Category: Austin (Page 261 of 318)

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.’”

A Visual Feast at #FEED Powered by Twitter at #SXSW Interactive

March 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

The second annual #FEED powered by Twitter at SXSW Interactive opened last night with a gala preview party.
“The five days of events focuses on “interactive social media feed art” created
by visual design artists from the The Meta Agency, telling the story of SXSW by merging social media, art, technology and wellness into an engaging offline experience,” said Len Stein, spokesman.
The first video “Generating Synchronciity” is by Justin Bolognino with Learned Evolution, producer of the events, parties and dances at the AMOA-Art House at Jones Center at 700 Congress Ave. He’ll be producing a new video every night, which we’ll post here.
To get the schedule for #FEED powered by Twitter, please visit Learned Evolution.

#FEED Powered by Twitter @Night 1 – “Generating Synchronicity” from #FEED on Vimeo.

Living the Life at Geeksta Paradise with Uber, Github and Airbnb at SXSW

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

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Uber, a ride-sharing app available in 30 cities nationwide, wants to change the way you get around.
Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, quizzed Travis Kalanick, CEO of San Francisco-based Uber during a morning session Saturday at South by Southwest Interactive titled “Geeksta Paradise: the ballers of Uber, Airbnb and Github.”
They kicked off the morning by playing the Harlem Shuffle and serving up Mimosas. More than 500 people packed into the A B and C conference rooms at the Hilton Austin downtown. It’s part of a day-long conference within the mega conference of SXSW, focused on Lean Startup methodology, based on the book by author and entrepreneur Eric Ries.
During the morning session, Kalanick discussed the challenges and opportunities of disrupting an incumbent industry: taxi cabs. He said Uber has received cease and desist orders in most of the markets in which it now operates. But it sued and won the right to operate in the those markets.
Still, Uber faces challenges expanding in the United States.
“It’s easier to do business in Paris than it is Colorado,” Kalanick said.
Uber is available in Dallas and Austin. It plans to expand to San Antonio and Houston in the future.
Kalanick also didn’t directly answer a question from an audience member about whether the company planned to go public.
“There’s so much money in the private markets right now,” said Kalanick.
So Uber isn’t looking at the public market right now, he said. It has raised $49.5 million from investors since Uber’s founding in 2010.
Uber is part of a movement called the shareable economy. Entrepreneurs have launched several businesses in the past few years focused on the transportation industry.
SideCar, which is operating in Austin, recently acquired HeyRide, a ride sharing app which received a cease and desist order from the city of Austin. Lyft is also chasing the ride-sharing market.
Other industries have found success in sharing consumer resources. Chief among them is Airbnb, a site that allows people to register their spare bedroom, cottage or house or even Airstream trailer to others. It’s a marketplace for people to find alternatives to a hotel or motel room.
Joe Zadeh, director of product at Airbnb, which launched in 2009, and Scott Chacon with Github, a social network for programmers, also shared their experiences with their companies in the shareable economy.
“Airbnb has to be everywhere where you are not,” Zadeh said. Thus, Airbnb has to be an international company to be successful, he said.

Hungry? Do #SXSW Like a Local, by Flow Nonfiction

March 8, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Lots of people from far flung places have descended upon Austin for the annual geekfest, film and music festival known as South by.
But amid all the mayhem of panels, meetups, parties and more, people get hungry. They get mighty hungry so that’s why this video by Flow Nonfiction is sooooo good when you’re soooo hungry. Flow Nonfiction created a 2013 SXSW: Do It Like a Local Guide. Go watch it now and then visit one of the places they recommend like: Hopdoddy, Home Slice Pizza, Barley Swine, Ramen Tatsuoya, Uchi, Uchiko, Justine’s Brasserie and more.
They also give tips on some of the best bars and venues in town to see live bands. And have you ever heard of Mouth by Mouthwest? Yes, it does exist and yes, it’s in a dental office.

Meritful Wins the Move Your Company to Austin for Free Competition at SXSW

March 8, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Silicon Hills News Reporter

The pitch was: Move your company to Austin for free. Five companies in other parts of the country or the world competed for a $100,000 package that included:
• A $35,000 investment from CTAN.
• Three months rent in a 3 bedroom house from HomeAway.
• Six months of co-working at Capital Factory , server hosting from Rackspace and local groceries from Greenling.
• Moving services from uShip
• Two badges for SXSW 2014
The winner, and welcome to Austin, was a company called Meritful. Meritful is like LinkedIn for college students. Students load their information on the site for free and companies—who are finding the cost of recruiting increasingly prohibitive–can find candidates on the site. Meritful allows students to interact with professionals, share their projects, build a resume and seek advice and direction and allows companies to check out prospective future employees. For companies, the cost is related to their size. A business of up to 100 employees would pay $5,000 annually, which founder and CEO Azarias Reda pointed out is roughly the cost of an intern and significantly less than companies spend recruiting currently.
Meritful will be moving from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Reda met his cofounders in graduate school. They learned about the competition from Josh Baer of Capital Factory and AngelList and the team drove 20 hours to get to SXSW.
The competition’s runner up was Pictrition, an app that lets consumers keep track of their nutrition just by taking photos of their food and submitting the photo to the Pictrition community rather than logging food items, calories or nutrition points. Pictrition includes competitions, leaderboards and reward coupons from health-oriented companies including Whole Foods. The company takes a percentage of each reward based purchase. The company is also working on corporate wellness programs. Pictrition currently is in Dallas.
Other competitors included Paceable, a CRM and project management tool that works with Gmail, Rock Your Paper, a company from Bangalore, India that wants to be the iTunes store for scholarly papers, saving researchers and institutions such as universities, from having to purchase whole journals, and Inaika.com which provides services to find instructors of all stripes through videos published by the instructors but also allows fans to subscribe to the videos of instructors all over the world they find inspirational.
Judges for the competition include Jason Cohen of WPEngine: Bril Flint, chairman and Rick Timmins, Director of CTAN; and Bill Boebel, formerly of RackSpace and now an angel investor and managing director of Capital Factory.

The 2013 Austin Startup Crawl Kicks off SXSW Madness

March 8, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

More than 15,000 people RSVPed to attend the Austin Startup Crawl which unofficially kicked off the South by Southwest Interactive madness Thursday night.
Andrew Moore, reporter with Silicon Hills News, attended the event and filed this video report featuring Joshua Baer, the co-founder of Capital Factory and the organizer of the event. Rackspace sponsored the Austin Startup Crawl which highlighted more than a dozen Austin startup companies. People rode a free shuttle from company to company with the largest contingent of startups based at Capital Factory.

Adventures in Austin, Part 2.0.5: SXSW = Big Fun and Big Business.

March 8, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY IAN PANCHEVRE
Silicon Hills News Reporter

Hey there! I wanted to pick up right where we left off, with Part 2.0.5 of Adventures in Austin.
Before things get too hectic, I felt it’d be interesting to explore the economic impacts of South by Southwest and the festival’s role in driving technology growth throughout the Silicon Hills.
It’s no secret that, relative to the rest of the United States, Texas’ economy is looking pretty good. One study conducted by Forbes in 2012 is particularly telling. Forbes used employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine the best metropolitan areas for jobs.
The oil and gas industry was a big driver, adding 200,000 mostly high-paying jobs in 2012. Accordingly, 5 of the top ten small cities were in Texas: Odessa (1), Midland (2), San Angelo (4), Lubbock (9), and Laredo (10). Among mid-size cities, Corpus Christi (2), McAllen (3), and El Paso (4) sat on top of the list.
But Texas’ economy is diverse. It’s not just the energy industry, but also manufacturing and technology industries, that are charging full steam ahead. Among the large cities, the metropolitan areas of Houston (2), Fort-Worth (4), and Dallas (6) have all been performing extraordinarily well.
As for Austin? It seems only fitting that the capitol of such a booming economy claimed the #1 spot among large cities nationwide. The Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos region already hosts over 4,400 technology companies that employee over 109,000 people.
And yet, the regional technology sector continues to grow, providing more and more high-skilled and high-paying jobs. 5,500 new technology jobs were added in the first three quarters of 2012. The technology ecosystem now accounts for 11.7% of all regional firms, 13% of all regional jobs, and 27% of the entire regional payroll.
What does SXSW have to do with all of this? Perhaps more than you think.
For one, there are the tangible benefits of hosting such a vibrant and popular festival. Each year an economic assessment of SXSW is conducted. Not surprisingly, expenditures skyrocket during the two weeks – all those people need to eat, sleep, move around, and party. In 2012 SXSW pumped more than $190 million into the local economy – representing a 12 percent increase from 2011.
And then there are the intangible benefits.
“An unquantifiable benefit comes from the opportunities that South by Southwest affords the local community,” explains Susan Davenport, Senior Vice President of Global Technology Strategies for the Austin Chamber of Commerce. “It presents a huge opportunity for talent and capital formation.”
Businesses coming together – via a convergence of talent and capital – is certainly important for the region. But one can argue that a full list of benefits associated with SXSW is even more abstract.
“The festival has helped position Austin in national and international light as a leader in innovation,” continues Davenport. “Some of the companies and early product announcements that have originated over the past few years at South by Southwest have given it an even better reputation.”
Over the two decades that Interactive festivities have been featured, the list of companies that have taken off at SXSW is impressive. Most recently, Twitter (2007), Foursquare (2009), and Instagram (2011) either launched or gained initial traction at the Interactive Festival.
Certainly, the emergence of popular consumer technologies reinforces the relevance of SXSW – and the contributions of Austin – in the eyes of the general public. But SXSW is more than just a laboratory for early stage startups and their flashy, social apps.
“We’re seeing expansions in clean tech and biosciences… as the festival continues to grow, more of the corporate world is trying to be a part of it,” notes Davenport.
To its credit, the Austin Chamber of Commerce is playing its part in supporting SXSW. Recognizing an opportunity to place Austin tech at center stage of an event with a global audience, the Austin Chamber approached SXSW with a partnership proposal a few years back.
Davenport explains that the Chamber’s goal, as integrated into the festival, “is to showcase relocation opportunities to executives and encourage investment in companies that are starting in Austin.”
SXSW welcomed the partnership.
“We then began to plan very specific events and initiatives that we thought furthered our goals,” Davenport continues. “With the amount of new jobs the industry is creating, we think it’s been very effective.”
For SXSW 2013, those events include : A Celebration of American Startups (Saturday, 7:00 PM – 11:30 PM at The Moody Theater), SXSW Startup Village (Saturday and Sunday, all day at the Austin Chamber offices), and a ‘Welcome to Austin’ Tradeshow Exposition (Sunday through Wednesday, 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM at the Austin Convention Center).
All things considered, SXSW is a big reason why Austin’s technology ecosystem continues to blossom. “Austin’s business reputation, coupled with an attractive quality of life, and a strong Texas economy – all those things come together in a perfect storm at South by Southwest.”
Certainly, Mrs. Davenport was referring to a metaphoric storm. But it may turn out to be rather literal at SXSW 2013, as the weather forecast includes rain and thunderstorms over the weekend.
Stay tuned for the next segment in Adventures in Austin…

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