Category: Austin (Page 278 of 318)

At the end of the SparkED program at Geekdom on Sunday, the kids presented their projects to their parents.
“My name is Ryan and I’m a Web designer,” said a member of the website team.
He then told the packed room of proud parents about how his team used design elements like typography, layout, hierarchy and wire framing to create an attractive website.
The Jackson Inc. website is live on the Wix.com platform. It illustrates how much work the kids did in two days. Forty kids from Jackson Middle School in San Antonio spent Saturday and Sunday learning to create a robot, a game and a website and build a business. They wrote all the content and took all the pictures on the website of the four teams that made up the SparkED program. Those teams included the website design group, entrepreneurship team, robotics group and the game programmers.
In the SparkED program, seventh and eighth grade students from select middle schools throughout the San Antonio area learn about technology and entrepreneurship in a weekend.
“These kids learned how to make a website in a day,” said Louis Pacilli, director of education at Geekdom and the head of the SparkED program. “Imagine what they could do in a week or a month.”
Mistique Chavez, 12, seventh grade, learned to build and program robots.
“It’s fun,” she said. “It’s cool.”
Mentors singled Chavez out for a special award for going above and beyond expectations to help her team. She received a Geekdom T-shirt.
Omar Khalid, 13, a seventh grader, also worked on the robotics team. His team built a Lego Mindstorm robot called “The Zombie Catcha” and programmed it to pick up a zombie doll. The kids created a scenario in which zombies attacked downtown San Antonio and they marketed their robot to the military, families and businesses as a way to protect themselves from the invading zombies.
“I like technology,” Khalid said. “I like anything that has to do with technology.”
After the program, Khalid said he would try to keep up with robotics by joining a school club and trying to make one at home.
During the presentations at the end of the program, the robotics team gave a live demonstration of their robot in action to their parents.
Throughout the weekend, the kids learned how to collaborate and work together in small teams, Pacilli said.
The kids also learned new words to express themselves, he said.
At the end of the presentation, the kids said in unison “We are the entrepreneurs of the future.” The parents applauded.
“It’s incredible what these kids have accomplished in a weekend,” Pacilli said. “These kids have been sparked to consider business.”
Each child received a gold trophy and recognition for completing the program. One member of every group also received a T-shirt for being exceptional.
Brian Hurley, principal of Jackson Middle School, watched proudly as the kids gave their presentation. He wanted his school to participate in the SparkED program because he wanted to get the kids involved in the creative side of technology and show them what education can provide them for their future, he said.
“I was very impressed, especially with the vocabulary, teamwork and that they had an actual product,” Hurley said. “I just think this is a great program. It’s a very innovative program. I know the kids were very excited about this weekend.”
Tony and Tanya Ballez’s son, Diego, was also recognized for being a team leader on the website design team. He received a Geekdom T-shirt.
“We thought it was wonderful,” Tony Ballez said. “We didn’t know what to expect when we came here. We’re very excited to see what he accomplished.”
Before this weekend all Cameron Lindner, 12, could say is my life’s over because he couldn’t participate in sports following two concussions, said Tammy Lindner, his mother.
“He loves video games,” she said. “He learned to build one and that’s better than football.”
The program filled a big void in Cameron’s life at the right time, she said.
“He’s smart,” she said. “I think this program is awesome. He’s going to be back for summer camp.”
SparkED will host weeklong summer camps during June, July and August for the kids. The camps will focus on teaching the kids how to build mobile phone games.
Michael Rice, a software developer with Rackspace, served as mentor to the programming group on Sunday. He’s a self-taught programmer who dropped out of school in ninth grade and later earned his GED and took some college computer science classes. But mainly he learned programming through participating in a Linux user group forum and reading. And he got his job at Rackspace after writing a lot of free open source code.
His advice to learn programming is to “focus and read and if you don’t understand something go ask.”
“A good programmer loves puzzles and likes to take things apart and put them back together,” Rice said.
He volunteered to mentor the kids because “I really like helping other people learn this stuff.”
Joseph Borrego, 16, a junior at Alamo Heights High School, volunteered to mentor the robotics group.
“They are really self directed,” Borrego said. “They really enjoyed the program and I enjoyed working with them.”
Jakyb De La Rosa, 14, eighth grader, also received recognition and a Geekdom T-shirt for helping out the entrepreneurship team.
“It was pretty fun,” he said. “I thought it was going to be boring.”
His parents, Manual and Valeria De La Rosa were thrilled with his accomplishments at SparkED.
“The vision these guys have for the next 10 to 15 years in the tech field is exhilarating,” Manual De La Rosa said. “They want to take the U.S. and the state of Texas to the next level. We want our kids to have great paying jobs in the technology field. We’re losing ground as a nation to other countries. This kind of program can help us keep those jobs in the United States.”
Dean Pacilli, 17, a freshman at St. Mary’s University majoring in international relations and computer science and son of Louis Pacilli, volunteered to mentor the website group.
“Just getting the kids involved in technology is so important,” he said. “Our future is going to be all about technology.”
“Because we’re advancing at such an exponentially fast rate we have to keep up,” he said. “Because they are learning about this technology at 12, they’ll be really advanced when they’re my age.”
The kids loved being able to create their own website, he said. They liked having that power, he said. He’s already volunteering for the next SparkED group.
“I totally love the program,” he said. “I can’t wait to see the new batch of kids.”

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Forty kids arrived by bus Saturday morning to Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.
Few of them knew anything about robotics or building a business.
The kids started off kind of groggy said Simon Barnett, a 16-year-old mentor from Alamo Heights High School. He could tell some of them didn’t really want to be there.
But through the course of the day and hands on learning, the kids came to life, Barnett said. He mentored the robotics group in which the kids build a Lego Mindstorm Robot.
“By the end of the day, several of them told me they didn’t want to leave,” he said.
That transformation is exactly what SparkED seeks to do, said Louis Pacilli, education director at Geekdom and the program’s administrator.
SparkED officially kicked off two weekends ago. Almost every weekend through May, a group of 40 at risk Junior High School kids will participate in the weekend long program at Geekdom, on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio. Then SparkED will host free weeklong summer camp programs for some of the returning students.
Graham Weston, chairman and founder of Rackspace, has put up the funds to pay for SparkED, which is free to the students and schools participating in it. Schools in the North East ISD, San Antonio ISD, Harlandale ISD and New Braunfels ISD will participate along with programs geared for home school kids.
This group of students came from Jackson Middle School, which has 842 students in the North East Independent School District. Almost 61 percent of its students qualify for either free or reduced lunch.
Teachers and administrators nominated the kids to participate in the program. The kids have been identified for being at risk of dropping out due to absences, failed classes or behavior problems. But none of that was evident Saturday. All the kids were well behaved and attentive.
In the beginning, the kids formed a corporation: Jackson Inc. Then they broke up into groups to become subject matter experts in gaming, entrepreneurship, programming and website design. Mentors from the community led the groups and assisted the kids. They watch, learn and practice their skills like an apprentice to a blacksmith, Pacilli said.
The idea is to spark a child’s interest in science, technology, engineering and math, he said. And in one weekend, they learn everything they need to know to launch a business.
Diego Ballez, 13, eighth grader, gave up a weekend baseball tournament in Austin to participate in SparkED. Before the program, he wanted to be a professional baseball player but now he’s thinking about becoming an engineer.
“It was worth the sacrifice,” he said.
He spent Saturday learning about logos, webpage design and how a corporation operates.
Meghan Oswald, 27, volunteered to mentor the students in the entrepreneurship group. She’s an MBA student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. She formerly worked as a fifth and sixth grade teacher.
“I think, as teachers, we’re feeling a great deal of pressure to teach to the test, to teach to scores and not all kids learn that way,” Oswald said. “Kids learn differently. Kids have different backgrounds. Kids have different parents and support systems. And so it’s really important to meet the kid where they are at right now. In this collaborative learning environment, breaking them up into expert groups, teaching them practical skills is important.”
Oswald impressed on the kids the importance of teamwork.
First off, the entrepreneurship group learned 20 vocabulary words that define entrepreneurship and how to apply them, she said. By the end of the program, the kids become experts in the terms, she said. The words include sales, marketing, strategy, persistence, customer appreciation, teamwork, sacrifice and Lean Canvas.
Ben White, 14, an eighth grader, explained what a Lean Canvas was.
“A Lean Canvas is basically all the things you need to have a successful company,” he said. It’s a business plan that spells out everything from production costs, including labor and materials, to marketing and advertising, he said.
The kids making up Jackson Inc. decided to market a robot from the research and development department called a Zombie Catcha because Zombies will be invading San Antonio and people need to defend themselves. The $1,650 robot will be marketed to the military, families and businesses on the Internet and radio and through retail channels.
“I’ve learned how to market products,” White said. “Before I didn’t know what went on to get a product on the market. Now I know what skills you need to get there.”
Desmond Savage, 33, an MBA student at St. Mary’s University, volunteered to mentor the entrepreneurship group because he wanted to help the kids see new opportunities.
“I wanted to give them some insight into something that’s different than what they see everyday because a lot of times when you grow up in a certain environment the only thing that you see, that’s what you believe,” Savage said.
His hope was to inspire the kids and empower them to change the world and dream big.
“Don’t limit yourself,” Savage said. “I think a lot of times, especially kids that come from economically depressed neighborhoods, they dream small. I want them to dream big.”
Vilmar Morgan, designer and creative strategist and Geekdom member, also believes in the vision of SparkED and volunteered to mentor the website design group.
“I believe in shaking up the educational system to help kids,” Morgan said. “I believe that our teachers and our parents would benefit from another perspective and an educational process that incorporates a thematic system of learning. It engages students on another level. It engages students on topics that are important in the real world.”
Within the website design group, the kids divided into three subgroups: logo creation, website design and content creators.
They used an online site called Wix.com as a template for the website design. But the students still chose the design elements such as the typeface, colors, layout and they created the content to go on the site.
“We help students unlock their minds and think creativity,” Morgan said.
The kids created a 3-D logo of a robot head with the slogan incorporated from the entrepreneurship group, said Natalie Ramirez, 12, seventh grader. She said they used the five principles of logo design and then she recited them from memory.
“Simple, memorable, versatile, timeless and appropriate – that all goes into your logo,” she said.
The logo was a team effort with each member drawing part of it, Ramirez said.
Saturday afternoon, Ramirez worked with her partners Mark Rojas, 12, and Alexandra Polanco, 12, both seventh graders, to take photos of the other groups and to do interviews to collect information for articles for the webpage. Each group has its own page on the Website’s homepage, Ramirez said.
“This is overwhelming, but it’s fun,” she said. “I hardly known anyone here, but I’m getting to know them. I know some of them but not all of them.”
Ramirez said she was proud of what she accomplished and the experience has prompted her to consider a career in technology.
“I know what I want to be, a vet,” she said. “But now I’m thinking I want to go into technology.”
Jimmy Valadez, 15, eighth grader, wants to be a video game programmer when he grows up. He worked in the programming group. He said doing programming is like learning another language.
Cameron Lindner, 12, seventh grader, received two concussions in basketball and football last year and can’t play sports for two years.
He said he saw SparkED and programming games as a way to occupy his time and keep his mind off sports.
They spent several hours Saturday programming a character using python code to make a game to market the robot.
“It’s like something I’ve never seen before,” Lindner said. “It’s a little difficult but I can deal with that.”
On Sunday, the kids will reconvene to finish their projects. At the end of the day, they present them to their parents and school administrators.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

An Exabyte is a quintillion bytes…or a billion, billion bytes. Every month the world generates 1.3 exabytes of data in the mobile space.
“Last year’s mobile data traffic was eight times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000,” Cisco reports.
By the year 2016, 70 percent of that will be video, according to Cisco.
The industry is wondering how it’s going to keep up with all that data. And how it’s going to monetize it when so much of it is free. Those were some topics of a panel Friday at Austin Technology Incubator’s Texas Wireless Summit Friday at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. Jeff Andrews, past-director, Wireless Networking and Communications Group at the University of Texas moderated the panel which included Jeffrey Foerster of Intel, Felix Fernandez of Samsung Dallas Technology Lab, Arvind Raghavan of AT&T Labs and Mark Newbury of Huawei.
Video is in some ways a forgiving medium. The quality depends largely on the perception of the person watching. So the industry extracts the opinions of many people to identify a quality standard it can use in algorithms to recreate that level of quality. Video quality also depends on what device people use to look at it. A close-up of something small requires fewer bits to look sharp than a football play in a stadium. But even a football play video that uses few bits can look good on a mobile screen.
The video that concerns the industry is all the real-time video. Streaming, personal videos people make and share of their lives—travelogues in real time, for example. With the increased burden on the network, latency is a big problem for those kind of videos. Interactive videos also need super low latency rates, especially video teleconferencing.
“Quality is only one aspect of the experience,” said Foerster. “Rebuffering is a huge issue that has the biggest impact on experience. Quality variations over time, audiovisual sync, startup delay, all those things come into play making this a rich space for optimization.”
Fernandez explained that a new video recording standard, which will probably be named HEVC, will be finalized in January 2013 and will significantly increase coding efficiency and compression, allowing higher quality videos to be transmitted at lower bit rates. Part of his work is in green video, which allows an encoder to send the video with information that would allow a receiver to decode the video at a 25 percent savings in power level. The end user would have to choose to trade off some quality for energy savings.
But, as Fernandez pointed out “Video streaming is very power hungry application. With social streaming you’re walking around a new place, you capture a video and upload it to the cloud so your friends and family can watch it somewhere else.”
The more that kind of video exchange grows, the more willing, he said, people will be to trade off a bit of quality for lower power consumption.
Part of the industry’s job will be classifying and directing traffic through the different mediums according to Raghavan.
“How do we manage the layers within cellular?” he said. “The carriers have several different dimensions with a reasonably good quality of experience across a wide base. How do you optimize across these dimensions and user profiles?”
Stored video, he said, can be transferred in fairly large chunks whereas as you move down the spectrum toward live and interactive you start to get more latency issues and the packets get smaller. They need to be able to groom the traffic coming in to make the radio network more efficient.
Another panelist, Newbury introduced the idea of monetization with an illustration of “black hole of consumer demand and provider investment.”
“The network itself is pouring investment dollars into this black hole. The revenue per bit for video is orders of magnitude less than the revenue per bit of SMS.”
In order to come up with better quality and revenue models, he said, the industry needs better ways to measure activity in the same way that the wireless industry measured dropped calls against load volumes.
Current revenue plans, he said, are bent not so much on raising revenue as on not breaking the network. Current pricing plans are just to protect the network. But it is too early, the panel decided, to answer the question of “Who is going to pay for this?” If the content in question is a professional sporting event, for example, is it the team? The network or the end user?
Raghavan, as the only provider representative, said models he has seen show that more data on the network would definitely result in new revenues.
“If you have a $30 a month plan and have a 3 gig bucket, if you consume more, the plan is going to go up. But we are also looking at more subtle and interesting ways of developing income.”
And that was all he would say on that….

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

In between your smart phone and the Cloud there’s a whole lot of multi-service edge space that Flavio Bonomi, Cisco Fellow, VP, Head, Advanced Architecture and Research calls the Fog. This is where 3 and 4G, LTE and Wifi live.
Flavio Bonomi, Cisco Fellow, VP, Head, Advanced Architecture and Research[/caption]Like the cloud, only closer to the ground, Bonomi believes the fog provides a layer of connectivity and opportunity for network building that the current wireless infrastructure lacks. It fills in the gap in The Internet of Things.
“It is the internet of everything, people and things and cyberphysical systems…it is an infrastructure for communicating, computing and storage, converging toward a common infrastructure.”
Bonomi was the keynote speaker at Austin Technology Incubator’s Texas Wireless Summit at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center at UT Friday. He spoke passionately of the convergence of IP and Mobile networks, of industrial and enterprise networks with applications including smart cities whose buildings have networked security, electricity and water systems; smart automobiles connected with a city’s traffic light system and with other autos so if a traffic accident happens a quarter of a mile in front of you, you are alerted and can react in time. In fact, your car would become a fully networked “data center on wheels.”
The key is to have a system that’s closer to the devices themselves, closer to the ground, like fog.
“You cannot control a building from the cloud,” he said. “When connectivity goes down, you’re dead.”
Instead, the fog must optimize the efficiency of wireless links and leverage heterogeneous access links to strengthen connectivity in highly flaky environments. There must be seamless mobility solutions. And, in the case of transportation, the fog would employ Location Identity Separation Protocol so your IP address would remain the same wherever you were.
Bonomi hopes to install roadside computing on the traffic lights themselves to enable what he calls multi-hop networking. This would require packets of data to travel shorter distances and reduce latency. This and other systems using 3G and 4G technology would also foster deterministic networking instead of reactive networking. Smart machines would move from one hub to the next like a spider rather than constantly searching for networks to connect to.
Similar systems would be set up along train routes and on the ground below well traveled air routes.
Bonomi’s vision depends on many factors, not the least of which is advancement of existing wireless technologies which would have to increase in sophistication before being fully deployable for the networks where they would be needed. But the opportunities to create new applications in a more seamlessly networked world where the data was closer to the ground could produce a whole new vibrant layer in the ecosystem of wireless.

MeetMeTix, a cloud-based mobile service for last minute tickets to sporting events, has launched and landed half a million in angel financing.
Ben Dyer, who pens the TechDrawl blog, is an investor and serves as chairman of the startup, which is based in Austin but has offices in Atlanta and additional workers in San Francisco.
The funding is being used for a national rollout of the product which provides a last minute marketplace for ticket buyers and sellers, according to a news release. The funding is half of a first round of financing for the service.
To date, the majority or 61 percent of the funding has come from Austin angels and the remaining from Atlanta and New York.
MeetMeTix claims to fill “a gap currently uncovered by the major ticket providers.”
In a news release, CEO Jesse Dyer describes this “not as a solution aimed solely at scalping for profit, per se, but as a broadly applicable service for anyone who wants to buy or sell extra tickets on game day with extreme convenience and security.”
MeetMeTix currently sells tickets for major college football games but will expand across sports and eventually into entertainment categories.

WP Engine added two new executives and announced an expansion to San Francisco.
The Austin-based startup, which specializes in hosting WordPress sites online, has hired Chris Errett to lead IT and developer operations and LaurieAnne Lassek to oversee marketing. Errett previously worked at Trion Worlds and the U.S. Army. He has experience in scaling IT businesses. Lassek has more than 10 years of experience in technology marketing and perviously worked as vice president of marketing at Quova, which Neustar acquired.
“When we started WP Engine we knew that there was a need for premium hosting for WordPress-built sites, but just how much of a need has really been eye-popping,” Jason Cohen founder and CEO, WP Engine said in a news release. “It’s been very important for us to maintain the highest level of support every step of the way. Our customers and the WordPress community have come to trust us to deliver excellent services and support. LA and Chris bring the right experience to help us to continue to expand our platform and scale services and support as we grow.”
Errett and Lassek join co-founders Cohen and Ben Metcalfe. Lassek will be based in San Francisco working alongside Metcalfe. Errett will be based in Austin.
“Founded in 2010, WP Engine was born out of a need for a scalable hosting platform to support WordPress, the fastest-growing CMS on the planet, now powering 18% of the world’s top 1000 highest trafficked websites,” according to the company.

Dell has donated an ARM-based server concept to the Apache Software Foundation, a volunteer group which oversees nearly 150 open source software projects and initiatives.
Dell’s server runs Calxeda’s ultra-low power scalable energycore computer chip, which it reports is ten times more energy efficient than x86-based servers. Calxeda’s chips power servers in giant data centers that require peak efficiency.
The ARM technology in Calxeda’s chips is similar to the low-power processers used in smartphones and tablets.
Dell reports that a lot of its customers use Apache’s open source software products and that the ARM infrastructure shows promise in saving energy and money.
The Dell ARM-based server is available to the ASF community now at builds.apache.org. The donation includes hosting and technical support.

TrueAbility, a startup focused on testing the technical aptitude of workers, has launched its first contest.
The contest tests the skills of Linux techs and allows them to compete for the top prize of a 3-D printer and three $100 ThinkGeek.com gift certificates.
Already hundreds of people have taken the test and a few have come really close to getting a perfect score, said Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, co-founder and COO.
The contest runs to midnight Central Standard Time on Friday. The company has listed the top eight contestants on its leader board.
TrueAbility, which is in Beta testing, has created a testing platform that will allow companies to know in advance how competent its job candidates are in different technical skills like Unix, Php and Java Script among other skills.
In addition to Mendler, the team members include Luke Owen, co-founder and CEO, Marcus Robertson, co-founder and CTO and Dusty Jones, co-founder and chief architect.
The team members used to work at Rackspace Hosting and have hired hundreds of technical workers.
The company is based at Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.

In 2010, Link Coworking opened in Austin.
Its founder Liz Elam, who previously spent 14 years working from home for Dell, wanted a nice place to work without the disruptions of coffee shops and with plenty of electrical outlets and speedy Internet access.
When she couldn’t find a place like that, she created Link Coworking in the Village Shopping Center at 2700 West Anderson Lane.
“Link Coworking provides members with a professional and interactive workspace where they don’t have to worry about spending too long at a coffee shop, trying to find an outlet, or being distracted by kids and chores at home,” according to Elam. “Members choose to work from Link not only because it provides them with a comfortable work environment and boosts their productivity, but also because they gain a new community of coworkers and the ability to network with people in many different industries.”
On its second anniversary, Link has expanded to Link Too, a 3,500 square foot workspace in the same location as Link, which provides a quieter work environment with dedicated desks and offices. Link Too also offers 24 hour access to the site whereas the original Link site closes at 6 p.m. daily.

Liz Elam with Link Coworking created this video to provide a virtual tour of its offices.

The nation’s fastest highway: SH 130 opens today in Texas.
The speed limit on sections of the road is 85 miles per hour.
SH 130 is a stretch of road between San Antonio and Austin that hopes to alleviate traffic congestion on existing roads like Interstate 35, which has seen its traffic load skyrocket more than 100 percent since 1990. In fact, I-35 has become “the busiest inter-metro Interstate in Texas and is overloaded on many sections,” according to the Texas Department of Transportation. It reports more than 80,000 to 100,000 vehicles traverse the corridor daily.
“In addition to local growth, NAFTA has put an additional strain on the corridor in the form of dramatically increased international truck traffic,” TxDOT reports.
The new tollroad, SH 130, is a 91 mile expressway that has been on the drawing boards for decades. The route is part of the now-defunct Trans-Texas Corridor project.
The tollroad is free until Sunday, Nov. 11th. Rates will be 15 cents per mile and will be billed with a Texas toll tag or by cameras which will record license plate numbers and bill the owner by mail.
The idea for a light community rail between Austin and San Antonio is not dead. Discussions continue about establishing a railway along SH 130 as a rail bypass that would “also free the existing rail line for a planned San Antonio-Austin commuter rail system,” according to TxDOT.