire 60 new employees and expand into a new headquarters and downtown.
The Austin-based company is moving into an 85,000 square foot space and three floors in the new Aspen Lake One business center. The space can accommodate up to 500 people. The company has 350 employees currently and plans to add 60 more by the end of the year.
“At Q2, we value a culture of communication, openness and collaboration. Our new location not only allows for continued growth, but also encourages the kind of environment we feel is vital to the success of our company,” Matt Flake, the company’s CEO, said in a news statement. “We’re proud to be headquartered in Austin, Texas—a place where so many people want to live, and to have built a company culture that employees truly love. We’re known for our innovative software and building stellar relationships with customers, and our success is possible because of our focus on creating an environment where employees love what they do.”
Earlier this year, Q2 completed a $20 million Series C funding round led by Battery Ventures along with existing investors Adams Street Partners and C&B Capital.
Q2, which caters to community and regional banks, credit unions and savings and loans, has more than 70 customers with assets exceeding $1 billion.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Texas State University’s Small Business Development Center (SBDC) is launching a free or lower-cost program to help startup and mid-stage tech companies, offering mentoring, education and helping them collaborate with key elements of the Austin startup ecosystem.
The new program, called Spectrum, allows companies to engage at any point, from ideation on, and to exit the program whenever they feel they’re ready. The SBDC already had a program to help entrepreneurs, but Spectrum will be focused on tech companies in areas green energy, biotech, gaming, hardware and software and mobile applications. It will partner with the University of Texas’ IC2 Global Commercialization Group and the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center.
Dr. Jeanette Hill, founder of Spot On Sciences, spoke at the Spectrum launch about her experience with mentors at the SBDC. Hill, who has a background in pharmaceutical research and has created products before, still was overwhelmed at the idea of starting her own company.
“I had no idea how to start and run a startup business,” she said. “At my first meeting with my SBDC advisor we started writing on a white board, took pictures of all the ideas we’d come up with, wiped that off, started writing again…three whiteboards later we had a plan.”
The advisor, she said, pointed out she was going to want to shorten the name she had chosen Spot On Bioscience. “He said ‘You’re going to need to sign contracts and you’re going to use initials.’ I’m so glad we’re not known as the S.O.B. company,” Hill said. “They helped me do a video about how to use the device and they are my biggest cheering section when I do pitches. They’ve also given me training. I didn’t want to learn how to use Quickbooks, but I need to.”
Dick Johnson, SBDC certified business advisor and certified technology commercialization advisor, explained that the mentorship part of the program would help companies decide if they were a good fit for the marketplace and identify strengths and weaknesses. This would include an assessment of a company’s IP, where it currently is in the life of the business and its team. Other organizations contributing to mentoring and education will include IC2’s Global Commercialization Group which will share its Innovation Readiness self-directed program created for entrepreneurs in developing nations, and the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center. Ron Lehman, state director of the TMAC explained how that organization can help companies go from ideation to prototype to manufacture, assisting with finding funding and vendors. The mentorship program is free.
Johnson said Spectrum will not compete with Austin’s incubation and acceleration programs but supplement them. Of the hundreds of companies that apply to local incubators and accelerators, only a few are chosen. Spectrum can help entrepreneurs prepare to apply and provide assistance for the ones that do not get in.
The program also includes an education component with classes and workshops at various times and places. The effort will be to provide a smorgasbord of options for tech entrepreneurs. Some of the classes are free, others offered at a rate far below competitors.
Peg Richmond, SBDC certified business advisor, said Spectrum wants to take “a deeper dive into the subject matters. We don’t want to stay at a high level. We want the content to be entrepreneur driven.”
Early courses, which they’re calling “information transfer” will include courses on funding, team building and IP considerations.
The third piece of Spectrum’s program includes collaboration with players in the existing ecosystem, including government agencies.
“The government has a lot of money in its’ pockets,” Johnson said. “It’s also very interested in job creation, because that’s what pays taxes.” States, chambers of commerce and others are interested in attracting high-paying jobs into the area.
Entrepreneurs need to understand and build the infrastructure necessary to support their ventures.
“A lot of entrepreneurs spend a lot of time and energy going from event to resource to event,” Johnson said. “We can help people make smart connections, the right resource at the right time.”
“We want Spectrum and our team of advisors to be that go-to information source. ‘What’s the best way for me to navigate and work in the Austin community to foster the growth of the Austin community?’” Johnson said.
Spectrum’s logo, which looks remarkably like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album cover, shows a rainbow entering a prism and coming out as beams of light. The meaning behind it, explained SBDC director Joe Harper, was that people could come in to the program at all phases of development and have multiple exit points, depending on their needs.
Spectrum is looking for more partners who can offer training, mentoring, venues and other support.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The culture of a business is partly planned, partly organic and partly pure accident or serendipity, according to the speakers at Extraordinary Culture/Extraordinary Business at Mass Relevance Monday night.
Matt Chasen, founder of uShip, Sam Decker, co-founder and CEO of Mass Relevance, Liz Elam, curator of Link CoWorking and Dean Kakridas, founder of Fovnders@ATX were on the panel, led by Paul O’Brien, founder of Cospace.
A big piece of determining culture is who and how an organization hires, the entrepreneurs agreed.
‘A big piece is hiring and aligning to your core values,” said Decker. “Do you have anything publicly that states what those values are? If you don’t connect to those values, you shouldn’t be here. You need to make that visible so that people can bounce off or attract to that culture.”
At Link, Elam said, they offer all prospective new members a free day to work at Link to see how they like it. But it’s also so Link can see how they fit.
“While they think they’re checking out the space, we’re checking them out,” she said. “Do they open a cabinet that’s marked ‘Private Do Not Open?’ If they open it, they have a problem with boundaries. If you put up your hoodie and put on a headset and sit there and code all the time, this is not your space.”
In early stages, however, that kind of selective hiring is easier as Matt Chasen pointed out. It took the company eight years to get up to 70 employees. Then they brought on 70 people in the last six months.
“Your culture should be self sustaining,” Chasen said. “If you’re doing it right, the organism with reject people who don’t fit and accept those who do. When you go on a crazy hiring tear you’ve got to have something in place to moderate your hiring. We had people who had been there two months hiring new people.”
They use the company’s own referral network a lot, he said, tapping into some rich “veins of talent” wherein employees bring their friends and “they’re all great.”
Chasen said, in response to a question about the influence of executives on culture that he was surprised at the influence he has.
“It’s really been interesting, as we’ve grown I’ve noticed things I never would have expected in terms of the influence I have on people. The way you act gives them permission to act like that, and that’s bad!” he joked. “No, don’t do that. Our personality is reflected in the culture, good and bad.”
Kakidras said he thinks of the CEO as the “Chief Energy Officer.” He’s responsible for the energy in the place and it’s key for him to get up every 90 minutes or so from his work, walk around and test the temperature.
The way a space is laid out and the working conditions set have a lot of influence on culture as well. Having a ‘democratic’ layout in terms of all employees being on the same level, having everyone work in an open space rather than in offices, and creating communal areas for work and socialization plays a huge part in culture.
Decker called the Mass Relevance space a “reverse mullet: party in the front, business in the back.” With a huge communal kitchen where lunch is prepared by a chef, (an idea he admits he stole from Chasen). He wanted to create a space that facilitated serendipitous reactions.
“Someone suggested we get a chef,” Decker said. “We were young, we had money. We thought, ‘Okay, we’ll do that. That’s kinda cool. Then these serendipitous conversations would happen and we decided we’d make it full time. People are working and eating, these cross functional interactions are happening. No bad seed or issue can go unsurfaced in that environment.”
Elam said that, were she to redesign Link, it would have a much bigger kitchen. Where the food is, she said “is where the magic happens.”
But while Decker planned the chef and communal kitchen, Chasen said that was an accident at uShip.
“We were just hungry at lunch,” he said. They originally brought in sandwich materials, then realized it was inefficient for them to be making their own sandwiches.
“When we got our first sandwich assembler person, everyone just loved it and we just kept raising the bar,” Chasen said. “When we actually had our first really true chef he had extension cords wired together in this kitchen in a warehouse in South Congress, which was preposterous. It really became this thing that snowballed on its own. It was a natural thing that happened, you can’t really direct that stuff.”

OpenIncubate, a new accelerator program focused on startups creating open source software and hardware, launched this week.
The program is backed by Austin Ventures in Austin, Battery Ventures in Boston and The Valley Fund in Menlo Park, Calif.
OpenIncubate is currently accepting applications.
“Our aim is to make 6-8 seed investments in the coming 12-18 months and work closely with young, early stage teams,” Alex Benik, a partner at Battery Ventures, wrote in a blog post.
The venture capital firms created the program in response to key shifts in the technology industry including “the emergence of open networking and the software-defined data center, and the growing prominence of open source initiatives such as Open Compute,” according to the OpenIncubate site.
The program offers seed funding, office space and mentorship to the teams that it selects to participate in the accelerator.
“Qualifying companies or teams of entrepreneurs must be product-oriented (versus services), and must utilize open source frameworks aimed at building on and refining the concept of the software-defined data centers in areas of innovation including hardware, software, and networking,” according to OpenIncubate.

The Texas State Small Business Development Center will kick off its new Spectrum Technology Assistance Program on July 23rd.
The program will take place at the Texas State University Round Rock Campus from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. It’s free to attend, but registration is required.
Texas State is collaborating with the IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin to bring its Innovation Readiness Series to the Austin technology community.
The program focuses on commercialization and growth in startup and mid-stage technology companies. The program will cover tools and education resources and groups available in the Central Texas region.
The July kick off meeting will provide an overview of the local technology industry. It will also include networking with “technology innovators, investors, assistance providers and those involved in the technology community,” according to a news release.
“I’m relatively new to the Austin area, but it’s been my goal to be involved in this market for some time,” said Joe Harper, Texas State SBDC Center Director. “The vibrancy of the entrepreneurial community and the innovations that happen in this market around technology far surpass many other places in the U.S. Key to our participation in this market is providing leadership along with other stakeholders in the Austin technology ecosystem, bringing together the best possible environment for technology companies to lay a successful foundation and grow to greatness.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Gigabot is Austin startup re:3D’s printer that builds objects thirty times larger than most consumer 3D printers, and costs less than $6,000. For comparison:

• The Makerbot Replicator 2 printer that can build objects of 410 cubic inches (roughly the size of a human head) costs around $2,000
• Gigabot prints objects of 14,000 cubic inches (about the size of your dorm refrigerator) for under $6,000
• Objet 1000, built by Stratasys, has roughly a 24,000 cubic inch volume (the size of your real refrigerator) for about $40,000

Of course there are other differences. Gigabot has a resolution of 100 micron layers whereas Objet 1000 can get an accuracy within 16 micron layers. But still….
It was basically a sales pitch that re:3D presented for a meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—at the Advisory Board building Wednesday night. But it was an interesting tutorial for anyone new to 3D printing. re:3D spokesman Tim Sandfort covered the history of 3D printing—which began in the 1980s despite its emergence in recent years—and explained the variety of products being made using the printers, from Nike shoe souls to human ears made of collagen feedstock (the material that is melted to make objects). Most printers use ABS plastic which is melted and laid down, layer, after layer, to build the object.
re:3D is currently working on a “plastic muncher” to recycle plastic into feedstock to enhance the ecological benefits of the printers. The company also had to make its printer extremely sturdy, from extruded aluminum, because the larger a printer is, the bigger the risk that it will shake during operation, which would damage the quality of the product. At the same time, Gigabot weighs only 100 lbs.
Since the technology is new to the public arena, Sandfort explained, there are a lot of hurdles in the industry’s future. re:3D calls itself an “open source” company in terms of the designs it produces. But there are intellectual property issues surrounding the design of the printers as well as the use of printers to replicated patented objects.
“For example,” Sandfort said, “we were interested in understanding whether a heated bed oven technology Stratasys uses is locked up. So a heated bed is something we could do, but the way we did it could have been an IP violation.”
And who loses if you break a part from some device and just print a replica at home rather than paying for a replacement?
There are also ethical issues surrounding what can be made on the devices including guns and “adult” objects.
re:3D was founded in January by a team that includes Matthew Fiedler, a biochemical engineer from the Neuroscience Laboratory at the NASA; Samantha Lynne Snabes, former Social Entrepreneur In Residence for the NASA Open Innovation Program; angel investor Lara Jeremko, who has worked in institutional venture capital portfolio management; Suzanne A. Pierce, a Research Assistant Professor with the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy in the Jackson School of Geosciences and Assistant Director of the Digital Media Collaboratory in the Center for Agile Technology at The University of Texas at Austin; Chris Gerty, an explorer and expert in the “maker” culture and Katy Jeremko, who is studying to be an Industrial and Interaction Designer at Syracuse University and last summer was the Designer in Residence at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
In April, the founders launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $40,000 and 24-hours later had $250,000.
Fiedler joined the meeting via Skype and answered technical questions about Gigabot’s design and functioning. But was most interested in the printer’s possibilities.
“These printers run on imagination,” he said. “The better imagination you have, the more useful objects you can make. That’s the big question now: How can we use them to their fullest potential?”

Chaotic Moon Studios, an app development and software company, has bought ThoughtLeadr, a digital ad service based in San Francisco.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Austin-based Chaotic Moon focuses on mobile content development and ThoughtLeadr, founded in 2011, thought that was a good fit. ThoughtLeadr has created an advertising platform that reaches more than 110 million people every month. Its clients include Virgin Mobile, Toshiba, Pepsi, Sony and Paramount Pictures.
“We were impressed by how ThoughtLeadr is working to create native advertising solutions for brands based around digital content along with the social conversation and context around that content.” Chaotic Moon’s CEO Ben Lamm said in a news release. “We know the challenges brands face as the digital advertising space continues to quickly evolve, especially in mobile. We are excited to collaborate in shaping the future of their platform and building brand experiences for our customers in a native and consumer-friendly manner on devices.”
Chaotic Moon’s clients include Fox, Pizza Hut, General Mills, Microsoft, Dell, CBS, Disney, Marvel and many more.
“Chaotic Moon’s expertise was a great fit for our vision of where user experiences in digital advertising are heading. Their focus on mobile, tablets, and other connected devices aligned perfectly with our goals at ThoughtLeadr,” said Todd Cullen, co-founder of ThoughtLeadr in a news release. “Brands and content publishers are always looking for better, more organic ways to connect with users who are becoming savvy to digital experiences. With our work in aligning brands with authentic conversations around content online and Chaotic Moon’s work in bringing best-in-class digital experiences to the market, we see a variety of compelling opportunities for brands, consumers, and publishers to deliver excellence in each facet of the digital space that keeps our clients on the cutting edge of digital.”