Category: Austin (Page 261 of 318)

TrueAbility Competes in the Finals of the SXSW Accelerator

March 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

TrueAbility of San Antonio made it to the finals of the South by Southwest Interactive’s Accelerator in the New Web Technologies category.
TrueAbility helps companies hire the best technical talent by assessing a job candidate’s technical skills in a live server environment. The company shortnes a company’s recruiting process and makes it easier and cheaper to hire great technical talent.
Luke Owen, co-founder and CEO, pitched the company in less than five minutes in front of a panel of judges Tuesday afternoon. Marcus Robertson, co-founder and chief technology officer, is also at the show.
At the end of his presentation, Owen fielded a lot of questions from the judges asking about whether the company would partner with universities doing Massive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, to certify students’ skills.
Bob Metcafle, one of the judges, mentioned he was taking a MOOC course in Python programming from MIT and he wanted to use TrueAbility’s testing to certify his skills at the end of the course.
Owen said universities have approached the company about partnerships but it is laser focused right now on helping companies hire the best information technology workers for their organizations.
TrueAbility faces three other competitors in the finals. They include Memoto, a company form Stockholm, Sweden, that makes a tiny wearable camera that automatically captures a person’s life in still photos. It’s also searchable and shareable through its smartphone apps. The other finalist is Wanderu from Boston. They company is a new travel startup that provides a simple way to find and book bus and train travel from Point A to Point B.
Rackspace Hosting sponsored the accelerator. The finalists will be announced tonight at 6 p.m. at SXSW Interactive.

Disclosure: TrueAbility is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News

Elon Musk and Grumpy Cat Are Big Hits at SXSW Interactive

March 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Photo courtesy of NASA

Elon Musk and Grumpy Cat stole the show at South by Southwest Interactive.
They received the most mentions in social media on Twitter and Facebook during the first four days of the technology festival, said Itai Asseo, vice president and creative architect of Digitas Labs.
Musk, co-founder of Paypal, founder of Tesla Motor and SpaceX, received 10,000 mentions on Twitter, followed closely by Grumpy Cat, which made a debut at Mashable’s tent and attracted a 600 person line outside the Mashable tent on Saturday to get their picture taken with the cat.
What people are tweeting about is a different type of thing than what garnered the most attention at the show, Asseo said.
Digitas collaborated with SXSW Interactive to crunch data from the show to present the real picture of SXSW Interactive during a panel Tuesday morning. Digitas’ Beth McCabe and Asseo, creative technologist behind Digitas Labs analyzed a variety of data collected before, during and at the end of the show.
Digitas used a new social data visualization tool called SODA to present their findings to more than 300 people gathered for the session.
The big themes from this year’s show revolved around space, the maker’s movement, data and entrepreneurs, McCabe said. Storytelling was also a big theme, but it is every year, she said.

Photo of Grumpy Cat courtesy of Mashable

Some of the most visible images shared from the show include Grumpy Cat, the Task Rabbit Van, which looked like a giant furry bunny, Brilliant Brew, a coffee truck run by General Electric that used a printing device to create intricate drawings in the foam of the lattes and Lyft, a ride sharing app that didn’t have any cars at the show so they brandished giant pink mustaches and gave people piggyback rides.

Photo by Guy Kawasaki

Also, NASA’s full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope was on display for two days at SXSW and it received a lot of attention.
“It’s inspiring and cool that a government organization like NASA was here at SXSW,” McCabe said.
The show’s attendance is expected to top 27,000 this year, up from 24,569 last year. Interactive has eclipsed music and film as the most popular part of the SXSW festival.
One of the interesting facts Digitas discovered is that no one from South Dakota made it to SXSW Interactive this year.

Elon Musck, SXSW Official Photo, courtesy of Peter Tsai Photography

Elon Musk, SXSW Official Photo, courtesy of Peter Tsai Photography

But people from every other state from the nation and dozens of foreign countries made it to Austin for the show.
The show targets young affluent decision makers. The most attendees fall into the 25 to 34 age range, followed by 35 to 44 year olds.
“We are the next generation of the leaders of this industry,” Asseo said. “We’re going to set the tone for this industry for the years to come.”
It’s also a highly educated group, he said.
Every panelist at the show, on average had 3,000 Twitter followers, 1,000 Facebook followers and the attendees also had quite a lot of influence, Asseo said.
From the words tweeted about the most at SXSW Interactive, Asseo and McCabe created Haikus for each day of the show. They are listed below.

Day One Haiku

SXSW Badge
MakerBot Vine Awesome Love
Party Play Talk Live

How much people were using Vine – fairly new tool launched by Twitter

Day Two Haiku

GrumpyCat Premier
Future-Looking Elon Musk
Biggest Party Time

Day Three Haiku

Watch Blogger Swiss Miss
Gore Defends Al Jazeera
Tonight Bands Perform

Day Four

Cityseed App Launch
Gomez Duck Lips, Spring Breakers
Shaq Interview Win

Three Entrepreneurs Recount Their Paths to Being Funded in Austin

March 11, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Justin Jensen with Cinetics, Matt Cohen with Onespot, Barry Evans with Calxeda and Claire England, executive director of RISE Austin

Barry Evans, co-founder and CEO of Calxeda, bootstrapped and eventually landed Venture Capital funding after seeking investment from California and Boston for his microchip company.
Justin Jensen, founder and CEO of Cinetics launched two successful Kickstarter campaigns to fund products for his company.
And Matt Cohen, a former partner with G-51 Capital, an early stage investment company in Austin, received angel money to launch OneSpot, an online advertising company.
They all detailed how they got money to back their ventures during a “Funded in Austin” panel in the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s Office at South by Southwest on Sunday afternoon.
“We really wanted to explore the entrepreneur’s perspective on fundraising in Austin,” said Claire England, executive director of RISE Global, an entrepreneurial conference in Austin. She moderated the panel.
People packed the room to hear the stories about how to get investors to back an early-stage startup. About a third of them were entrepreneurs, some investors and others interested in the subject, according to an informal survey England took of the room.
At first, England quizzed the panelists about their experiences and then the audience members asked the founders questions about their ventures.
Calxeda, founded in 2008, spent a year bootstrapped, got some strategic investment, Texas Emerging Technology Fund money and angel money and in 2010 closed on a $48 million Venture Capital round, Evans said. Calxeda makes ultra-low power server microchips that use ARM-based processors, which are the same ones used in iPhones and iPads.
Austin in 2008 through 2010 would not invest in early-stage hardware companies, Evans said.
He said he “burned a lot of time double checking that fact” and then went to Silicon Valley, Boston and even the Middle East for investors. The company’s first round of funding came from ARM Holdings, Abu Dhabi-based Advanced Technology Investment Co., Texas Instruments, Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners.
Eventually, Austin investors did back the company, Evans said. Last year, the company closed on a $55 million round adding Austin Ventures and Vulcan Capital as investors.
“The breakthrough for us was the help of the ATI (Austin Technology Incubator) we were able to figure out the VCs in the Bay that had investments in Austin,” he said.
Evans made sure to get on their schedule when they were visiting Austin. He also learned Battery Ventures was an early investor in Bazaarvoice, Solarwinds and others in town.
In the beginning, Evans spent 50 percent of his time looking for funding and now it’s about 10 percent to 15 percent, he said.
“You never stop fundraising as a CEO,” he said.
It’s Evans first startup and he learned a lot from the early days of fundraising. He said he developed a tactic early on where he would reach out to a potential investor to meet for coffee to just talk about his big idea. If they said yes, then he would pitch them. If they weren’t a fit, it was OK, because it really wasn’t a formal pitch, he said.
His biggest mistake was trying to raise too little money.
“I was asking for $5 million and ended up getting $48 million,” he said.
It was easier and faster to raise a larger amount and spread out the risk among several VC firms.
“It spoke to the risk that everyone was feeling about this crazy idea,” he said.
Onespot, an advertising company that created a platform to turn online content into ads, raised $1.5 million in angel funding last year.
“Angels invest for slightly different reasons than VCs,” said Cohen, the company’s president and founder. “Typically the main reason why angel investors are investing is that they really want to help out companies.”
Onespot sought out investors that could help the company make connections and give it advice, Cohen said.
“Angel investors have a lot more availability and time to give us than VCs,” Cohen said. “We will almost certainly raise a venture capital round later on.”
He advised the entrepreneurs in the room to continue to develop their minimal viable product and gain traction in their marketplace while seeking funding.
“If you’re not making a lot of progress fundraising, make progress on the product or service and then the actual fundraising processes will go a lot easier,” Cohen said.
It’s also important to find the right investors, he said. The most important thing is to do research on which angel investor is the best fit for your company, he said.
“Angel investors are investing in an individual,” he said. “They are putting their bet on you.”
Angel investing is about cultivating relationships, building a network and getting warm introductions anywhere you can, Cohen said.
At G-51 Capital, Cohen often took recommendations from lawyers that work with startups. Many of the lawyers will defer fees until a company gets funded.
Angel investors have their own vetting processes but they like referrals from lawyers and other trusted sources, he said.
“Angel investment is one of the areas where Austin really shines,” Cohen said.
Most angel investors write checks between $25,000 and $200,000, Cohen said. To be successful angel investors, they need to make between a dozen and three-dozen investments, he said.
“I wound up getting a number of angel investors in Austin and also in New York and California,” he said.
Cohen said he’s looking forward to seeing successful entrepreneurs in Austin giving back.
“The thing that brings capital and resources to a town is success,” he said.
In October of 2011, Cinetics completed a successful fundraising campaign on Kickstarter. The Austin-based startup originally sought to raise $20,000 and ended up with $486,518 from 2,019 backers.
“We were bootstrapped,” said Jensen. “We went to Kickstarter for presales.”
Cinetics created CineSkates “a portable tripod slider system that enables fluid, rolling video without the hassle of bulky camera gear.”
It’s a camera dolly that fits into a backpack for independent filmmakers and hobbyists so they “can get shots without breaking their bank or their back,” Jensen said.
“It was really a product that didn’t require a lot of prototyping and funding,” he said. “We built the first product for under $10,000. We really didn’t need any significant capital.”
Jensen advised entrepreneurs to put as much information as possible on the Kickstarter campaign so that potential funders don’t have to ask a lot of questions.
In January, Cinetics launched a second successful Kickstarter campaign for “CineMoco, a compact motor controlled dolly and slider for video and time-lapse photography.”
The CineMoco campaign more than doubled its goal of raising $50,000. The company ended up raising $113,913 from 283 backers.
When Cinetics started crowdfunding, it was one of the first Austin hardware companies to do so, Jensen said. But now many resources exist for companies seeking crowdfunding. He recommended the Austin Hardware Startup Meetup Group to learn about projects and funding.

It Takes a Startup Village and Chris Valentine Created One for SXSW

March 11, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Chris Valentine seems to be everywhere at once in SXSW Startup Village, watching, analyzing, conferencing, counting. One minute he’s in the Hilton’s Grand Ballroom gauging the crowd and seemingly an instant later he’s transported to the Austin Chamber offices (which actually can only be reached by an escalator, an outside door and an elevator).
This is his baby. The Startup Village, which last year was the darling of SXSW Interactive, was an idea he brought to Interactive director Hugh Forrest three years ago. Last year, he introduced Startup Austin—a series of events within the event– to showcase all the reasons Austin is a great city to build to transplant a startup. Ultimately, he’d love for Startup Village to consume an entire block of buildings…like an actual village.
There is a palpable energy in Startup Village. Everyone is hopped up on the possibilities of the new technologies, new companies, new investments. And Valentine shares in all of it.
“I’m so excited by all of it,” he said. “There are so many incredible things happening with technology and I get to work with some of the most amazing, smartest people alive. I was fortunate to find something I am passionate about. I love what I do, I am good at what I do and I’m respected for what I do. ‘Before, I did events but I didn’t specialize. I didn’t have a passion. Now I love to focus on technology.”
He says this despite the fact that managing the Accelerator and Startup Village is fraught with potential failure.
“Because it’s such a large event you don’t get to do what you do at other events, like rehearsals,” Valentine said. “And it’s fluid, things are constantly changing. At other events it’s considered rude if you walk out but because at SXSW it’s actually okay…. The deal with startups—there were 56 at the accelerator this year– is there’s a lot of volatility. We’ve had startups that got acquired, like, two weeks out. Some people run out of money. Some are in acquisition mode and their buyers say ‘We don’t want you to market.’”
Add to that the staffing reality that Valentine works with two professionals, Michelle Murdough—Accelerator assistant– and Maria Alonso—Startup Village assistant—but everyone else on his staff of 50-60 people are volunteers.
And yet, Mudough said, “Perfection is his starting point.” Murdough has worked with Valentine six years on various events including SXSW. She noted his focus on detail, down to making sure each pen on the judge’s table works.
“The smallest thing is something he would obsess over, more than….” she gestures a big picture. “And I’ve been like: Are you kidding me? You really want me to sit and check on every pen? Sure enough, one of them doesn’t work.”
They’ve had their blow ups in all the tension, but over the years they’ve learned to work together when something cranks up the pressure, like today when a pitching team that was supposed to pitch at 3:30 never appeared. Someone had to talk to the judges, the other teams, the emcee and make changes that would all be upended if the team suddenly showed up. Valentine and Murdough spell each other in those moments, taking turns dealing with the circumstance. “He has a huge heart and a tremendous focus on his work,” she said.
Valentine sees SXSW Accelerator and Startup Village as part of the startup ecosystem of the city that has been steadily growing over the past 10 years.
“I love this community,” he said, “the eclecticness, the quality of lifestyle…we have our own identity as far as a tech community. A new wave coming up and we’re different from the other tech communities. SXSW is not your traditional conference and I think people see and appreciate that. It’s so intertwined with the city. More and more the city realizes the value of startups, that they create vibrancies, possibilities.”
Valentine wound up as SXSW Accelerator and Startup Village Producer by a circuitous route. He got his degree in communication and behavioral science. But what he really loved was the arts. When he was a kid he lived part of the time in New York and New Jersey and his parents often took him to the museum. He began volunteering at various arts events just to be around the arts and wound up being asked to run the events. Two years in a row he created a Dancefest with 39 dance companies and 450 dancers over five days.
He was working as a recruiter with Intelquest when he decided to ask the marketing department if he could switch jobs and become their event manager. When he showed the head of marketing his portfolio, they were thrilled.
“People love it when you are passionate and have a lot of energy,” he said. Two years later, he was asked to run events for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and they elevated him to Executive Director. Then he started his own events video and audio company for the Chamber of Commerce and tourism industry, but when the tourism industry slowed down he segued to other jobs. He took on events management for the Busby Foundation for Central Texas for families of patients with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) which he still does.
When he feels overwhelmed by the pressure at SXSW, he remembers the families he deals with who are dealing with really painful issues and it restores his perspective. “People are dealing with really hard life issues,” he said.
But none of that means he lets anything slide.
“This event is very, very important to Chris,” Murdough said. “This one has his name and reputation on it. This one has to go right.”

SubtleData’s Developers Garage at SXSW

March 11, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

At the SubtleData Developer Garage event

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could order and pay for a beer – or any other food or beverage – at your favorite bar just by using a smartphone? Sure it would. Can you? Well, probably not. While there are most likely a million cool ways to build an app that lets you order from your table or have a cold beer waiting for you at your favorite bar, there probably isn’t any.
Why? Your Smartphone app doesn’t speak the same language as the cash register at the bar. In fact, having a cloud based app communicate with the server infrastructure of an establishment’s point of sale system is really difficult. The POS infrastructure – as in your favorite bar’s registers, touch screen software, servers the software talks to, etc – doesn’t speak in a smartphone-friendly language.
Building software that translates into each of the many different POS systems used in bars and restaurants is time consuming prohibitively expensive for app developers–costing thousands of dollars. Thus, your smartphone simply can’t buy you a beer.
SubtleData – an Austin-based startup – is solving this problem. It has created software that integrates with 12 of the major POS systems — including four of the five most-used systems – which gives them the ability to communicate with 60 percent of the POS system market. SubtleData installs a plug-in on local POS servers which translates to the SubtleData cloud platform. The cloud platform speaks the same code language as smartphone app developers – enabling developers to finally build that app which can tell your bar’s register you would like a beer.

Richard Bagdonas of SubtleData

“Our goal is to make it easy for people to build apps that interact with point of sale systems at bars, restaurants, casinos, hotels, nightclubs,” says President and CTO Richard Bagdonas. “The developers that build the actual apps utilize our framework and platform to get to the point of sale.”
This year, SubtleData will release new API technology that provides developers with code shortcuts to create POS related apps even faster — replacing operations that require around 80 lines of code with ones requiring 20. They showed a demo of the new technology at the SubtleData Developer Garage event, which was held yesterday at Bourbon Girl in Austin, TX.
“Mobile application developers can build an app in days, and it used to take them months and years,” says Bagdonas.
Bagdonas says that 550 startups are already using the SubtleData platform. Several such startups attended their SubtleData event and pitched their ideas to venture capitalists.

Pitching to investors

Innovative Delivery Systems President Dietrich Diehl, who pitched his Ordr It product to investors, is using SubtleData to integrate into the POS systems of stadium concessions. Diehl’s product is an app that would let fans at sporting events order food right from their seats instead of waiting at the concession stand.
“If you want to integrate yourself into these POS systems it will cost you like $100,000 to $500,000,” said Diehl. “These guys do it essentially for free and then charge a percentage of revenue.”
Diehl says that using SubtleData helps their sales pitch to companies who own stadiums — who would otherwise need to agree to split the high cost of software integration.
Coupon Media project manager Eric Moore also attended the event, but did not present. Moore does not use SubtleData, but is interested in its potential. Moore’s business helps companies integrate coupon services in their POS while preventing fraud.
“We are looking at SubtleData as a way to kind of streamline our process into some of the newer POS systems,” says Moore. “It’s a huge cost saving if it works.”
Moore said his company spent “tens of thousands of dollars” integrating with their first POS vendor. He hopes that SubtleData will incorporate coding for “shopping cart” style transactions to help his company fully integrate coupons.

: The Panel (From left) Mark Turner, Lyle Worthington, Bryan Menell

The SubtleData Developer Garage event also had a panel of industry operators, who fielded questions about the current technologies in the restaurant and hotel industry and talked about what they would like to see from new technologies that use POS communications.
Restaurant Freedom Owner Mark Turner, who operates 18 restaurant locations, says that he sees potential in the new apps based on SubtleData’s technology but needs them to be integrated in a simple and easy way.
“I don’t want to have a loyalty program that is stand alone, that is different than my ability to checkout, that is different than my interactions on social media,” says Turner. “It’s just a matter of – can they get them all to work together as simplistically as possible?”
Turner says that for a restaurant owner to bite on a new technology there has to be some cost efficiency or certainty of revenue.
“It’s an allocation of my marketing dollars,” says Turner. “I’ve got at budget already that I am planning on spending. If you bring me a way that seems to be cost efficient and have a better return on investment over all, I am absolutely open to looking at that.”
One returning SXSW startup has already decided to use SubtleData for its efficiency. Noom – or Next One’s On Me – is an app that lets users gift small food or drink items to friends or acquaintances. The current version of Noom requires you to redeem gifts by showing the app to an employee at a Noom-friendly establishment. The employee must enter a coupon-like code back at the register before you receive your item. NOOM CEO Sara Rodell is using SubtleData to make the app’s gift redeeming process more elegant.
“With SubtleData, the user gets to choose what they want to redeem,” says Rodell. “Once they make that selection, which is entered into the POS, there’s no interaction that’s needed with the waiter or waitress.”
Soon, Noom users will be able to redeem a gift simply by walking into a Noom-friendly establishment, selecting their item, and entering their table number. The app can either generate an already paid ticket in the establishment’s POS system or can add the gift to an existing bill. Rodell hopes to have the new Noom app ready by this fall.
So thanks to Noom, and SubtleData, we will soon be able to walk into a pub, enter a table number, and have a pint delivered right to our table. Cheers!

Realty Mogul Won the HATCH Pitch Competition at SXSW

March 10, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

It may be good news for the economy that two of the top winners of the HATCH pitch competition make it easier for investors to invest.
Realty Mogul, a company that calls itself “crowdfunding for real estate” won the HATCH pitch competition presented by the Houston Technology Center Sunday. The Los Angeles company, whose impassioned pitch earned it the term “histrionic” by judges, makes it simple for accredited investors to find qualified real estate investments and pool resources with minimum investments as low as $5,000.
Second place was won by Molecule Software, a Houston company that simplifies trading of stocks for small energy companies.
Third place was claimed by Austin company Taskbox, which processes mobile email inboxes into priority tasks according to due dates and other factors. Taskbox also won the audience popularity award, a new feature this year created and managed by Protexting.
Greg Wright, HATCH founder, said the 100 companies that applied for the pitch competition were very diverse in focus and product type including a health IT company—Snap Health—and Lynx Laboratories which created a 3-D camera that measures the object it’s photographing. Last year, the HATCH competition spilled out into the hall with many people standing in line, trying to get in. A number of the audience members were last year’s participants, Wright said.
The HATCH competition, which was staged for the first time at the 2012 SXSW Startup Village, is unique in that all the participants are coached extensively before presenting. Each team has a coach who meets with them either in person or virtually, until the pitch is right.
One of the judges, this year, last year’s winner Distil Inc. CEO Rami Essaid, has done a lot of Google hangouts with various startups and blogged extensively about the pitching process.
“A big piece of what pitches needs to happen is to make the audience relate. What made us successful last year was we told a story about the problem. A lot of the companies don’t engage the audience that well. When you tell a story in four minutes, it’s really hard to be concise with the message. You have to treat it like you have 30 seconds instead of four minutes. That forces you to get the message down.”
Distil found an investor among the judges last year, John Frankel, a partner with ff Venture Capital and closed a $1.8 million deal in December. Frankel was also a judge this year.
Wright said it was largely Essaid’s energy and enthusiasm that sealed the deal last year.
“You just have to watch Rami to understand why they will be successful,” he said. “He was there at everything. I would email the group or send out a Tweet ‘Got a TV opportunity in 15 minutes; be here or miss it’ and he would be the first one there. Or ‘At the Bing lot, one of the investors is here, come and join us,’ and he would be there.”
Each of the 12 judges had a virtual $1 million to invest and whichever contestant garnered the largest share of that investment won. Each contestant had four minutes to pitch with six minutes of questions from the judges.
Judges were blunt, sometimes almost chiding with contestants, calling them out on business models that looked more like features of other products than businesses on their own, questioning their ability to get customers. Joel Yarmon of Draper Associates told Taskbox founder Andrew Eye that he’d be “pissed” if he’d given a seed-round investment to a company—as the Central Texas Angel Network recently did for Taskbox—and the company used it to find more investments. Eye assured him that CTAN recognized the size of the players he was competing against and supported his pitching to which Yarmon replied “Let’s agree to disagree.”
“I don’t think the judges are harsher this year than last year,” Frankel quipped. “I just think they’re grumpier.”

DreamIt Ventures Austin’s Inaugural Demo Day Introduces Nine Startups

March 10, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

On the Stage at DreamIt Austin Demo Day -Photography by Samantha Davis

DreamIt Ventures Austin’s inaugural demo day showcased its first crop of startups at an event Saturday.
After 12 weeks of work at Capital Factory in downtown Austin, the nine startups finally took to the stage at the Bullock Texas State History Museum to pitch their companies to potential investors.
DreamIt Ventures is a startup accelerator similar to the TechStars program – helping startups make over a year of progress in just three months. The program is in Philidephia, New York, Austin, and TelAviv, Israel. It has completed 9 classes since its start back in 2008. The DreamIt ventures program offers qualifying startups free office space, a stipend for living expenses, dedicated mentors, legal and accounting services, and access to tons of potential investors. While the program generally lasts 14 weeks, the following nine startups had to be ready in 12 so they could have their demo day at South by Southwest Inactive.
Doccastor
When trying to put together a big tech conference, getting sponsors and investors to provide funding is crucial. But reeling in those sponsors can be tricky, if there is no proof that people will attend. CEO and co-founder Kyle Christian Steel presented a solution to this problem.

Kyle Christian Steele and Himanshu Pagey of Doccaster

Doccastor is designed to help show investors how much buzz their event is getting. It accomplishes this by creating a virtual locker that holds all the information for a given event. When users log into Doccaster with Linkedin and look at the event information, their activity is tracked to show their level of interest. The event creator using Doccastor can then show potential sponsors how many people are checking out the event and considering participating. Any sponsor or user who posts information in the locker can see the basic profile information of any user who viewed their content – giving sponsors valuable feedback and more incentive to participate.
Doccaster also makes it easy for users to find out about what events are happening around them. The service can be logged into with any mobile device, and users can view all related documents as well as contact the event creator. Additionally, users can see any other doccastor events happening in close proximity.
Doccaster has just started a $1 million round.
NewsTastic
Presented by CEO Eric Paradis, NewsTastic was created to link local journalists with paying local jobs. They have created a marketplace where local companies who need an event covered can sponsor journalists and pay them for an article.
“We were able to see firsthand just how outdated and inefficient existing news organizations are,” says Paradis. “NewsTastic has a better approach”.
Companies have several incentives to do this. First, it’s an easy way for them to find a journalist to cover the company’s local event without hiring a PR agency. Second, the company can get its name out by sponsoring coverage of local events that affect potential customers. Any articles written will have the sponsor information visible to readers.
The service is also a way for local freelancers to build a reputation and earn extra cash. Reporters who are able to establish their credentials will automatically get access to paying jobs. New reporters can have access to jobs that don’t pay, but boost their credentials. Successfully completing those assignments will increase their credentials and unlock paying assignments.
NewsTastic has already signed an agreement with Microsoft to cover events at SXSW. They will receive around $150 per story from Microsoft and pass along $100 to the journalists who covered the story.
Newstastic is now opening a funding round of $800,000.
Pincam

Kevin Taehwa Kim of Pincam Austin Demo Day -Photography by Samantha Davis

Pincam was presented by Kevin Kim, who works with an app development team for South Korea-based SK planet. The Pincam app is a video recorder that lets the user “pin”, or mark while recording, their favorite five second highlight segments to later combine into one highlight reel.
“Pincam is the only app that insures users capture the best moments in their special days,” says Kim.
Pincam can do this while recording an original video or can be used to edit a video the user already has on his iOS device. Edited videos can be grouped together into channels for other users to see. The channels can be open to everyone or restricted to a group of contacts such as family and friends. The app also makes it easy to share the video with Gmail, Facebook, or other outlets.
Seer
Presented by Conall Arora, Seer is a web app that congregates all the important data that a user needs access to every day into one location.
Seer is an intelligent desktop that can pull in multiple kinds of files from Gmail, Google Drive, Exchange, Dropbox, Evernote, and Apple desktops. Once the user gives it access to one of these sources, it will pull in and index to one single personalized desktop. That content can then be organized for easy access. When you select any of those files to work on, Seer pulls up a menu of any content related to it such as emails or word documents.
Seer is also in the process of implementing an intelligence component where the program can figure out what information you need to see first each day you wake and turn on your computer. Arora Claims Seer will be even able to prioritize the most important people in your life. By analyzing words or phrases in your content, Seer will bring you information related to your closest contacts before any other information.
Seer will release a beta in April to the first 700 people on their waitlist. The app will be launched in June.
Trendkite
Presented by CEO AJ Bruno, Trendkite is a media monitoring company. It helps companies find out where their PR efforts are best spent by monitoring the web for articles, Facebook messages, and tweets about that company.
“We are helping organizations understand what the world thinks of them, and act accordingly.” says Bruno.
Trendkite gives companies a dashboard that gives them several different metrics for how often their business is referenced and where. They search and scan millions of articles a day. The metrics can be filtered to include only the data a company wants – such as financial articles or press releases. The dashboard can also help target certain information, such as what the press is saying about a company’s CEO. Additionally, Trendkite allows companies to compare themselves to their competitors on different metrics.
The company has as an annual subscription fee for their service. They have already acquired several bigger clients such as Opentack and Gamefly.
Trendkite has just opened a $750,000 round.
FastFig
FastFig does for math what Microsoft Word does for writing. Presented by Brian Peacock, FastFig is intended to help students learn math more efficiently. His team wants students to spend more time on math and less time crunching numbers.
“The students are spending too much time crumpling up pieces of paper because they missed one number, rather than focusing on how to understand and set up the problem.” says CMO Greg Heller-LaBelle.
FastFig intends its product to be used by freshmen and sophomores in college to more quickly crunch numbers after setting up complex equations. They also see it being used by advanced high school students. The processor can do basic math, algebra, and calculus – and it can tell the difference between math and English so that note taking is still easy. The processor is browser based, making it available on almost any device. The math documents are also very easy to share.
FastFig is currently being utilized at the University of Pittsburg as well as a couple high schools. It is starting a $250,000 round of funding which will enable it to put the technology in 30 schools across the country.
Stereotypes

Jason Keck of Stereotypes

Presented by CEO Jason Keck, Stereotypes is trying to make music personal again.
“It’s a group messaging app that lets you have real, two-way conversations with your friends around music,” says Keck.
You can share different music with different groups of friends. The app is designed to push messages with memorable songs to groups of people, letting them somewhat relive memories of listening to the song.
According to Keck, test users stay on the app for an average of 8 minutes and messaged groups have an average of 8 friends. They will take advantage of this by offering the app for free and then using established revenue models such as ads and in-app purchasing. Keck also sees the app being used successfully by different music groups to connect with their fans.
They will open a $500,000 round this summer.
Yevvo
Yevvo is a video sharing app presented by founder Ben Rubin. The company is based in Israel. Yevvo allows its users to share live, raw video from their mobile phones almost instantly. App users just press one button and their phone is a live camera.
Once a Yevvo user is live, any other users linked to him gets an alert that there is a live stream happening and can follow that stream by accepting the alert. The video is not saved – it’s designed to be a one-time opportunity to glance into the life of another user wherever they are.
“The power of video is in the feeling of drama, anticipation, uncertainty. This unfiltered intimacy we have with the audience,” says Rubin.
There is currently a real-time lag of about 7 – 12 seconds, but Yevvo is working to cut that time down. The person serving the live video can see the number of viewers grow in real time and will be able to identify what friends are tuning in.
Yevvo has just finished a closed beta of 300 users. Of the 100 sampled, users spent an average of five minutes using the app each day.
Yevvo is now available for iOS devices in the app store. Rubin claims the app is currently registering 10 users per minute right now.
Planana
Planana is a rewards platform designed to help brands maximize visibility during the events they sponsor by interacting with attendees.
“We turn event attendees into brand advocates,” said presenter and CEO Anna Sergeeva. “And we convert that social momentum into actionable data for brands to use events as a viable way to increase their sales.”
With Planana, a user who signed up to go to a sponsored event is given incentives to reference the sponsor in social media for a reward. By tweeting that they are at a Microsoft event, for instance, a user might receive special seating or a free drink. Users can tweet a default message but can create their own as well. Planana also tracks who attends events and whether their attendance resulted in a conversion – or a purchase of some sort. They can even track some conversions weeks after the event – creating extremely useful analytics for brands.
Planana has been generating revenue for 5 weeks and claims to already be profitable. Six major companies have already signed on. They are starting a round of $500,000 in order to scale up their services and sales team.

Flying High with Interact ATX! (Adventures in Austin, Part 3.2.1)

March 10, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY IAN PANCHEVRE

Wow, wow, wow.
What a whirlwind has #SXSWInteractive been so far! I’m not even half way in and I’ve already had the pleasure of hearing addresses from Bre Pettis (CEO @ MakerBot), Travis Kalanick (CEO @ Uber), Joe Zadeh (Director of Product @ Airbnb), Scott Chacon (Vice President of R&D @ GitHub), Steven Blank (Author of Four Steps to the Epiphany and Startup Owners Manual) Elon Musk (PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Solar Cities), and former Vice President, Al Gore.
I’ve also been able to play with some amazing new technologies like 3D Printers at UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering and motion-control software/hardware at Leap Motion’s promotional tent.
Not to mention, I’ve managed to score bunches of free t-shirts and get a few books signed – all while cluttering my pockets with flyers, cards, and stickers from plenty of early-stage startups. Oh, and my phone battery is dead for the what feels like the tenth time in the past two days.
But I wanted to take a brief moment to reflect on some of the amazing people I’ve gotten to know over the weekend. I’m at SXSW solely because of an organization, Interact ATX, that has sponsored badges for a youthful few in hopes of creating a community of entrepreneurial students from around the country.
Interact ATX was founded by Maran Nelson, a current senior at the University of Texas, who has been working with startups for the past few years. Nelson recently spent a summer in New York, where she came to appreciate the exotic appeal that Austin evidently had on the rest of the country.
“I was pleasantly surprised that a bunch of people thought Austin was the coolest city ever. Whenever I told people that I was from Austin, they would go crazy,” explains Nelson.
Nelson continues, “I asked myself, ‘What is the coolest thing that Austin has to offer each year?’ Clearly, I thought about South by Southwest. And then I asked, ‘what can I do to make something happen?’”
Nelson then got to work, reaching out to contacts at various universities as well as potential financial backers. The work, Nelson admits, “was a lot, especially for the first year for something to exist.”
But Nelson didn’t let logistical difficulties hold her back. At first, Nelson was told that having 25 or 40 participants would make the endeavor successful. “I said no, we are doing 100.”
Ultimately, Interact ATX received over 500 applications.
Admitted students represent a wide range of universities, including: MIT, Princeton, Brown, The University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale(!), Harvard, Rice, and The University of Texas.
Interact ATX sponsors – whose financial contributions subsidized badges, operations, and events – include Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s 20 Under 20 Fellowship, Balderdash, Capital Factory, Highland Capital Partners, the Cockrell School of Engineering, Readyforce, Bain Capital Ventures, and many more.
“It’s been a great experience, interacting with like-minded people who are working on projects that are trying to change the world,” comments Param Jaggi, a student at Vanderbilt.
Jaggi has built upon his high school science research – an endeavor which took him all the way to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) – to begin commercializing an inexpensive and disposable green technology. Jaggi’s algae-based technology can filter carbon emissions from the exhaust of cars, which contribute to over 25 percent of global carbon admissions.
Thomas Sohmers is another gifted mind. Sohmers, currently working on embedded cluster computing, has cracked the code for retrofitting raw processors from cell phones and tablets to create high performance computers. Sohmers hopes that his technologies will eventually replace current servers and mainframes with more powerful systems that use less power. As a seventeen year-old high school student from Hudson Massachusetts, Sohmers is a finalist competing for $100,000 in seed capital from Peter Thiel’s 20 Under 20 Fellowship.
“It’s been really fun, I feel really honored to be a part of this group,” says Sohmers. “I really like Austin, it’s a lot better than three feet of snow.”
And then, there are the Longhorns.
Albert Rondan, Jeff Mahler, Chris Slaughter, and Dustin Hopper have teamed up with their professor from the University of Texas, Dr. Srirarm Vishwanath, to start Lynx Laboratories, a company which is producing a handheld 3D structural capture camera. For the laymen among us, their device is used like a traditional camera to capture and render objects or rooms in 3D.
“It takes the point and shoot experience of a 2D camera and applies it to a 3D concept,” explains Rondan, as he demoed a 3D image of an Interact Fellow’s face on his computer, using the software to circle around the face in surprising detail. The technology is impressive and is currently looking for funding through a recently launched Kickstarter.
In the words of Nam Chu Hoai, a student at Boston University, “The amount of energy at South By is overwhelming!” Indeed it is.
Fortunately, a select group of young entrepreneurs have each other to rely on as they navigate the brave new world of South by Southwest.
Please stay tuned for the next segment in Adventures in Austin!

Previous segments:
Apparently there’s this conference happening in Austin?? Adventures in Austin, Part 1.0.0

Adventures in Austin, Part 2.0.5: SXSW = big fun and big business.

AuManil Wins the Austin Startup Fast Pitch Competition at SXSW

March 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Bart Bohn with AuManil pitching at the Austin Fast Pitch competition at #SXSW

The free to play model dominates the multi-billion dollar video game industry.
So a lot of game makers capitalize on that by selling things to players in the game to make money.
AuManil, which creates software to manage the customer relationship market for video games, wants to make sure the game makers capture the most revenue possible.
AuManil won the Austin Startup Fast Pitch competition Saturday afternoon. The Austin Technology Incubator and the Central Texas Angel Network sponsored the event in the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s offices at South by Southwest Interactive.
It was a close race said Kyle Cox, director of wireless at the Austin Technology Incubator. He reported that AuManil won with 74 out of a possible 100 points. It was just two points in front of the next competitor, he said.
The other companies presenting included Circle Media, Dejaset, Ridescout and Tenduit.
As the winner of the competition, Bohn received a free entry into a funding cycle for CTAN and a six-month membership into the ATI portfolio.
Five Austin-based startups pitched to a panel of judges including John Stockton with Mayfield Fund, Krishna Srinivasan with Live Oak Venture, Bril Flint, chairman of CTAN and Pat Noonan with Austin Ventures.
“We’re AuManil, CRM for Whales,” Bohn told the panel as the first company to pitch.
Bohn explained that 70 percent of a video game’s revenue comes from whales or big fans, 20 percent from dolphins, moderately engaged fans, and 10 percent from minnows, fans that aren’t that engaged. AuManil’s software targets whales and allows the video game makers to use analytics to cater to their best customers.
“We’re taking game play data and mixing it with predicative and social analytics – acquiring, converting, retaining and migration from game to game to game,” Bohn said.
The company already has four games under management with its first product that targets increasing repeat business from engaged customers.
AuManil is seeking a $500,000 seed round of investment and already has 40 percent committed, Bohn said.
“We bring the measure to unmeasured media,” said Mark Piening of Circle Media. His company focuses on measuring brand engagement at events.
“We want to help brands understand what audiences want,” he said. It has created a software program that includes an “audience intelligence dashboard” that gives brands insights into consumer engagement.
Matt Peterson, founder and CEO of Dejaset, pitched his music app for bands to produce and sell live performances of songs to consumers. Dejaset is capturing more than 100 live performances in the next 10 days at SXSW. With the Dejaset app, bands can make their recordings available instantly for consumers to buy. Dejaset expects to have up to 3,000 artists signed up by this summer. The company takes a 50 percent cut of each song sold and provides a 10 percent cut to the venue hosting the band.
Ridescout aggregates transportation available to consumers in real time, said Jospeh Kopser, the company’s founder.
“Aggregation is the way of the future” Kopser said.
Kayak is focused on airlines and hotels and Ridescout is focused on transportation, Kopser said. It gets real time feeds of availability from pedicabs and other drivers that self report. It does not include services like Sidecar, which are not legally approved by the city of Austin, he said. The app also enables friends to get rides from friends for free, he said.
Lastly, Dave Perry, CEO of Tenduit, pitched the company that makes datacenters “more reliable and more efficient” with its software.
“Data centers suck,” Perry said. They require more energy than the entire airline industry, he said.
But most data centers operate at 50 percent or less of their capacity, Perry said. That’s due to lack of effective tools to manage all the computer servers inside, he said.
“It’s a huge problem and Tenduit is going to be part of that solution that makes that problem go away,” Perry said. The company raised $1.3 million in a seed round from friends and family and is seeking a $3 million Series A funding round to scale up sales and marketing, software development and operations.

Why Austin? At #SXSW

March 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
The Austin Startup session on Why Austin skewed aspirational Saturday morning as Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin and Kevin Koym of Tech Ranch explained that Austin is the city where you can “be yourself,” where people “look you in the eye and smile at you” and where the culture invites diversity of ideas and interests.
To make that last point, Koym discussed different technologies being explored in Austin from Arduino to Wiki Weapon to E-nose which detects and analyzes the chemical makeup of an odor to self monitoring devices.
“There are so many ideas that you wouldn’t see in Silicon Valley because it’s so expensive there you can’t take the risk,” Koym said. “Someone comes up with great idea and you have five teams doing the same thing. What a waste of effort.”
Goswami pointed out that, in Austin, there are myriad experiences to sample and, “if you like it, you hold onto it. If you go to the Continental Club and try two-stepping and you like it, the next time you go back you have a community.”
The session wasn’t entirely aspirational. Susan Davenport of the Chamber of Commerce and Jim Butler, manager at the City of Austin shared all the statistics so often quoted about the strength of the local economy and the growing resources for the entrepreneurial community.
One attendee expressed interest in moving his 12-person company to Austin and asked what first steps would be. Davenport explained that the Chamber can walk new businesses through all the steps from getting registered with the state, looking for office space and real estate for employees as well as introducing business owners to the community, which includes 75 organizations to support entrepreneurship.
“We find out what your needs are and come up with a strategy to meet those needs,” she said. Butler added that part of the city’s job was to help entrepreneurs with information about mentoring and financial resources.
Another question was posed by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur inspired to possibly move to Austin but wondering about VC opportunities and recruiting of talent. Davenport talked about the chamber’s effort to recruit talent and the fact that 72 countries attend SXSW and “we’re taking resumes all through the conference.”
Koym pointed out that Austin is six hours from Monterrey Mexico where development help can be found for $10 an hour and, from his experience, “Mexican developers kick ass.”
The VC question received a more fudged answer.
“We don’t have as strong a picture in the VC class,” Koym said. “I do believe we have more millionaires here per capita than almost anyplace else…if you’re looking for angel investment you can find that. It’s not necessarily in a formalized group…but you can find the guys who say ‘I’m going to take the risk with you.’”