Microchip Technology, with offices in Austin and Chandler, Arizona, announced today the acquisition of Novocell Semiconductor.
The acquisition was announced today at the 2013 Design Automation conference in Austin.
Both board of directors of each firm have approved the deal. The terms of the deal, which is expected to close this month, were not announced.
“We are pleased to announce the acquisition of Novocell and are expecting great things as we integrate the technology into our ever-expanding portfolio of IP solutions,” Mark Reiten, vice president of Technology Licensing for SST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microchip, said in a news release. “This acquisition provides our customers with valuable and differentiated technology and helps us to enable their designs with an even more comprehensive set of solutions, expanding our position as a leading memory IP supplier.”
When the deal closes, Novocell, which is based in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SST, a Microchip company based in San Jose.
Category: Austin (Page 247 of 318)
Jason Cohen founded WPEngine because his A Smart Bear blog kept crashing whenever he wrote a popular post.
He looked around for a reliable hosting site, but he couldn’t find one.
So he thought why not create one?
Voilà! WP Engine was born.
Cohen, who has founded four startups and sold two, founded the specialized WordPress hosting site in July of 2010 at Capital Factory, the downtown Austin coworking site.
But now Cohen said the startup, which has 50 employees and is hiring five to six new employees every month, has outgrown the space and is moving to 15,000 square feet of space in August. WP Engine also has four employees at a satellite office in San Francisco.
The new office is at 504 Lavaca, Cohen said during a recent interview at WordPress Camp 2013.
WP Engine now has more than 30,000 customers including Wells Fargo, Williams-Sonoma, Constant Contact and Pottery Barn.
In late 2011, WP Engine raised $1.2 million led by Silverton Partners and angel investors including Eric Ries, Bill Boebel, and others. The parent company of WordPress also invested in the company.
Money has not limited the company’s growth, Cohen said. The company’s ability to grow and provide good customer support has been the biggest challenge, he said.
“Our support is everything,” he said.
While web hosting sites like DreamHost, BlueHost and Go Daddy are cheaper than WP Engine, the site distinguishes itself by offering superior customer service, Cohen said. WP Engine is also four times faster than regular Websites, he said.
A few months ago, WP Engine had some trouble with fulfilling its customer service promises. A customer’s ticket for service usually took less than a day to resolve and soon it was stretching to two or three days. Customers were not happy. WP Engine had to retool to solve the problem. Simply hiring more people was not the answer, Cohen said. The company had to hire for fit and not comprise its culture to growth, he said. They worked crazy hours and eventually solved the problem. They’ve since scaled back some of their marketing initiatives to deal with the growth, Cohen said.
“The goal is BBNW – Bigger But Not Worse,” Cohen said. He said he borrowed the mantra from Chuck Gordon, co-founder of SpareFoot, another fast growing Austin startup.
In a post on Startup Digest, Damon Clinkscales, organizer of AngelHack Austin, announced PeerLearn, a peer-to-peer learning platform accessible via the Web or a mobile phone, won the weekend hacking competition.
At the first AngelHack held at Mass Relevance’s headquarters in downtown Austin, teams and individuals started working on projects at 9 a.m. on Saturday and continued until Sunday afternoon.
They produced a “wide variety of hacks, focused on mobile, web and even some hardware solutions,” according to Clinkscales.
“While around 25 projects were submitted since the hackathon began on Saturday, the projects were narrowed down to an overall winner and a runner-up,” Clinkscales wrote. “The participants had a lot of fun and were extremely focused and determined to create something awesome this weekend. It was inspiring to be around such dedication and creativity.”
As the winner, PeerLearn will get free local mentoring and a trip to San Francisco to attend TechCrunch Disrupt. The second place finisher was Starbox, a photobooth for retailers that uses a Kinect tracking device.
The judges for the event included Jason Seats with TechStars Austin, Gordon Daugherty with Capital Factory Accelerator, Josh Kerr, CEO of Written, Sam Decker, CEO and Founder of Mass Relevance and Chris Dunn, Central Texas Angel Network investor and Founder of Emini Academy.
Photo courtesy of Dell
At an annual event called the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network, which takes place this year in Istanbul, Dell announced plans to create a Website and community called Pay It Forward to help foster female entrepreneurship worldwide. It was joined in the effort by United Nations Foundation, Girl UP, Girl Scouts of the USA and the Dell Social Innovation Challenge.
The goal is to reach more than 1 million aspiring women entrepreneurs by the end of 2015.
“Whether it is in business, mentorship or philanthropy, women have the skills and the power to pay it forward and build strong communities that can make a meaningful difference,” Elizabeth Gore, resident entrepreneur, United Nations Foundation, said in a news statement. “Through this new initiative from Dell, we’re looking forward to being part of something that helps to truly transform lives and opportunities, in addition to unearthing inspiring stories of the successful contributions made by what will become an amazing community.”
The program involves women business owners serving as mentors to aspiring female entrepreneurs. It also involves financial support and access to information, technology and networks to succeed.
The Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network’s event runs through Tuesday and is co-sponsored by Intel. Some parts of the event are being broadcast online. It’s also possible to follow the conversation on Twitter via @DellBizWomen and the hashtag #DWEN.
The 2013 Texas Linux Fest takes place today in Austin at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center.
And the team from San Antonio-based TrueAbility will be holding a Linux showdown, similar to the one they had at SXSW Interactive earlier this year.
The contest will test the skills of Linux administrators and the top programmers will be awarded prizes. First place will get a Lenovo laptop, second place a Nexus tablet and third place with get a Beagle Bone Black starter pack. This contest is only open to those in Texas attending the conference, said Luke Owen, co-founder and CEO of TrueAbility.
The festival is being livestreamed for those who can’t attend. The conference is highly technical with sessions like “Automating Software Deployments With Puppet & Jenkins – Gareth Greenaway” and “TrueOS and Warden: Easy to Deploy FreeBSD Servers – Dru Lavigne.”
Dell filed papers with regulators Friday to take the company private in a buyout deal valued at $24 billion led by founder Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake partners.
A special shareholder meeting will be held on July 18th to vote on the deal.
Michael Dell and Silver Lake are offering $13.65 per share in cash, which is a 37 percent premium over the average closing share price during the 90 calendar days ending Jan. 11, the day rumors of the buyout began to circulate, according to a news statement.
In a letter to shareholders, a special committee of Dell’s board recommended shareholders approve the deal.
“Our analysis led us to conclude unanimously that a sale to the Michael Dell/Silver Lake group for $13.65 per share is the best alternative available – in a challenging business environment it offers certainty and a very material premium over pre-announcement trading prices. It also shifts very substantial risks to the buying group – risks that in any leveraged recapitalization would be retained by the stockholders and considerably magnified by leverage and the public nature of the resulting stub,” according to the letter.
TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook gets more than 1,000 pitches from tech companies seeking publicity every day.
So how does she sort through it all and find the stuff she likes to write about?
“It’s all about the person. When I can find an app that I love that I can share with other people that’s what I look for,” said Crook, a New York-based writer with TechCrunch.
While some TechCrunch writers focus on how much funding a startup gets, Crook seeks out companies at their earliest stages.
“I’d rather hear that you’re bootstrapped and you’re doing something really cool,” she said.
TechCrunch held a Pitch Off at Stage on Sixth Thursday night to meet some of the startups doing cool technology in central Texas. The technology news site is starting to see more and more activity coming out of Southern states, Crook said. It’s also seeing a lot of activity coming out of Asia, Latin America and Europe, particularly Germany and England.
On Thursday, 20 startups got a chance to deliver a 60 second pitch in front of a panel of judges consisting of Jeff Harbach, executive director of the Central Texas Angels Network, Joshua Baer, co-founder of Capital Factory, John Biggs, East Coast Editor with TechCrunch and Matt Burns, senior editor at TechCrunch. Crook served as the master of ceremonies for the event, which was packed and really loud and boisterous.
In the end, First Cut Pro, an online video editing and collaboration program, won the #TCAustin Pitch-Off and Embarkly, an online dog boarding location service, got second place. Camperoo, a directory of camps and activities for kids, won as audience favorite. The winners got tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt SF and the first place winner got a spot in Disrupt SF Startup Alley that allows the company to have an exhibit at the show.
TechCrunch has the list of all of the companies that presented here. A few of them didn’t show up.
This summer, the team behind Austin-based DeckPresenter will be in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for 12 weeks participating in the gener8tor startup accelerator program.
The company was one of five startups chosen from more than 250 applications to participate in the program, which will culminate with a Launch Day event on August 29. At that event, every startup will pitch their venture to a crowd of community members and potential investors.
DeckPresenter is a Web-based presentation tool for companies to host, manage and track Powerpoint decks.
The other companies selected to participate include Catalyze.IO, which offers infrastructure for health and wellness applications, based in Milwaukee, Docalytics, which makes online marketing tools, based in Minneapolis, Minn., OpenHomes, an online home seller based in Madison, Wisc. and Optyn, a marketing inbox management tool for consumers, based in Chicago.
“The Summer 2013 Program consists of some of the most innovative startups from around the country,” Troy Vosseller, co-founder of gener8tor, said in a news release. “We’re really looking forward to helping these companies grow and achieve their full potential.”
Tabbedout announced Thursday that the company has hired two veteran technology executives to lead its engineering operations.
Lance Obermeyer will become its new chief technology officer and Tom Bernhardt will takeover as vice president of product and strategy.
Previously Obermeyer cofounded Digby and other technology companies. He has a Ph.D. in computer sciences from the University of Texas at Austin.
“Tabbedout is unique in the mobile payment arena since both users and merchants see value in paying their tab with Tabbedout. I’m excited to join the Tabbedout team and look forward to helping Tabbedout succeed,” Obermeyer said in a news release.
Tom Bernhardt, winner of the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2000, founded Mission Critical Software and has served as chief technology officer at CTO at NetIQ, Tidal Software, and Digilife.
“I am excited to join Tabbedout as a company that is spearheading rich mobile payments and customer connection in an enormous market,” Bernhardt said in a news release.
Tabbedout has created an app that allows people to pay their tabs at bars and restaurants easily with their smart phones.
Want to leave a lasting legacy online long after you’ve gone to the grave?
Not content to just write R.I.P. on a gravestone? Then Spiritcube has got a product for you.
The Miami-based company sells a digital-after life online package that allows people to leave behind text, photos, video and more for loved ones after they’ve left this world.
And Spiritcube has decided that Austin’s “Silicon Hills” offer plenty of opportunity for the company to expand outside of Florida. The company is opening an office here.
“If businesses are looking for a sustainable, progressive and an affordable city to expand their futures, then they need to look no further than Austin, Texas,” according to Spiritcube’s news release. “There’s a reason why dozens of national and international technology based corporations chose to open an office and operate from Austin. The Information and Computer Technology industry was selected to be part of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s growth initiative because of its powerful potential for future economic growth.”
Spiritcube is opening a research and development office that will also provide customer service, according to the company. It did not provide details on how many people will be located in Austin.