The big takeaway from watching this summer’s buddy comedy, The Internship, about two middle aged laid off salesmen who become interns at Google, is don’t get so enamored of the latest technology and gadgets that you neglect real life.
And Google, for all its glory, is just a tool that humans use to get what they need to live better lives.
When technology rules our lives, we become unbalanced.
The older interns, played by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, teach the young technology whizzes how to live in the real world and to appreciate every moment. The young technology whizzes also teach Wilson and Vaughn how to use technology to create better products. The intern groups must compete against each other in a series of tasks and the best team wins jobs at Google.
“We’re looking at some sort of mental Hunger Games against a bunch of Genius kids for just a handful of jobs,” Wilson says in the movie.
While a lot of the movie is just pure fiction, Google really does make its new Googlers, called Nooglers, wear multi-colored beanies with propellers on them. But another thing Google does is it pays its interns really well with a software intern making $6,463 a month.
Glassdoor did a report earlier this year and reported that Google ranks number one as the best place to intern.
The movie is hilarious. But as a big Hollywood motion picture, the Internship is loaded with stereotypes that some may find offensive. Google, though, comes through looking like a star.
Category: Austin (Page 245 of 318)
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.
By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Mayor Julián Castro at Zachry talking about immigration reform. Photo by Andrew Moore
On Tuesday, Mayor Castro joined President Obama and other government and business leaders at the White House to show support for the so-called “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill currently being debated in the U.S. Senate.
On Friday morning, Mayor Castro joined Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston, and Zachry Holdings Executive Director of Public Policy A.J. Rodriguez at a press conference to urge Congress to pass the immigration legislation currently being considered.
The legislation has been led by a bipartisan group of senators called the “gang of eight” including Senators Marco Rubio, R-Fla., John McCain, R-Ariz., Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., Michael Bennet, D-Colo. and Bob Menedez, D-N.J.
The conference followed a discussion with San Antonio business leaders led by Mayor Castro at Zachry Holdings.
Rodriguez said the group came to a consensus and is “largely supportive of immigration reform.”
“We are honored to join the Mayor who has been a constant leader on immigration reform, in showing our company’s support for this issue,” Rodriguez said. “We believe that the U.S. economy will greatly benefit from an effective guest worker program, a clear expedited path to citizenship, and enhanced Visa opportunities for graduates.”
Mayor Castro urged Congress to support the legislation, which he saw as a historic opportunity to make much needed changes to the U.S. Immigration system.
“The legislation that is before the United States Senate, is the best chance that this country has had in a long time to fix its broken immigration system,” said Mayor Castro. “I’m confident that the business community throughout the United States, the business community in Texas, and our San Antonio business community sees the benefit of passing this legislation.”
The event’s three speakers supported several measures in the bill including increasing increase annual H1-B visas from 65,000 to 110,000, the increase of exempted advanced degree H1B visas from 20,000 to 25,000, and an increase in the ceiling of low tech visas for unskilled labor.
The group also supports increased border security and an earned pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, though Mayor Castro thinks that the 13 year requirement is too long.
Speaking for the tech industry, Rackspace’s Weston said immigration reform is crucial to a growing tech economy in the U.S.
“Without immigration reform America is less competitive, and our businesses are less competitive,” Weston said. “This to me is not a Republican or Democrat issue. This comes down to whether America wants to have policies that support its business community.”
A national shortage of high tech employees exists in America’s high-tech industries, and immigration reform is needed so the high tech industry can fill these positions instead of outsourcing them, Weston said. Today, American companies outsource not because of cost reasons, but because of skill reasons, he said.
“Would we rather have a talented Indian move to America, work in our offices, and be part of this American team that exports to the world; or would we rather hire that person in India? It is much better for America for that talented person to move here,” Weston said.
But today, hiring any immigrant is a struggle for Rackspace Hosting. Every immigrant employee must go through a complex legal process and “lawyer up” with Rackspace to stay with the company. If Rackspace wants to buy a foreign company – and they are looking at several right now – they may be forced to leave that company overseas instead of bringing the new employees to the U.S. This result is less productive for both Rackspace and the American economy.
“To me, you cannot be pro business without being pro immigration reform,” Weston said.
Photo courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary.
It was 2006.
And now tweet has become a verb too!
The world is getting much more high tech and a lot quicker at that.
In a “Quiet Announcement” on the Oxford English Dictionary site that has been picked up globally by just about every news outfit, John Simpson, chief editor, announced “the noun and verb tweet (in the social networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion.”
The dictionary just added a whole slew of new words including plenty of techy ones like big data, crowdsourcing, e-reader,mouseover, flash mob, follow and geekery.
By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
An earthquake simulator that runs on National Instruments’ LabView software.
Those are a few of the hands-on activities for high school kids to learn about physics thanks to a program created by National Instruments.
The Austin-based company has created a curriculum for Texas physics teachers to give their students hands-on experience with different subjects and concepts and to teach them how to apply mathematical models to real-world data.
The programs, powered by National Instrument’s LabVIEW software, provide real-life experiments that bring textbooks to life.
And on Wednesday and Thursday, 29 high school science teachers learned about new ways to teach physics at National Instruments’ corporate headquarters.
They are part of the Texas Regional Collaboratives for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching’s first program at National Instruments to expose the teachers to real-world applications of physics and engineering and show them how to teach that in a compelling way to students in a classroom. More than 60 teachers applied for the program, said Carol Fletcher, associate director of TRC. She chose teachers from many disadvantaged school districts and those who would have the best ability to train others, she said.
All of the technology and entertainment kids get exposed to today tends to dilute their curiosity, said Antonio Gomez Pedroso, physics teacher at Longview High School in East, Texas, who was attending the training.
“You have to do big stuff to get their attention,” Pedroso said.
Ray Hsu, Senior Program Manager, K-12 Education
at National Instruments
“We can be viewed as a customer of the education system,” Hsu said. “We’re trying to reach out and be an industry involved in bringing real world experiences to the classroom.”
National Instruments, which has been involved in the First Robotics program since 2006, is committed to making a substantial impact on the STEM education of kids, Hsu said.
The idea comes from the principle of shared value “which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges,” according to the Harvard Business Review. “Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress. Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success. It is not on the margin of what companies do but at the center.”
National Instruments has taken that philosophy to heart, Hsu said.
In 1998, NI engineers created a version of its LabVIEW software for Lego Mindstorms designed for use with the Lego Education robotics platform. And all of the robotic controllers and robots used for the First Robotics competition run on the LabVIEW software platform.
LabVIEW is a system design software used by engineers and scientists to design and control applications. Elon Musk’s SpaceX uses LabVIEW “systems to control launchpad equipment and to command and monitor the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles and its Dragon spacecraft,” according to National Instruments. Those are the kinds of cool applications that spark student’s interest, Hsu said.
“Engineering is not as well understood in the K-12 space,” Hsu said. “We want to change that. We want to take it to another level. We want to change the classroom.”
National Instruments created a data acquisition tool called myDAQ, which sells for $175, and connects via a USB port to a computer. It partnered with Pitsco Education to create an earthquake table. With the myDAQ device and the earthquake table students can study the effects of earthquakes. National Instruments also created a curriculum as a guide for teachers and students “Understanding Structures & Earthquakes.” The booklet is the first of 12 specialized physics curriculum National Instruments is creating. The other two that are currently available include “Discover Heat Transfer” and “Explore Power and Energy.”
“Teaching is an art,” Hsu said. “If they can get students to start asking questions then they’ve got them.”
National Instruments is also working with Carnegie Mellon University to create a pathway for students to get certified in LabVIEW with a badging system to mark each of their milestones. It’s all about making real life engineering work relevant and engaging to students, Hsu said.
During this week’s two-day training session at National Instruments, teachers learned how to teach lessons on the properties of waves and sound including frequency, wavelengths, the Doppler effect, resonance and more.
Manos Chaniotakis, with Ergopedia and one of the authors of a new physics textbook.
“Our focus is to make sure we get reality into the curriculum,” Chaniotakis said.
Texas is going through adoption of a new physics textbook for the first time in 11 years. The latest book emphasis hands-on learning, said Chaniotakis. It has an e-book component, which can be accessed by computer, tablet or smartphone. It features videos, illustrations and more features that extend the paper textbook and provide the student with more opportunities for learning.
“Hands on is the key,” Chaniotakis said. “You learn better by doing something.”
Unfortunately, Texas lawmakers just passed H.B. 5, which makes physics and optional class for high school students, Hsu said.
Joni Milanovich, a physics teacher with Roosevelt High School in San Antonio, liked the training at National Instruments and the new textbook and the interactive approach to teaching.“It’s vey hands on,” she said.
If she gives her students a paper assignment, they won’t do it often, she said. But if it’s on the computer, they are more engaged, she said.
“They are used to using electronics and equipment to do their homework and labs,” she said.
National Instruments’ technology focused on the K-12 market will be on display next week at the U.S. News STEM Solutions Conference, June 17-19 at the Austin Convention Center.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Jeff Johannigman, former game designer who now works at General Motors
The symposium, hosted by the E-Learning Council and the Department of Information Resources (DIR), is an interactive conference for professionals involved in web-based education services in various industries. Johannigman has developed more than 25 published games and co-founded the Game Developer’s Conference. He left the gaming world when he concluded his work was inspiring a lot of people to spend a lot of time alone, in the dark, glued to their game systems. But then he turned his skills to the question of learning.
Traditional learning models, he pointed out, are linear and good for knowledge transfer, feeding someone information that they then memorize and regurgitate. They’re passive. And in traditional learning, failure is bad. But games are active. Instead of a test at the end, there’s a challenge at the beginning that engages the player in a series of decisions, acquiring knowledge at every step. And failure, with feedback is good.
“Yes I died, but I learned something in the process,” he said.
Games are immersive, addictive, simulate real world situations, and effective for learning. But while some organizations, like the military, fully embrace gaming as a learning tool, the private sector—in particular the C-Suite rejected anything that could be called “play,” despite evidence that the brain is most creative during play.
So Johannigman renamed what he was doing Immersive Learning Simulations—a moniker the corporate world could embrace.
An effective game, Johannigman said, needs to include:
• Cause and effect logic
• Algebra, geometry, mathematical concepts
• Probability and statistics, even game theory
• Psychology
• Storytelling, literature and mythology, especially the works of Joseph Campbell
An effective game needs to immerse you in another world and give you the opportunity to connect with your playing character, even design your character, in order to increase engagement. And it’s much more powerful when it has a social interaction component.
An effective game continually ups the player’s challenges. That might mean pitting the player against someone slightly more skilled than he or she is, with the skill levels of opponents rising as the skill level of players increase. Or it might mean challenging the player to build a business starting with $1,000 and making the business incrementally more complex, rather than starting with $10 million which presents little challenge. The challenge has to meet “optimum flow” meaning it’s not so easy it’s boring but not so hard it’s discouraging.
The more compelling games have fluid branching stories, a decision isn’t just right or left but effects change all over the game. That, and having to balance time, resources and other limitations, make them ideal for learning to manage organizations where a manager or executive may need to increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction and decrease operating costs, all at the same time.
A great game doesn’t need a complex story line or characters, Johannigman said. People are comfortable with “the goofy sidekick.” But it does need mechanics, which includes objects that have behaviors. For example, if you buy one house, you can charge X amount for rent but if you buy three, the price goes up…or down.
And, of course, a game—like life—needs rewards. Devotees of behaviorist B.F. Skinner, game designers, Johanningman said, refer to the rewards they build into games as “rat chow.”
A simple game without a lot of options, he said, can be developed for under $50,000. But the more complex ones cost from $100,000 up. And the key is to align the game with the company’s goals, for example:
• What are the performance issues? What should learn learners be doing differently?
• What are the common mistakes and bad decisions learners make?
• What external, variable factors can affect whether a decision is a good one or a bad one?
There’s a new map in town: ATXup.
Nick Hammond, an Austin-based software developer, created the map using an open source program called RepresentMap. Other startup communities worldwide are using the same program to map their emerging tech startup economies.
Some of the latest additions to the map include: Nitero Inc., Trails.by, Longhorn Startup Camp, Clay.io, Main Street Hub, Basanty, The Radio Box Inc. and Mososh. The map has more than 130 startups listed along with incubators, accelerators, coworking sites, investors and events.
Any tech startup can submit a form to be included on the map. They’ve got them listed all the way to San Marcos and Canyon Lake.
But the ATXup map isn’t the first and only map in town.
Andy Keil and Andrew Berg curate the Startup Genome – Austin Map, which has more than 540 startups listed and 51 investors. It has filters that allow you to search by date founded, amount of money raised and number of employees.
Ricardo Sanchez, who runs the co-founders meetup, created the Austin Tech Map. His map, which he launched last year, has more than 360 startups listed, 12 service providers, 13 coworking spaces, 36 angels and VCs and more than 100 jobs listed.
And Bijoy Goswami, head of Bootstrap Austin, created this elaborate Mindmap of Austin’s entrepreneurial tech scene. Goswami’s map goes far beyond listing local startups. He links to communities, universities, lifestyle, funding sources and so much more.
And lastly, one of the oldest maps of the area’s tech scene, is not a digital map, but a paper one from Silicon Maps. It’s a map of Silicon Hills and it lists mainly established technology companies like Dell, IBM and eBay that can afford to pay more than $1,000 to get listed on its map.
Kendra Scott on being an entrepreneur, photo courtesy of Incubation Station
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Among the presenters at the Incubation Station Showcase Tuesday night were a women’s apparel company that employs African women to make beautiful necklaces out of melted bullet casings, a cider company that sells the fastest growing drink in the U.S., a company that imbues peas with the flavors of the world, a vegetarian burger with no fillers, a salsa company called Texas Texas, and a company that sells men’s wipes.
The Austin room of the Bob Bullock Museum was filled as graduates of the Incubation Station presented their products, looking for investment dollars. Steven Tomlinson of Acton School of Entrepreneurship gave an inspiring speech about entrepreneurs combining what they love and get lost in, what they’re good at and what the world needs–against the challenges of culture, scaling and urgency.
If they’re not engaged, he joked, entreprene
Kendra Scott on being an entrepreneur, photo courtesy of Incubation Station
The key to remaining passionate in entrepreneurship is remembering the people you’re trying to serve, Tomlinson said. Culture, scaling and urgency just produce an adrenaline rush of fear that produces little. But engaging with the people you’re trying to help causes the brain to fire in the same multifarious way that play does. And that’s what entrepreneurs must keep alive.
The six presenting companies each had several Incubation Station mentors for their consumer packaged goods companies and each had a highly polished pitch presentation, leaving few questions in the audience besides the ubiquitous: What keeps you up at night?
Raven + Lily, a socially-conscious fashion and jewelry company, employs women in Ethiopia, Cambodia, India and homeless women in the U.S. to make eco-friendly, fair trade products including jewelry, clothing and soy candles. The company projected annual sales of $770,000 for 2013 and $10 million by 2017. Its gross profit margins for 2012 were 55 percent.
Goodseed makes vegetarian burgers using hemp seed, sprouted lentils, sunflower and chia seeds and other ingredients not including the wheat, corn, dairy and eggs incorporated in its competitors’ burgers. Currently the company makes the burgers by hand and is looking for $700,000 to automate to meet distribution demand. It projects revenues of $290,000 for 2013 and $9.6 million by 2017.
World Peas makes snacks out of peas in seven international flavors. Founder Anish Sheth, a corporate attorney by day, has created the company all on his own and has increased sales from $33,300 in 2012 to nearly $147,000 for the first half of 2013. He projects revenues of nearly $15 million by 2017.
Sanderson Specialty Foods is a profitable company that makes Texas Texas brand salsas and barbecue sauces. The company had 2012 sales of $1.4 million but was looking for $500,000 for sales reps and increased distribution. One investor asked why the company didn’t go for a line of credit.
Co-founder Brian Sanderson responded “We explored both options, the line of credit versus an investor and we are also seeking knowledge to help us grow. You don’t necessarily get that from a bank.”
Austin Eastciders is capitalizing on a skyrocketing growth in the alcoholic cider industry which it said has has grown by about 70 percent since 2009. Founder Ed Gibson started a cider bar in Bristol, UK seven years ago. The business is profitable, but when he visited Austin he fell in love and found a way to move here. Gibson said the company is the only U.S. cider maker using cider apples versus eating apples which makes a huge difference to the taste. The company has received $300,000 in finding but is looking for $350,000 for its production site and sales and marketing primarily.
Arguably the most entertaining pitch was for Dude Wipes, a division of Dude Products, created by several Chicago transplants with a combination of sales and engineering, data and risk modeling, banking and manufacturing. Capitalizing on a growing trend for men to avoid certain “laundry issues we won’t go into here,” Dude Wipes replace what is commonly and erroneously referred to as “facial tissues.” The company, which taped a portable packet of the wipes under each chair, projects nearly $90,000 in sales for 2013 with a 2018 exit of $15.6 million.
Austin-based startup LDRK Media makes fun and engaging online videos.
Its clients include Badgeville, Best Western, Realty Austin, National Renters Association and many more. Now it’s focusing more on doing whiteboard explainer videos for startups in which it takes complex subjects and break them down into a series of white board illustration. The videos are clever.
“This is a really good product for technology companies because the video has a knack for making complex ideas sound simple,” said Erika Benson, spokeswoman with LDRK Media. The company also does commercial videos and profile videos.
Full disclosure: LDRK Media is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News. It is producing a whiteboard video for SHN in exchange for advertising.
TVA Medical announced Tuesday that is has received $9.5 million in Series B financing in a round led by S3 Ventures along with TriStar Technology Ventures and Sante Ventures.
The Austin-based medical device company says the funding will be used to complete clinical trails and validate its endovascular technology. The company is developing a minimally invasive catheter-based system that allows physicians to join and arty to a vein to deliver hemodialysis to patients suffering from kidney failure.
“The technology is being studied outside of the United States and is currently not available in the U.S. The Company intends to seek Food and Drug Administration clearance in the future,” according to a news release.