Category: Austin (Page 242 of 318)

A few years ago, Bart Bohn co-founded Ravel, a big data analytics firm. Ravel applied analysis to big data sets like Reddit and Tumblr to create social graphs. W2O bought Ravel in 2012. Before that Bohn served as director of wireless and information technology at the Austin Technology Incubator from 2007 to 2011. He’s been involved in Austin’s startup scene for a long time. His current startup is AuManil. The company created a software program that does predictive customer management. Last week, Bohn met with Silicon Hills News at Ino’z under giant Cypress trees near the river in downtown Wimberley.

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

A. We help our customers take proactive actions to keep their customers and improve their customer satisfaction. All that enables them to make more money from them over their lifetime.

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

A. The core of it is our algorithms and the ability to create algorithms about an individual person at scale. So what that means is that we would end up building a different one for each person so that we can measure changes in your behavior relative to yourself instead of against some generic average.

Q. When AuManil started it out, the focus was on predictive retention of customers in the video game space, but the company has since pivoted to all online retailers. Can you explain why?

A. We grew beyond just that narrow focus. Free to play games are a $15 billion industry. The U.S. online retail industry is a $350 billion to $400 billion business. We definitely grew into a much bigger opportunity.

Q. Who are your competitors?

A. With the larger companies, it’s in house data team. They hire PhDs in physics. They build their own data teams and they use tools like SPSS and SAS. There is a couple doing retail. InsightOne does a lot of work in the health industry. Windsor Circle is another one.

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

A. We raised a little bit of angel money last May. We’re raising more money over the summer. We’re in the Beta Angel stage still.

Q. Who makes up your team?

A. We have two founders: myself and Philip Flesher, who led the teams responsible for rebuilding Bazaarvoice’s data platform, which is one of the top ten most trafficked websites in the world. We also have a couple of contractors and advisers.

Q. Where are you based?

A. Our offices are based mostly out of Capital Factory. We’re part of their incubator program.

Q. Who are your customers?

A. Spacetime Studios and then we’re working with a couple of local online retailers.

Q. Are there particular industries that you are targeting?

A. We like repeat purchases. When it’s food you have to eat all the time. Another one is cosmetics or healthy and beauty. Another one is entertainment. Apparel is the biggest one. Consumer electronics is also a big category.

Q. What was the biggest mistake so far since your launch?

A. I think it would be the pace at which we proved value versus built the product.

Q. What is your business model?

A. Software as a service with a monthly subscription fee.

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

A. We won the CTAN and ATI pitch competition at SXSW. And we were on the GigaOm 10 startups to watch list.

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

A. Certainly, the core team at ATI and the mentors at Capital Factory. Some of the angels from CTAN have provided great feedback. Outside of that, we spent so much time in the video game space and the community leaders in that space were very helpful, very open, receptive and encouraging.

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

A. Team and community. Finding talent has always been a challenge. But in Austin you can find individuals who can make a big impact. And there’s enough supply of people at this early stage that you can get them. And Austin itself is just becoming the center of gravity for startups. You see that with TechStars opening here and SXSW is getting bigger every year. And now we have Startup Week. All of that is bringing a lot of attention to Austin.

Q. What are your plans for the future?

A. Raise a real seed round and build out the core team. Get a full time data scientist and then a data engineer.

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

A. Austin is a place for creative talent. I used ATI as a platform to go create new things. That turned out to be 3-Day Startup, the UT summer accelerator. All of that is really accepted in Austin. You see something, you go create it and the whole community helps you do it.

Fred Dinger has done it again.
The San Antonio-based biotechnology entrepreneur sold his startup ENTrigue Surgical for $45 million to ArthroCare Corp. of Austin.
Dinger previously sold OsteoBiologics for $72 million to Smith & Nephew Endoscopy in 2006.
ENTrigue designs and develops innovative implants, disposables and instruments for endoscopic sinus surgery, including balloon dilation.
ENTrigue will operate within ArthroCare’s ENT product area as a complement to the ArthroCare Coblation and Rapid Rhino product lines currently being used by ENT surgeons worldwide.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

According to Kyle Samani, CEO of Pristine, which is developing a surgical app for Google Glass, people need to think hard about what glass can do and what it really shouldn’t do before they begin developing apps for it.
For example, Glass has a tiny little screen that shows maybe 40-50 words at a time. It’s not a content machine and trying to use it for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is just frustrating, he explained. Glass just came out with its first web browser which allows you to zoom in and out and scroll up and down, but who wants to do that on a screen the size of a fingernail if you’ve got your smart phone in your pocket?
In fact, there’s a very narrow range of uses for Glass. And all Glass apps have to make infinitely more sense on that device than they do on the phone to have a prayer of success, Samani said. If apps for the device can’t justify its existence and its price—which Samani believes will go from $1,500 to around $250 by December 2013—Glass will fail. Oh and by the way, Samani, who spoke for about 70 developers at a Bleeding Edge Web/Google Glass Meetup at Capital Factory Tuesday night, believes all the low-hanging fruit for Glass apps will be snatched up within two years, starting this past May. He is the founder of the Austin Google Glass meetup. Tuesday was their first meeting.

If You’re Going to Do it Anyway…

So what’s an app developer to do? Consider these perspectives Samani shared:
• Google Glass has three advantages: It’s got a heads-up display, it’s hands-free and it’s friction free (meaning it’s always there). If your app doesn’t need to be any of those things, don’t develop it for Glass.
• It can’t superimpose augmented reality over reality.
• The track pad is “a frustrating piece of shit” and only lets you see one thing at a time. A worthy Glass app must focus on what the wearer is doing right now. Looking for historical information is a pain.
• Something that relies on voice commands rather than the scrolling function will probably go over better. Short, simple commands are best.
• Its best consumer use is probably for hobbies like bicycling, knitting, cooking where you can get reference information while you’re doing your thing. It’s not good for noisy places like bars where you’d have to scream “Ok Glass!” over all the noise to get it to function.
• Text should be white on black with most important information at the bottom
• It has definite uses for enterprise including mechanics, doctors, florists, artists and others who work with their hands.
“There is a cost to wearing the device,” Samani said. “You look funny. It’s always there. You could drop it and break it….apps have to be so good that they warrant the cost, not only price of buying it but of day to day use and usability.”

Google, of course, has its own development guidelines:

1. Design for glass
2. Don’t get in the way
3. Keep it timely
4. Avoid the unexpected

An Unknown Future

But a lot is unknown about Glass’s future. Doubtless both the hardware and the software will improve. But what rules may be imposed on the device? Will it be illegal to wear while driving, for example? What about hacks like the one Samani and his partner, Patrick Kolencherry, installed on the device that allow you to take a photo by winking your right eye? Evidently the device can tell the tensionless motion of a blink from the muscle-tense wink, and responds. Does that violate privacy laws?
Plus, Samani said, you have to consider why someone would wear glass. His list of reasons:

1. To enhance a hobby.
2. Because you love (adequate) pictures.
3. Because you live in northern California.
4. Because you work for Google.
5. Because you’re a geek like that.

A month ago, Zac Maurais and Ben Doherty launched Favor in the Austin area to deliver food to your home or office.

Maurais and Doherty, graduated from California Polytechnic State University or Cal Poly and then went on to the Boost.VC accelerator program in January, and launched a Favor pilot program in San Luis Obispo. They completed more than 1,000 deliveries. The service has steadily grown in popularity, Maurais said. They raised a seed investment round of investment from Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Favor delivers Home Slice Pizza, East Side King, Torchy’s and all kinds of food fare from Austin’s eateries and even its food trucks.

The service works through a free App available for IOS devices, although an Android version is in the works. The App offers a curated list of popular restaurants. But customers can ask for whatever they want. Favor doesn’t limit the places to order from as long as they are in the service area. Once a request is submitted one of Favor’s verified “Favor Runners” will pick up your food and promptly deliver it to you. The deliveries cost a $5 flat fee plus tip.

The drivers wear bright blue tuxedo shirts and drive cars outfitted with oversized blue bowties.

Favor chose to relocate to Austin because of its strong tech community and its great food, Maurais said.

Favor launched in Austin on June 8th and currently serves central Austin. It is based at the Longhorn Startup Camp at the University of Texas at Austin.

Favor is working to build strategic partnerships with restaurants, Maurais said.

Stormpulse has raised $1.3 million led by 500 Startups and E-merge.
The company crunches weather-related data to track major hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons and other storms.
Stormpulse moved to Austin this year and launched the first version of its asset and risk management product.
Matthew Wensing founded the company in 2004 in Chicago so he could track hurricane threats for his family living in South Florida.
The company previously raised a $635,000 seed round of funding from Bill Boebel, Joshua Schachter, Paul Singh, Rony Kahan, Joshua Baer and Laurent Drion.
Wensing was one of a handful of entrepreneurs who got to Demo his product for President Barack Obama during his visit to the Capital Factory.

Outbox, which digitizes postal mail and delivers it to a costumer’s computer, phone or iPad, just completed its Series A round of financing for $5 million.
The Austin-based company previously raised $2.5 million in angel funding.
The funds will allow the company to expand its operations in San Francisco and to hire more people, according to the company’s blog post.
Mike Maples at Floodgate led the round. Peter Thiel and Brian Singerman at Founders Fund, Correlation VC, TDF Ventures, WTI, Expansion VC, Joel Peterson Capital and Emerge DE also invested in the round.
And more than 80 AngelList investors participated in the financing.
The company recently introduced a new Android app and has processed more than 150,000 pieces of mail so far. The service is available in Austin and San Francisco.
Evan Baehr and Will Davis, Harvard classmates, founded Outbox in 2011.
Every day Outbox’s employees, decked out in bright red Under Armour shirts, drive their white Outbox Prius cars to pick up customers mail. They then open the mail and scan each piece into a highly secure website. Customers can then access their mail and decide which items they want hard copies of to keep. Those items are delivered every Friday to the customers.
Outbox charges $4.99 a month for the service. Customers only need to send a picture of their mailbox key to Outbox to get started. Outbox then scans the key and creates a copy of it using a 3-D printer.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

It’s a dubious distinction to be among Austin’s best kept secrets, but that pretty much describes St. Edward’s University’s entrepreneurship undergraduate program. As Tony Alvarado, interim chair of the program expressed when he came on at St. Ed’s in 2010: “Wow this is an amazing place! Does anybody know we exist?”
St. Ed’s Bachelor of Business Administration in Entrepreneurship started with a 2003 grant from the Kauffman Foundation, Alvarado said. The program is small, only 70 students in 2013, and clearly lacks the resources of behemoth McCombs at the University of Texas. The entrepreneurship program at St. Ed’s is more likely to focus on new uses for existing or emerging technology than on creating new technology. It’s only beginning to build relationships with incubators and accelerators such as Capital Factory and Tech Ranch.
But it has its own advantages. One is that, with classes so small, teachers and business people who come in to be mentors can connect more intimately with individual students and their projects.
“To be an entrepreneur you have to know your risk tolerance and what motivates you,” Alvarado said. “This entrepreneurial journey is fraught with traps. Your mindset has to be calibrated to take that journey. Because the program is so small, our classes are about 15-to-20 students, we have good contact with our students and we’re able to assess where they need a little bit of tweaking, support, encouragement.”

Focused on Service

And the second, but possibly most important aspect of St. Edward’s program is that it’s part of a school whose mission of service fosters a lot of community support among local business owners. Founded by the Catholic Order of the Holy Cross but with a non-denominational orientation, St. Edward’s provides financial aid for more than 60 percent of its students, many of whom come from homes in the lower economic brackets both in the U.S. and abroad. The university also strongly supports international studies and global perspectives, making study abroad accessible, and encouraging community service and volunteerism.
In fact, one program available to entrepreneurial students is to accompany MBA students on trips to campuses abroad where St. Ed’s has relationships to consult with businesses. That might include helping with micro-lending programs in Honduras or creating a marketing and business plan for a woman who owns a winery in France. The school also provides consulting for Austin business owners who have going concerns but no educational background in business.
“Someone here on South Congress might have a taqueria and they are able to hit the big time but have no idea how to scale this. Here comes our entrepreneurship program,” Alvarado said. “We encourage our students to reach out to this community in South Austin and start talking to local entrepreneurs. Observe what’s happening around St. Edwards….. We’re very well positioned to get our courses and students into these eco systems.”
Fred Schmidt, principal of Bullseye Business Development, co-founder of Portalarium and co-founder of Wild About Music Galleries, is an advisor for St. Ed’s School of Management and Business. He’s also the father of a recent grad from the MBA program.
“(Service) is woven into the student body,” Schmidt said. “With the amount of scholarships they issue…you’ve got everything from very wealthy children from the Middle East, to my son, to children who have never been out of Costa Rica and they’re here getting an education. So the focus is not in how much money they’re going to make or how important they’re going to be but whether they’re going to do something in the world that makes it a better place.”
In addition to numerous core business courses, the program has a “mission” segment that covers topics such as “the human experience, ethics and science in perspective.”

Quietly and Humbly

“Some things do have right answers,” Alvarado said. “You have to learn those competencies. But once we take care of those basics, they need to understand there’s a whole world out there with no right answers but huge problems….. What really excites me about entrepreneurship is that it’s the first major where you’ve got to know everything: accounting, finance, human resources, communications, technology…and you’ve got to be a team player because you’re not going to be good at all those things.”
One of the program’s star students is Hunter McLaughlin, who will graduate from the program in December. He started out as a computer science major, switched to finance, then started a clothing company to test out an idea and decided he was hooked on entrepreneurship. He’s already helping to run two companies.
McLaughlin is president of Basanty, a social portfolio system for primary schools where students can do all their work online. The company operates out of Capital Factory and has seven employees.
“You start off in kindergarten and when you apply to college you have this entire portfolio” that can be used is applying for scholarship, for example.
But he’s also founder of Brew Cupid, which mails coffee to customers’ homes on a regular basis. Capital Factory is one of their customers.
“We’ve been around for about five months and we just became profitable about three weeks ago,” McLaughlin said. “We started with, like $400, so we ran it really lean, I guess.”
McLaughlin didn’t notice any particular lack of resources at St. Ed’s because “I was already doing things on my own. But you have really, really tight-knit relationships. You share ideas, bounce things off each other. The network is really good as well. But fundingwise, there are no resources.”
Perhaps, as Schmidt said, that’s because St. Ed’s program is only beginning to emerge on the radar.
“Everybody knows about McCombs School and UT, but St. Ed’s and the Acton School of Entrepreneurship are sort of lost in the shadow of the giant, longhorn 40 acres. There are amazing students (at St. Ed’s). Certainly those who I have interfaced with are good kids with good heads on their shoulders. They have practical skills and come out immediately productive for any employer. They have enough core knowledge to come into the entrepreneurial world with a good foundation.
“But it’s still a best-kept secret. If you’re walking south on the west side of Brazos just above 7th Street and look down through the portico to the balcony at the Driskill Hotel, you can see all the way to the SEU hill on South Congress. The balcony frames St. Ed’s in its columns. It’s been there forever, quietly and humbly going on about its amazing work.”

Got a great idea for the next big thing?
Then South by Southwest’s PanelPicker might be a great place to vet your idea. Every year, SXSW puts together a portion of its popular annual conference from its PanelPicker process. That involves people submitting ideas, other voting on their favorite ideas and the SXSW folks selecting the programs for 2014.
“SXSW Interactive is positioned at the forefront of creativity, so the more inventive the idea, the better.”
The PanelPicker is for programming for the Music, Film, Interactive and EDU conference activities that takes place March 3 – 16th next year in Austin.
The PanelPicker system will be accepting proposals today through July 26th. Then community voting begins on August 19th and continues through Sept. 6th.
The first round of confirmed programming for all three conferences will be released on Monday, October 14, 2013.
“The PanelPicker interface is a natural extension of the creative intermingling that takes place during the festival itself,” Roland Swenson, SXSW’s Managing Director, said in a news statement “We are excited that we can provide a forum for new ideas to debut and flourish year-round.”

RideScout, an Austin-based startup that has created a transportation app, now offers access to car2go.
RideScout’s app is currently available for iPhones and provides aggregated information on public, private and social transportation options and recommends a “best ride” based on cost and time.
Now car2go members can reserve a vehicle using the RideScout app. The app also allows people to sign up for the car2go service.
“Our hope is that RideScout will help teach people who don’t even know about car2go yet and how accessible and easy to use the car2go service is,” RideScout CEO and Founder Joseph Kopser said in a news statement.
“RideScout is like car2go super-sized“ said Austin car2go member Ytzel McDaniel. “I can see public
transit, taxis, pedicabs, ridesharing and now car2go too. The cool thing is that RideScout gives a car2go trip cost estimate – something the car2go app doesn’t even do yet.”
The full integration of car2go into the RideScout App will allow RideScout, currently in beta, to quickly build relationships with car2go members in Washington DC, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Miami and other U.S. car2go cities, Kopser said.