Category: Austin (Page 244 of 318)

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

When Whurley of Chaotic Moon learned he was one of 100 innovators chosen to participate in British Airways Ungrounded, an 11-hour hack over the Atlantic Ocean to find a solution to the problem of unbalanced STEM in the world, he said “I literally almost cried.” Imagine what would have happened if he’d known his team—Team Altitude– was going to win, that their idea would be presented at the (DNA) Decide Now Act Summit as well as the G8 Innovation Conference preceding the G8, and that the Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union would make a video talking about Whurley’s team’s solution.
Ungrounded Thinking was British Airway’s idea, to put 100 innovators on a plane from San Francisco to London in teams, each of which was asked to solve a problem around STEM: How to meet the growing demand for STEM workers; how to use global pools to meet the U.S. demand; how to grow STEM in emerging economies and Team Altitude’s problem—How to foster STEM among women.

The Women’s STEM Team

The night before the flight, Whurley said, four of the seven team members met for drinks to get to know each other and understand each others’ backgrounds and what they each brought to solving the problem. His team members included founders and students:
Sue Black, Founder, The goto Foundation
Kimberly Bryant, Founder & Executive Director, Black Girls Code
Lauren Hasson, iOS Software Engineer, Bottle Rocket Apps
Kelly Hoey, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Women Innovate Mobile
Cindy Padnos, Founder & Managing Partner, Illuminate Ventures
Cassidy Williams, Student, Iowa State University
They knew they would have no wifi on the plane, so before they took off the next day, Whurley said, they decided on a name, bought up domains, started social media groups and enlisted 400 women as participants. They built AdvisHer, a foundation and online community by women and for women to advise women in STEM and women interested in STEM. Men will only be welcome to advise through AdvisHer as second parties who have been vetted by AdvisHer members.
Onboard the Plane
“Some of the teams had very formalized methodologies,” Whurley said. “We really wanted an open source conversation where everybody has an equal voice. ‘Yeah, we should do that and what about this?’” The perspective of Cassidy Williams, the Iowa State student, was given weight because she’s living the problem, Whurley said. The same weigh that of Kimberly Bryant who founded BlackGirlsCode, created to introduce the world of STEM to young black women in underrepresented communities and of Whurley himself, the only male team member.
“We were very lucky to have Cindy and Kelly and Kimberly…the entire team were women who have been through this (discrimination in STEM jobs). They’re subject matter experts, they’ve suffered from not having this.”
Teams were given only paper and markers to create their projects. Then, after about eight hours, teams went around “grading” each other’s projects with sticky dots. Then the participants had about two and a half hours to sleep. When they awoke, Team Altitude learned they had won.
But it wasn’t over. They wanted the project as perfect as possible before presenting it at the G8 Innovation Conference. So after they arrived in London, they got back to work. At an unspecified date, Team Altitude has been invited to Geneva, Switzerland, to present their project—which they’ll continue to develop—before UTI.
“These weren’t just the best of the best on the plane, they’re the best of the best there are,” Whurley said. “And the best part of it was it was just we’d decide something that had to be done and it was like ‘You’re going to kick ass and do this, right?’ Every issue that came up, everybody was super awesome at solving it. These were amazingly talented, amazingly respectful people. It was literally a life-changing experience.”

It’s that time of year again when the A-List of Austin Startups gets released.
The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and South by Southwest Interactive announced the 2013 Austin A-List this week.
They compiled the list based on input from local investors.
This year’s list includes 19 startups spanning a wide range of industries.
The companies include Adometry, AeonClad Coatings, Caisson Biotech, Digby, Famigo, Gravitant, Invodo, Kimbia, Localeur, MapMyFitness, Mass Relevance, NOOM, Ortho Kinematics, RetailMeNot, Spiceworks, SpredFast, Tango Health, Televero and Terapio.
“The A-List has proven a successful tool with past A-List winners receiving a combined $57.7 million in investment since the October 2012 announcement. A few of these notable successes include BlackLocus’ acquisition by Home Depot as its innovation lab, and Toopher’s $2 million capital raise,” according to the Chamber.
The Chamber and SXSW Interactive revealed the list, now in its third year, at an event Thursday at Fogo de Chao.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

“Wouldn’t it be great if you guys could be in a conference and wear (Google)Glass and it did facial recognition—which it doesn’t—and you could instantly look up all this information about people in the conference? How many of you would want that?” Whurley asked the crowd of more than 100 people assembled at the Austin Convention Center for the Web Leadership Day at Drupal Camp Austin 2013.
About a third of the crowd raised their hands.
“Fuck you guys!” Whurley responded. “If you can’t remember my name I don’t want to talk to you! That’s horrible social interaction!”

Glass Is Limited in Functionality

Whurley, whose company Chaotic Moon is sponsoring a Dev Camp for Google Glass this summer, nonetheless unleashed a slew of critical observations about the practicality of Google Glass in his presentation, Google Glass WTF? Among them, the battery life is miniscule, the prism is too small to use for large amounts of data—like a website, you have to move your head and hands in distinctly uncool ways to make this cool technology work on certain functions, it will probably hurt some people’s vision.
Plus, the apps that could be created, or web designs including responsive design, are very limited.
“What I think it will be used most for is ‘Boop, boop, you have a call.’ And my phone vibrates so why do I need that?”
Developers are reluctant to miss out on an opportunity to have the first apps for the next big thing, but there are too many drawbacks, right now, to qualify Glass as the next big thing.
Whurley considered that it could be used for a new, unique, augmented reality game as long as the clues were small and not a lot of data is required. It could be used for a banking app, but he fears that’s insecure.
“A lot of times we do stuff because it’s cool,” he said. “But the question is, does it have a purpose? If my website is Google maps that would work. It could give you arrows and audio cues. It could be just like your annoying GPS. (Glass) does have a video function. You can play videos. I can see having a DIY website where you’re looking at it for reference while you’re working on something…. As I tell my clients, not all things are suitable for apps. And not all things are going to be suitable for Glass.”
To be fair, he acknowledged, Google is working Glass’s shortcomings. But he advised the audience against changing anything about the way they function right now for Google Glass. Instead, just be thinking about all the new, emerging interfaces, like Thalmic Labs’ armband that allows users to control electrical devices with a gesture, or Atheer’s interactive glasses that let the wearer touch a space represented by the virtual image to affect change on the screen.

Right Now, Glass Just Makes Glassholes

And don’t just race out and get a pair, like the “Glassholes” on his recent Ungrounded flight with British Airways. There were 100 innovators on the plane. Of course, he said, there would be people wearing Glass, and “the rest of the passengers who hated them.” Once the group arrived, Whurley said, he was on a London street with one of these Google Glass wearers, looking for a restaurant where no signal was available.
“They guy’s literally like ‘Woah, woah, whoa I got this.’ And I thought, here comes a disaster…. I was waiting for it like a shark. And then he (moved to another part of the sidewalk) like he knew the signal would be better there.”
“So I stepped forward and asked these two women ‘Excuse me, we’re looking for this pub’ and they’re like ‘Yeah it’s around the corner two blocks over.’
Technology has to be useful, Whurley said. Which means it can’t encumber you with bad interfaces, it can’t require you to move in unnatural ways, it can’t make you blind…. And it has to actually make life more convenient than life would be without the technology.
Glass has some other issues, he pointed out. He’s convinced that within months after they come out, Texas will ban them during driving and the rest of the country will follow. The only exception being if you use them to show your insurance company how you’re driving.
And there are some privacy concerns. One fellow innovator on the plane was filming Whurley without asking him.
“It drove me mad,” he said. “It’s not a screen, it’s a prism. I know you’re filming me. I know what you’re looking at. I know you’re not listening to me now.”
On the other hand, some people seem to fear that Glass will be able to recognize faces and call up private information.
“There are concerns you’re going to be able to walk around and know everything about everybody. Does Glass connect to a special NSA computer? None of you have any privacy anyway so I don’t know what you’re worried about. Everybody seems to think this is magic technology that’s going to do something it can’t really do. There just needs to be a reality about Glass.”
There’s especially a limitation when you can’t get a signal. On the Ungrounded flight, there was no wifi. Yet people wore their Glasses.
“It was weird,” Whurley said. “It was like, ‘What are they doing?’ ‘Nothing!’ But they’re under the impression they look really cool right now.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Gamefication builds a framework into an experience that taps into humans’ need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness or relevance. It uses people’s craving for the neurotransmitter dopamine—connected with reward–to hook them. And it can be used for good or evil.
Wes Kay, user centered design advocate, spoke in place of Robin Krieglstein, his co-founder at the new meetup group Intersection: Psych+Tech. He gave a whirlwind explanation of the psychological power of gaming Wednesday night at MakerSquare.
He explained how every person has a desire for

• Competence—the ability to accomplish things
• Autonomy—the ability to do something by yourself, on your own steam
• Relatedness—the sense that what you’re doing matters

Hooked on Hormones, and Neurotransmitters

Good game design provides all of that and can be found in places where people least expect it. Filling out a LinkedIn profile, for example, is boring and doesn’t provide any specific sense of accomplishment. LinkedIn had to find ways to make it more engaging. So it added little feedbacks, “Congratulations! You’ve finished 10 percent of your profile.” Now there’s a sense of accomplishment for each incremental part of the task, rather than the profile holder having to wait until someone finds and uses his or her profile. People don’t fill in the profile for the praise, of course, they fill it in because they desire to be successful. But the feedback gives them little squirts of the dopamine that tell them they’re doing well and encourage them to keep going on this boring task.
The key is keeping people in the flow state, that mid-range between anxiety and boredom, where challenge and excitement lies. Filling in a LinkedIn profile, Kay said, falls strictly in the boredom zone and needs a little sense of accomplishment to bring it closer to the challenge zone. Other transactions, he said, like buying something from Amazon, are more likely to create anxiety—too much challenge. So that company has to make it easy and painless for customers to glide into the checkout section.
Other tools use gameification. Salesforce CRM tool has leaderboards that let people feel the psychological buzz and dopamine injection of status. Yelp and Foursquare do the same. The more you use them, the higher you rank. And each rise in rank brings another dopamine squirt, sense of accomplishment. And because these are social tools, it also confers a sense of relatedness.
Facebook likes, Kay said, are the cheapest and most effective source of dopamine.
A hormone that can be used in gaming for social good is oxytocin, the hormone that’s released during a hug and increases trust.
“I could walk up to you and shoot oxytocin in a nasal spray up your nose and you’re going to feel better about me when it’s over,” Kay said.
He mentioned a project Coca Cola did, putting a shell of a Coke machine in Pakistan and another in India that allows people on both sides of the border to see someone on the other side, “touch” hands, draw a heart or peace sign together. An oxytocin dump to build trust across a hostile border.

Life on the Point System

The end of Kay’s talk tackled something gaming enthusiasts rarely seem to broach: the criticisms of gaming. There is concern that gaming has zapped the ability of a generation like the millennials who spent months or years of their lives playing video games and working for badges to find intrinsic motivation.
One Baby Boomer who manages younger people complained “They’re constantly needing strokes. If I give them a task with no structure and no guidance, they couldn’t even begin to think how to do it. They’re constantly looking for that feedback.”
And more than one millennial in the audience confessed to being disappointed with the shortage of praise and feedback in “the real world.”
“I grew up playing games and you get out in the world and realize life doesn’t have a reset button or cheat codes and you’re like ‘Man, this shit sucks.”
One Baby Boomer pointed out that there are some “big problems” to solve such as how turn algae into fuel, “where you can work for weeks and months with no feedback. Are we preparing people for that? When was the last time you turned all the electronics off, stared out a window and thought about a problem?”
There’s also a limit to how much happiness people can derive from external rewards, Kay said. In a principle known as the hedonistic treadmill, as the rewards increase, the happiness generally stays the same, like with an addictive drug. So there’s some concern that as more and more companies use gaming as an engagement tool, it will cease to be effective.
On the other hand, he pointed out, like with the Coke machine and another project in Stockholm, Sweden, where the city increased the use of stairs at a train station by 66 percent by turning the stairs into piano keys—fun can inspire social good.
Intersection: Psych+Tech was founded in April by Kay and Krieglstein, senior architect at Badgeville, the leading gamefication and behavior management platform.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

He called it WordPress for apps…on steroids. Avai Mobile Solutions LLC, recently introduced its app platform for large organizations, which lets them create the look and feel and manage content on their apps without having to build one from the ground up.
“It does a lot more than a WordPress site could because it allows you to utilize smart phone functions. It’s not just serving out HTML pages,” said Avai CEO Rand Arnold.
Arnold moved to Austin from Silicon Valley in 1999 and was working in UI/UX design and touchscreen interfaces. When his funding dried up at the start of the recession, his company pivoted into mobile.
“We said, here’s what we’ll do, we’re good at tying apps into back end servers. We don’t do games. We don’t do consumer apps, no iBeer…. The content would be updated with backend services.”
The company began working on individual custom mobile apps and many of its customers were state parks or theme parks.
“Where’s the first place people really start understanding the value of an app?” Arnold said. “You’re out in the state park and you don’t have your laptop or computer and you think ‘I sure would like to know what’s going on. Where am I? How do I find out where I want to go?”
But creating individual apps, with their long development cycles, endless iterations and long wait times after they’re submitted to the app store was proving too frustrating.
“We would build the app and customers wanted to see it on their phones before it went out but there was no easy way to get it to them until it was in the app store. They would approve it and then we’d wait around for weeks for Apple to release it. Then they’d see it and say ‘We know we approved it but we want the background a little darker green and we need it tomorrow…..’ Then we’d change it and have to resubmit the app to the store. The time and cost involved with building apps was ridiculous and it was going to get more ridiculous. You’re never done with software. As soon as you’re done you have to start the next draft.”
That’s when Avai decided it preferred to provide the architecture for enterprises to manage their own apps and app updates. T.J. Christensen, vice president of business development with Accesso, a company that provides ticketing and ecommerce solutions to theme parks, said the company has worked with Avai since 2010 as a white label app re-seller.
“Our ability to leverage their enterprise platform and mobile expertise has allowed us to become a leading provider of mobile solutions within our market segment,” Christensen said. “Over the past three years they have continued to re-invest in the platform bringing new and exciting features into the standard offering year after year – which has allowed us and our clients to stay well ahead of our collective competitors.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The founders of Cubit had a list of failures for each of their five years, but decided not to enumerate those for the crowd of 150 at Austin Lean Startup Circle at Capital Factory Tuesday night. It was too depressing. But Kristen Carney, co-founder of Cubit, said that as the five years progressed, the number of failures and successes evened out and eventually, the balance weighed in favor of success.
That was the story of Carney’s and Anthony Morales presentation: Cubit Case Study: Five Years of (Mostly) Failures and (a Few Successes) which they demonstrated with Paul Graham’s startup model.
Cubit packages demographic data for customers including small businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. In 2008, Carney was working for an environmental engineering firm studying the socioeconomic impacts of new roads. She would pull data, create drawings, discover that plan wouldn’t work, pull more data. She knew what a pain point data collection could be. So she and Morales, who worked in web design and programming, built a technology to pull together demographic reports with data that’s freely available on the census, but not easy to mine if you’re not a data expert. They founded Cubit at Capital Factory with $20,000 seed investment.
“We started off with the 37signals model of ‘I’m a customer, I know what the customer wants,” Carney said. As a result, they didn’t listen carefully enough to mentors. She and Morales created a very simple site with formulaic reports and instantly had customers. Since it was a “crappy” site, yet people were buying, they knew they were solving a problem. But the vision they had included maps, which was more involved. And that was one of their first mistakes, she said, clinging to a vision rather than selling what customers were buying.
By 2010, she said, they were in Graham’s downward slope of wearing off the novelty running out of money and heading for the trough of sorrow. They made 1,000 cold calls and sold nothing. They decided their first priority was “feed the family.” This slowed things down a bit because they alternated working on paying jobs and working on Cubit.
In 2011, they launched into another common mistake of startups. They started a different business.
“There’s this idea of my first business is failing. I should start a new business and do it right this time.”
They created a process to automate handwritten thank you notes. This was an eight-hour startup that slowed them down even more.
“We were a tiny company, we had no business trying to do both,” Carney said.
But 2011 was also when Carney started digging into the idea of lean startups. By 2012, they closed the thank you notes business and focused on Cubit. But this time, they put a ton of effort into finding out what it was customers really wanted.
They put a “buy now” button on the landing page with no specific offer, surrounded by space and no content, just to see if people would click on it. And they did. They started tracking the data to see who was clicking and what they were asking for. They hooked the button up to a Paypal account and Morales’ phone would go off at all hours of the day and night when customers bought a specific data set. He’d have to get up, pull a PDF and email it to them.
Then Carney and Morales really started digging into the existing pain points. They used Google Ad Words to drill down the terms people were searching for and they started reading Amazon reviews on books about census data or business marketing research to find what customers were complaining about. They created Wufoo forms that would collect data from users, used usertesting.com and purchased at least $100 worth of Google adwords, which noticeably improved their SEO traction.
They also tapped nonprofits who dealt with small businesses, offering to pull free data for any clients who would participate in an interview. Four non-profits turned them down in disgust. The last has become a valuable channel partner.
They then conducted interviews using the Spin Selling methodology written about by Neil Rackham and Bob Kalomeer. Carney, who considers herself a woefully bad saleswoman, had great success by asking potential customers if they would take 10 minutes to explain their project to her. Almost no one refused. When they told her of their data need, she’d also point out that all the data they provided was available for free. To that, customers would explain why getting the data themselves was too hard or time consuming, providing valuable information. Finally, she would ask how the data they sought would help their project.
All of it was rich with information. In addition, she added traditional “lean” interview questions like “What keeps you up at night?”
Another big issue was pricing. “Pricing is just hard. It just sucks. There’s no fun way to do it,” Carney said. “If we were in the interview we’d say hey, would you pay $200 for this report and they would lie to our faces and tell us, ‘Yes, we would pay $200 for this report.’” Ultimately they came up with pricing from $20 for standard reports to $12,000 for some custom reports, based on raising prices until some customers dropped out.
Their overhead is small, since they work from home and use data that’s free. And after five years, Carney said, they’re Whole Foods profitable, meaning they can afford to shop at Whole Foods. They’ve hit the better end of Graham’s curve.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The entrepreneur’s reality began to warp as the pitch competition took on a Shark Tank feel. The entrepreneur made an introductory joke…nobody got it. Then the investors began asking more and more personal questions. Nobody would really ask those kinds of questions would they? Soon it was clear, this was a pitch nightmare come true.
That is a scene out of Funemployment, a movie being made in Austin about the Austin startup culture. The film will begin the casting process June 27 and July 2. Some roles will be paid, others are strictly volunteer.
Director/producer and co-writer Christine Chen went to business school at UT and “got sucked up into the startup world in Austin….. I wanted to write something very Austin about the culture itself, from working at coffee shops to networking events to trying to get funding and pitch parties. It’s a world I don’t think a lot of people know unless you’re a startup.”
Chen, who has created commercial short videos for companies, has never done a full-length script before. She’s estimating the film will run about 100 minutes and is similar to two of Chen’s favorite movies: Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. She’s planning to start shooting in July, though she’s still seeking funding. The movie is looking for startups interested in being featured in the movie in exchange for sponsorships.
“It’s funny and quirky but fairly dark,” Chen said, because of the questions entrepreneurs face—like whether they’re going to be able to make their rent. Chen is hoping for some guest appearances from Austin startup icons. Anyone interested in getting involved should contact Chen at funemployment@mothtoflamefilms.com

San Antonio has landed its own chapter of Health 2.0 and an organizational meeting will be held Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at Geekdom.
The organization’s mission is to support health technology startups. Health 2.0, based in San Francisco, started as an annual convention and now has 64 chapters around the world.
Cynthia Phelps, founder of HEALTHeDesigns in San Antonio, is the founder of the local chapter.
“Our vision for Health 2.0 San Antonio is to provide an organizational structure to cultivate the health technology startup culture in San Antonio with the goal of healthcare innovation,” Phelps wrote in a mission statement.
My over arching goal is to connect essentially the high tech startup culture here at Geekdom with the healthcare innovators in San Antonio,” Phelps said. “I would like to see San Antonio become a leader in health-tech innovation.”
San Antonio is poised to do this because of the developing community at Geekdom paired with the excellence of the city’s military healthcare system and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Phelps said. One of the main goals is to bring the geeks together with the those in the healthcare space who have ideas to improve healthcare, she said.

RetailMeNot has filed a registration statement with federal regulators for an initial public offering worth an estimated $230 million.
The Austin-based online coupon site, formerly Whale Shark Media, has applied to have its stock listed on the Nasdaq market under the ticket symbol “SALE.”
The company also reports that it is “an “emerging growth company” as that term is used in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or JOBS Act, and, as such, will be subject to reduced public company reporting requirements.”
“The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined,” the company reported in a news release.
Morgan Stanley & Co., Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Credit Suisse Securities will manage the proposed offering.
RetailMeNot operates the world’s largest digital coupon marketplace and had coupons from more than 60,000 retailers on its site in 2012 and reported 450 million visits to its websites. It also has contracts with more than 10,000 paid retailers.
“In 2013, our marketplace featured more than 500,000 digital coupons in each month,” according to its filing.
Founded in 2009 as Smallponds by CEO Cotter Cunningham, the company has seen its revenue increase from $16.9 million in 2010 to $144.7 million in 2012, representing a 192.9 percent compound annual growth rate. It’s net income also increased from $2.3 million in 2010 to $26 million in 2012. Its growth comes from acquisitions and organic growth. The majority of its revenues come from the U.S. with the rest coming from the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
The company has 331 full time employees in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and the Netherlands.
RetailMeNot has received $300 million from several venture capital firms including Austin Ventures, Google Ventures, and Institutional Venture Partners.