Category: Austin (Page 240 of 318)

Those crazy folks at SpareFoot have done it again.
First, they created the SpareFoot calendar.
Now, they’ve launch a new recruiting campaign featuring an over-the-top “mockumentary” documenting the exploits of human resources to attract new employees.
One of my favorite parts is the shock collar on the employee to keep him from gorging on the free chef-prepared food in an effort to curb obesity. Huh?
SpareFoot earned the title of 2013 Best Places to Work in Central Texas among midsize employers in the Austin Business Journal’s annual list. Filmmaker Matt Sobel created SpareFoot’s mini-documentary.
The “Stars” of the movie include SpareFoot co-founders Chuck Gordon and Mario Feghali, SpareFoot marketing specialist Jenny Zhang and SpareFoot recruiter Rachel Morse. Numerous other SpareFoot employees also appear on camera. It was shot at SpareFoot’s offices.
“At SpareFoot, we’ve thrown old-fashioned HR out the window. For instance, we do not have an HR department. We have a People Department. All of us who work at SpareFoot are people, not resources,” Gordon said in a news release. “At a growing, successful startup like SpareFoot, company culture matters a lot. Our recruiting ‘documentary’ is a funny way of saying SpareFoot’s culture is not like the rest.”
And oh yeah, SpareFoot is hiring.
SpareFoot provides a free marketplace that lets customers find and reserve storage units online. It works with more than 6,500 storage facilities nationwide.

MeetMeTix has redone its site and expanded along with its partners Red Carpet Tickets and Ludus Tours.
The Austin-based company, which also has operations in Atlanta, offers a variety of tickets to sports and entertainment events for sale including those by people, though a peer-to-peer listing, and listings to tours such as Oktoberfest and a comprehensive listing of all tickets for upcoming events in a city.
“The company now offers for sale essentially every dealer ticket in every market, which averages about 55,000 events on any given day, plus tours reaching up to the Olympics and World Cup, plus the ability for individual buyers and sellers to list and trade tickets,” according to its news release.
MeetMeTix offers a proprietary and patent-pending paying platform that allows buyers to pay safely with a credit card and for sellers to have those fund directly deposited into their checking account. The transaction replaces the risks involved with Craigslist and street-corner scalpers, according to the company.
“And, it incorporates SMS technology that works in and around crowded venues where bandwidth renders other ticketing sites unusable as event time nears,” the company reports.
MeetMeTix has also partnered with media outlets and will be actively promoting tickets for college football as the season kicks off this fall.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Startups need to begin by strategically envisioning where they want to be in the end—whether that’s a number, like earning $50 million in revenue, or a goal as simple as “I don’t want to have to pay to work, anymore,” said Cindy G. Goldsberry who spoke on How to Organize Your Startup Selling Strategy, Wednesday at Avinde Startup Accelerator’s first meetup.
Begin with the vision and reverse engineer your process, Goldsberry said. That will reveal gaps and opportunities that need addressing. One of the first steps is to envision who will be using your product or service. These days, she said, it’s reasonable to come up with several profiles of users. Who will be using it? How will they be using it? And how do you go about creating relationships with those customers? She suggested modeling customer lifestyles and buying cycles.
“What do you do to start building relationships within the area where you believe your ideal client is waiting for you to have a conversation? What do you have to do to start that conversation?” The focus is on the relationship, not what you have to do to get that person to buy from you. You have to envision the relationship and the customer using the product.
Goldsberry spent seven years as VP of strategic sales and services for Boundless Network, an Austin Ventures portfolio company. During that time, the sales organization grew from 11 sales reps to more than 150, and sales from $1 million to $54 million in 2012. In February, she launched the Z Factor, sales accelerator, to help startups with their sales strategies. In 2012 she co-authored The Z Factor Sales Accelerator from Vendor to Value Creator.
Everything she knows about sales, Goldsberry said, is based on the pillars of profit which include marketing, operations, communications, and service. The problem is that so many startup founders have to manage all those functions. So they have to be very “ecological” about where to invest their time or money next. They have to look carefully at their gaps and opportunities and see how they can advance toward their goals. And that’s not always in a straight line. Instead, she introduces the Z Factor sales accelerator wherein most actions fall on a grid with relational relevance as one vector and strategic relevance as another. Everything a company does, from creating a target customer persona, to sales to service, to hiring, has a place on that grid.
If a company just begins with its product or service, it’s a commodity, Goldsberry pointed out. Then company A offers a Koozie at 10 cents and company B at 8 cents, company B wins. What makes the difference is relational and strategic relevance.
Relational relevance used to come from being the one who brings the donuts, or the one the customer had martinis with. Now it’s begun with marketing, social media, service, and sometimes in person.
Strategic relevance is being the skin care product that’s there when you have an acne problem or the florist who knows what you want for your wedding. Frequently you gain strategic relevance by being on the ball with someone you already have a relationship with.
“Now,” Goldsberry said, “You’re very difficult to replace. Your services and your customer’s needs are so intimately aligned that the relationship can’t be busted.”
She told a story about working for Boundless Network, which provides schwag for events, and having a sales rep come in all excited about selling $30,000 worth of jackets.
“What do they want them for?” Goldsberry asked? The sales rep didn’t know. Hadn’t asked.
Goldsberry did some digging and found out it was part of a $300,000 safety campaign. There was a lot more opportunity in that sale than the 10 percent Boundless Network had won.
Boundless started learning everything it could about all the events thrown by various enterprises that might require their promotional products. That included annual parties, observance days, walks for causes, reunions, etc.
They got on all the Request For Proposal, or RFP, lists they could.
And they began approaching enterprises with how much money, time and trouble Boundless could save them if allowed to manage the entire category of spending involving promotional products. In one case, Goldsberry said, she was talking with a group of Gen-Xers and here she was a “gray-haired baby boomer.”
“I was not relevant to them,” she said. “But they took their responsibility for a $500,000 budget item seriously….. We had the strategic conversation, even if they weren’t ready for it.”
Shortly thereafter, the organization got a new CFO and weeks after that, Goldsberry got a call: “You know what you said you could do for our organization? Can you do that?”
It all came, not from knowing how totally awesome their products were, but from understanding the clients’ motivation.
Startups need to begin by filling out ideal client profiles and knowing they must target all those profiles differently. Whether it’s at events or on social media, she said, “you can still wind up having a conversation of insight.”
Next, startups should offer something for free. It could be a free sample or a consultation. In return, customers give something, perhaps just their email addresses.
“It can be pretty simple or it can go very deep,” she said.
Operations, she said, comes in to determine what talent you need and when. How you attract the people who will help attract your client. Who owns the client, and when?
Of course, if you’re a very small company, particularly someone who still has a “day” job, this will take longer. You’ll have to break the action items for gaps and opportunities into chunks.
But at least you’ll be moving forward.
Avinde is a women’s startup accelerator program. The meetup convened at Saltgrass Steakhouse.

HomeAway, the world’s largest online marketplace for vacation rentals, announced Tuesday that it has bought travelmob, an online startup for vacation rental properties in Asia.
The Austin-based company reported that the all cash deal is expected to close in a few weeks.
At close, travelmob management will retain a 37 percent stake in the business and they will continue to operate as an independent brand, based in Singapore.
The price and terms of the deal were not disclosed. But HomeAway reported it expects to “incur about $2.0 million in additional expense to further grow the travelmob business,” according to a news statement.
In March, HomeAway and travelmob struck up a strategic partnership with travelmob, which features more than 14,000 Asia Pacific short-term rental listings including luxury villas, urban apartments, houseboats, a private island and even some shared spaces on its site.
CEO Turochas Fuad and CTO Prashant Kirtane, cofounded travelmob in 2012. The site has 16 employees. Early investors of the start-up include Jungle Ventures, Accel Partners and private investors, including Dan Neary, vice president of Asia Pacific at Facebook.
“Economists note over 100 million people will enter the Asian middle class each of the next several years, and Asia will have an increasing influence over the world’s economic growth. We believe this will have significant implications for not only travel but also for the purchase of homes, both of which drive HomeAway’s growth,” Brian Sharples, chief executive officer of HomeAway, said in a news statement. “We view Asia as a region where we can build tremendous incremental value for our shareholders and existing customers over the next several years. Given this opportunity, we’re excited to work with the experienced travelmob team to address today’s market needs in Asia – where vacation rentals are mostly new, but alternative accommodations are not – to build scale and accelerate the development of the vacation rental industry.”

Veros Systems Inc. has raised $5 million in venture capital from Austin Ventures and LiveOak Venture Partners, according to a news release.
The company, based in College Station, makes software that monitors industrial motors and other mission-critical plant functions.
As part of the deal, Jim Dechman will join Veros as president and CEO. He previously worked for Procter & Gamble, the Boston Consulting Group, and Monitoring Technology. He has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas and a MBA from Harvard.
“Veros has created the most compelling solution for managing and maintaining critical industrial assets that I have seen in my career,” Tommy Knight, Co-Founder and Chairman of Veros, said in a news statement. Before his involvement with Veros, Mr. Knight worked for Brown & Root, Inc., a Halliburton Company, for 32 years, progressing from a design engineer to President and CEO.
Veros has exclusive, worldwide rights to technology developed at Texas A&M University.
“Current solutions to monitor mission critical industrial assets are expensive and unscalable, limiting them to the very high end of the market. By leveraging the unique technology developed at Texas A&M and the latest software platforms, Veros beats the performance of these high-end solutions and makes it available to a broader set of applications,” Venu Shamapant, general partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a statement. He will also join the Veros board of directors.

Entrepreneur Magazine teamed up with GoodApril, a San Francisco-based tax-planning startup to find the best market for startups.
And….drum roll please…..Austin ranks as the best place in the nation to launch a startup.
Seattle claimed the second place, followed by Boulder, New York and Boston.
You can find the full report on Entrepreneur Magazine’s site along with an infographic comparing seven of the best markets in the U.S. to launch a startup.
The list ranks cities by the median tech paycheck, maximum personal income tax, property tax, cost of a house and cost of an office.
“San Francisco, the longtime Silicon Valley startup mecca, ranks as the worst place to launch, due to high costs and taxes, GoodApril found,” according to the report.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” ― President John F. Kennedy

Photo courtesy of NASA

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of visiting the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.
My dad drove us from Illinois to Florida to escape the winter snow and to visit the Kennedy Space Center.
We also visited Disney World in Orlando.
But to my two older brothers, and me the stop at the Kennedy Space Center far surpassed Disney World because it was real and we grew up during a time when the U.S. focused on NASA, astronauts and innovation.
At the center, we learned about space missions, astronauts, rockets, spacecraft and spacesuits and that left us awestruck. We thought astronauts were some of the most accomplished men on earth.
Today marks the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, which carried the first astronauts into space to walk on the moon. I was too young to remember that event, but my dad made sure we understood the importance of the space program and NASA.
During the 1970s, NASA ended the Apollo program and they also launched the Skylab space station. And during the late ‘70s, NASA began to ramp up for the Space Shuttle program.
Going to NASA, I felt like I was visiting ground zero for innovation in the United States.
That feeling has never left me.
Several years later during my sophomore year at the University of Illinois, my mom moved from Illinois to Clear Lake, Texas, near the NASA Johnson Space Center. During visits home, I also made trips to the center, which was home to Mission Control.
After graduating, I worked as a reporter in Texas for a while and then I ended up back in Florida. And I went back to the Kennedy Space Center several times. But this time, my job allowed me to meet some astronauts including Astronaut Ken Cockrell, who flew with the Discovery crew and legendary Astronaut Buzz Aldrin who piloted Apollo 11 and walked on the moon with Neil Armstrong in 1969.
During a Knight Center Fellowship at the University of Maryland, our group also got to visit NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
But the most fun I ever had was taking my son, Teddy at six years old, with my husband Charlie, to Kennedy Space Center. Our son got to meet an astronaut and visit the rocket garden and watch science demonstrations. I wanted him to be as excited about NASA and space as I was as a kid. And it worked. Today, at age 14, he loves everything about space and he knows quite a bit more about it than me.
In fact, last year, Teddy and I had the privilege of visiting the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio for the 50th anniversary of Astronaut John Glenn’s orbit around the earth in his Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft. We were part of a NASA Tweetup that got to tour the facility and attend a ceremony honoring Glenn and then we got to meet him and ask him questions afterward. Teddy asked him his opinion on space flights for tourists. Glenn answered that he didn’t think the engine thrusters had yet been perfected for casual space travel, but that eventually that problem would be solved. He also said that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science and children needed to be encouraged to pursue those fields. He worried that the end of NASA’s shuttle program would hamper the U.S.’s competitiveness in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, known as STEM, fields.
As NASA has downsized, private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have emerged to fill the void left when the shuttle program shut down in 2011. NASA has a contract with SpaceX to supply the International Space Station.
This week I am attending a NASA Social event Wednesday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston along with 29 others from around the country. We will visit Mission Control and learn about astronaut training and the International Space Station which NASA calls “the gateway to the rest of the universe, enabling important discoveries that benefit humanity and vastly increase our understanding of how humans can safely work, live and thrive in space for long periods.”
Later this week, I will report back on ground zero for innovation at the Johnson Space Center.

Austin-based TrustRadius, a crowdsource software review site for companies, landed $5 million in Series A financing from Mayfield Fund.
Rajeev Batra, Mayfield Fund partner, will also join its board of directors.
Last November, the company debuted at Innotech Austin’s Beta Summit.
TrustRadius has a platform that allows people to review major software programs so other companies and organizations know what to expect from them and whether they meet their needs. The company compares its software review site to consumer-facing applications like Angie’s List, Yelp and TripAdvisor.
“We’re thrilled to collaborate with Mayfield, a leading global venture capital firm with a strong record of backing companies that have changed the way the world operates and, in the process, become industry leaders – 3PAR, Marketo, Solarcity and StorSimple, to name a few,” Vinay Bhagat, Cofounder and CEO, TrustRadius, said in a news release. “Mayfield shares our vision which is to empower enterprise technology buyers and users everywhere in a way that will forever change the way technology is bought and sold.”
Before Trust Radius, Bhagat founded Convio, which went public in 2010 and was acquired last year for $325 million.
“Although U.S. businesses spend nearly $3.8 trillion annually on enterprise technology and services, until now, they have had to evaluate and select solutions based on biased and/or patchy information,” according to the company.
With the latest round of funding, TrustRadius plans to hire more employees, increase membership, expand its base of reviews and other content and further develop its product.

The LoneStarRuby Conference kicks off Thursday and runs through Saturday at the Norris Conference Center in Austin.
The event features more than 25 speakers and a RailsBridge training day for women, teens, and recent grads seeking to learn how to program. The training, made possible by a donation from Rackspace, is free and open to the public but registration is required .
The event is one of a handful of regional conferences that draw hundreds of startups, IT executives, and developers focused on Ruby on Rails, the open source web application framework that runs on the object-programming language known as Ruby.
According to Lance Vaughn, Executive Director of the LoneStarRuby Foundation (), the event organizer, the purpose of the conference is to address the market opportunities, challenges and future of Ruby on Rails.
“We put together this year’s conference to address how design can impact communities, and vice-versa, in a way that can lead to positive change in our world,” Vaughn said. “The Ruby community has long been one of the most diverse communities in the world of software development, so this year we wanted our speakers to reflect that richness in background, culture, gender and values.”
Speakers include Sandi Metz, Steve Klabnik, Katrina Owen and Avdi Grimm. The conference also features the following:
• Ruby Rogues panel and live podcast
• Cloud panel featuring speakers from Rackspace, Heroku, Engine Yard, and HP Cloud
• Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, presenting Elixir
• Ashe Dryden speaking on diversity in the computer programming culture

The conference is open for registration.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

CanWe Studios just rolled out its first app, CanWeNetwork, in iTunes and Google Play. The app uses geolocation, LinkedIn and other data to help people with mutual interests find one another at networking events or conferences…or possibly just walking down the street.
According to co-founder Greg Braswell, the app’s “secret sauce” is offering “models that we bring to a not-so-obvious match,” such as business skills, social skills and personal skills. “It involves taxonomy, ontology, it grades hundreds, if not thousands of vector points and comes up with the potential commonalities or interests of two individuals. LinkedIn is a starting point.”
“If the person is analytical, here are other skills and social skills that the person may have. It helps you discover opportunities,” Braswell said.
So the app can help a person find someone in a similar industry, or it can find a match based on other attributes or needs that may lead to a collaboration between diverse individuals. Although the ability to match two people currently requires both to have the app, in coming weeks, that will change, Braswell said. At present, the app will allow you to learn more about people at an event and build files on them so you can set an appointment with them later.
CanWe started with a dating app idea, Braswell said, but during beta testing in San Marcos, Austin, Boston, Chicago and a few other places, realized that a pivot might be wise. There were connectivity issues in some bars, for example. Plus they decided the app would be far more valuable in the B2B and B2C space.
In March, private investors, including the company’s president Dan Kloiber, invested $1.5 million to help get the app launched.
The app is free for consumers, who, in the future, will be able to get notifications of possible matches being someone living, say in Austin, and someone visiting. The app will inform the two smartphone holders of the proximity of the other and suggest a meeting place.
The company plans to monetize the app via the event and conference space, allowing people attending the event to schedule meetings before or after speakers, allowing individuals to connect with vendors and the like.
CanWe also intends to market to enterprises to create more social connections among employees, of, say IBM either locally or when many members travel to a conference.
“A lot of companies are trying to figure out better ways to add more social connections among employees because employee retention becomes much higher,” Braswell said. “Also there might be skill sets that employees have that they’re not using in their roles. For example, they might be in finance but on the side they love to code in PHP and the company has a project that can marry these two skills.”
In the future, CanWe hopes to release the app on platforms other than iTunes and Google Play.