Category: Austin (Page 254 of 318)

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.”

Toshiba Lighting & Technology Corp. has bought GreenStar Products, which makes energy-efficient, long-lasting LED lights for roads and other outdoor areas.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Since February of 2012, Toshiba International Corp. has contracted with San Antonio-based GreenStar to make LED Lights.
GreenStar’s LED lights last longer and require less maintenance than traditional roadway lights. They also do not contain mercury or lead.
“We were attracted to GreenStar for its innovative product design and keen focus on developing luminaires that make the most of LED technology to address the market’s desire for more energy efficient and low maintenance products,” Ken Honeycutt, Toshiba’s LED Lighting Systems Division president, said in a statement. “This acquisition allows us to supply a variety of markets from commercial and industrial to governmental and institutional in North America and beyond, with innovative, reliable products that create real value.”
CPS Energy has contracted with GreenStar to replace 20,000 of the city’s lights with LED lights in a year long program that began last year.
In addition to GreenStar, Toshiba also bought Consert, a smart energy home meter company with 60 employees, in February of this year.

MDI Group, an information technology staffing company based in Atlanta, has opened a new Austin office.
MDI recently opened an office Fort Worth and has another Texas office in Dallas and seven other locations nationwide.
The company decided to locate in Austin because Austin’s technology industry is booming and “Staffing Industry Analysts places Austin in the top 20 temporary IT staffing markets,” according to a news release.
MDI plans to have 20 employees in the Austin office by the end of the year. It already has its first client here.
Daryl Fox, a University of Texas graduate, will oversee the Austin office. She has nearly 25 years of IT business development experience.
“After 16 years, I’m excited to return to Austin and leverage my local IT experience and relationships on behalf of MDI,” Fox said. “We’ve hit the ground running and are pleased to have landed our first of many Austin clients – providing ‘best fit’ IT staffing services and contingent workforce solutions.”

The Austin Technology Incubator, known as ATI, in the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, reported its companies raised $35 million during the first three months of 2013.
During the last five years, ATI companies have raised more than $250 million of investor capital.
The ATI companies reporting funding in the first part of this year are as follows:

• Spredfast, a social marketing software provider, raised $18 million in venture capital led by OpenView Venture Partners with InterWest Partners and Austin Ventures.
• Savara Pharmaceuticals received a $7.4 million second tranche of a its 416 million Series B financing and received a $4 million grant by the National Institutes of Health. Savara develops pulmonary drugs to treat Cystic Fibrosis.
• Xeris Pharmaceuticals raised $1.7 million in venture capital and $1.9 million from the Texas’ Emerging Technology Fund for the commercialization of its Glucagon Rescue Pen (G-Pen) ™ and G-Pen Mini™ for diabetes treatment.
• Admittance Technologies received $2 million from the ETF for the development and commercialization of CardioVol™, their first platform technology, which enhances the performance of existing cardiac devices and the detection of early signs of heart failure.
• WheelInnovationz received $868,000 in seed funding to continue the development of its mobile-device management software.

“Our number one job is to get ATI companies funded. We accomplish this by surrounding them with talent they couldn’t access otherwise,especially at their early stage,” Isaac Barchas, director, Austin Technology Incubator, said in a news release. “Q1 2013 delivered on this, and we congratulate our portfolio and alumni companies on their momentum.”

InCube Labs, a research incubator in San Antonio, Thursday announced it has launched two new life sciences companies.
Those companies are Theracle, which has developed a treatment for brain cancer, and iBridge Medical, which is developing a technology platform to manage patient’s implanted medical devices.
That brings to five the total number of companies at InCube Labs. The others are Corhythm, Neurolink and Fe3 Medical.
“These new companies represent the 21st century innovation and high-wage job creation that are fast becoming a thriving part of San Antonio’s economy,” Mayor Julian Castro said in a news statement.
“Our new companies represent exciting opportunities to dramatically improve patient care,” Mir Imran, InCube Labs Chairman & CEO, said in a statement.
In 2010, InCube Labs and the City of San Antonio announced the creation of InCube Lab’s San Antonio Innovation Center and three companies moved from Silicon Valley to San Antonio – Fe3 Medical, Corhythm and Neurolink.
InCube Labs also has a center in San Jose, CA.