Austin-based Food on the Table, a meal planning app, has partnered with the Mom365 app to provide recipes and more.
Together, the two companies have launched Mom365 Meals, a comprehensive Mom365-branded mobile and website app for busy new moms.
“Food on the Table has been a leader in its category with the highest user rating in iTunes (currently 5 stars) and engagement metrics that rival top mobile shopping apps like eBay and Amazon,” according to the company. “With Food on the Table’s new platform licensing program, digital publishers can offer their users the industry’s most powerful platform served up under their own brand.”
“Mom365’s highly engaged community is a perfect fit for our service,” Manuel Rosso, founder and CEO of Food on the Table said in a news statement. “They offer the most complete set of content and services for moms. We’re delighted to work with such a strong and quickly growing partner.”
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BitAngels, a network that invests in early-stage Bitcoin and cryptocurrency startups, has invested $100,000 in BlueSeed, an offshore Bitcoin incubator.
The venture is based offshore in international waters in the Silicon Valley area so it’s not subject to U.S. regulators.
“Bitcoin is a digital currency which allows anonymous and instant peer-to-peer payments,” according to the Better Business Bureau. It estimates more than $1.3 billion worth of bitcoins are currently in circulation.
Four individual BitAngels each invested $25,000.
“The beauty of the BitAngels model is that we can rapidly evaluate and fund opportunities with global resources, distributed due-diligence databases and deep-pocket angels anxious to expand the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency infrastructure,” BitAngels co-founder and Executive Director David A. Johnston said in a news release.
BitAngels has more than 120 members and $17.7 million in capital to invest in Bitcoin startups.
Johnson of Austin founded the company along with SocialRadius CEO and Marketwire founder Michael Terpin of Las Vegas and four additional founding board members: Gyft CEO Vinny Lingham, Memory Dealers CEO and “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver, Tradehill CEO Jered Kenna, and angel investor Sam Onat Yilmaz.
Austin-based Silverback Enterprise Group announced Thursday the purchase of Noetix Corp., which makes business intelligence and data analytics software.
Noetix, based in Redmond, Wash, has more than 1,500 customers for its software products.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We are excited to welcome Noetix to the Silverback family of companies,” Jack McDonald, Chairman and CEO of Silverback Enterprise Group said in a news statement. “Business intelligence, analytics, and performance management is a $13+ billion growing market1, driven by the ‘Big Data’ explosion of structured and unstructured data. Noetix’s product suite and patented metadata technology provide a powerful platform for addressing this growing market opportunity.”
“Partnering with Silverback will give us access to the resources we need to achieve the rapid growth we envision for Noetix,” Doug Moore, President of Noetix, said in a news statement. “Noetix customers and partners will benefit from this extremely positive next step for our business, which will improve our ability to deliver even more innovative BI products.”
By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Leto Solutions won first place in the UTSA CITE $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition
“If you get a good blister you might be out of your leg for a day or two. If that doesn’t heal and becomes a real sore, you might be out of your leg for a week or two,” said Walters.
It’s a common problem for amputees but also an unsolved one, and the only solution Gary’s Prosthetist could suggest was to “put deodorant on the limb” to try and keep it dry.
As a University of Texas at San Antonio undergraduate engineering student, Walters later pitched this problem in his capstone design class. Fellow engineers Austin Darius, Jake Montez, and David Schultz tackled the problem head on. Their solution – now named the Aquilonix prosthetic cooling system – is a prosthetic component that keeps an amputee’s limb dry even while active. The device is now the central product of new San Antonio medical startup Leto Solutions.
The team, Leto Solutions, went on to win UTSA’s $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition. The biannual competition is held by the Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship – or CITE. In the CITE program that precedes the competition, business students and engineering students come together to market a product – in this case the Aquilonix system — and form a viable business model as company.
For the competition, Walter’s engineering team was joined by business majors Nam Do, Eric Michael Garza, Enrique Medrano and Justin Stultz. In the program, the students did market research, created a business plan, and presented the product to a board of judges. Becky S. Ariana, who specializes in bringing medical technology from the conceptual prototype stage to the market, mentored the group.
Now hired as the startup’s CEO, Ariana says that Leto Solutions is not just a business venture; it’s a personal mission for everyone involved.
“This product spoke to all of us because it’s a necessity for amputees,” said Ariana. “Almost everyone on the team had contact with someone in their life who was also an amputee.”
UTSA graduate Justin Stultz, who led the Leto Solutions business team, has both a cousin and a neighbor who use prosthetics and suffer from heat buildup — giving Stultz firsthand experience of the struggles they face.
“Once they have this freedom and then due to a secondary infection caused by heat and sweat buildup they have to go without the prosthetic for three and four days…it just puts a complication in their life that doesn’t need to be there,” said Stultz. “It’s 2013 and we have the technology to do this. It’s just a matter of getting it done.”
The buildup of heat and sweat can cause more than just discomfort and pain for amputees, however. Diabetic amputees can contract gangrene leading to additional limb loss and even death.
When heat and sweat buildup inside a prosthetic joint, it causes skin breakdown, friction blisters, and open sores. For diabetic patients who have trouble healing, these sores can become infected by bacteria and then develop gangrene. As the flesh starts to decay, it must be further amputated. If the gangrene gets into the blood stream, the diabetic may become septic and possibly die.
The Aquilonix prosthetic cooling system helps prevent these problems by keeping the limb from sweating in the first place, which means the user will no longer slide around and become blistered. The system uses special thermoelectric disks that, when subjected to electricity, actually pull heat from one side of the disk material to the other and away from the limb. A second component then dissipates the heat with a small fan. The system can be turned on and off at will from a control switch on the prosthetic and runs on a rechargeable lithium polymer battery. The battery life is only two to three hours, but it can be easily charged at home in a similar manner to a mobile phone. Incorporating the system to an existing prosthetic only adds 2 pounds. According to Walters, the system is complex enough to self-regulate the heat removal – meaning users will never have to worry about over-cooling their limb. While Leto Solutions is still perfecting their system, any additional changes will be mostly of an aesthetic nature.
In the product’s first official test, where Walters actually wore the prototype on a treadmill for a ten minute walk, the limb stayed completely dry the entire time – even while Walters was drenched in sweat.
“We were actually surprised it worked as well as it did,” said Walters.
For Walters in particular, the prosthetic cooling system presents not only an exciting business venture, but increased personal freedom in many daily activities – from working in the yard to going to the park with his daughter.
“After about an hour we’ve got to go home because I’m sweaty and the limb is starting to slip and slide around,” said Walters. “With the system on, I’ll be able to go play with her as long as I want.”
As a new medical startup, Leto Solutions is still taking its first steps to becoming a company. The startup is currently filing its articles of incorporation and the provisional patents on its new technology. It will soon file the cooling system with the Food and Drug Administration as a Class 1 Exempt Medical Device. According to CEO Ariana, the company will need to go through three rounds of funding and should be profitable by their third year of operation.
Five of the eight students are moving forward with the company. Walters will be the startup’s new operations manager, Stultz with be the regional sales manager, and engineering graduate David Shultz will be the engineering and science manager. The other two members of the engineering team will be unpaid consultants until the startup can afford to bring them on. As the winners of the CITE competition, Leto Solutions will have additional resources available such as legal services from Cox Smith, free office space for a year at the San Antonio Technology Center, and funding from additional sponsors.
The business plan for Leto Solutions will be to sell the Aquilonix cooling system to Prosthetists, who build prosthetics out of multiple components based on each patient’s needs. According to the startup’s market research, there are approximately 800,000 below knee amputees in U.S. and around 300,000 prostheses sockets made per year – virtually all of which can incorporate the cooling system. Leto Solutions will be contracting with Coastal Life Technologies, a local company, for the manufacturing and packaging of their system. The predicted price point for the Aquilonix system is $650.
Leto solutions plans to begin their beta testing as soon as possible and will also apply for insurance and Medicare reimbursement so patients will not have to pay out of pocket. The startup plans to partner with the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio for their initial testing and will partner with other Veterans Affairs medical centers across the country to do a 2-arm comparative clinical study.
According to Walters, the whole situation for Leto Solutions was extremely fortunate – from their access to San Antonio Veterans Affairs offices to their mentor who has done this kind of work before.
“Our entire situation was so fortuitous,” said Walters. “We end up with a mentor who – this is what she’s done for the last 40 years. We’re in San Antonio which is a heavy biomedical and highly innovative city and we are doing an innovative and biomedical product. So everything dovetailed perfectly.”
Civitas Learning has received $8.75 million in funding with Emergence Capital Partners leading the funding round joined by returning investors Austin Ventures, First Round Capital and Floodgate.
New investors include Felicis Ventures and New Markets Venture Partners.
The funds will allow Civitas Learning to expand its predictive analytics platform and software program and to hire more staff.
The Austin-based company helps students stay in college and graduate on time by helping them develop a course plan and other support systems. Already, six colleges and universities are using the company’s program. Those institutions include Austin Community College, DeVry, Strayer University, University of Central Florida, University of Maryland University College, and Valencia College.
“Students come to higher education with big dreams,” Charles Thornburgh, CEO and founder of Civitas Learning said in a news statement. “Today, far too many leave with debt and no degree. We are catalyzing a community of institutions to learn together with the best of big data – a cutting-edge analytics platform, front-line focused software applications, and insight and inquiry – to give all students the opportunity to learn well and finish strong.”
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Is it possible to marry the insights from stories—quantitative data, or data-in-context—with the qualitative world of big data? How do you scale the collection and interpretation of thousands of stories that might contain truths more pithy and authentic than you could ever mine from a survey? And could something that would accomplish that task be the solution health care executives are looking for to achieve meaningful use of health tech data and provide more accountable care? That was the discussion at Tuesday night’s meeting of Nebular Health Tech at People Fund.
Discussion leader Senem Güney, co-founder at Quantifiable Quality Care, is an organizational researcher specializing in collaborative practices and use of information and communication technologies.
She pointed out that stories are the way humans make sense of their experiences. Even in introducing themselves, attendees told little stories about how they came to be at the meeting. But stories, unlike surveys, or medical tests are not quantifiable at present. And frequently it is through stories, rather than surveys or other forms of data collection, that problems are revealed.
“My interest in all of this is figuring out a way to make what I think is really significant data that reflects that experience–the story of somebody with somebody else–to capture that in its integrity as you would tell it to someone else when you’re trying to make sense of it for yourself.”
A survey, she pointed out, might never ask the key question that unlocks a patient’s experience. And even just tagging and analyzing words from stories is a form of dissection. Once you start analyzing and quantifying the pieces of the story, Güney said, “You cut the frog and the frog is dead. The experience, as it was lived in the contextual integrity of someone’s story, is changed.”
Platforms to Collect Stories
She’s working on a platform to collect patients’ stories and then ask questions about the story such as “What does the story tell us about the nurse? That he/she was a) caring b) competent….” The responses to the questions can be quantified. But she wants to go farther in capturing experiences on a grand scale.
Güney is not alone in her pursuit of stories to effect change. Gregory Foster, project manager for the Consumers Union, talked about that organization’s platform: Stori.es, which collects stories for the purpose of affecting change. Stori.es provides a way to collect stories, sort them, tag them and filter them for use in policy or other kinds of change.
And CRG Medical has a tool called Share Our Stories, S.O.S. where people can report medical abuse and accidents.
At some point, as James Cooley of Health and Human Services pointed out, IBM’s Watson technology, which analyzes information from basic speech may be useful for mining large quantities of data from stories. But that’s not how it’s being used at present and, as Güney pointed out, it’s an enormously expensive technology. Not a practical tool for collecting stories across several populations.
Amber Lindholm, a design strategist at the Clinical Design and Innovation Center at Seton Medical Center pointed out that, in stories, it’s often one detail, one encounter that opens up the right path of inquiry or has the most impact. But participant Adam Ragsdale who works in business development IT Solutions at TRC Staffing Services Inc. was concerned that the emotional power of a compelling story could wind up trumping quantities of qualitative data that told a more accurate story.
The group plans to revisit the conversation in future meetings.
Nebular Health Tech is a new group started in April by Erin Gilmer, an attorney and health rights advocate.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Photo courtesy of Daniel Heron
He’d also been through a major depression and, at that moment, in 2003, had just lost a close friend. And there on the snow he thought: “I don’t want to build another fucking widget.” He wanted to make a difference in the world. And he wanted to do it by helping entrepreneurs.
What he really wanted was a hero’s journey. So he came back to Austin and sought out Betty Sue Flowers, then director of the LBJ Library, who had edited Joseph Campbell’s book The Power of Myth. Flowers listened to Koym’s story and said something unexpected. “If you are serious about this, you should go to Chile and meet Senator Fernando Flores.”
What she didn’t know was that friends—worried about his emotional state—had asked him that morning to join them on a trip to Chile.
“I almost freaked out and ran and hid,” Koym said. “But another part of me was watching over me.” And that part got him to go. So he went: “Hell bent for leather and ragefully angry” about the loss of his friend; about life without meaning.
That was the beginning of Prueba el Mundo, an entrepreneurship development program Koym co-founded with participants from Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. (He also leads entrepreneur teams in Santiago, Chile and Guadalajara, Mexico.) It was also the year he helped launch Bootstrap Austin. And it was the seed that would, in 2008, become Tech Ranch. It was the start of the journey.
Internal Alignment
Speaking at Startup Grind, hosted at Tech Ranch Monday night, Koym told a story of periods of meteoric success, huge mistakes, emotional storm and eventually arriving at a place of doing what he’s meant to do. Though he’s still doing it in an “unruly,” special forces, take no prisoners way.
A graduate of UT with an electrical engineering degree, Koym had several great internships at major corporations like IBM and Motorola, but when he discovered startups, he said, he “got religion.” He worked for Pencom Software after being laid off by NeXT, then founded Praxsys, a skunkworks, early stage technology implementation and innovation consulting firm. It was during those years, when he was a golden boy of the software industry, that he hit a huge depression.
“I had my first venture–an ecommerce venture–my face was on the cover of Computer World magazine, most of the cash I have in my bank account came from that time, I was one of the fair haired boys of the Austin Chamber…and I was suicidally depressed,” he said. For Koym, that was a seed to one of the aspects of Tech Ranch that is unique: helping entrepreneurs become “internally aligned” as well as offering insights about getting customers or pivoting a business plan.
“You can do the lean startup, but if you don’t have the insides of you ready to attack and hold the customer…you need to find what’s missing in yourself, to develop that part of you for your venture. If you don’t figure out the inside you end up cheating or think you’re winning when you get funding.”
A lot of entrepreneurs are misaligned in terms of seeking money or meaning, Koym said. They have one, but not the other. They may have issues with performance or with dysfunction. As the child of a psychologist who’s dug around plenty in his own psyche, that’s one area where Koym likes to help. It’s impossible to succeed, he said, unless you have internal alignment.
But Tech Ranch requires more than internal alignment. It requires a small investment: The Ranch’s weekend program, Venture Start, is $150. Venture Forth, the eight week mainstay of Tech Ranch, is $650, but Koym said the price is going up soon. Then there’s Venture Builder for established companies.
It also requires intense passion.
Take No Prisoners
When talking about Venture Forth, for example, Tech Ranch’s main program for entrepreneurs, Koym makes it clear that it’s only for people who are committed to their enterprise, because it’s done in groups of 15 where there’s “nowhere to hide.” It’s not for “entrepreneurial tourists,” or “pretentrepreneurs.” If someone is building a business with his last dollars, he doesn’t need to try to work through his issues with a team mate who is dabbling. Koym prefers bootstrappers because they tend to “bleed” for their companies and—he’s seen a lot of this in countries like Chile and Mexico–they find solutions that people with venture backing don’t have to look for. And he promises that any teacher who is used by Tech Ranch will have “entrepreneurial scar tissue, none of this bullshit arrogance.”
“What I really want you to hear,” Koym said, “is there’s something really special about the path of the entrepreneur. There’s something really special you stand for. You have to be the pioneer. You’re the one going out on the skinny branches.”
Skyonic Corp. announced it has raised $128 million in funding to build a carbon capture and mineralization plant.
The Austin-based company raised $9 million last July and has raised a total of $48 million in a Series C round of investment. It also secured a loan of $80 million from Apollo Investment Corp. and Maxus Capital Corp. The company has also received a $28 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Skyonic’s plans is expected to remove more than 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide when its operating. Construction begins this summer at Capitol Aggregates Cement in San Antonio.
“The funds will also help support the advancement of Skyonic’s global IP portfolio of profitable carbon chemistry solutions and other R&D and operations expenses,” according to its news release.
The new funding includes equity investments from new investors Cenovus Energy, BlueCap Partners, Toyo-Thai Corporation Public Company Limited and Energy Technology Ventures. These companies join previously announced investors Berg & Berg Enterprises, Northwater Capital Management, ConocoPhillips, BP Ventures, PVS Chemicals, and Zachry Corporation.
“The Capitol SkyMine plant will mark the first time that carbon-negative chemistry has reached the commercial stage,” Joe Jones, founder and CEO of Skyonic, said in a news statement. “Our unique, patented process means that emission problems can become emission profits. The carbon-negative products produced, which include sodium bicarbonate and hydrochloric acid, will displace the carbon-positive products currently sold. This is a crucial step towards a cleaner global manufacturing industry.”
By LAURA LOREK
Founder Silicon Hills News
Ross Buhrdorf of HomeAway talking about innovation at Santa Fe Institute event.
And the genesis of big ideas might still be a mystery, but innovation, in the aggregate, can be broken down into a series of processes.
Those are a few of the big takeaways from the Santa Fe Institute’s first ever speakers event Monday night at HomeAway’s headquarters in downtown Austin.
Ross Buhrdorf, Chief Technology Officer with HomeAway, brought the nonprofit organization to Austin to talk about innovation to an invitation-only crowd made up of about 100 artists, musicians, technology and business executives, entrepreneurs, academics, investors, media and more.
The Santa Fe Institute, which has been called a modern-day Lyceum, brings together people from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines to address big issues like computer malware, cities and urbanization, how life began, innovation and so much more.
“No one really understands, in a deep sense, where ideas come from and how they are generated,” said Chris Wood, vice president with the Santa Fe Institute, during his introductory remarks. But the Santa Fe Institute attracts diverse, smart, curious, passionate people and they work on big transformative ideas. That’s something Austin is working to foster here, Buhrdorf said.
The Nature of Technology
The first speaker, W. Brian Arthur, a leading economist and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, studied extensively the evolution of technology. He wrote “The Nature of Technology” which explains how technologies are made up of pieces of technology that already exist.
To explain how technologies become more complicated over time, Arthur used the example of Frank Whittle’s turbo jet engine, patented in 1930. The original model is “incredibly simple,” Arthur said. Yet 30 years later, that engine became incredibly complex.
“Individual technology is made up of building blocks,” Arthur said.
“At the start those building blocks are incredibly simple.’’
W. Brian Arthur, a leading economist and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute
So how does innovation work in the economy? The standard states that the economy adopts new technologies and becomes more productive, Arthur said.
“This is woefully deficient,” he said. “Technologies do not come along one by one. They come along in whole bodies of technology.’
He provided as examples: textile materials, railroads, electronics, digital telecommunications, genomic engineering and nanotechnology.
“They are not quite adopted by business,” Arthur said. “The economy doesn’t adopt the new body, it incorporates it. Each industry collides with the new technology.”
Business processes from the industry and from the new body combine to form new processes, Arthur said.
His examples included banking and derivatives, which started to evolve with the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Formula in 1973. Human processes from banking incorporated telecommunications and computing processes. And decades later, it’s still going on for better or for worse, Arthur said.
“There’s one trillion dollars worth of goods per day traded in a $15 trillion economy,” he said.
These technologies sweep right across the economy changing businesses, one after another, and they transform the industry, Arthur said.
When this body of technology collides with a new technology, the result is the economy wells up from its new bodies of technologies, Arthur said.
“It thereby forms and reforms itself,” he said. He called the process “tectonic” and resembling the shifting of the tectonic plates to create new landmasses.
“The economy is forming and reforming from the process of old technology reforming with new technology,” Arthur said.
And despite the rise of China and other nations to challenge the United States in eight primary areas of technology, the U.S. still leads the world, Arthur said.
In response to a question from the audience, Arthur defined technology “as a means to a human purpose.”
In response to another question about the abuse of technology by governments, Arthur declined to address the current National Security Agency’s PRISM program which accesses phone and computer transmissions in the U.S.
“We’re entering a Brave New World for good and for not so good,” Arthur said. “I would like for us to pause and think more about this. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s desirable.”
The Cambrian Explosion
Doug Erwin, senior scientist and curator of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institute
He also recently published a book, with Jim Valentine, on “The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity.”
Erwin posed the question on one of his slides on what drives innovation, whether in biological, cultural or technological systems.
The conclusion is there are a lot of similarities between innovation in the animal and plant world and the human one and we can learn from the processes employed by each.
Austin’s Creative Class Spurs Innovation
HomeAway T-Shirt
“I have a passion about innovation and about science,” Buhrdorf said. “And I love the institute because they have this concept of multivariate models and cross discipline interactions. I think it’s perfect for Austin, Texas because we have this creative class that these young guys know here.”
That mix of the creative class with the big data scientists and multivariate models will yield innovative results, Buhrdorf said.
Buhrdorf, an artist, musician and an innovator, teamed up with 3-Day Startup to create the first corporate 3-Day Startup held at HomeAway last year. He’s working with them to announce something soon related to the Santa Fe Innovation talk, he said.
Austin, because of its innovative nature, is a perfect place for the Santa Fe Institute, Wood said.
“It’s a good place for us to try to make some contributions and we benefit substantiality from being pushed and goaded by the business community,” Wood said.
And in September, Santa Fe Institute is offering a two-day short course on Complexity: Exploring Complex Networks in Austin that is open to anyone to apply.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
In Austin, Mike Holp has become one of those guys who seems to be at every tech event, making friends and hawking his app: Dude Where’s My Car?
DWMC lets iOS users mark where they left their cars so that if they have to park in some obscure spot—a common occurrence in Austin—or park in some huge lot at an event, they don’t have to worry about wandering for hours looking for it. But while losing your car is a drag, the most appealing thing about the app might be the developer himself. In the app world, where swagger is the culture, Holp is mild mannered, positive, plucky even. He’s so easy to like, you just want his app to succeed.
Currently, DWMC is a free app and has been downloaded by more than 8,000 people. But there’s a new pro version that uses Google maps to help you locate gas stations, restaurants, cafes and more for $2.99. Only around 30 people have purchased that version.
Marketing professional Mike Rozelle met Holp at a professional event—where Holp has become so ubiquitous—and downloaded the app afterward.
“I’ve used it several times when I was in the west 6th area where it’s hard to find a consistent place to park,” he said. One day he’d love for the app to be able to take pictures and map the location of cars near his that looked like they might hit his on the way out of a parking space.
“That would be an interesting feature to have,” Rozelle said. “I’m not sure how admissible it would be in court.”
Holp would like to beef up the app by partnering with Onstar or another company so that app users’ GPS would automatically detect when the car stopped moving so they don’t have to remember to drop a pin. He’s started an Indiegogo campaign, but it’s not doing much. In the meantime, he’s creating an app for Do512, scraping their site for what’s happening in Austin. “I figured I’d just put it out there and see what happens,” he explained.
He moved to Austin a year ago from Michigan State. Something just called him here. He shows up at everything, including being the only male to attend the Women in Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship Forum during RISE. He was looking, he told the group of women, to push himself out of his comfort zone. That’s the kind of statement that has earned him a fan club in a short time in Austin.
As app user Mike Davis said: “Mike’s just a really good guy. I hope he succeeds.”