Category: Austin (Page 263 of 318)

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Traditional work is killing people so they are looking for alternatives and coworking fills that void.
That’s the view of Gervais Tompkin with Gensler, a global design firm. He spoke Tuesday morning on a panel on trends in coworking at the Global Coworking Unconference Conference. An estimated 300 people are attending the two-day conference at the Austin Music Hall.
“Modern work has pushed everything we’re doing onto little screens,” Tompkin said. “Work in a traditional office environment is literally killing people.”
Coworking can make people more active, Tompkin said. The computer and Internet age has resulted in workers leading more sedentary lives. That coupled with a poor diet in the U.S. has led to an obesity epidemic. Coworking can bring more balance into people’s lives and lead to a healthier lifestyle, Tompkin said.
Coworking is a movement that is about 10 years old but in the last few years it has grown tremendously.
Work is changing, said Jean-Yves Huwart, an expert in organizational models with Global Enterprise, and the panel’s moderator.
Coworking is becoming a specialized industry, said Liz Elam, GCUC founder who runs Link Coworking in Austin. Coworking sites that specialize in food, technology, maker spaces and more are popping up around the country.
More than 110,000 people worldwide work in one of the nearly 2,500 coworking spaces worldwide, according to deskmag, a coworking magazine which covers the industry. Its annual report shows that coworking spaces increased 83 percent last year and membership at those spaces grew 117 percent.
An explosion in the number of coworking venues allows employees more flexibility on how and where they do their jobs, according to panelists. Austin has more than a dozen coworking space scattered around the city. San Antonio has Geekdom, the state’s largest coworking space with more than 500 members.
Coworking spaces allow people to work remotely in a workplace with others. The businesses provide desks, Internet access, networking and coffee. Some are run as nonprofit ventures, but the majority are for profit ventures. The workplaces encourage collaboration and provide workers a more social and interactive environment than working from home.
“It’s the new health club you can get your workout and get your work done,” said Tompkin with Gensler. “People come to cowork with an intention.”
The coworking movement is a phenomena that is taking people by surprise, Tompkin said. He estimates that 77 percent of all relationship’s are virtual so people need contact with others to be happy and productive.
“We need these extremely divergent experiences to keep us human,” he said.
The U.S. has the most coworking spaces with 781, ahead of Germany’s 230, Spain’s 199, Great Britain’s 154 and Japan’s 129, according to deskmag. Altogether, 83 countries have coworking facilities.
The industry is not going to slow down, said Kevin Kuske, chief brand anthropologist with turnstone, and panelist.
“The things that drove coworking to be popular are not slowing down,” he said.
He estimated that there will be 1.3 billion virtual workers in the next decade. And energy costs and carbon emissions is also driving that behavior, he said.
At a later panel on corporate coworking, company representatives said coworking gives their employees flexibility and the ability to save time commuting to a remote office.

Disclosures: Silicon Hills News is a media sponsor of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference. And Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

The Austin Technology Council Monday announced a free Gateway to Austin’s Best app to showcase Austin’s coolest technologies, food and entertainment.
ATC’s Gateway to Austin’s Best app has been developed in partnership with Circuit of the Americas, MapMyFitness, Tabbedout, the Austin Food Blogger Alliance, Austin Startup Games and RED Method. The Gateway mobile app for iPhone and Android is a guide to the food, tech and entertainment. The app provides Austin’s best maps, lists, links and picks to help navigate Austin during South by Southwest.
People who download and use the Gateway to Austin’s Best app will be entered to win two tickets to any 2013 event at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas. Winners will be announced at the ATC CEO Summit on May 8th.
“We will only be successful in Austin as a global competitor if we work collectively to showcase what we all know and love about Austin tech,” ATC President Julie Huls said in a news release. “We get to experience the best and brightest in Austin everyday– we have amazing executives; hundreds of available tech jobs; and a cool scene to support a strong workforce. Now, it’s time to showcase what we know and love to the rest of the world.”
ATC, with more than 7,000 members, is hosting its first “Very Important Tech or VIT” Gateway Party, Thursday, March 7, at ACL Live at The Moody Theater from 5 p.m. until 10 p.m. for its members. Reserve a ticket on its website. The party features music by the White Ghost Shivers, LED dancers and executive networking.

A new travel startup, Localeur launched today in Austin.
The site, aimed at Millennial travellers, provides local travel recommendations from “a curated community of local insiders,” according to the company’s news release.
Localeur is only available in Austin right now, but plans to expand to other cities this year.
Joah Spearman and Chase White, former employees with Austin-based ratings-and-review software company Bazaarvoice, founded the company.
“Localeur gives Millennials the confidence of having a local experience by putting the recommendations in the hands of local insiders,” Spearman, CEO, said in a news release. “Review sites don’t get to the heart of a city and travel books get outdated too quickly.”
“Austin is a perfect fit to launch Localeur and a model city for the kind of local travel Millennials want,” said White, president. “People in Austin are very attuned to eating and shopping local, and our curated, screened group of Localeurs offer recommendations that only fellow Austinites could know.”
Early investors in Localeur include Austin-based serial entrepreneur and investor Chris Shonk, Sweet Leaf Tea and Deep Eddy Vodka co-founder and CEO Clayton Christopher and Austin City Limits executive producer Terry Lickona. Other Austin investors include identity protection industry leader Joe Ross and Spredfast co-founder Ken Cho. The company also has investors outside of Austin.

Localeur | Experience Local™ from Localeur on Vimeo.

The University of Texas at Austin wants student entrepreneurs to receive as much recognition and support as the school’s athletes, according to Bob Metcalfe.
Metcalfe, UT professor of innovation and a successful entrepreneur, innovator and venture capitalist, heads up the university’s Longhorn Startup Program, previously known as One Semester Startup, along with serial entrepreneur Joshua Baer. That program has helped dozens of student entrepreneurs launch companies and seek investment capital.
This week, the University of Texas puts the spotlight on campus innovators with UT Entrepreneurship Week, which is a week of events designed to develop student entrepreneurs and their new ventures. The full list of events can be found on its website.
This evening, Metcalfe will discuss the importance of student entrepreneurship to kick off the UT Entrepreneurship Student Startup Expo, which highlights 15 student run companies. The event is hosted by Scientific Entrepreneurial Society and run by Taylor Barnett.
“The goal for E Week is to engage the student body in supporting these students and considering the entrepreneurial lifestyle,” according to Nick Spiller, one of its organizers.
The event includes a special Longhorn Entrepreneur Awards Dinner on Wednesday at 7:30. For the first time, the university’s student government will recognize a Student Entrepreneur of the Year.

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter for Silicon Hills News

How influential are online reviews? Have you used a review site such as Yelp to find a restaurant lately? If you have, you may be one of the 100 million people to use Yelp in January of 2013. Did you review that restaurant? I hope it was good — a Harvard business study found that a one star increase in Yelp ratings meant a 5 to 9 percent increase in restaurant revenue. The Guardian reports that a half star increase translates to a better chance of being full at peak dining times. This means that restaurants, and other businesses, have a vested interest in keeping track of their online reviews – and that’s what Grapevine does.
“We aggregate, or gather, online reviews from customers, and notify businesses when a new review is left for them online,” says Grapevine co-founder and marketing rep Erik Larson.
Grapevine notifies it’s customers with daily email alerts. Its service covers 10 major review sites including Google, Bing, Yelp, CitySearch, Insider Pages, Yellow Pages, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, and UrbanSpoon. While there are many more review sites on the web, Grapevine claims that their service covers 95 percent of online restaurant reviews.
The email alerts show a synopsis of what the reviewers said, how many stars they gave the establishment, and the author of the review. They also include links that allow the user to quickly go to the site that originated the review to either read the whole review or respond to it.
“Instead of having to keep ten different websites bookmarked on your browser and check them every day, we now do that for you automatically,” says Larson. “We are an alerting service.”
Because Grapevine gets users their reviews quickly, it gives the user an opportunity to easily respond to a bad review or thank a customer for a good one.
“We want them to respond, we encourage them to respond,” says designer Josh Seltzer. “Owning their reputation is huge. We can help them get to that point as effectively as possible.”
Grapevine believes that responding to negative reviews and encouraging customers to leave positive reviews is the best way to improve an establishment’s reputation.
“You need to ask you customers to give reviews when they’re happy, and that’s what most businesses don’t do,” says Larson. “The most you can do with a bad review is push it down [on web searches].”
Reputation management has become a big industry in the last few years. Businessweek.com recently reported that “Media consultant BIA/Kelsey estimates that small and medium-size businesses spent about $1.6 billion managing their online reputations in 2011. It expects the figure to grow to more than $5 billion by 2015.”
The article discusses how some of the major reputation managers have hurt their own reputations by trying to push bad reviews down by creating artificial or fake review pages designed to show up high on Google searches – a tactic that Grapevine and other companies look down on.
“That actually used to work for a while and it doesn’t work anymore,” says Larson. “As time progresses, customers online will get smarter and smarter — and they’ll see through the B-S.”
There are other companies that offer services similar to Grapevine, such as Reviewtrackers.com, but Grapevine hopes to gain an advantage through speed and simplicity.
“We look at it from the standpoint of, ‘what is the simplest way to get this to the customer?’” says co-founder and developer Richard Ortega. “We are focused on simplicity in the delivery of the technology.”
Grapevine incorporates this simplicity by using email instead of a website or dashboard that must be logged into. It also touts that users can start receiving reviews the day after you sign up – which they claim is faster than most other sites. Grapevine is also the only company to offer a free version of their service. The free version gives users up to five reviews a month for as long as the user wants – there is no limited trial period.
The paid version of the service is $30 a month. On March 5, paying customers will be able to access a dashboard that gives a statistical overview of all the reviews a business has received. Users with multiple locations can have all locations covered for a negotiated price.
The Startup currently has 94 customers – half of which are paying for unlimited reviews. About one-third of Grapevine customers are restaurants, but the startup also provides services to everything from health and wellness businesses and attorneys to jewelry stores and a RV park.
Grapevine was originally created by Erik Larson and Richard Ortega as a complex and expensive costumer review management and comparison service exclusively for hotels and car dealerships. The service launched in 2011 but failed due to a lack of market research and customer demand.
“We built a product without a need, which is not the right way to do it,” says Larson.
After losing $40,000 in what startups refer to as “their first burn”, Grapevine re-invented their business model and re-launched as a greatly simplified alerting service on July 26, 2012 — bringing on co-founder Josh Seltzer. It was then re-vamped on Jan. 15 to provide reviews to customers in a faster and easier way. Grapevine was also the first startup to officially receive the $25,000 Geekdom fund from Geekdom of San Antonio.
Grapevine’s next move is to adapt their service for tracking product reviews on sites like Amazon.com and newegg.com for consumer manufacturers. It is currently looking for an intern to help web development and sales.

By L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Think of it like a souped-up high tech bookmobile for today’s tech savvy students.
A sleek new teaching tool, the Geekbus, plans to roll out to schools, social agencies and military bases in San Antonio in March.
Louie Pacilli, director of education at Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space downtown, will be taking the Geekbus to kids throughout the city.
“The Geekbus teaches kids to make and build things with their hands and then connect them online to the Internet of Things,” Pacilli said. “We want kids to play and create with circuit boards today which become the tools we need for tomorrow’s society.”
The idea is to expose kids to job opportunities in fields like Cloud Computing, which are in high demand and pay well. The demand for workers with Cloud Computing skills is projected to grow 26 percent annually through 2015 and as many as 7 million cloud-related jobs are available right now worldwide, according to an IDC report released last December.
Like SparkEd, the weekend program held at Geekdom that teaches middle school students about technology and entrepreneurship, the Geekbus aims to spark student’s interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math and Entrepreneruship, or STEAM-E, a term Pacilli coined. The activities on the Geekbus will focus on “teaching kids how to quantify and calculate objects aligned to the theme: Land, Sea, Air and Space,” Pacilli said.
“We teach kids how to use Makey Makeys which are today’s Tinker Toys, Legos or Erector Sets and so much fun,” Pacilli said.
On the Geekbus, about 30 students at a time will build circuit-based devices to connect things to the Internet. The goal is to visit 30 middle schools and reach 4,000 kids between March and June, Pacilli said.
On March 19th, the Geekbus is scheduled to visit Mark Twain Middle School in the San Antonio Independent School District.
“It’s a great way to introduce middle school students to careers in the IT field,” said Roxanne Rosales, executive director of academic support for SAISD. “We’re thrilled to be able to expose kids to these opportunities.”
Mark Twain Middle School students have already participated in the weekend SparkEd program at Geekdom and they really liked it, Rosales said. The Geekbus’ mobility makes it easier to reach even more kids at once, she said.
The Geekbus is a free program that complements the current school curriculum, Pacilli said.
“We are doing this in San Antonio because San Antonio is fast becoming a national tech hub – we want our local kids to grow up prepared for the future jobs to come and build the world they want,” Pacilli said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

BY IAN PANCHEVRE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Austin-based Outbox Mail has been making huge strides as of late. Outbox, a self-described “beautiful inbox for your postal mail,” is expanding beyond its initial pilot in Austin, where for the past year and a half more than 500 customers have enjoyed the service.
As of this week, Outbox has officially broadened its reach beyond the Silicon Hills to include Silicon Valley.
Now, selected zip codes in the San Francisco bay area can take advantage of the service.
“Our time in Austin has proven out both our model and the value of the service to our customers,” explains Evan Baehr, co-founder of Outbox. “We are ecstatic to launch in San Francisco and can’t wait to show thousands how we can make their lives easier.”
Outbox is an innovative service that collects and organizes physical mail into a digital format for its users. “All a user has to do is sign up and take a picture of their mail key, and we’ll take it from there,” notes Outbox Engineer, Juan Carlos Jimenez.
After doing just that, Outbox’s team – fondly known as Unpostmen – retrieves a user’s mail from their mailbox three times a week. The mail is then returned to Outbox’s secure warehouse, where it is promptly digitized and then delivered via the Web. Users can browse, organize, prioritize, discard, and unsubscribe from their physical mail through their computer, iPad, and most recently, iPhone. Additionally, users can take advantage of features like reminders and to-do lists which help them manage important deadlines.
And the amazing thing is, this service is available for a flat fee of $4.99 per mailbox, per month. No hidden fees, no volume based billing. Just the cost of a wrinkled Lincoln.
For those interested in the service, they can experiment with a free demo to get a feel for how the technology functions. A user will quickly take note of the application’s ease-of-use and aesthetic beauty. Yep, Outbox isn’t only making mail easier to manage, it’s also making it sexier.
“This is an exciting time for anyone and everyone that receives snail mail,” explains Will Davis, Outbox co-founder and a former classmate of Baehr at Harvard Business School. “Mail is an essential mode of communication, but nobody has taken the leap to modernize it and make it meaningful again. That’s precisely what we’re doing in Austin and now San Francisco.”
Certainly, the postal system is in need of some innovation, and, dare we say, modernization. In 2011, over 168 billion pieces of mail were delivered throughout the United States. And as an industry, postal mail stands large at an estimated domestic value of $900 billion. Despite an astounding volume of physical mail underlining a tremendously valuable service, the U.S. Postal Service is struggling.
Facing layoffs and shuttered offices, the USPS recently announced its plans to discontinue mail service on Saturdays, in an attempt to address cash flow issues that exceeded $15 billion in losses in 2012. The cut, which is expected to begin in August, should save the USPS about $2 billion a year. And in perhaps a greater sign of desperation, the USPS has announced a new product line of “Rain Heat & Snow” clothing and accessories. Yes, the USPS is getting into the fashion business.
Despite the challenges facing the USPS – and the various reforms it is considering – the core service of sending and receiving mail seems all too stale and familiar for the end customer. Outbox, on the other hand, is determined to blaze a new trail. By stubbornly pushing physical mail into the digital era, Outbox breathes a fresh sense of social interaction into the postal mail experience. Outbox empowers its users to engage mail on their terms, when they want, where they want.
Outbox is backed by an impressive group of investors, including Mike Maples, Jr. (Twitter), Adam Ross (Yammer), and Peter Thiel (Facebook). The expansion into San Francisco, the recent release of its iPhone application, and the glowing reviews that Outbox has received – both offline and online – only validate the momentum that Outbox has been steadily building.
Davis hopes that Outbox will be available “across the country in the near future.” Until then, non-residents of Austin and San Francisco can continue to mutter a small curse under their breath, every time they make the trek to collect their snail mail in the rain, heat, and snow.

Liz Elam, founder of Link Coworking in Austin, is getting ready for a huge conference next week.
But it’s not South by Southwest.
It’s the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, which takes place next Tuesday and Wednesday at the Austin Music Hall at 208 Nueces St. The first day is a formal conference with an unconference taking place on the second day.
“I follow coworking and I study it all the time,” Elam said. “I look at trends. I go to the European coworking conference. And I don’t know a coworking space that isn’t planning for expansion and growth.”
The number of coworking establishments doubled last year and today more than 100,000 people work in coworking spaces, according to DeskMag, which covers the industry.
“I just opened my second space this past year,” said Elam. “You need to know how to fund it. You need to decide who you want to be and how you’re going to manage it.”
Coworking spaces are networking goldmines for people who work there, Elam said.
“They are run by Josh Baer, Liz Elam or a Kevin Koym – people who are connectors – people who know people,” Elam said. “The average coworking space is 44 spaces. Mine is about 70. The people in those spaces are also innovators, early adopters and influencers.”
This year’s conference will cover topics such as how to make coworking profitable, the impact of coworking on society, specialized coworking spaces and alternative sources of funding.
Nick Longo, co-founder of Geekdom, a coworking and collaborative workspace focused on the technology industry in San Antonio, is sponsoring the conference and speaking on a panel.
This is the second year running for GCUC, which is nicknamed “Juicy” for all its juicy content on coworking. The conference brings together the world’s experts on coworking including space owners, property managers, investors, academics and entrepreneurs.
People travel from all over the world to attend the conference which is expecting more than 300 people, Elam said.
“We have people flying in from Australia, Europe, Asia, South America, Mexico and Canada,” she said.
The conference began when groups of coworking enthusiasts met up at SXSW in 2008, 2009 and spun their gathering into an unconference in 2010 and 2011. Last year, Elam combined a traditional conference with professional speakers and a do it yourself unconference to create the first GCUC.
The coworking movement has become a serious business in the United States, Elam said.
“What we are seeing now is specialization in coworking,” she said. “It is coworking but they are really looking for a very specific demographic in a very specific part of the market.”
Capital Factory in Austin and Geekdom in San Antonio both target high-technology professionals. Link Coworking welcomes all kinds of workers and doesn’t specialize in a particular industry, Elam said.
“What I look for at Link is somebody who wants to get stuff done,” Elam said. “At the tend of the day, what you need is a place to be productive.”
But niche coworking is a very high growth area. Plug and Play in Austin targets workers with young kids. Kitchen Coworking on sixth street is aimed at people in the food industry.
“On the West Coast, we’re seeing maker spaces and people making stuff with their hands,” Elam said.
In Round Rock, TechShop is a specialized workplace aimed at making stuff with tools.
This may be the last year for GCUC in Austin. Next year, Elam is planning on hosting the conference in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.
“It’s an amazing conference put on by a few people working really hard,” Elam said.

GCUC Tickets are still on sale. And GCUC still has a few sponsorship opportunities available.

Disclosure: Silicon Hills News is a media sponsor of GCUC. And that’s because it’s one fun, smart and informative conference and we like to cover it. We’re also a fan of coworking. And Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.