Category: Austin (Page 253 of 318)

To kick off a nationwide initiative focused on creating middle-class jobs and spurring the technology industry, President Barack Obama is in Austin today.
First off, he visited students at Manor New Tech High School, an innovative six year old school focused on science, technology, engineering and math.
“So this is the first stop that I’m making on a tour of the Austin area today,” President Obama said. “And I chose Austin partly because I just love Austin but also because there are some terrific things going on in this area, in communities like Manor. And there are terrific things going on in communities all across the country that are good models for all of America to follow.”
Manor New Tech High School is doing things differently than other high schools and it’s working, President Obama said. The majority of students don’t come from wealthy backgrounds, he said. Yet their test scores are high and the majority of the students go on to college.
“Our economy can’t succeed unless our young people have the skills they need to succeed,” President Obama said. “Every day, this school is proving that every child has the ability to learn the real world skills they need to succeed in college and beyond.”
In Austin, people are working together because they understand that when they work together everyone succeeds, President Obama said. Austin has created 85,000 new jobs in the last three years.
Apple and Visa are getting ready to open new offices and General Motors is hiring for its new innovation center, President Obama said. The tech sector makes up one quarter of new jobs in the city, he said.
“And all of this has helped to make Austin one of the fastest-growing cities in America,” Obama said.
People in Austin are doing something right and the rest of the country can learn from them, he said. His entire speech is available on the WhiteHouse.gov website.
After his visit to the school, President Obama had lunch at Stubb’s BBQ downtown and then travelled to Capital Factory, a startup incubator, to meet with entrepreneurs.

“We’re looking forward to showcasing Austin as an innovative model for the rest of the country.” #ObamaAustin baer.ly/16iud2l

— Joshua Baer (@joshuabaer) May 9, 2013

Later, the President toured Applied Materials, a semiconductor manufacturer. Austin’s Mayor Lee Leffingwell attended the event as well as San Antonio’s Mayor Julian Castro.
President Obama also launched a competition to establish the first of three manufacturing innovation institutes. He is seeking to set up 15 manufacturing innovation institutions across the country and is currently seeking $1 billion investment from Congress to establish them.
“No job in America should go unfilled just because a person doesn’t have the right skills,” President Obama said.
During his talk at Applied Materials, the President recounted his trip to Capital Factory, where startups take off, President Obama said.
“And everywhere you turn, somebody has got a new idea,” he said. “They’re all thinking big. They’re taking risks. It’s exciting.”

At Capital Factory, he met the founders of Lynx Laboratories which makes a camera that can capture 3-D images. He also met Stacy Zoern, CEO of Community Cars, which makes electric cars for people in wheelchairs. He also met startups which rely on data for their businesses.
“And one of the things we’re doing to fuel more inventiveness like this, to fuel more private sector innovation and discovery, is to make the vast amounts of America’s data open and easy to access for the first time in history,” President Obama said. “So talented entrepreneurs are doing some pretty amazing things with data that’s already being collected by government.”
As an example, President Obama mentioned StormPulse, which uses government data to predict weather patterns.
And on Thursday, President Obama announced that the government is making even more data available and making it easier for people to find and use.
“And that’s going to help launch more startups,” President Obama said. “It’s going to help launch more businesses. Some of them undoubtedly will be using this data powered by chips that essentially started right here at Applied Materials.”
To read President Obama’s full remarks at Applied Materials, please visit the Whitehouse.gov website.

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Beyonic, a company whose software connects major global finance sources with payment networks in the developing world to facilitate mobile payments, won the IBM Global Entrepreneur pitch competition Wednesday at the IBM campus on Burnett.
Beyonic founder Luke Kyohere, from Uganda, said 20 percent of the $150 billion paid out in cash in developing nations is lost for various reasons, including having to pay armed guards to transport it. In the countries where Beyonic works and hopes to expand, people lack smart phones and debit cards and though mobile payment systems exist, they are fragmented. So Beyonic created a cloud-based, Software as a Service, known as SaaS, platform to connect with those mobile payment systems, meaning $30 billion in funds now reaching their intended beneficiaries. Currently the company has signed on with the three largest networks in Uganda and Kenya which, Kyohere said, gives the company 75 percent of the market.
Kyohere, who has started three companies and sold one, said Beyonic was looking for $80,000 for platform development, $220,000 for marketing and sales and $200,000 for integration. The company hopes to move into the $70 billion microfinance market, and the $320 billion public and government sector. “We want to be the Twilio for payments,” Kyohere said.
The IBM Global Entrepreneur Mentor Days program admits companies under five years old whose business models fit the theme IBM Smarter Planet. Companies interested in applying must use data capture or integration, integrate data laterally across and end-to-end process, system, organization, industry of value chain and must “yield new insights that drive actions, improving the outcome.” Those outcomes must change the end-user experience or ecosystem with intelligence that’s “real-time, forward-looking, or predictive.”
Participants must become members of the IBM Global Entrepreneur program and receive mentoring from area experts like Mitch Jacobson, who is Co-director and lead adviser to ATI Clean Energy companies, Sancia Matthyssen, business partner transformation leader in IBM’s Business Partner organization and Jerry Sullivan, retired general partner from Adams Capital Management.
Three other finalists competed Wednesday afternoon.
Kin Valley is a closed social network that allows parents to control access to their children, which still allows children to participate. The business started with the idea of connecting families in a protected space but has been adopted by large organizations whose constituents are children, such as the Girl Scouts of America in Houston, Puerto Rico Health and Human Services Department, Navajo Nation Department of Education and Childstart. Kin Valley exceeds federal standards for online child protection. Parents get to choose the level of interaction between their kids and all other participants on an individual basis. Founder Jim Donnelly has had five successful startups and exits.
Picture it Settled is what founder Don Philbin calls “Moneyball” for legal negotiations. Since the majority of cases are settled out of court, Philbin said, negotiations can take a long time, involving anywhere from two moves to 50. Philbin, himself a lawyer, said Picture it Settled uses a model of 13,000 cases involving hundreds of thousands of moves to create a predictive model of what the actual settlement number will be, helping attorneys figure out where to begin negotiations with a visual model of where each of the parties might begin and what the actual number will likely be.
There’s still maneuvering to be done, Philbin said. “The right number at the wrong time is still the wrong number.” But with the software, attorneys can start closer to the mark than they otherwise might have and settle negotiations more quickly.
“People are irrational during lawsuits,” Philbin said, “but they are predictably irrational.”
Philbin’s target market includes corporate counsel, trade associations, people responsible for strategic partnerships.
The fourth finalist was Toopher, an app for IOS and Android that tackles the $114 billion annual problem of ID theft and hacking. Toopher authenticates your password at ATMs, your own computer and other places where you use security, without your phone ever leaving your pocket. With Toopher, just having the password isn’t enough, your phone’s location awareness system has to verify that it’s you. The app even logs users out when they walk away or locks down accounts when someone else has tried to activate them.
There were two keynote speeches at the event as well. Jeff Eisen, IBM Chief Architect for Watson Core Technology spoke about the development of Watson, an artificial intelligence that can break down human language looking for answers. The technology made a debut on the game show Jeopardy in 2011. Currently the IBM team is moving Watson into the medical services field where misdiagnosis and diagnoses that are not evidence based is a critical problem.
Watson can read and understand the lexicon of hundreds of medical journals and articles. So, with a cancer patient for example, Eisen said, a doctor can enter a patient’s medical reports and Watson can recommend additional tests. With the input of the test results, Watson can prescribe various courses of treatment based on copious amounts of data.
IBM also hopes to move Watson into the financial services realm.
Rudy Garza, Austin angel investor and founder of G-51, gave the final keynote speaking on mentorship, calling LinkedIn “the coolest thing ever” for building mentoring networks.
It is difficult, Garza acknowledged, to approach someone for whom you have respect and ask him or her a question that may sound stupid, only because you’re new in the arena and that person is a veteran. But it’s crucial to overcome that anxiety because the newer you are, the more you need to develop mentorship relationships that you can call on when it’s crunch time.
“You can’t wait until you’re at the launch point, with money in the bank,” Garza said. “Once you put the money in the bank it’s like running through a tunnel with a train behind you. You know, or should know exactly how long company will operate before run out of money. You can’t stop and say ‘Oh wait, I need to go hire someone. I don’t know anyone to hire as VP of sales.” If you have a mentor team, however, you can tap those people for ideas about who to hire fast. They’ll often even help you select someone.

BY LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Mike Maples Jr. wants Austin entrepreneurs to create a “Thunder Lizard,” a $100 billion company within 10 years.
He explained that the idea for Thunder Lizards comes from Godzilla, the fictional giant lizard hatched from radioactive atomic eggs in Japan, that stomped on entire cities, spit fire, destroyed things and was a force to be reckoned with by everyone who encountered him. Godzilla, the Thunder Lizard with an attitude, created chaos and destruction.
“A great startup aspires to be a Thunder Lizard and there’s no plan B,” Maples said.
That’s the kind of company that Austin needs, Maples told a crowd of about 150 people gathered for the Austin Technology Council’s 2013 CEO Summit at the ACL Live’s Moody Theater on Wednesday.
Maples, formerly co-founder of Motive in Austin, now runs Floodgate, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
“The tech industry is an industry of exceptionalism and that a very small number of companies truly matter,” Maples said.
In the beginning of his talk, Maples referred to Brett Hurt’s Lucky7.io blog in which Hurt lays out the different stages of companies. Austin has stage one companies in the consulting and services industry like Perficient and stage two companies that have products like Bazaarvoice, HomeAway and Solarwinds. And stage three companies that are sustainable franchise companies like Dell and Whole Foods.
But Maples sees there is an even longer view of the “long game,” and those are the multi-billion dollar world changing enterprises.
Then Maples launched into a fascinating discussion of “exponential entrepreneurship,” which he links to Albert Einstein and his non-linear way of thinking.
In the tech industry when it comes to exponential entrepreneurship, two basic laws exist, Maples said.

The first basic law is Moore’s Law, which states that computing performance doubles every 18 months. Moore’s Law animates the magic of the tech industry, Maples said.
“The power of Moore’s Law is more powerful than any incumbent,” Maples said.
“Moore’s law guarantees that the tech industry is not an industry of bubbles. The technology industry is always going to have a magical supply of startups to challenge the incumbents.”
It is our asymmetric weapon of the startup, Maples said. The PC supplanted the mainframe, and then the networked server disrupted the PC industry, followed by the Internet and social networking.
Maples also said that he believed the social networking wave in the computer industry was over and it was time to get on with the next wave of innovations.
The second law Maples explained is the Power Law, which states that the biggest outcome is bigger than all of the other outcomes combined and the next biggest outcome is bigger than all of the cumulative next set of outcomes combined.
In the next year, angels will fund 10,000 to 20,000 companies and 50 to 100 of them will not suck and will provide an exit greater than $50 million, Maples said. About 10, plus or minus five, will be special, Maples said. He defines special as getting to $100 million in profitable revenue within five years of Series A funding.
“In a typical year, the most valuable company is worth more than the other 9,999 companies combined,” Maples said. “That’s pretty interesting. That’s pretty counter-intuitive.”
Maples hopes that Twitter, one of his early investments, will have the most valuable crown some year.
So what does the Power Law mean?
“Being awesome is about being number one and no plan B,” Maples said. “Being number two is dramatically worse than being number one and being number three almost doesn’t matter, particularly in a given market segment. But high tech is a winner take all business.”
Among Maples’ angel investments, Twitter is by far, worth more than all his other angel investments combined. Twitter is worth more than 200 times his original investment, Maples said.
Dropbox is worth more, right now, than all of the other YCombinator funded companies combined, Maples said.
“The Power Law is an important law to respect,” he said. “It animates exceptionalism just as much as Moore’s Law.”
Going long involves embracing these laws as weapons of advancement and entrepreneurship, Maples said.
“I basically believe high tech entrepreneurship is about using the asymmetric power of Moore’s Law to create one of the ten best companies of the year,” Maples said.
So to create a breakthrough company, entrepreneurs need to use nonlinear reasoning. And that’s hard because people are hardwired for linear thinking. Maples used Einstein’s exponential reasoning and nonlinear thinking as examples of creating breakthrough ideas. He had counterintuitive and abstract ideas.
Today, too many entrepreneurs reason by analogy when they come up with their startup idea, Maples said. They copy what others do but with a slight variation, he said. That will not give you a breakthrough idea, he said.
“When people say I’m the this of that I almost always say no,” Maples said.
Also, the Lean Startup methodology to figure out a startup idea will not lead to the breakthrough idea, Maples said.
He challenged entrepreneurs to employ first principle reasoning and to come up with a valuable company that nobody is building.
To quote from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book Maples read when he was ten and still considers one of the most meaningful books on entrepreneurship, Maples displayed a slide that stated, “The limits that we experience in this world are usually not created by the world they are created in our own minds.”
“Break the chains of your thought and you break the chains of everything,” he said.
Tech entrepreneurs today have an imagination problem, he said.
“The thing that I’ve learned from these entrepreneurs is the really great ones are the ones that refuse to see the limits that other people see,” he said.

BY LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

No one disputes that Austin has become a major technology hub.
But some say that Austin tech entrepreneurs don’t think big enough when it comes to launching startups.
“Too many Austin companies are lifestyle companies not betting on world domination like Silicon Valley,” said Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin. Austin tech entrepreneurs need to focus on innovation and changing the world at scale, Metcalfe said. That’s what he did when he co-founded 3Com in 1979. They wanted to connect the world and that resulted in new jobs, but it wasn’t the focus, Metcalfe said.
“Our goal was innovation at scale,” he said.
Metcalfe was one of three experts on a panel titled “The Long Game: Building Tech Successes” at the Austin Technology Council’s CEO Summit Wednesday morning at ACL Live at the Moody Theater in downtown Austin. Mark McClain, CEO of SailPoint Technologies, moderated the panel.
Instead of building really big companies, some worry that Austin entrepreneurs sell their ventures too soon.
The hardest decision for the VC and the founder is when is the right time to take an offer, said Brett Hurt, vice chair, founder of Bazaarvoice and now venture partner at Austin Ventures.
John Arrow, CEO and Founder of Mutual Mobile, said there is certainly the possibility in Austin that companies are selling too soon. Last year, Mutual Mobile turned down an buyout offer for $50 million. “It’s something we very seriously looked at,” Arrow said. But the company’s ideology focused on making the world a better place through mobile technology, Arrow said. But if there was another zero behind the offer and it was $500 million that might trump their ideology, he said.
The way to solve the systemic issue resulting in a lack of innovative tech startups in Austin is to get more companies starting up in Austin, Arrow said.
“People are starting up companies in the Valley like people in Austin are starting up bands,” Arrow said.
He recommended starting a tech entrepreneur class in high school to get kids interested at an early age.
Mutual Mobile is four years old and has 350 employees. The founders just launched its stock option plan and the question they got asked the most from its employees was when is the Initial Public Offering, Arrow said. They needed to educate the employees on other ways to redeem the stock options other than an IPO like through free cash flow and share buyback, Arrow said.
Silicon Valley has the gold rush and swing for the fences mentality and Austin needs to adapt more of that attitude, said Hurt.
“I think the biggest thing missing in Austin is know-how,” said Hurt. He details his thoughts in a post “The State of Tech Entrepreneurship in Austin” on his Lucky.io blog.
He recounted how Sergey Brin and Larry Page tried to sell the source code for Google to Excite for $1 million but they got turned down. So they went on to create a world changing company. Hurt said Austin entrepreneurs have the potential to create the next world changing company.
“Let’s think bigger and not become the India to Silicon Valley,” Hurt said.
Austin needs to change the world through innovation, he said.
“Austin has a huge opportunity here,” he said.
Companies should not focus on IPOs as the ultimate accomplishment, Metcalfe said.
The IPO is just a relatively minor financial event in a company’s lifecycle and it’s not the end game, Metcalfe said. After 3Com went public, Metcalfe said he was still there.
“You’ve got a company to run right after the IPO,” Metcalfe said.
It wasn’t an exit. It wasn’t game over. He still had a company to run.
“I see a lot of product pitches, a lot of them, and too many of them have a slide about the exit,” Metcalfe said. “Someone is teaching our entrepreneurs to put an exit slide in their six minute pitches and it breaks my heart. Cause the company doesn’t even exist yet and they’re already talking about exiting. What’s the entrance?”
Another entrepreneur had a slide about the company’s philanthropic endeavors, and Metcalfe told him to focus on making money first before worrying about how to give it away.
Austin also needs to have more tolerance for failures, said Hurt. In Silicon Valley, they churn out failure after failure, he said. That’s why it turns out so many successes, he said. They continue to experiment.
Austin now has several incubators with Capital Factory, Incubation Station, DreamIt Ventures and Tech Ranch, Hurt said.
“Most people in incubators will never make money,” Hurt said. “Most experiments will fail.”
But it only takes a few to succeed to create a culture of innovation, he said.
One of the biggest things happening in Austin is the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. The school will not only have doctors and biologists but engineers and entrepreneurs all over it, Metcalfe said.
Biotechnology, nanotechnology and 3-D printing offer all kinds of possibilities for entrepreneurs to develop startups, said Hurt.
Hurt also recommended the book Abundance, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, to encourage entrepreneurs to think about big ideas.
Diamandis has started a company, Planetary Resources, to mine asteroids, Metcalfe said. That’s a big idea, he said. At the University of Texas at Austin, undergraduate students suffer from ideas that are too small, Metcalfe said.
That’s true of a lot of entrepreneurs in Austin, Hurt said.
“They are thinking too small,” Hurt said. “They are thinking of an exit strategy too early.”
Austin has plenty of money, Metcalfe said. Venture capitalists know how to fly to Austin too, he said.
“We need to focus on having better companies,” he said.

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

This month at SA New Tech: Biovideo shows how it documents your baby’s first moments, SocialREST helps developers get their iOS apps on Facebook, and an Amazing JellyBean fixes your internet connection.

The Amazing JellyBean
The Amazing JellyBean is a physical device that plugs into both your modem and wireless router. It can be used to provide a hard reset to both devices in the event that your internet goes down. This replaces the manual “fix my connection” dance we all know and love (unplug everything, wait, correctly plugging everything back in — in the correct order) with the press of a single button.
Amazing JellyBean creator Jim Pyle originally got the idea for the product when his wife called him at work about a problem with their home internet.
“I told her to go unplug the cable modem and she was like ‘which one is it?’” said Pyle. “The idea that I could just tell her to push one button to reset the internet is such a simple thing to do.”
According to Pyle, 80 percent of all connection problems can be fixed by rebooting the modem and router in the correct way. This includes problems related to power fluctuations on a network that affect the wireless signal or static buildup that slows the connection down.
The Amazing JellyBean is currently working on a prototype Bluetooth-to-phone connection that will allow users to reset the connection with their phones — entirely removing the need to go find the router-modem cables and press the button at all. The prototype should be ready by the end of June.
The Amazing JellyBean is funding their Bluetooth prototype and first round of production with a Kickstarter campaign that raised $13,968.
[Amazing JellyBean video]

SocialREST
SocialREST was born one year ago at the 3 Day Startup event in San Antonio. As of May 7, customers can sign up for the alpha version of the product at SocialREST.me. Founder Clayton Selby says the alpha product should be out this week.
The SocialREST product will help users connect their iOS apps with Facebook by providing a library of coding “shortcuts” — greatly reducing the time and effort developers must spend writing code for the process. SocialREST will also help developers easily adapt to any changes in Facebook’s API so that the developer doesn’t have to redeploy all their applications.
While SocialREST is not the only company providing this convenience, Selby says they will compete by offering a much deeper coding library as well as analytic services.
“We focus on making the library very, very simple and easy to use for developers. It’s not going be like any other run-of-the-mill library you see out there,” says Selby. “And we are committed to giving you the best analytics with that experience.”
The analytics portion of SocialREST will release later with their beta version. This service will help iOS developers find out how often their app’s social interaction on Facebook results in a conversion — a person actually purchasing their app from the App Store. This lets the developer know if his social media strategy is actually working when he incorporates that app with Facebook in different ways.
SocialREST has already created the foundation of their social data analytics service and is now working on creating a user friendly dashboard interface so their clients can take advantage of it. The first set of these analytics will be available in a month or two.

Biovideo
[Biovideo]

Founded in Mexico in 2006, Biovideo works with hospitals in Texas and Mexico to create a movie documenting all the special, emotional moments of your child’s birth. After the patient signs a consent form, a Biovideo team will handle the entire video and then will later edit the movie while collaborating with the newborn’s family.
“Before they leave the hospital they get to have their baby’s first movie, ready to share online, as private or as public as they want, to connect with their family and friends,” says CEO Carlos Villaseñor.
Each time a family shares their movie, the brands that sponsor the movie get more exposure through advertising. The brands payout to Biovideo as each movie becomes more viral. Brands sponsoring Biovideo include Johnson & Johnson, Disney, Pampers, State Farm, and others.
Biovideo is available at 19 different hospital systems in Texas and Mexico. The Texas office is based in San Antonio, and Biovideo is available in San Antonio’s Methodist and Baptist health systems. The company plans to expand to in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and El Paso in the future.
According to the Biovideo website, the company has already produced 150,000 videos for U.S. and Mexican families.

Noah Kagan is the CEO and founder of AppSumo in Austin.
He also blogs at OKDork and he moderates the Facebook Austin Startup Group. And that’s where I stumbled upon this post he made to Quora to answer the question “How do you start a business.”
He starts off by advising people to get all of their excuses for not starting a business out of the way and then take the plunge. It’s all about being fearless.
And at AppSumo, Kagan runs a How to Make Your First Dollar course in which he requires people to do a “Stranger Challenge” and go out and take a picture with a stranger who holds a sign proclaiming “I don’t know this person.” The exercise is designed to conquer people’s fears about failure. He’s aslo got a gallery of photos of people with strangers and blog posts about their experience. It’s an intriguing idea.
I’ve never met Kagan, but I’ve followed his adventures online. He wrote a fascinating blog post about why he got fired at Facebook and how it cost him an estimated $100 million in lost stock value. Kagan was employee number 30 at Facebook. I also like his post on the 18 books that changed his life. Kagan even has a Wikipedia entry detailing his roles at Facebook, Mint, KickFlip and AppSumo.
In his post, Kagan also advises people to test their idea on friends and to find a few customers who are willing to pay for the product or service. He says to do all of this before writing any lines of code.
“Validation is completed IF within 48 hours you can get 3 paying customers or 10 intented people,” Kagan writes in the post.
If no one wants it, then it’s time to move on to the next idea and that little bit of market research saved a ton of time and expense, according to Kagan.

Dell announced Monday the acquisition of Enstratius, Internet-based management software and services provider.
Enstratius, founded in 2008 and based in Minneapolis, Minn., helps organizations manage applications across private, public and a combination of the two types of cloud hosting services, known as hybrid. It supports more than 20 public and private cloud platforms including OpenStack, VMware, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. Enstratius can run on any type of cloud infrastructure. Cloud computing refers to the ability to share computer resources online in the “cloud,” rather than having dedicated local computer servers to handle the applications.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“As enterprises increase their use of public, private and hybrid clouds, the need for controls, security, governance and automation becomes more critical,” Tom Kendra, vice president and general manager, systems management, Dell Software, said in a news release. “Dell, together with Enstratius, is uniquely positioned to deliver differentiated, complete cloud-management solutions to enterprise customers, large and small, empowering them with the efficiency and flexibility in the allocation and use of resources.”

How big an impact does the technology industry have in Austin?
The Austin Technology Council’s Technology Economic Impact Report released on Monday puts the figure at $21 billion.
And the bulk or 80 percent of the city’s technology companies plan to hire new employees this year resulting in the creation of 10,000 new jobs, according to the report.
The report is being released in advance of the ATC’s third annual CEO Summit which takes place on Wednesday at the ACL Live at the Moody Theater. CEOS and high-level technology executives from Central Texas are expected to gather for the event to discuss the report, including a shortage of tech workers and other issues affecting the local technology industry.
The tech industry “must invest in aggressive recruiting and training methods,” according to Joel Trammel, chairman of the ATC.
Recruiting and retaining tech talent will be a major focus of the CEO Summit.
“So much of Austin’s economy is dependent on tech,” Julie Huls, President and CEO of ATC said in a news release. “Technology has a responsibility to the community – not only to create jobs, but to invest in building a sustainable engine for growth. Just as any dynamic business, Austin must now refine our strategy to be a national drive for innovation.”
The fastest growing tech sectors in Central Texas from 2012 to 2017 are engineering services, computer and computer peripheral equipment and software merchant wholesalers and customer computer programming services, according to the ATC report. The jobs most in demand include computer systems analysts, software developers for applications and systems and computer support specialists.

BY JOSHUA SCHECHTER
Special to Silicon Hills News

The maker movement is one of the hottest trends in the U.S. right now and no place was that more evident on Sunday than the Austin Mini Maker Faire at the Palmer Events Center in Austin.
A family-oriented day of discovery, imagination and inventiveness, the Faire offered a chance for people to show off their skills and learn from one another. Maker Faire aims to entertain, inform, and connect the community of Makers in Austin and surrounding areas.
The makers ranged from tech aficionados to off-the-grid types, from educators to inventors to garage tinkerers of all ages and backgrounds. The Faire focused on human resourcefulness, eclipsed, perhaps, only by passion and love of invention and creation.
The event appeared to be geared generally for children. Austin Tinkering School had tables of computer components for young children to take apart and reassemble. ATX Hackerspace gave soldering lessons to guide middle schoolers to create an LED bat. Kimberley Varney of www.thefoundery.org (sponsor of the Atlanta Mini Maker Faire) highlighted Maker Scouts, a kind of boy/girl scouts for junior makers, opening up ‘troops’ in Austin and San Antonio imminently. The FIRST Robotics teams showed off their student built robots, tossing frisbees and performing other attention-grabbing achievements.
The Sustainable Village showcased resourceful and green ways of living and nourishing personal and community lifecycle. Unfortunately, it didn’t have anything new or particularly innovative – especially for a city like Austin which has such a vibrant and vocal eco community.
On the commercial side of the maker movement, a bazaar of tinkerers and crafters peddled some interesting gadgets, gizmos, arduinos, and other do-it-yourself circuit boards and accessories. With all the hype around low-cost 3D printing (Staples now sells them online and soon in their stores), and hacker spaces, maker spaces and fab labs popping up everywhere, there appears to be a great opportunity in the maker community for commercialization of their hobbies. Very few entrepreneurs are capitalizing on this prospect…with a few notable exceptions:

• KRAFTWURX – On demand 3D printing in 70 materials at 116 production facilities worldwide. From platinum to gold to plastics to fire-glazed ceramics, Kraftwurx can turn any 3D idea into reality.
• Seasoned app developers Chaotic Moon Studios, are doing some innovative stuff in their labs. Their Smarter Cart shopping cart uses Xbox Kinect technology, a Windows 8 voice controlled tablet and a Parallax Eddie drive system to not only follow you around the store, but recommend specials and warn you about food allergies and preferences. Once adopted by retailers, it will make your checkout a snap, too.
• TechShop is a maker’s dream come true, and the Austin area is lucky enough to have one of six nationwide. Part fabrication and prototyping studio, part hackerspace and part learning center, TechShop has an entire collection of tools: Laser cutters, plastics and electronics labs, a machine shop, a wood shop, a metal working shop, a textiles department, welding stations and a waterjet cutter. They train you and give you access to design software, and over $1 million worth of equipment.

The Faire inspired me and I was thrilled to see such a lively local scene in the makers’ space. In the future, it would be great to see a more inclusive regional scope to involve cities like San Antonio and the Hill Country, and to embrace more maker businesses and industries, like clean and alternative energy incubators, so they may broadcast their innovations.
I was asked if it was worth the drive up from San Antonio with Sunday traffic? My answer: A resounding 011110010110010101110011 (“yes” in binary).

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

What drove Andrew McFadden, Director of Innovation and Business Development at Press Enterprise crazy, was that the Riverside County newspaper company he worked for only saw the downside in readers’ shift to the Internet. The publishers couldn’t see the tremendous opportunity that the shift afforded.
“I’ve been in startups,” he told them. “The hardest thing is to get the door open. You guys already have that. You can open any door you want. There’s money lying around the floor here.”
The newspaper company was already an 800-pound gorilla as far as Google’s search metrics were concerned. It churned out content and directed SEO traffic. But it wasn’t leveraging that position to sell ads. McFadden hooked up with one company, Local.com, that connected the newspapers’ advertisers to websites and social content. But the Press Enterprise was too small to get top tier service from that company. So, McFadden switched to Austin-based OwnLocal. That company, started in 2009, has four products that help leverage the newspaper’s presence to become more valuable to advertisers. AdForge software converts print ads to SEO and SEM optimized online ads. Local Hero is a business search optimization platform that includes maps, directions, coupons and more in a local directory. Web Builder helps small businesses create mini sites linked to the paper since up to 30 percent of the print advertisers they serve have no website. And Daily Deals is just that, complete with distribution and professional writing.
“Every day newspaper reps get calls for print ads, which are worth of a tenth of the price of an online listing,” said OwnLocal founder Lloyd Armbrust. “But online ads are hard to sell because people don’t understand the value.” Part of that value being that online ad ROI is trackable. Print ads’ ROI is much less so.
In smaller markets, advertisers don’t always recognize the value of online ads. They’re not trying to reach a nationwide marketplace, just penetrate a local one. Armbrust talked to a music store owner in Somerset, Pennsylvania who owned the only music store in town. Why would he need an ad? Because, Armbrust explained, when someone new came into town and Googled “music store Somerset, Pennsylvania” another store popped up as the top store. And that store had been gone 10 years. With an online ad, optimized both for SEO and SEM and linked to a heavyweight like the local paper, rankings are bound to rise.
But from McFadden’s standpoint, OwnLocal’s biggest advantage isn’t its software, it’s the company’s customer service. Newspapers buy this process from OwnLocal. They don’t control it or the software. So if something changes, or goes wrong, they need to know they won’t get left behind.
“I’m an (OwnLocal) advocate,” McFadden said. “Every software will have problems. It’s technology, that’s the nature of the business. Everything changes, the search engines change…. The difference I felt with going with OwnLocal is that when have I have a problem and mark an email urgent, I get a response right away. That has nothing to do with technology. That’s how you run your business.”
Armbrust had been in the newspaper industry several years before founding OwnLocal and had seen that print ad revenue was shrinking, and digital revenue was not rising to meet it.
He started his newspaper career as circulation call-center manager for the Duluth News-Tribune and moved to online sales in 2001. He became the expert at building newspaper websites, creating several from the ground up. In 2007, he was working for Morris Communications when the company sold more than a dozen of its small-town newspapers and a commercial printing operation to GateHouse Media. GateHouse was a huge organization with more than 400 publications at the time and it was difficult to get the company to pay attention to Armbrust’s efforts to bring small, community papers into the digital world. So he decided to go out on his own, starting with software that would digitalize print ads.
One of his brilliant strokes was that the paper’s ad reps don’t have to know anything about digital advertising. When they send out information about advertising, there’s a box that says “call your rep to upgrade” or “click here to upgrade.”
“It’s sort of a CRM for ad reps,” Armbrust said, “it adds to digital revenue but you don’t have to hire digital reps. That would be a problem because your print reps would be pissed ‘I’ve had that account for 20 years.’ It aligns everybody’s incentives.”
Armbrust launched OwnLocal in 2009 and in 2010 received funding from Y Combinator, Baseline Ventures, Lerer Media Ventures,the Knight Foundation, Automattic, Paul Buchheit and several other Angels.
Now, OwnLocal is used by more than 400 publications and continues to grow with 12 full time employees in Austin and nearly 40 contractors. The company hopes to get into countries like Japan and India. While the technology is easy to scale and software does a lot of the work, humans have to look over what’s been done because, as Armbrust said, “Computers do weird things.”