Category: Austin (Page 248 of 309)

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2013 Women in Tech Summit Agenda

Keynote – Graham Weston, Chairman & Co-Founder, Rackspace

Being a Trail Blazer and Risk Taker: Fireside Chat
Marlee Perez, VP IT, Tesoro
Janelle Monney, Founder & Managing Partner, The Monney Group

How to Keep Up With Technology and Remain Relevant in Today’s Marketplace
Major General Suzanne M. Vautrinot, Commander, 24th Air Force; Commander, Air Forces Cyber; and
Commander, Air Force Network Operations, Lackland Air Force Base, Texas
Catherine McGuinness, Managing Director, Preod LLC, Author, Emperors’ Clothes

Carolyn Green, Director of the Center for Information Technology and Cyber Security
Texas A&M University-San Antonio

Diane Kenyon, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, Harden Healthcare

Say What? Achieving the Ability to Communicate the Business Value of Technology
Amanda Justice, Business & Economic Development Executive, CyrusOne
Patsy Boozer, Chief Information Security Officer, City of San Antonio
Janet Cinfio, Vice President of Digital Platform Infrastructure and Operations, EA

Disclosure: Innotech San Antonio is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Mike Davis, founder of StoryPress, has gotten a lot of traction for his free storytelling application since launching late last year.
He got the idea for the company when he wanted to record some stories from his grandma, Bea, for future generations. Davis created an iPhone and iPad app that does just that.
So far, StoryPress has been featured in PC Magazine and Mashable. Davis kicked off a Kickstarter campaign April 1st to raise $15,000 for the next version of the software and to enhance its features. So far, he’s raised $4,577 from 92 backers. He’s almost a third of the way to reaching his goal with 17 days to go.
Silicon Hills News also did a Q&A with Davis and Slice of Silicon Hills News featured him in this recent video interview.

Disclosure: Storypress is advertising on Silicon Hills News this month.

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Entrepreneurship is not an age-based activity, Susan Strausberg, co-founder of 9W Search, made that clear at the Entrepreneur in Residence Speaker Series Tuesday.
Many successful CEOs today are over 50. It’s not connected to gender, although Strausberg did point out that, statistically, companies run by women CEOs generally perform better than those run by men. And it has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a parent.
In response to a question about juggling family and work responsibilities she said: “I was never meant to be a stay-at-home mom. We could afford to have really, really good help to take care of our children…the person who took care of my children was not doing menial work. She was doing half of my job. Of course, you can’t do everything.”
Being an entrepreneur is about seeing and seizing on opportunities.
Strausberg, a serial entrepreneur, is best known for founding EDGAR Online, Inc. a leading provider of interactive business and financial data, largely culled from SEC filings, in 1995 and taking it public in 1999. She recently moved to Austin and launched 9W Search Inc., a sophisticated financial search engine primarily for mobile users. She’s known as a pioneer in the democratization of financial information. Entrepreneur in Residence Laura Kilcrease interviewed Strausberg for the University of Texas Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship speaker series at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center.
Strausberg does believe it’s crucial to have a good partner. Hers has been her husband, Marc Strausberg who co-founded both EDGAR Online and 9W Search with her. Prior to founding EDGAR, her entrepreneurial ventures included Internet Financial Network (IFN), an EDGAR-based financial information vendor that was acquired by America Online, a division of Time Warner, Inc. In the 1970s she co-founded a publishing company specializing in custom-made textbooks for the college market and was involved with film development, co-producing a documentary about Kansas City Jazz called “The Last of the Blue Devils” and “It Came from Hollywood,” a Paramount Pictures film.
In founding EDGAR Online, Strausberg said, they had few competitors at first, so new was the Internet. But they recognized it as promising to be a key delivery vehicle in the future. Collaborating, however, with financial information companies who both could be sources of information and potential competitors required both a willingness to “open the kimono” and at the same time be “switchilant,” ready for collaborator to become a competitor.
In 1999, EDGAR went public, raising $34 million because, as Strausberg pointed out “We couldn’t turn down the money. It was 1999, you didn’t NOT go public if you could.”
At the time, she said, “I felt we should be public. It made sense to me. I also liked the fact that we always knew what we were worth, our valuation was behind us.” At the same time, she said, running a small public company was “excruciatingly hard because it’s a tremendous distraction. It’s very expensive to be public. You’re paying the same amount for Sarbanes (Oxley regulatory costs such as insurance and audit costs) as a multi-billion dollar company. Now the world is more M&A. We’re going more that direction than being public.”
She wasn’t cut out for the corporate life, she found, and left her position as CEO in 2007. A non-compete agreement kept her from considering another venture involving financial information until she and her husband had an “epiphany” regarding the marriage of the mobile market and the standardization of data sets. 9W Search promises to give “the right answer” to any financial question, like Google for the financial world.
Currently they’re getting ready to roll out a free service of 9W Search for “anyone with an edu address.”
When asked why she’s an entrepreneur, Strausberg responds: “I can’t help it. Moth to a flame. If I see an opportunity that can benefit from our skills, then I go for it. I try to find things that are big gaps in the market, where an audience is underserved and where our skills apply.”

In this We Are Austin Tech video, Strausberg shares her thoughts on the opportunities for 9W Search in Austin.

And not to be outdone by Google in its backyard, AT&T on Tuesday also announced plans to deliver a 1 Gigabit broadband network to Austin.
“Most encouraging is the recognition by government officials that policies which eliminate unnecessary regulation, lower costs and speed infrastructure deployment, can be a meaningful catalyst to additional investment in advanced networks which drives employment and economic growth,” Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO, said in a news release.
AT&T already announced plans to expand its broadband access and now reports “it is prepared to build an advanced fiber optic infrastructure in Austin, Texas, capable of delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second.”
“AT&T’s expanded fiber plans in Austin anticipate it will be granted the same terms and conditions as Google on issues such as geographic scope of offerings, rights of way, permitting, state licenses and any investment incentives,” according to the news release.
On Tuesday, Google held a press conference at Brazos Hall downtown to announce its Google fiber will be coming to Austin. It’s only the second city in the country to receive the super fast broadband network, which is 100 times faster at uploading and downloading speeds than average Internet broadband services available to most consumers. Google plans to start working on the network immediately.
“First you’ll see our surveyors and engineers around town, working to put together a good construction plan,” according to its news release. “Then construction will actually start.”
Google’s fiber service is expected to be available in Austin homes beginning in mid-2014.

BY LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Google fiber is coming to Austin.
It’s only the second city to get the Google fiber network which began rolling out in Kansas City, Kan. last year.
Google officials made the announcement Tuesday morning at a packed Brazos Hall conference center downtown filled with more than 100 local and state business officials, politicians and media representatives. The room erupted into applause when Google officially announced the fiber network for Austin with a wall-sized slide that proclaimed:

“Hello, Austin, Goodbye, loading bars”

The Google fiber network has already elicited a response from broadband competitor AT&T, based in Dallas, which on Tuesday also announced plans to deliver a 1 Gigabit broadband network to Austin. AT&T issued a release right after the Google event. AT&T “is prepared to build an advanced fiber optic infrastructure in Austin, Texas, capable of delivering speeds up to 1 Gigabit per second.”
No word yet on how Internet providers Time Warner Cable and Grande Communications will react to the new Google fiber network.

So what does all of this mean?

The Google fiber network means super fast uploading and downloading speeds that are 100 times faster for businesses and homes than what most broadband Internet users currently experience, as well as TV service with hundreds of high-definition channels. With 1 Gigabit Internet access, you can upload a 90 minute concert in 10 seconds or upload 300 vacation photos in 12 seconds.
“Way to go Austin. You’re changing the world,” said Gov. Rick Perry, who encouraged everyone to Tweet out the news using the hashtag #FiberATX.
The Google fiber network in Austin will transform the city’s already super hot technology startup industry and could lead to the world’s next Google, Perry said.
“Already, Austin is home to some of the boldest, most creative, most visionary people in the world,” Perry said. “This development will mean another way for those visionary companies, and many to come I would venture to guess, to help them take those innovations and those visions and make them a reality. It vastly increases the odds the next great thing, the next Google, will be born and bred right here in the Lone Star State. For these types of companies the connection with the Internet is the air that they breathe. The faster and the more stable, the better.”

Google fiber should spur even more technology startups in Austin

High speed Internet not only lets consumers stream videos, upload and download pictures and skype without issues, the Google fiber network can unleash all kinds of possibilities and innovations. The industries most likely to benefit include healthcare, education, new media, broadcast, business services, software companies and cloud computing businesses. The Google fiber network may even spawn new industries that don’t yet exist, said Joshua Baer, co-founder of Capital Factory, a coworking and technology accelerator downtown. He installed Time Warner’s 50 megabit network into his workplace recently at a cost of $4,000 a month. He was going to advertise that Capital Factory had the fastest Internet network in the city, but now Google’s announcement has made that obsolete, he said.
“For geeks, fast Internet is like a big monitor and a good chair,” Baer said. “It leads to higher job satisfaction and productivity.”
The Google fiber network means more companies and people will move to Austin to take advantage of the lightning fast Internet speeds, Baer said. It also means that more companies will launch the latest products and services here for the wired population to test out. And the Google fiber network will spawn all kinds of innovations that can only be left up to the imagination for now, he said.

When is Google fiber coming and how much will it cost?

While Google fiber’s pricing has not yet been announced, the Kansas City service runs about $70 a month for Internet service and $120 a month for combined TV and Internet service. In Kansas City, Google also offers “free” Internet which offers average American broadband speeds at no monthly charge for at least seven years to any homeowner who pays a $300 construction fee. Google plans to announce a business service package in Austin, said Kevin Lo, Google’s general manager of access services, but consumers are its priority.
Google will start working right away to build its infrastructure, Lo said. The company would not disclose the cost of the network but Lo said no taxpayer incentive money will be used to build and deploy the network. It is expected to be in operation by mid-2014, he said. TechCrunch cited a report estimating that Google would spend $11 billion to rollout its service nationwide to 20 million homes.

In addition to consumers and businesses, Google plans to work with the city of Austin to put its Google fiber network in 100 public institutions such as libraries, community centers and schools for free.
Austin applied to be the first recipient of the Google fiber technology in 2001 and it competed against more than 1,100 communities. Google selected Kansas City. But Austin never gave up, said Mayor Lee Leffingwell. The city’s business and community leaders, with Councilwoman Laura Morrison spearheading the effort, kept lobbying for the technology to come to Austin, he said. The city created videos, email marketing and social media campaigns and more. The campaign was called BigGigAustin.
“When Google was originally choosing where to bring fiber, Austin had one of the most enthusiastic reponses,” said Milo Medin, vice president of access services at Google.

Google fiber can lead to new innovations

“It’s a resource that can help make our city even more innovative,” Mayor Leffingwell said.
Austin asked its citizens how they would use the Google fiber network and they came up with a wide range of responses from interactive classrooms and medical center imaging and teleconferencing to uniquely Austin ideas like streaming live broadcasts of concerts and turning Austin into the live music capital of the Web, Morrison said. Other ideas included a smart energy management system for the home and a interactive town hall meeting online.
Morrison also recognized Gary Chapman, 58, a professor at the University of Texas, who died in 2010, and worked tirelessly to bring high-speed Internet access to Austin.

Creating fiberhoods in Austin

Morrison also mentioned that the Google fiber network will create “fiberhoods” that provide everyone access to the Internet. She showed a video of people in Austin proclaiming how they would use the high speed network.

Google has been in Austin since 2009 and has more than 100 employees in the city. Google briefly opened an office downtown and then shut it down and moved its staff to a North Austin campus.
Google sponsored a happy hour in February with RISE Austin and Engine Advocacy at Rattle Inn. At that event, Google gave away Google Austin T-shirts. The Engine Advocacy spokesman said the focus of the event was on H1-b Visas, patent reform and broadband spectrum access. But Google was mum about its plans for rolling out Google fiber, which was already in the works.

In a globally competitive world, Internet speeds matter

“We’re here because speed matters,” said Medin with Google. “At Google, we’re obsessed with speed.”
Everyone knows the frustration of trying to upload or download a large file on the Internet, Medin said. It wasn’t long ago that broadband Internet access was a novelty, he said. Broadband Internet access has led to all kinds of new innovations on the Web, he said. Yet despite the innovations, the speed of broadband access had not gotten that much better for most people, Medin said.
Today, the U.S. ranks 16th in Internet speeds worldwide and yet consumers pay some of the highest rates in the world, Medin said.
“This is a problem in a world that is globally competitive,” he said.
Medin said he was sadden to read a story in the Wall Street Journal in January about high school students who hang out in the parking lots of Starbucks and McDonald’s to use the free Wi-Fi to complete their homework.
“We’re giving everyone living within Austin the choice to use Google fiber,” he said. “No more waiting on the Internet.”
With the Google fiber Internet and TV package, consumers will get a Digital Video Recorder and they will be able to record up to eight high-definition television shows at the same time.
“The way Google fiber works, we build where you tell us to,” Medin said. The first rollouts of the service will be in the neighborhoods with the most demand, he said. The area that has the most people sign up for the service will get it first.
Google has confirmed that it’s going to bring Google fiber to small businesses and that’s expected to make Austin, which has a growing technology base, even more competitive with Silicon Valley, said Eugene Sepulveda, CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas.
“It means greater productivity and a higher quality of life,” Sepulveda said. “It will definitely be a competitive advantage for Austin.”

Google’s fiber network has spurred Kansas’ Silicon Prairie startup industry, said Lo with Google. Today, some areas without high speed Internet access resort to putting information on thumb drives and flying to another business location to transfer giant files, Lo said. The Google fiber network in Kansas has created a clustering effect where businesses that need access to dependable broadband access locate, Lo said.

High tech companies are already looking to relocate to Texas

Already, the Austin Technology Council gets a few calls every week from California high-tech companies looking to move to Texas to escape high taxes in California, said Julie Huls, president and CEO of ATC. Now she expects even more calls.
“Google fiber validates Austin as a Tier One market for technology,” Huls said. “It really solidifies our place. The announcement alone will create additional global visibility for Austin.”
Huls said she recently spoke with the Kansas City Technology Council CEO who told her that Google fiber has dramatically changed the city and spurred further technology startups.

If I had Google fiber I would…..

Following the official announcement, the invited guests went upstairs for tacos and sodas and to receive Google blue “swag bags” with a white Google fiber Austin T-shirt in them. People also filled out red Google map marker stickers that said “If I had Google fiber I would ….” They filled in the blank with all kinds of suggestions including work from my hammock and rule the world and they placed them on a map of Austin.

Google kicked off the announcement with this video.

This video gives even more details on Google fiber.

Gov. Rick Perry’s speech at the Google fiber event.

Nathan Bernier with KUT Austin has uploaded a soundcloud file with the full 30 minute press conference, if you would like to listen to it yourself.

For more information on the availability of the Google Fiber service in Austin, sign up for updates.

BY RANDY LANKFORD
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

If Tim Porter didn’t let a bomb blowing up in his hands stop him, he’s certainly not going to back down from a bully. Porter, who retired from the army as a sergeant first class in 1998, lost all the fingers on his left hand and all but the forefinger on his right when a C-4 explosive device he was dismantling in a training exercise detonated. Doctors were able to save the thumbs on both hands and replace Porter’s left index finger with one of his toes. A less-than-full complement of fingers didn’t keep him from creating a career on a keyboard though.
His curious nature, entrepreneurial desire and determination to protect children drove Porter to create Appddiction Studio, a San Antonio-based mobile applications development company, best known for its “Stop Bullies” app.
“I was working in the information technology department at the San Antonio Express-News,” explains Porter, “and I could see how quickly applications for hand-held devices were growing. It was obviously the fastest-growing segment of the development market. So I taught myself how to develop mobile apps. It took me about two years to learn it on my own.”
The first apps Porter’s company created were for preschool children to teach them the alphabet, shapes, colors and how to count. And while that work was rewarding, it wasn’t enough for Porter. Driven by ever-increasing news accounts of bullying and childhood suicides, Porter developed his anti-bullying app that has spread across the nation.
“I wanted to help prevent those suicides, so I did some research,” he explains. “I talked to a lot of school administrators to find out how kids were reporting bullying.
“In most schools a kid has to go into the office, or put a note in a shoebox or a locker somewhere to report bullying. I felt that was pretty antiquated. Most kids today either have a smart phone or want one. And the main reason parents give their children smart phones is to make sure they’re safe and at school.”
Porter’s concept was to give children a way to immediately report incidents of bullying to school administrators, in real time, accompanied by video footage or photos of the event.
“Now,” says Porter, “instead of finding out about it hours or days later, school officials can respond immediately and it’s not just one student’s word against another’s. There’s documentation, proof so schools can be more proactive and preventative in tackling bullying and other incidents.”
Shelly Smede, principal of Eagle Rock Middle School, vouches for the value of the program.
“The Stop Bullies app by Appddiction Studio and Tim Porter has received a warm welcome in our middle school. Students who would never visit the office to get a paper ‘bully report’ will send in a report via their smart phones from home. We also do the Safe School Ambassador program at Eagle Rock, and Ambassadors have used the app as a means to connect with administration, reporting exclusion, bullying, and even a suicide threat. We ended up sending police officers to a young lady’s home to do a welfare check, and her family was incredibly grateful that a classmate was able to send us a picture of the Facebook messages she was sending that discussed her desperation. We also received pictures of threats that a boy from a high school across town was making to a female student in our building. We sent the pictures to his principal and the threats have stopped. Even though we’ve only had the app for less than a month, I cannot imagine our school without it. A few days ago, I told a community member about it and he said, ‘Why don’t all of our schools have this?’”
Introduced in 2011, the app is already credited with preventing three suicides among students who were being bullied.
“I’d estimate we’re currently protecting more than 35,000 children,” adds Porter who funded the startup of the company through his 401(k) retirement account. With $415,000 in sales, Appddiction has grown to six employees, mostly programmers, who are developing school and campus safety apps to go along with programs serving federal, state and city governments.
“Our campus safety app is being implemented at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio and the University of Miami in Florida. It alerts students of any emergencies on campus and allows them to connect to campus police without knowing the phone number. You have access to university policies and procedures, how to react in an emergency and how to contact university administrators. More and more universities are expressing interest in that app as a way of protecting students and staff.”
Appddiction is also creating an app to enable school districts to assess individual school campus safety procedures without cumbersome and time-consuming paper work. Porter believes early safety assessment and preparedness, along with effective responses to threats, are, like his recovery from his injuries, possible with determination.
“It’s all in your mind. If you have the intestinal fortitude you can do anything. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 fingers or not.”

The mysterious invitation from Google began to show up in email boxes on Thursday. The invitations were delivered to members of the press and leaders in the business community.

You’re Invited.
You are a leader here in Austin. Every day, your work and contributions help make our community better and stronger. That’s why we want you to be one of the first to hear about something new coming to Austin. Please join Google and the City of Austin for an announcement on Tuesday.

Tuesday, April 9th
Doors open at 10:30am
Program starts promptly at 11:00am

Google, which has more than 150 people at its Austin campus, is not commenting or providing any further details about the press conference.
But GigaOm, VentureBeat and CNet have all written articles speculating that the news could be about Google Fiber network might be coming to Austin. The network which is currently only available in Kansas City, delivers 1 Gigabit broadband upload and download speeds to the home. Google has said it plans to roll the service out to additional cities, but did not provide any timetable or additional information.
The Austin Business Journal is also reporting that the Google fiber announcement will be made next week, quoting unnamed sources.
VentureBeat reported that the addition of the Google Fiber Network to Kansas City last July has ignited that city’s startup industry. That’s one reason economic development and technology industry leaders want to see the network come to Austin and just on down the highway, San Antonio.
But no one knows for sure what the announcement might be. It could be a Google expansion in Austin or a new product line here. So speculation will continue until Tuesday when Google will reveal everything.

Here’s Austin’s promo video from 2010 designed to encourage Google to put its high-speed fiber network in Austin.