Category: Austin (Page 265 of 318)

BY RANDY LANKFORD
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

SiteB Data is becoming larger by thinking smaller.
Founded in 2009, SiteB Data in San Antonio is primarily a colocation data storage service. Businesses that don’t have the wherewithal to build the infrastructure to securely manage and store massive amounts of data, use SiteB’s data center instead.
“Colocation is usually used by small organizations with specific storage needs, like educational systems or medical providers, that have some infrastructure but don’t want to invest in everything that goes into a data center like air conditioning and backup power,” explains Fred Reyes, CEO of SiteB.
There’s also the environment to consider. Not what the business is doing to the environment, but what the environment can do to the business. Companies located along Texas’ gulf coast, for example, don’t want to store precious data in the path of a hurricane. It’s much safer to store that information in San Antonio and then access it remotely.
Eric Elliott, chief information officer of the Texas Organ Sharing Alliance (TOSA), agrees. One of only 58 independent, federally-designated Organ Procurement Organizations in the United States, TOSA has massive and critical data storage and processing needs. With locations in San Antonio, Austin and McAllen, TOSA chose SiteB’s colocation services because of service and reliability.
“We’ve been very satisfied,” Elliott says. “They give us that personal touch that other colocation services are just too big to provide. There have been times when I’ve had to call someone in the middle of the night and SiteB has always been there. They’ve been very responsive, very reliable.”
But what about even smaller businesses, startups, companies with a great idea and little more? Where do they store their critical data? Where do they get the processing power to run their often one-of-a-kind applications? That’s a question SiteB is answering with its Nuboso Cloud-based hosting brand.
Nuboso was introduced at Austin’s South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival in 2011. Focused on art, music and interactivity, SXSW explores emerging technologies and is a breeding ground for new ideas. That’s the grassroots market Reyes wants to be a part of.
“When we launched Nuboso, we got about 50 users right out of the gate,” says Reyes. “And things have been going fast and furious since then. One of the things we do a little bit differently is we don’t sell virtual machines. We sell resources. The reason we did that was when we first looked at the Cloud offerings out there, there are a lot of people offering virtual machines, or Cloud servers, but the end user didn’t gain the benefit of the Cloud. If you needed a virtual machine, you paid one price and then, if you needed another one, you paid that price again.”
Reyes’ model of the Cloud is built on providing a suite of options enabling users to configure their service to best meet their unique needs.
“We sell you a number of CPUs, a certain amount of drive space and a certain amount of RAM. Then you allocate it as you need it. You can cut it up anyway you want. Let’s say you buy five CPUs, seven gigabytes of RAM and 100 gigabytes of drive space. You can slice that into 20 machines or you can make it one machine. So the end user can utilize the Cloud the way they want to.”
Reyes believes providing that flexibility to entry level businesses through Nuboso will build relationships that will grow. “As those businesses start to grow and reach a point where they need dedicated or specialized services, they naturally grow into our colocation services with SiteB.
“We really get in there with our customers, ‘what do you need, what are you looking for?’ We build that initial relationship when they’re using our Cloud computing service and then, as they grow, we provide them additional, more sophisticated services. And, since we’ve been partnering with them from the start and seen how they’ve grown and how their needs have changed, we’re ready to help them take it to the next level.”
SiteB, and its Nuboso product, are located on the near west side of San Antonio in a 27,000-square foot building owned by the Reyes family, a location Reyes says is ripe for growth.
“We’ve developed the first 7,000 feet so we have room to grow. When we looked at this building we realized the surrounding infrastructure was already there. The long-haul fiber ‘railway’ is right behind us and the connection point is only two buildings away. The power grid this building is in is only 40 percent utilized and the building itself was an empty shell so it was sort of screaming to be a data hub.”
Nuboso’s development was completely self-funded by the cash flow of SiteB. “It wasn’t easy,” says Reyes, “but we were able to do it. Once you have the datacenter, you can do a lot of things with it.
“The initial investment, building a datacenter, was huge. That’s not a cheap project. Just the value of the building itself has probably tripled since we started construction in ‘08. We’re probably at 60-70 percent of our current capacity and we expect to reach 100 percent of our current capacity in the next year. We should pay off the initial investment in four years. What’s probably going to happen, obviously, is we’re going to keep investing in growing our facilities and our capabilities. That’s not a hard sell. It’s pretty easy to raise capital when you’re investing it in growth.”

Infochimps raises $2.78 million of a $3 million offering, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Austin Business Journal reported the “filing is an update to an April 2012 report in which the company received $305,000 of a planned $1.3 million financing from six investors.’
“In 2010, about a year after it started, Infochimps got $1.2 million in funding from venture capital firm, DFJ Mercury. This followed $375,000 in seed financing from angel investors,” according to this profile Susan Lahey did on the company last year.
In addition to the financing, Infochimps also announced that it added Burke Kaltenberger as vice president of worldwide sales and Dave Spenhoff as vice president of marketing.
Infochimps started out as a data marketplace but has since pivoted and now provides data management products to companies.

BY IAN PANCHEVRE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

MetroHi.com , a San Antonio based startup in the review management space, started with humble beginnings but is now picking up momentum, and it’s all thanks to a unique approach to an enduring problem.
Radu Istrate, the founder and CEO of MetroHi and a Boston College graduate, first came to San Antonio in 2006 to start a viral marketing company with his sister, a Trinity University grad. His experience with the promotional aspects of online marketing got him thinking broadly about analytics, reviews and reputation management. And he spotted an opportunity.
At the time that MetroHi was founded – in the ever-so-distant era of early 2011 – a wave of interest and excitement was building in the social media analytics space. But the review analytics space was still relatively nascent, and thus afforded an abundance of opportunities for growth and disruption.
“Now there are a lot of ‘Reputation Management Companies’,” explains Istrate. “But a lot of those companies don’t have a technology, they make claims about managing reviews, but they don’t have an application or any…” Istrate pauses to search for the right term, “technical gravitas.”
MetroHi, on the other hand, has plenty of gravitas, both technical and otherwise.
In pursuit of a core mission to provide local businesses an easy and convenient solution for reputation management, MetroHi offers several key services. The first, Review Site Placement, gets a business placed on all the top review sites. The second, Review Boost, drives new reviews for the business from existing customers. Additionally, MetroHi offers a review aggregator dashboard that allows businesses to monitor activity across a number of different review sites, while generating regular reports that capture broad trends.
Despite building an impressive engine for reputation management, MetroHi believes its role transcends the web and includes offline approaches to building reputation.
“MetroHi boosts reviews through a process that combines online approaches with physical materials and in-store promotions,” Istrate elaborates. By producing and distributing materials (e.g. cards and display stands that contain QR codes, which in turn link to a custom landing page) MetroHi makes it easy for customers to post reviews on behalf of brick-and-mortar businesses.
Wait a minute, a review management company that encourages more reviews? This approach may seem counter-intuitive because it cuts against the grain of most reputation management companies, which promote their business by spreading fear of negative reviews.
But MetroHi doesn’t see it that way.
“If you give your customers an easy and convenient way to post a review, the people that will most likely post are your satisfied customers” notes Istrate. Seen another way, if it’s inconvenient to post a review, only the unsatisfied customers will go out of their way to post about their experience.
“By addressing the convenience issue, you give a voice to the satisfied customers and impact the broader conception of the business.”
In turn, MetroHi has adopted a philosophy that values feedback and embraces public chatter. And it just so happens that the lone, disgruntled customer has his voice drowned out by a chorus of overwhelmingly satisfied customers. This contrasts with the approach of traditional reputation management companies, which are more reactive in nature, offering after the fact solutions for businesses once negative reviews appear.
And it seems that MetroHi’s approach is working shockingly well.
Gina Umana, a Financial Advisor at Waddell & Reed, initially engaged MetroHi in the fall for review site placement but ended up subscribing for additional services. The results? “We weren’t even on the sixth page of Google and now the website shows up right away!” proclaims Umana. “We’ve received at least one client who said she was searching online, found our website, and decided to come in and do business.”
Ah, behold! The marvels of the web, and the accomplishment of a local reputation management company that managed to double its client’s monthly web traffic. Yes, gravitas is something MetroHi does not appear to lack. And this non-traditional approach towards review management may no longer be so counter-intuitive, now that it has had endured and proven itself.

Xtreme Power has raised $5.7 million of a $10 million offering, according to papers on file with the Securities and Exchange Commision.
The Austin-based company, founded in 2004, designs, manufactures and installs batteries and power management systems for utility companies. It has 100 employees, according to the Austin Business Journal.
Since launching, Xtreme Power has received $36 million from investors, the Austin Business Journal reports.

National Instruments, once a startup created by University of Texas graduate students, plans to create 1,000 new jobs and spend $80 million expanding its Austin campus.
National Instruments will also receive $4.4 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund and other incentives from the City of Austin.
“Central Texas’ flourishing high tech industry is further strengthened by National Instruments’ expansion, which will create 1,000 technical and engineering jobs and bolster Austin’s status as a hub for research, development and innovation,” Gov. Rick Perry said in a news statement.
National Instruments, which makes test equipment and software including LabVIEW, a graphical development program, plans to build a 300,000 square foot building next to its current site in North Austin.
“National Instruments was founded in Austin over 35 years ago and has grown to a global company, supplying tools to scientists and engineers around the world to accelerate productivity, innovation, and discovery,” National Instruments Chief Operating Officer Alex Davern said in a news statement.
The Austin American Statesmen has more on the announcement in this story by Kirk Ladendorf.

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Five weeks into its 13 week program, the startups in the TechStars Cloud program, based at Geekdom in San Antonio, had a chance to blow off some steam with some special, and helpful, guests – the alumni of last year’s first program. The alumni startups, which have been successful since exiting the program last April, returned to Geekdom to share beers and stories with the new TechStar Cloud startups at a series of informal hang outs around San Antonio.
Up to this point, the new startups had been meeting mostly with a torrent of highly experienced mentors who gave them advice on how to shape their business ideas and do their market research. Each new startup will meet with around 100 mentors throughout the TechStar Cloud program – as many as three a day in some cases. After the hectic pace of the first five weeks, hanging out with peers and eating barbecue was a welcome change.
TechStar Cloud Managing Director Jason Seats says that talking to alumni startups can be just as valuable as talking to big time mentors like the chairman of Rackspace Hosting, because the experiences of the year one teams hit much closer to home.
“Talking to a team that literally nine months ago was just at Demo Day makes it a lot easier to see the steps that those guys went through,” says Seats.
Currently, in the TechStars Cloud program, some of the fledgling startups are just now ironing out their business models after constant suggestions from mentors. Some still have a long way to go before they finish their prototype product and get ready to pitch to investors. Seats says that it’s important to give the new startups a sense that they aren’t alone in their experience of starting a company.
“This is a hard thing to do and the only people who know what you’re going through are the people who have done it,” says Seats. “It’s really hard
when you’re in the moment to take a step back and look at the big picture. Talking to someone who has walked that path and is a little bit ahead of you is really useful for that perspective.”
In addition to just hanging out and sharing personal stories, the alumni startups gave a few presentations. Andrew Cronk, co-founder and CEO of TempoDB, gave a presentation about his experience in changing from an engineer to a sales person as his new business grew.
“The first thing you have to overcome in your startup is the obscurity gap. No one has ever heard of you,” says Cronk. “You’re product is not going to sell itself. If you build it, they won’t come.”
Cronk says that selling his technology was a major learning experience. Explaining a highly technical product to a non-engineer was not a skill he possessed when he started the company.
“Convincing other people to spend a lot of money to buy new software from someone they’ve never heard of is an art,” says Cronk.
The new startups will get a lot of practice presenting their products in the next few weeks. Richard Grundy, co-founder of alumni startup Flomio, says that the process of explaining your ideas to a constant stream of mentors really helps a startup refine their sales pitch.
“CEOs and CTOs of successful startups, as well as formal companies, come through and vet your ideas and just ask you really hard questions. So it forces you to think about pretty much everything. By the time you’re pitching to an investor, who are very much like these people, it’s like second nature,” says Grundy.
Many of the returning companies also stressed the incredible importance of Demo Day, which is at the end of the whole program where the new startups pitch their idea to a theater full of potential investors. The startups will get eight minutes on stage at the downtown Charline McCombs Empire Theater to impress investors and secure funding for the future of their company.
“They are literally focusing a light on you at the end,” says Cronk. “So if you want to raise money, then raise money. If you want to do a big press release and do a product announcement, do that. But do something when you are on that stage.”
The new startups will practice their Demo Day presentations every other day after about the midpoint of the program. Mentors will watch and critique every aspect of the presentations from the presenter’s slides to their word choice.
Although the alumni weekend was much more of a hang-out time than a weekend of presentations, both Seats and the returning alumni companies view the social aspects of the TechStars Cloud progam as being central to the success of the participating startups.
“So much of TechStars is about shared personal experience that keeps you from making the mistakes that someone else made,” says Seats.
“There is a lot of cross-pollination of ideas, and that happens with the social component,” says Grundy.
“Something that I really appreciated about the program was really building those personal relationships – because that has, in several cases, allowed me to address issues that I was encountering with my business.”
The San Antonio TechStars Cloud incubator is only one of six TechStars programs across the country.
It focuses on cloud technology with one of the key sponsors being Rackspace Hosting. Twelve companies were chosen for the San Antonio program out of several hundred applicants. Managing Director Seats sometimes refers to the Cloud companies as the “plumbers of the internet” – providing technical services to address the needs of much bigger companies.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

BY LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Just in time for South by Southwest, there is a new way to network with a digital business card called Icon.
Icon is the brainchild of Kent Savage and Matt Hovis, technology startup veterans in Austin, who grew tired of having wads of crumpled business cards at the bottom of their briefcases after a business trip.
In the digital age, they thought there had to be a better way to network. So they created one that provides a slick digital image with critical contact information along with all of a person’s social streams.
Icon helps establish and package an individual’s brand just like Coke and Pepsi and Miller Lite brand their beverages. Last week, Savage and Hovis took time out of their busy schedules to answer a few questions about their new startup.

Q. What is Icon?

A. Matt: It is a digital business card system. We think of it as a wicked smart one. It does some things beyond sharing our contact information. Instead of going through a briefcase and digging for paper business cards, we created a system that allows us to have it on our smartphone so it’s with us wherever we go. At its simplest form it’s a wicked smart business card with a rich dynamic profile.
Kent: Think of it as turbo-charging your LinkedIn page and your Twitter feed. It provides a shareable view of who you are as an individual.

Q. What problem are you trying to solve?

A. Matt: It’s the whole art of engagement. What it takes to make a great first impression and present your brand. Companies hire advertising agencies to build their brand. We, as professionals in this increasingly self-serve digital landscape, need to take our personal brand seriously and we need the tools to build our own network and brand in the industry. Crafty people have found ways to do that on their own through e-cards, email signatures and their own Web pages. Building a complete turnkey system is hard, but Icon makes it easy.

Q. Why are you two the best people to tackle this problem?

A. Kent: I’ve been part of multiple startups since 1996 in Austin from sales and marketing to CEO. I know what it takes to build businesses and build brands. How best to engage in the form of email. Matt has been on the digital production and creative agency side building brands for clients. We put our heart and soul and capital into making Icon the best it can be.
Matt: We think of this as personal brand building. We’re professional brands. Those of us who do a better job of managing our brand do better in business. We think about making consistent good impressions across all of our touchpoints. We don’t think there’s a good tool out there like this.

Q. What’s wrong with paper business cards?

A. Kent: We kind of galvanize our whole business around the business card. We thought things had gotten kind of sloppy around the art of engagement. We love business cards but they are obsolete in the way we exchange information today. With a smartphone, I can share my Icon with you. I can send you my digital business card mobile to mobile right there on the spot. I can be invited into your contact network. I don’t lose that spontaneity.
Matt: At the bottom of my briefcase is a crumpled wad of business cards.

Q. How do you plan to acquire customers?

A. Kent: SXSW is right around the corner and this is really your survival kit. You’d be crazy to show up at SXSW without an Icon. It’s purely coincidental with when we are launching Icon. By doing a good job with our customers we expect to spread the word about Icon. We launched a private Beta starting Jan. 1st. Some of those featured Icons are in our gallery. By virtue of what Icon is and how it gets used there is a viral loop that occurs. You can add it to your phone. When someone receives it via text or email there is a button to sign up for Icon. And then secondly, there is simply a way to add this as your email signature. We’ve created this container of your personal content in the form of your Icon that recipients will be compelled to click on. We think by building a great product and service and by satisfying customers, we will grow. We literally turned on our Icon Pro version today that provides users the ability to brand their Icon with their businesses colors and logo and also provides you with your very own analytics telling you who is viewing, sharing and downloading your contact information and content. So now businesses can provide their employees with Icons rather than business cards. Icons are more affordable, always up to date and you never run out. So that’s how Icon will be adopted.

Q. How does it work?

A. Kent: You can share your Icon through the web, email, in person or via mobile. With our optimized mobile you can have your Icon on any smartphone platform. You can send your Icon via SMS or to an email address.
Matt: This brings back that dignity that business cards once had. They represented you. They formed an important barrier.

Q. How did you come up with idea?

Kent: It really just goes back to our experiences of trying to get our arms around multiple points of engagement. I have all these different contact points and social media properties. I have friends and family members on Facebook and then my LinkedIn, which is really nothing more than my resume, and then Twitter came on the scene as a celebrity and news outlet. I had my business card, mobile phone number and business addresses. We created a better way to organize all of these contact points and present yourself in the art of doing business across all of the ways we communicate in business. We also created Icon pro that allows you to brand with your color scheme and it comes with your own personal analytics dashboard to provide a command center so you can see who is viewing, sharing your Icon as well as downloading your contact information. We also aggregate across all your social media friends, followers and connections to let you gauge your reach and brand power.

Q. How does Icon make money?

A. Kent: It’s a freemium model. We have a totally functional solution that is free with Icon. Then we offer the Icon Pro version that is $4.99 per month. You can upgrade or downgrade. We also will be unveiling our Icon business for enterprises.

Q. Why did Icon launch in Austin?

A. Kent: Because it’s our home. We created our livelihood and we live our lifestyle and we’re committed to Austin. We’ve been here since 1996 building digital centric business and we didn’t have to go to Silicon Valley to make that happen. I was at a venture summit at Silicon Valley in December and you’d be amazed at how many of those people were talking about moving to Austin.
Matt: It’s ended up being an ideal place to grow a business like this. It’s sort of an ideal place we’ve ended up in.
Kent: We are also seeing the blending of Austin and San Antonio by connecting not only for lifestyle but also through economic development and business. It’s like what I saw with the telecom corridor in the ’80s and early ’90s in Dallas and Richardson, which provided a huge economic boost to the DFW area. We’re going to see similar opportunity through economic development efforts here.

Q. Who’s your competition?

A. Matt: Maybe the traditional business card. The way we’ve combined some critical components in a digital form. We don’t see there’s a lot competition looking to solve the problems.

Q. How is Icon financed?

A. Kent: It’s privately finance by angels – high networth angels. We initially raised $500,000 and as part of this launch we will start series A discussions.

Q. What are your plans for the company during the next year and the next few years?

A. Matt: We’ve got a defined roadmap of features we’d like to get started on. We charted several of those. Likely develop a mobile app version as well. Learning from customers initial use. We’ve got some dials to use. Look at the way Icon users integrate the product into their lives.

Q. Who makes up your team?

A. Kent: Matt and I are the co-founders. Then we have a great group of product development and strategists that work along side with us to put the dedication and brainpower into making Icon what you see today.

Q. What’s your favorite local startup resource?

A. Kent: My boat dock. That’s where Matt and I brainstorm these ideas. Matt: The espresso trailer: Patika that’s helped fuel these ideas.

Q. Where can I get my own Icon?

A. Go to Icon.me to create your own wicked-smart digital business card.

TSYS announced plans to acquire Austin-based NetSpend for $1.4 billion.
Netspend, founded in 1999, sells prepaid debit cards and other financial services to customers without bank accountants in the United States.
The deal calls for TSYS, based in Columbus, Georgia, to pay $16 in cash for each share of NetSpend common stock.
NetSpend, which sells its prepaid debit cards at more than 62,000 retail locations, is also a leading provider of corporate payroll card solutions, and has a direct distribution channel to reach consumers through online, mobile and direct marketing sources. It has more than 2.4 million accounts.
“The NetSpend acquisition is truly a transformational event for TSYS and consumers alike. It enables us to meet our strategic goals of diversifying our business, being a more innovative payment solutions provider and expanding our role within an area of payments that is expected to grow at a 20% annual rate over the next four years*. The acquisition also complements our already strong presence in the prepaid processing space,” Philip W. Tomlinson, chairman of the board and chief executive officer, TSYS said in a statement. “By acquiring NetSpend, we gain a leadership team with deep prepaid experience, a company with scalable technology and a differentiated product offering customized for the partners and channels they serve. NetSpend’s mission is to empower consumers with the convenience, security and freedom to be self-banked, and this promise aligns with TSYS’ people-centered payments approach that is expected to add significant capabilities in terms of future revenue growth for our companies.”
“With the strength and resources of TSYS, our opportunities are endless,” Dan Henry, chief executive officer of NetSpend, who will join the TSYS executive team, said in a statement. “I can’t think of a better, more strongly positioned industry leader who can help us take NetSpend to the next level. We bring a meaningful, fast-growing business to TSYS, and we will be able to offer our unique products and services to the unbanked consumer faster than ever before. We have built such an amazing team here at NetSpend, and we are excited to be the newest addition to TSYS.”
The transaction is expected to close in mid-2013, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.