Category: Austin (Page 245 of 318)

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.

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

After eight weeks of hard work and not much sleep, 17 students graduated from the Rackspace Open Cloud Academy on Friday in San Antonio.
The graduates are now certified in A+, Network+, Linux+, Apache, MySQL, Rackspace system administration, Red Hat system administration, cloud basics, and critical thinking. Each graduate put in around 250 training hours while going through the program.
Speaking at the ceremony, Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston called the next 100 years the “era of the cloud” and told the graduates that the ability to speak the language of the cloud is will be essential.
“What has happened is we’ve moved from the world of just using computers to what your are learning, which is how the cloud is going to interact with the whole world,” said Weston. “Software – fixing it, maintaining it, and writing it – are all the building blocks of the next hundred years. In the same way that concrete, steel, shovels, and sweat were the building blocks of the last hundred years.”
The skills each graduate learned will make them valuable candidates for Rackspace’s employment needs as well as open up other doors in their professional lives. Rackspace VP of Talent Management Larry Guillory says there is a huge cost savings to Rackspace associated with the Open Cloud Academy.
“A year and a half ago, I was paying upwards of $10,000 to an agency to hire a Linux tech for me,” said Guillory. “In this model, we have people essentially paying to learn and that gives us an extended opportunity to interview them.”
The graduates are also already trained to handle typical Rackspace IT issues, making them easy to hire into the company. Guillory says that Rackspace is looking to hire at least 10 of the 17 graduates.
In addition to Rackspace, local technology companies also sent talent scouts to check out the Academy graduates. Guillory even invited HostGator to interview the students after graduation. While the academy classes were held at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio, the graduation ceremony took place at Rackspace’s headquarters, known as the Castle.
Additionally, companies post about 40,000 job openings monthly on job sites looking for people with Linux skill sets and the average salary increase for such jobs is about 5 percent. The average salary for a Linux Systems Administrator in San Antonio is $74,000, according to Indeed.com, the world’s largest job postings site. Rackspace Director of Learning and Development Duane La Bom says the graduates will have plenty of opportunities in both San Antonio and Austin.
“Any organization that uses Linux as their primary operating system — our graduates would be fine candidates — great candidates! – for any of those organizations even if they are not IT,” said La Bom.
According to La Bom, the program offered by the academy did not require prior computer knowledge for candidates to be successful, but it did require a great amount of passion, aptitude, and interest in IT. Graduate Kristy Elizondo was previously a stay-at-home mom. Getting through the program meant only two to three hours of sleep a night and little time with her husband, but she still walked across the graduation stage.
“I’ve been a mom this whole time. I’ve raised three kids. And I came into the program with only a year and a half of knowledge about computers,” Elizondo said. “[Now] I can do Apache, I have a few problems with MySQL, but as far as any kind of Linux, command lines, or scripting — I can do it because this program showed me how to do that.”
Even if the graduates aren’t employed by Rackspace, the different certifications provided by the Open Cloud Academy are a huge resume boost. Morgan Davis, who got laid off from his private defense contractor job in February, says the certifications and Rackspace name brand will really help him stand out as he looks for a job – a problem he had before the academy.
“The problem was I had such a diverse skill set I could not prove to potential employers that I had been doing excessively well at any given discipline,” said Davis. “By having these actual certifications under my belt recruiters can find me under a much smaller pool of candidates now.”
Some graduates even left previous stable job positions for the new field of Cloud computing. Graduate Carlos Fuentes spent 14 years in economic development and is leaving his post as a Bexar County Strategic Initiatives Coordinator on Monday.
“I thought it was worth the risk entirely,” said Fuentes. “I’ve gone from community development where you write grants for communities that have no economic base, to marketing a community of 1.7 million people that has a diverse economic base.. ..a natural progression is to want to be part of providing direct value to a business that has customers at stake, that’s is globally competitive, and that’s ambitious in trying to make a dent in things.”
Fuentes is excited about having the chance to move up in a company that is globally competitive and hopes to one day have his own business and create new things.
The next session of the Rackspace Open Cloud Academy will start in the second week of July and following sessions will be back to back for most of this year. Rackspace’s Weston is already looking forward to ramping up the Academy up to a much bigger scale.
“I can’t wait for the day that we have a thousand graduates in the Open Cloud Academy,” Weston said.