Category: Austin (Page 267 of 318)

Tim Rothwell, one of the co-founders and managing director of UMeTime, recently answered a few questions about the new startup, which launched last week in Austin.
The company has been under development for a year and a half.
UMeTime has raised $862,000 and is seeking an additional $500,000, according to Rothwell.

Q. What is UMeTime?

A. UMeTime is a tool that allows businesses to connect with local customers in real-time. Business owners are in complete control of the technology, and can use it however and whenever they’d like … speed up their slow hours, fill empty chairs and tables, and sell a new product or service.
UMeTime delivers local customers into the door, so the chances of them turning into a repeat customers is much greater. Plus, merchants can test the effectives of their campaigns with UMeTime’s Merchant Management Tool Suite, which provides real-time analytics and reports.
Think of UMeTime as a marketing solution rather than a daily deal service.
UMeTime is also a free mobile application that connects consumers with local businesses and deals that are happening around them right now. With the “Blast Out” technology, users have the ability to receive notifications from all Food and Beverage merchants that are running specials at any given time in their immediate area. “My Tab” is a consumer’s personal filter tool to customize their “deal-feed” and choose individual merchants that they want to receive instant offers from.
No more spam, no more distant offers, and no more Botox specials! Support local Austin businesses and connect like never before!

Q. How did you come up with idea?

A. I moved up to Los Angeles following my studies with Brett Berman, who has been my best friend of 12 years and business partner in UMeTime. It’s quite funny how we came up with the concept of UMeTime. The very first bar that we went to was a hip place on Abbot Kinney in Venice Beach. We were shocked when our beers were $9 a piece, given that we were absolutely broke! Our solution at the time was to subscribe to all of the daily deal sites to receive all of the best offers from businesses in our local area. Within a few days we quickly realized that this was a mistake as our email inbox began to overflow with Brazilian Bikini Wax-type offers from “local” businesses that happened to be 45 minutes away. UMeTime, in the early days, was built to be the ultimate happy hour guide, where merchants can post real-time specials throughout the day, depending on
their slow hours and types of drinks/food specials that they want to “Blastout!” Of course, it has evolved since then, but our core remains the same … put the merchants in charge of their offers and the terms, and put the user in charge of their “deal-feed.” UMeTime is the hyper-local technology that connects the two.

Q. Why did UMeTime move from Los Angeles to Austin?

A. I’ve been coming to Austin for the past 3 years. I have good college friends that grew up here, and we would travel to Austin every opportunity we could. (ACL, Halloween, UT Football games). For a few years, I remember telling Brett how awesome Austin is, and giving him detailed reports on my trips. Finally, in November of 2011, we took a trip here from LA to scope it out and get a feel
for the technology scene, and how it differs from CA. This city began to grow on us, we knew there was something special about Austin. Over time, we recognized that this city would be the best market to launch the technology. Some of the most dedicated and loyal people out there, Kyle Nathanson, Dan McKernan, and Kristian Zak made the move with us to launch the company. The great part about it is that we are all best friends, so it’s been a great experience for us to do this together.

Q. Who’s your competition?

A. Of course the big Daily deal companies come to mind, such as Groupon, Living Social, etc. The issue for the merchants is that the terms of the offer are not in favor of the local merchant. The customers redeeming these specials are what we call, “one night standers”, or bargain hunters who are there to redeem an insanely discounted, long-term offer and rarely visit the merchants
again. 9 out of 10 businesses require marketing solutions that are targeted to deliver local, loyal and regular customers on terms that do not cannibalize their current profit margins. The market response of the early entries to the “discount” marketplace, including household names such as Groupon and Living Social, deliver distribution channels for deeply discounted offers BUT only on terms and conditions that the merchant cannot possibly sustain.

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

A. We are excited to be launched in our first market, Austin, Texas! Our immediate goals are to get some traction in the market and observe how local merchants and users engage with the technology. We strongly feel that college-based markets will be UMeTime’s sweet spot, and we have identified many ways that we can strategically integrate ourselves with the University and it’s students. Our 1-year goal is to have a strong presence in 10 University-based markets by the end of 2013, and by the end of 2014 we want to be in 60 markets, while exploring international expansion.

Q. Who makes up your team?

A. Tim Rothwell – Co-Founder/Managing Director, Brett Berman – Co-Founder/Managing Director, Donald Clark – COO, Kristian Zak – Community Marketing Director, Dan McKernan – Director of Digital Marketing and Advertising, Kyle Nathanson – Sales Director/Campus Marketing, Robert Varela – Business Development & Sales, Michael Hernandez – Business Development & Sales, Tyler Reynolds – Business Development & Sales, Diego Hernandez – SEO & Graphic Design, Genevieve Andretti – Customer Support.

Q. How is UMeTime financed?
A. Friends, Family, and Angels

Q. How does UMeTime make money?

A. UMeTime charges the business when we deliver a paying customer in the door, which is when the business wants it, on their terms, and selling the inventory that they want to sell. For every customer that UMeTime
delivers during a “Blastout” (1-3 hr deal campaign pushed to a 2-mile radius), UMeTime charges $1. For each “Deal” (Longer campaign that receives increased visibility, and instantly notifies customers who are “following them”), UMeTime collects 25% of the revenue on the deal, and releases 75% plus any overspend to the merchant. In the future, we may implement a monthly subscription fee for the use of
Blastouts.

Q. Anything else you want to make a point of that we haven’t asked you
about?

A. We have recently moved our team and business operations to Austin from California. We feel that Austin is the place to be, and we look forward to building technologies that benefits local business and Austinites. The startup community has been great to us, and we now know why this city is so special and a great market to launch a business.

Q. What’s your favorite local startup resource?

A. The Austin Chamber of Commerce has been great to us, and has opened many doors for UMeTime. We are very thankful to them for what they’ve done, not only for UMeTime, but for the city of Austin and the startup community.
Texas Entrepreneur Network has been a great resource for UMeTime and has allowed us to get plugged in within a short time. They’ve provided an “Austin Resource” section, which pretty much breaks down everything tech going on in Austin and resource links for startups. The Capital Factory has enabled UMeTime to meet a lot of great people, and has abundant resources to assist startups at any stage.

BY IAN PANCHEVRE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

“Of everything which we possess there are two uses,” Aristotle noted some 2,300 years ago. “One is the proper and the other, the improper or secondary use of it.” For Aristotle, the proper use of a shoe would be to wear it on your feet. Whereas the “improper” or “secondary” use of a shoe would be to exchange it for something else. “The same may be said of all possessions, for the art of exchange extends to all of them,” Aristotle continues.
Certainly, the Kyrgyz, a tribal group in Kyrgyzstan, would understand Aristotle’s sentiment. Among the Kyrgyz, horses are not only good for riding, but also for exchanging as their primary unit of currency. And when a deal can’t be done by exchanging an even number of horses? The Kyrgyz throw in some lambskins as change.
Despite the wisdom of Aristotle or the traditions of the Kyrgyz, barter economies haven’t been in fashion for several thousand years. There are obvious reasons why modern economies operate off a common currency. But one San Antonio startup is forcing a serious rethink of the full faith and credit we place in traditional currency.
“Money may not be the most efficient way to value things,” explains Steven Quintanilla, the founder and CEO of Kirpeep.com. “It’s funny because we have come so far as a society, but we still use an archaic system of exchange.”
Kirpeep, a recent recipient of a $25,000 investment from the Geekdom Fund, is an exchange engine. By tapping into a potentially vast and hidden market of exchange opportunities, “Kirpeep will do for exchange what Google did for search,” Quintanilla predicts.
The problem that Kirpeep is attempting to solve is one of measuring the value of an object or service, which is inherently subjective.
“Buying power and utility can be maximized via an economic system that is based off of what things are worth instead of what they cost,” Quintanilla elaborates. This sounds good in theory, but in practice a system needs to be established for enabling exchanges in an open market.
And that’s where Kirpeep comes in.
Kirpeep powers exchanges through a simple, four phase process. The Locate Phase involves identifying an exchange by searching or browsing for an “offer” that a user has posted, or an unmet “need” that another user can satisfy. Offers and needs can be either goods or services. Once a potential swap is identified, the users – more fondly known as Kirpeepers – message each other and begin a bargaining process in the Agree Phase. When an agreement has been reached, the two parties enter the Perform Phase, where the exchange occurs. Once the parties complete their obligations, the R2 Phase prompts each participant to rate and review the experience along four key metrics.
When asked for examples of exchanges on Kirpeep, Quintanilla fondly recounts the story of a web developer who traded his programming services with a local auto body shop. The auto body shop received a flashy new website. And the web developer? A 1986 Cadillac Coupe de Ville.
“I think it’s the future of a new economic system,” boasts Ana Rodriguez, a self-described power user who exchanged logo design work for a professional photo-shoot. “We are already witnessing a change in how we collaborate: people work online, many don’t even carry change and use their card to make purchases… I foresee many starting to embrace the barter/exchange/trade philosophy and Kirpeep will be the place for that.”
Kirpeep, an abbreviation of the phrase “keep it real people,” was conceived by Quintanilla back in 2008, while he was an undergraduate at MIT. While pursuing contract work, Quintanilla became frustrated with the lack of reliable platforms for exchanging services and goods with one another. The anonymous nature of Craigslist destroys accountability, rendering potential exchanges shady at best. Whereas Taskrabbit is narrow in focus, only allowing for odd job services in exchange for cash. After an extended period of revisiting the concept and tweaking the technology, Kirpeep publicly launched in November of 2012.
Early activity has been encouraging for Quintanilla and the Kirpeep team. Moreover, Quintanilla assures that an array of new features will be deployed in the near future. Kirpeep is currently looking for development and business talent to join the team. And Quintanilla hopes that a recently launched crowdsourcing campaign will secure more capital.
Although it may be a while until Kirpeep.com finds adoption in rural Kyrgyzstan, Quintanilla believes it’s only a matter of time until Kirpeep realizes its vision. Until then, Kirpeep will continue powering local exchanges, one after another.

Disclosure: Geekdom is a Sponsor of Silicon Hills News

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The competition among the finalists at Friday’s Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition was fierce. But the winner, recipient of $135,000 and entry to the Global Venture Labs Investment Competition, was Seismos, a company that uses CO2 and sound waves to free up incremental amounts of oil reserves left underground after drilling.
The two other winners were GluTact, a company that plans to bring to market a contact lens that reads glucose levels in diabetics, and BeatBox Beverages, an Austin company that creates volume quantities of party drinks that appeal to the Millennial generation.
The competition was held by Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs accelerator at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. The judges, Isaac Barchas of Austin Technology Incubator, Morgan Flager of Silverton Partners, Shelley Hossenlopp, Spot on Sciences, Robert Reeves, Datical, and Jerry Sullivan, a retired venture capitalist, were instructed to judge solely on the basis of which company they would invest in, if they had $1 million to invest in one company. All entrants were Texas-based companies.
Friday’s competition was the final five, whittled down from 60.

Seismos
The winning company had one clear advantage: They were developing software to be used on existing machinery in a space worth $4 trillion, which soundly trumped the profit potential of other competitors. Team members pointed out that two-thirds of oil tapped in drilling remains underground, trapped in the rock. Even freeing a small portion of that oil, they estimated seven percent, could result in billions of dollars of profit for oil companies as well as 60 more years of oil production for the U.S. Various methods of extracting the oil have proven environmentally dangerous and expensive.
One method that is less damaging than, say hydraulic fracking, is releasing CO2 into the ground where the oil is, releasing the oil. But in the process, CO2 gets stuck and increasingly smaller amounts are available for recycling. The problem, oil industry executives and engineers confirmed for Seismos, is that they are “operating blind” and can’t see where the CO2 is going or where it’s stuck. Seismos is preparing to license a software technology invented by a scientist at Berkley University that uses sound waves to map the path of the CO2 as well as the location of oil underground. The process would cost oil companies about $3.5 million per year as compared to about $38 million per incident of current mapping technologies which require a well to be shut down for a period of weeks. Presenters were looking for an infusion of $2 million, beginning with a $500,000 investment.
Seismos was the last presenter, seeking money to obtain the license and conduct testing. After the group’s presentation, the judges were silent for a moment before several of them said it was “an excellent presentation” and Shelly Hossenlopp noted it sounded “almost too good to be true.”
The group had a relationship with the scientist who discovered the power of the sound waves and is preparing to sign a license agreement. One of the other groups that won, GluTact, isn’t quite so close to claiming the technology it hopes to bring to market.

GluTact
GluTact presenters pointed out that one in ten Americans currently has diabetes and by 2050 the Centers for Disease Control projects, the number will be one in three. Consistent monitoring of glucose levels is crucial for managing diabetes but current methods require people to prick themselves, draw blood and use a glucose monitor and test strips. It’s messy, the test strips cost roughly $1 each, and it’s not something people want to do in front of others. Because it’s a hassle many diabetics just don’t do it.
Tear fluid, however, also accurately reads glucose levels. Researchers at the University of Washington have invented a contact lens whose outer ring reads the levels and sends a radio signal to a card that registers what glucose levels are when the person looks at it. The cost is approximately the same as existing monitoring methods. GluTact seeks to bring the technology to market. The group is planning to seek funding from sponsors in the medical device and healthcare fields and is hoping to secure the patent for the lens.

BeatBox
The third leading team is BeatBox. The Austin company has created an alcoholic beverage that meets what it says are the three requirements of Millennials—good taste, good value and high alcohol content. Millennials, presenters said, are all about to be of drinking age. They’re not content to throw a party with a keg of beer. Men buy most of the alcohol for parties and they want to serve beverages that will appeal to women. The company’s first offering is a raspberry-lemonade flavored drink with an orange wine base that tastes like vodka. The company has already obtained all the necessary licenses to create the drink, has a manufacturing plant, a top-tier packaging partner and has hired a law firm and a distribution company. It was seeking a $100,000 loan at 11 percent interest to be paid or converted to stock after three years.
The other competitors received honorable mention.

Intelligent Menu
Intelligent Menu is a restaurant app that would perform the functions of other apps, allowing customers to identify specific food items by location, make reservations, and order food from their own phones using a QR code. The app would provide detailed analytics to restaurants. The analytics would pinpoint the success of specific food items and highs or lows could help restaurants identify the cause of falling or rising customer satisfaction. Who was cooking at that time of day? Who was serving?
The group’s research showed restaurants could improve table turnover by seven percent by giving customers control over the ordering process. Customers would also be likely to purchase more high margin items items like appetizers, desserts and alcoholic beverages.

EduSex
EduSex is a company that repurposes content from the CDC into a sex education app geared toward adolescents. It begins with gestures as harmless as hugging and evolves from there. Parents can choose which information they want their children to have on the app and preferences are saved with a login. Presenters said their main target audience was divorced dads who didn’t know what their spouses were teaching their sons and feared their sons were experiencing shame around sexual feelings.
Research shows, presenter Harry Lindner said, that most of these conversations take place in cars when “Parents don’t have to make eye contact and the kid can’t leave.”
The group plans to extrapolate the idea to other formats, such as books and other topics like bullying and drugs.

Rackspace Hosting has received a $2.5 million job training grant from the Texas Workforce Commission.
The San Antonio-based company will use the grant, in partnership with Alamo Colleges, to train 1,000 new employees, as well as current employees.
Rackspace will be hiring the new workers in San Antonio, Austin and Dallas and paying them an average hourly wage of $25.38, under the terms of the grant.
The announcement is being made at a news conference this morning at Rackspace’s headquarters with TWC Chairman Andres Alcantar, Alamo Colleges Chancellor Bruce Leslie, Rackspace’s Chairman Graham Weston and its CEO Lanham Napier.
“We’ve committed to hiring 1,000 new employees in the next two years,” said Duane La Bom, Rackspace’s director of training and development.
The grant will be used to create and provide a new online curriculum on cloud-based technologies. The training will be for technicians, Linux administrators and software developers.
“It’s no secret that the shortage of these skills exists today,” La Bom said.
The research firm IDC reported that 1.7 million cloud computing jobs went unfilled last year and that’s expected to grow in coming years, he said.
Rackspace is also partnering with Geekdom to launch the Open Cloud Academy to provide training to veterans and the public on Cloud Computing technologies. The first class will start training at the end of February. The official ribbon cutting for the Cloud Academy, which is based at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio, is March 19th.
This is the second Texas Workforce Commission training grant Rackspace has received. In 2008, Rackspace got a $4.7 million grant to provide training to more than 3,000 Rackspace employees.
Rackspace, with 4,600 employees, is the second largest cloud computing provider worldwide. It launched the world’s largest commercially-operated open cloud platform in 2012.

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder Silicon Hills News
At Startup Grind, Clay Christensen decked out in a business suit with tie, looked like he was about to address his Harvard Business School class.
Instead, Christensen, perched on the arm of a leather chair, spoke plainly and authoritatively, to an attentive audience of technology entrepreneurs, angel investors and VCs at Startup Grind, a two-day technology conference focused on startups held on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Christensen covered a lot of topics including how entrepreneurship is becoming a more predictable path to success through pattern recognition and that it’s no longer a trial and error process.
He also predicted major disruptions in education, smartphones and the venture capital industries.
“Just as I pray for Harvard Business School, I pray for Apple,” Christensen said.
And in the wake of recent suicides in Silicon Valley and the technology industry, Christensen also discussed his latest book How Will You Measure Your Life? The book focuses on integrity, happiness and living a balanced life.
For the first half of his talk, Christensen spoke directly to the audience. During the second half, Mark Suster, venture capitalist, quizzed him on a variety of topics.
Christensen, best known for his 1997 bestselling book The Innovator’s Dilemma about disruption in traditional industries, spent a great deal of time talking about how disruption breaks traditional businesses and spawns new ones. Disruption occurs when companies spend too much time focused on their existing business and fail to adopt new technology to meet future needs.
Christensen’s theory of disruption allows companies to predict “whether you will kill the incumbents or whether the incumbents will kill you.”
In one example of disruption, Christensen recounted his youth and his love of transistor radios because they were portable and allowed kids to listen to rock and roll music outside of the earshot of their parents. His parents had a large RCA radio equipped with vacuum tubes.
Transistors eventually replaced vacuum tubes in electronics because transistors were the superior technology. But they were also disruptive because they created a new marketplace.
Christensen explained that disruption occurs when incumbent industries respond to new competitors. He advised entrepreneurs to go after the bottom of a market and to work their way up. He also advised them to go after markets that have no customers. He used the example of a vendor selling solar TVs to the two billion people in Asia and Africa who don’t have electricity. They are thrilled with the devices. But people accustomed to high-quality TV in a market like the U.S. would not be as thrilled.
The path for entrepreneurs has also evolved from one of trial and error to an industry focused on pattern recognition.
“Most VCs still live in a world where they think it’s unpredictable to pick winning companies and entrepreneurs,” Christensen said. They still trust their gut instinct instead, he said.
That’s one reason why the venture capital industry is ripe for disruption, Christensen said.
“As a group, there are fewer venture capitalists that have read my research than any other group,” Christensen said. “They still think entrepreneurship is in the realm of intuition.”
“The Theory of Disruption” is what Christensen is best known for, he said.
Intel’s Co-founder Andy Grove, a fan of the Innovator’s Dilemma and author of Only the Paranoid Survive, told Christensen he should call the theory the “Christensen effect” because people would not understand what he meant by disruption.
“Everyone uses the word disruption but very few of them really understand what it means,” he said. “Disruption is what the competition will do in response to what you do.”
That’s why entrepreneurs should always move up from the bottom of the market in pursuit of profit, Christensen said. The existing market will flee up market.
“That’s actually quite important if you want to succeed,” he said.
He also advised startups to compete against non-consumption markets.
“When you have a new product it’s important to target people whose options are none,” Christensen said.
Tesla Motors makes $100,000 electric cars but that doesn’t fill a very big market niche. Instead, an electric carmaker should market a car that doesn’t go very far or very fast and sell them to the parent’s of teenagers, Christensen said.
Apple makes its iPhone and other products with proprietary technology, whereas the Android Operating System is built on open architecture. That makes the smart phone industry ripe for disruption, Christensen said. The marketplace will go to the cheaper Android-based smart phones.
Online education is leading to a massive disruption in the higher education industry. Christensen predicted 15 years from now half of all universities will go bankrupt including state institutions.
Lastly, Christensen explained how the venture capital industry will be disrupted, but not through crowdfunding. The VCs focus too much on large investments and they should be looking at the smaller deals too, he said.
He said that royalty-based financing, popular in Austin, has become a viable alternative to venture capital. Royalty-based financing gives an entrepreneur money in exchange for future repayment but doesn’t require any fixed payment schedules or amounts.
Christensen also talked about how an entrepreneur can find out if a customer is going to buy their product or not.
“What causes us to buy a product or service is stuff happens to us everyday,” Christensen said.
Understanding the cause and what motivates people to buy improves the probability of success to a much higher level, he said.
But the customer is the wrong unit of measurement, he said. Instead, an entrepreneur must understand the job the customer is trying to do.
Christensen recounted a story about a fast food restaurant that studied why customers bought milkshakes in the morning. They discovered that people who “hire” or buy milkshakes in the morning do so to keep themselves occupied on their drive to work because it lasted 25 minutes and satisfied their hunger. They occasionally “hire” bananas, donuts, bagels and coffee, but the milkshake did the job better than the others.

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

This month on SA New Tech: Want to find the most authentic places to visit in downtown San Antonio? Now there’s a map for that. Plus, SPoTS can help you motivate your sales reps and SportyBird.io helps small soccer teams use big statistical tools.
The Loc@List Map

The Loc@List is a printed tourist map to downtown San Antonio that identifies the most historic and authentic establishments the city has to offer. Created by San Antonio natives Eddie Romero and Christopher Perez, the map will be released quarterly and will designate 13 places in the downtown area that tourists should visit. The company plans on designating new establishments each time they release a map, though there will be some reoccurring locations. The layout of the map was created by graphic designer Robert Salinas.
“We all wanted to do something in San Antonio to highlight great places and kind of get past this ‘San Antonio is lame’ kind of stigma that everyone has,” says Romero.
Romero and Perez pick the locations themselves – drawing from their own experience and keeping an eye on local blogs like Puropinche and sites like Yelp. The product will generate revenue by selling add space on the back of the printed map.
The maps will be available downtown at B-cycle locations, hotels, and various places along E. Houston Street.
The Loc@List is currently in the process of establishing an online presence and plans to produce a series of YouTube videos highlighting San Antonio’s downtown area.
The Loc@List is currently looking to hire people to help market their product.

SportyBird.io

SportyBird.io is a mobile app designed to keep track of soccer statistics in a user friendly way. The app was invented by co-founders Joshua Swank and John Trenholm. Swank has been involved with soccer for most of his life and had the idea for the app while coaching youth soccer.
“After college I started coaching youth soccer and realized a lot of teams don’t have a resource [for statistics],” said Swank. “Over 70 percent of coaches between youth soccer, college, and professional teams use statistics in some form or fashion – a lot of them still hand-write them on paper.”
SportyBird is designed to make recording these statistics much easier. The app can not only gather simple numerical data such as the number of saves, corner kicks, and shots on goal for a team, but it can be used to record the location of those shots and saves on the field. The mobile app links to a web interface where a coach can login to their SportyBird account and see graphs and detailed information about his team’s performance – both per game and over the length of a season. The app can also be used to record statistics outside of games such as how many practices a player has missed. Swank envisions the app one day being scaled up to a point where entire soccer organizations, such as division one clubs, can use it.
The SportyBird.io Team app is scheduled to come out in about a month. Swank hopes to market the product to youth clubs and lower-level professional teams. Their pay structure will work by charging a monthly or yearly rate for the product.

SPoTS

SPoTS is a web based application that is designed to help structure compensation for sales teams – essentially helping users identify and reward their sales superstars while not overpaying those employees that are not generating adequate revenue. Founder Dan Sevigny created the product to correct a problem he dealt with in his own sales experience while working for State Farm Insurance.
“The way I got compensated never lined up with the way the agency made money,” said Sevigny. “So I wanted to develop a tool, and we’ve come up with the solution of SPoTS.”
SPoTS stands for “scorecard production tracking system”. It started back in 2008 as an excel spreadsheet with some nice graphics. The system allows employers to identify and easily communicate to sales reps what products are most profitable to sell at any given time. The sales reps then can focus on selling those products and can receive better compensation by focusing on what makes their company the most money. The employees will also be able to see how their pay will increase if they make certain sales benchmarks.
SPoTS has improved their product each year, making the spreadsheet look progressively more appealing and adding better compensation system to let employees know what the best products for them to sell in the future would be. In 2012, SPoTS made $600,000 between their spreadsheet system and their consulting services.
Now in 2013, CTO Seth Watson has put the system online – making the system accessible from any computer or iPad. Every day, team members can see an online paycheck letting them know how much they’ve made. More importantly, they can see a “scorecard bonus scale” that shows how their paycheck will increase as they sell more. The scale is generated based on point values and indicates how profitable each product is for the employee to sell at any given time. It also shows how the employees commission will compound as they achieve certain benchmarks.
“They can see exactly what they need to sell, when they need to sell it,” says Sevigny. “All of the real time analytics are there.”
SPoTS also consults agency owners on how to manage their team and create the compensation system that is best suited for their production needs. To even better inform agency owners, the SPoTS product comes with analytics that show owners how and where their sales people are making the agency money.
The company currently has around 400 users – most of whom are State Farm Insurance agents. Right now, 2.2 percent of all State Farm Insurance agents use the system.
The company is currently looking for people to help them market their product.

Wimbo Music Inc.

Wimbo is an iPhone app with a very simple, yet difficult to execute, music function. It allows users to listen to their favorite songs while independently controlling each instrument and vocal track in the song. Users control sliders on a virtual mixer that allows them to mute, or change the level of, every element of a song.
“Wimbo music was born so that we could make playing music, practicing, and rehearsing much more fun,” says founder and CEO Denis Ouellette. “Music is the ultimate social media, and playing alone sucks.”
By using Wimbo, musicians can now play along with their favorite bands without having to play over them. A guitarist could mute the lead guitar in Sweet Home Alabama, for example, and play those notes himself instead. A drummer could mute the drums in his favorite song and experiment with different rhythms to fill in that space. Ouellette envisions musicians using Wimbo to practice, teach, analyze, and experiment with their favorite songs. They could even use the product as a portable Karaoke machine.
The trick to making Wimbo work, however, is obtaining a user’s favorite songs in a large, multi-track format where the instruments are not pre-mixed. Most bands, both past and present, do not keep their multi-track mixes. And if they do, the master recordings of the songs normally belong to an artist’s label and are very expensive to acquire. Wimbo Music resolves this problem by obtaining the right to reproduce popular music from the relent publishers, which is cheaper, and then re-creating popular songs by partnering with special studios, musicians, and sound engineers across the county. These studios have the resources and the talent to re-create popular music, including older music from artists like The Beatles, with an almost indistinguishable difference in quality from the original song. They can even replicate the voice of a popular singer like Christina Aguilera with around 90% accuracy.
Currently, Wimbo Music plans to have 50 to 100 songs available by their products release in mid-April – focusing on classic rock and country at the time of launch. They are also planning to work with upcoming musicians and indie bands to grow their library. At launch, Wimbo will charge $4.99 per song.
Ouellette sees Wimbo as a huge opportunity for artists to make more revenue and increase their interaction with fans.
“Artists are doing everything they can to engage their fans and there is no more intimate way than to actually let them play and mix their songs,” says Ouellette.
Wimbo is currently looking to hire developers with music backgrounds to grow their company.

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

What is the best way to learn the acoustic track of Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd? Find the original sheet music? Constantly listen to the song? With five instruments playing at once, it’s hard to pick out the notes you want to play. But it’s not like you can just turn the rest of the band off right?
Well, now you can.
Wimbo Music Inc., founded by CEO Denis Ouellette, wants to change the way that musicians learn and interact with their favorite music. The Wimbo product is an iPhone app that allows users to manipulate the individual instrument tracks of their favorite songs. Individual instruments in a song are controlled by a virtual mixer. Users can change instrument levels with a slider, or simply turn them off.
“We wanted to give people a tool — a simple tool — to be able to play over, or to play with, their favorite songs — or customize their songs,” says Ouellette. “We wanted to give people the opportunity to be able to customize a song for whatever their intended use would be… … and the only way to do that was to be able to have songs broken down by the instruments and vocals that make up their favorite songs.”
Ouellette sees countless uses for the product. It can help musicians learn their favorite songs, teach music to others, jam out with friends, and even play karaoke off their smart phone. Furthermore, Karaoke users are not limited to just singing – any instrument, or combination of instruments, can be muted so that a musician or two could “fill in” for their favorite band on a karaoke stage.
“You can play with, truly, a band backup of professional musicians,” says Ouellette.
The product is not without limitations, however. To be utilized by Wimbo, songs must be available in a multi-track format many times larger than an MP3. Most bands, both past and present, do not keep their multi-track mixes. And if they do, the master recordings of the songs are very expensive to acquire from an artist’s label. While Wimbo Music can obtain some songs directly from artists in original multi-track format, most popular music must be re-created in that format.
To do this, Wimbo must first buy the rights to popular songs from the relevant publishers. The company then partners with studios, musicians, and sound engineers across the county to re-create popular songs for Wimbo’s product in the correct format. These studios have the resources to re-create popular music, including older music from artists like The Beatles, with an almost indistinguishable difference in quality from the original song. They can even replicate the voice of a popular singer like Christina Aguilera with around 90% accuracy.
Replicating music is not cheap, but right now Wimbo Music plans to have 50 to 100 songs available by their products release in mid-April. They plan to focus on classic rock and country at the time of launch, but are also looking for indie artists and local bands to partner with and increase their music library. Songs for the product will cost $4.99.
Wimbo Music Inc. is currently a three man team composed of founder and CEO Denis Ouellette, Chief Technical Officer Greg Cerveny, and Director of Design Cory Shaw. They have been working on their product for three years and are currently in the beta stage of development.
All three partners play an instrument and sometimes jam out together at Geekdom of San Antonio. They are currently looking to hire developers with music backgrounds to grow their company. They also need a drummer to jam with.

SpreadFast, a maker of social marketing software, announced today that it has raised $18 million in venture capital.
OpenView Venture Partners led the round with additional investment from Austin Ventures and InterWest Partners.
The Austin-based startup plans to use the money to hire employees and further develop its product.
“For the past few years we have been tracking the social media management space and believe the market is at an inflection point. Companies are no longer concerned with Likes, but rather with building real customer engagement and value across their social networks,” Adam Marcus, Managing Director at OpenView Venture Partners, said in a news release. “We believe Spredfast has built the only true enterprise-class product to help the Fortune 1000 manage this incredibly important channel. We couldn’t be happier to partner with this tremendous team to build a category-defining company.”
Spredfast’s customers include AT&T, Caterpillar, Rackspace, Starbucks, AAA, T. Rowe Price, Whole Food Market and Warner Brothers.
The company recently integrated Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews into its platform for easy social amplification of authentic word-of-mouth.
“Social is rapidly becoming the preferred interaction mechanism for consumers and business people alike. The time is fast approaching when your customers will no longer email or call you — they will send out a signal via social and expect a thoughtful response. They’ll expect you to know about them and for you to offer them something of value for their attention,” Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast said in a news release. “Spredfast’s customers understand the strategic advantage of laying the technical and organizational foundation for this future now, working with a trusted partner whose entire focus is social.”