Category: Austin (Page 279 of 318)

Online game maker Zynga cut 5 percent of its workforce or 150 employees Tuesday.
Zynga reportedly laid off 100 Austin employees, nearly its entire local workforce.
The game maker is “sunsetting 13 older games and we’re also significantly reducing our investment in The Ville,” Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus wrote in a memo to employees, posted to the company’s blog.
Zynga also closed its Boston studio and is proposing closing studios in Japan and the United Kingdom. It also cut 100 employees in Austin and reportedly gave them just two hours to clear out their desks and vacate the office.
“This is the most painful part of an overall cost reduction plan that also includes significant cuts in spending on data hosting, advertising and outside services, primarily contractors,” Pincus wrote. “These reductions, along with our ongoing efforts to implement more stringent budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects, will improve our profitability and allow us to reinvest in great games and our Zynga network on web and mobile.”
Zynga, founded in 2007 by Pincus, is the most popular gaming platform on Facebook. The company reports 60 million people play its games daily which include Words with Friends, Farmville and Mafia Wars.
On June 3, 2010, Zynga acquired Challenge Games in Austin for $20.5 million, according to Crunchbase, and hired its 35 employees and renamed it Zynga Austin. Challenge Games’ Co-Founder CEO, Andrew Busey, became its general manager and vice president. But he eventually left Zynga in September of 2011 and now serves as a partner in Austin Ventures.

Zynga just laid off 100+ employees (incl. my friends) in its Austin office during the Apple Event. Gave them 2 hours to vacate. RT please.

— Justin Maxwell (@303) October 23, 2012

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
An application that helps chronic pain sufferers manage pain through increasing activity won the Health 2.0 Austin Codeo Sunday, October 21st at the Capital Factory.
Triumph Over Pain was one of seven teams to spend the weekend creating health-related tools at the event, which was sponsored by Athena Health/More Disruption Please. Athena Health is a cloud-based medical management company and More Disruption Please holds conferences and code-a-thons to try to identify new ideas and fresh thinkers in the medical space. Frequently the company adopts some of these ideas into its accelerator.
The codeo teams formed Friday night had a little more than 24 hours to build something around the ideas they’d chosen. Triumph Over Pain was a company already founded by Tricia Scott, Business Office Director for the Cooper Fitness Center Foundation of McKinney Texas. But the app was new.

Scott suffers chronic pain because of an arthritic condition. She founded Triumph Over Pain in 2008 to garner money for pain research after realizing the incredible power that increasing activity had in managing pain levels. The app built by her team, which included healthcare IT consultant Chris Huntley and David Walling of the Texas Advanced Computer Center at UT, helps chronic pain suffers track their pain levels along with their activity levels. It would, the team said, also track other inputs such as medicine dosages, diet, sleep and more. It would include a social aspect, letting the pain sufferer’s support network know the level of pain being experienced at a given time.
But the chief goal of the app was to help people see how increased activity shrinks the intensity of their pain.
Other winners of the competition included CrowdRX, a team from UT’s one semester startup. CrowdRX used data sets to create an algorithm to help doctors know, almost instantly, whether a stroke victim was a good candidate for a drug called t-PA which has remarkable results in helping some stroke victims when administered early; but which has disastrous effects on others.
In third place was Followup Doc, which let emergency room doctors follow up with patients they’ve seen, rather than just treating them, releasing them and not knowing the outcome of the treatment or whether the patient would receive further care.
The most important factor in judging was patient centeredness and application of health literacy concepts. Judges included not only developers for Athena Health, but physicians Tracey Haas and Tammy McConnell, John Lebkowsky, founder of Society for Participatory Medicine and Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW.
Other sponsors included Twilio, Frog design, Texas Health Alliance, attorney Erin M. Gilmer, Ad Clarity, WCG and HCB Health.

Venture capital investments in Texas dropped nearly 29 percent in dollar volume to $127.7 million in 35 deals during the third quarter, according to the Moneytree survey.
That compares to $179.5 million invested in 38 deals in the second quarter.
For the first three quarters of the year, Texas companies have received $716.8 million in 119 deals.
Nationwide, venture capitalists invested $6.5 billion in 590 deals in the third quarter, down 11 percent in dollar amount from the second quarter.
The MoneyTree Report comes from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data provided by Thomson Reuters.
For the first three quarters of the year, venture capital investment drop was $20 billion into 2,661 deals, well below this point last year.
“The decline in funding for Seed/Early stage companies is firmly in place – we’ve seen a drop in dollars and deals both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year,” Tracy T. Lefteroff, global managing partner of the venture capital practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said in a news release.
“We’re seeing fewer new venture funds being raised which means less capital is available for new investments. And, we’re seeing venture capitalists be very cautious with the capital that is available due to the lack of a significant number of liquidity events. Instead, venture capitalists are continuing to support the companies already in their portfolio.”
The software industry continues to get the bulk of the funding with $2.1 billion invested in 304 deals during the third quarter and the fourth quarter in a row in which investment exceeded $2 billion.
Investment in biotechnology and medical devices topped $1.7 billion in 181 deals showing an increase in dollar volume but declined in the number of deals done for the third quarter.
Overall, though, investment in biotechnology and medical devices is down 19 percent in dollars and 12 percent in deals for the first three quarters of 2012, compared to the same time last year.
Investments in alternative energy, pollution and recycling, power supplies and conservation also dropped 20 percent in dollars but rose slightly, 2 percent, in deal volume with $791 million going into 58 deals during the third quarter.
Other industries seeing growth in dollars invested in the third quarter included financial services, healthcare services, business products and services and retailing.

AirStrip Technologies has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against mVisum.
The federal lawsuit, filed in New York, accuses mVisum of violating AirStrip’s patented intellectual property rights. San Antonio-based Airstrip received a patent on Aug. 28th this year covering “an industry-leading method for remote monitoring of patient medical data on smartphones such as the iPhone®, tablets such as the iPad®, and on other mobile devices.”
“AirStrip has a responsibility to exercise its patent protection in ways that rapidly drive the evolution of mHealth in a
uniform and positive direction,” AirStrip CEO Alan Portela said in a news release. “AirStrip respects the intellectual property of others, and will vigorously defend our own. Such action is not taken lightly, but we feel it is in the best interest of providers, our partners, and ultimately, patients.”
AirStrip Technologies develops mobile apps for physicians and other medical workers to care for patients remotely. AirStrip is backed by investments from Sequoia Capital, Qualcomm, Inc., Hospital
Corporation of America (HCA), and the Wellcome Trust. Dow Jones VentureWire this week reported that AirStrip Technologies had just landed an estimated $10 million in additional venture funding.

Ready to leave your wallet or purse at home?
Soon smartphone customers in Austin and Salt Lake City, Utah will get that opportunity when the Isis Mobile Wallet launches in a test market trail on Monday, Oct. 22. It is currently available in the Google Play marketplace.
The Isis Mobile Wallet puts everything that people carry around with them in their wallets on their mobile phone. The program is available right now by invitation with general availability beginning Oct. 22 in Austin and Salt Lake City.
Isis is a joint venture between AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless. The app will be available on a variety of NFC-enabled smartphone mobile devices by HTC< Motorola, RIM, Samsung Mobile and Sony Ericsson. Wired Magazine reports that it can’t find a phone that the Isis Mobile Wallet works on yet.
The Isis app allows consumers to “securely make payments, store and present loyalty cards and redeem offers at participating merchants with the tap of their phones,” according to Isis. It will store your existing credit cards including American Express, Chase and Capital One on the phone. Or consumers can use free Isis Cash card.
“Seamlessly transmit your payment info, loyalty and offers at checkout with just one tap at Isis Ready SmartTap merchants,” according to Isis. “No more fumbling through your wallet or purse.”
The Isis Mobile Wallet is PIN protected and has the same protections against fraud that physical credit cards have and can be frozen with one call to T-Mobile if it’s lost or stolen.

Cinegif has struck a partnership with PulseConnect to bring high-quality animated GIFs to their client’s email marketing campaigns.
Under the partnership, Cinegif will license its patented technology to convert and compress video clips and still images into professionally looking animated GIFs. Austin-based Cinegif’s video conversion software reduces file size and makes sharing short videos easy. The company has three patents on its technology and one more pending. The animated GIFs play on any browser.
PulseConnect plans to offer Cinegif’s animated GIF technology to its customers as a way to create unique and visually appealing e-mail campaigns.
“The animated GIF is experiencing a “rebirth” as teens and artists are breathing new life into this twenty-five year old standard image format,” according to Graham McFarland, Cinegraf’s CEO. “The GIF trend is beginning to go main stream as big name brands such as Coca-Cola, Calvin Klein, Adidas, MTV, and Burberry are using animated GIFs as part of their digital advertising and social media strategies.”
“Cinegif’s unique technology fits nicely with our client platform and helps deliver more visually appealing content for our clients,” Damian Borichevsky, VP of Professional Services PulseConnect, said in a statement.
Silicon Hills News did this story on Cinegraf this summer.

Calxeda, which uses cellular technology to power datacenter servers, recently landed $55 million in investment.
And Wednesday, the Austin-based startup announced that Penguin Computing is now selling servers equipped with Calxeda chips. Boston Limited and Hewlett-Packard already offer servers with Calxeda’s technology.
The Calxeda has shipped thousands of its EnergyCore ECX-1000 to customers, and it is also providing free access to the technology on the OpenStack Trystack.org cloud.
Calxeda plans to market its products for public and private cloud operators and large datacenters.
“We are very excited about the market’s response to our pioneering first generation product,” Barry Evans, Calxeda’s founder and CEO, said in a news release. “Now we are taking it two steps further to reinvent the server, first into a rack-based cloud appliance, and then extending into an integrated fleet of computing resources, spanning many thousands of efficient servers.”

The OpenStack Summit kicks off today and San Antonio-based Rackspace is there in force.
Its OpenStack experts are giving all kinds of presentations today through Thursday at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego.
About 1,000 people are expected to attend the event.
Garrett Heath, a Racker and his team, created the following video to explain the impact of the cloud.