Category: Austin (Page 281 of 318)

Technology entrepreneur Andrew Eye cofounded Taskbox to save time and increase productivity by turning an email inbox into a task list.
Six days ago, the startup launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $30,000 to hire more engineers and expand its operations. It’s based at Capital Factory in downtown Austin. Earlier this week, Eye spoke with Silicon Hills News about his startup, the Kickstarter campaign and his passion for changing the way people interact with their email.

Q. What does Taskbox do?

A. Taskbox turns your inbox into a task list. It’s a productivity app available for iPhone. Every email you receive that isn’t spam is a request for you to do something. The key is to change the way people are able to organize their email. Email always lists what is newest as the most important thing. But Taskbox allows you to prioritize by due date and lets you manage your email more effectively. Just because a message came in a week ago doesn’t mean it’s no longer important. Taskbox gives you the tools to define what’s at the top of the list.

Q. How did you come up with the idea for Taskbox?

A. Before Taskbox I was running a 200 person consulting business. That inspired Taskbox. My inbox was always full. I wanted to tackle one of the major problems that software hasn’t yet solved. Before Taskbox, I had 6,500 messages in my inbox. With Taskbox, I have just ten messages.

Q. How is Taskbox financed?

A. We’re 100 percent bootstrapped today. The Kickstarter funds will allow us to add engineers.

Q. Who does Taskbox compete against?

A. Two of the largest competitors are Salesforce and Asana.

Q. What sets Taskbox apart from them?

A. What’s fundamentally different about us is we don’t ask you to stop doing what you’re doing. Our strategy is just different. We’ve created a better process for that email you are already seeing. I’m never going to stop using email. This is a solution for the evolution of email. The other guys want to create entire new systems to replace email.

Q. How do you make money?

A. The app offers paid features that costs $6 per user per month.

Q. What’s a smart move you’ve made so far?

A. Our biggest success is moving into the Capital Factory that has just expanded our network. Two of the biggest experts in email, Josh Baer, founder of the Other Inbox, and Bill Boeble, founder of Webmail.us, run Capital Factory. They’ve been great mentors. It’s serendipitous.

Q. What’s your biggest mistake so far?

A. We’re still so new. I don’t know we’ve had the opportunity to make a big mistake. If I had one thing I wish I could change it’s that there are a lot of competitors in our space and we need the support of folks who want to pursue a large market.

Q. Who is the team?

A. Andrew Eye, CEO and cofounder, Adam Cianfichi, chief technology officer and cofounder, Jessica Stough, community manager and Kris Wong, mobile software engineer.

Q. What local resources do you draw upon?

A. TeXchange and Mark McClain from Salespoint, Capital Factory is the center of gravity for all startups. This is my third startup. I’ve had lots of great mentors along the way. So I wanted to give back. I’m a mentor at the University of Texas’ 1SemesterStartup.

Q. What’s your favorite coffee shop for meetings and work outside of the office?

A. Opa on South Lamar. It’s off the beaten path. It has free wi-fi and good coffee and easy parking.

Q. Anything else that you’d like to point out?

A. The big thing for us right now is what is the strategy for Taskbox. With the acquisition of Sparrow by Google (July 20th) there was a big outcry from the software community. Google buys an independent software company and immediately shuts down the product. What a shame that an independent company can’t make it anymore. We’re not trying to figure out how we can make a million dollars. We’re in this to change the business world and how people communicate. We think we can help people.
We’re not the company figuring out how to sell to Google tomorrow.

During Austin Startup Week, Eye will present Taskbox at Capital Factory’s Demo Day on Thursday, Oct. 11.

Itography from Dripping Springs officially launched today at DEMO Fall 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif.
The company makes a virtual item collection game for smart phones. It offers brands a new type of advertising by providing virtual representations of real products.
It’s like a virtual scavenger hunt. With the app, people can pick up items, collect them and share them. They can also win prizes in the process.
Melissa Tyree co-founded the company with her husband, Jeremy Tyree, architect and android developer, along with Kyle Grundmann, iOS Development and partner.
On the DEMO stage today, Tyree gave a six minute demonstration of Itography and its game and mobile advertising platform for brands.
Itography makes its money from a fee to make a brand’s collection and then a monthly service fee to keep the collection active. They can also make money from players who buy services.
VentureBeat, which runs the DEMO conference, selected Itography and more than 70 other companies to present at its event. The selected companies do pay a fee to present. But Itography, which is bootstrapped and went through Tech Ranch Austin’s Venture Forth program, is a DEMO scholarship partner program recipient.
For more on the company, read this profile Silicon Hills News did earlier this year and the VentureBeat article from today’s presentation.

To support Austin’s thriving technology industry, city officials voted today to back the Austin Technology Education Labs partnership.
The initiative, known as The Labs, will feature a series of educational and others meetings and events by the Austin Technology Council and its members and the city.
The Labs will focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, innovation, entrepreneurs and other critical areas of the technology industry.
In addition to the city and the Austin Technology Council, San Francisco-based Engine Advocacy and the ATC Community Foundation will execute the programs.
“We are so fortunate to have such an abundance of technology innovation here in Austin,” Council Member and Emerging Technology Committee Chair Laura Morrison who co-sponsored the resolution, said in a news release.
“This partnership, and the united voice for tech growth that it represents, quite simply sets our market apart from any other market in the country,” ATC president Julie Huls said in a statement.

Recruit Co. announced today that is has bought Austin-based job listing site Indeed.com.
The Japanese-based provider of HR and recruitment services, did not disclose the terms of the deal. MarketWatch is reporting that the New York Times, which invested in Indeed.com in 2005, stands to gain $100 million from the sale.
Indeed will retain its current workforce and operate as an independent unit of Recruit. The company has 175 employees in Austin and 500 worldwide, according to the Austin American Statesman. The acquisition allows it to expand in Asia, Europe and the Americas, according to a news release.
“We became the world’s leading job site by putting job seekers’ interests first and providing the best possible job search experience in every market,” Rony Kahan, Indeed’s co–founder, said in a statement.
“Our success is also due to our dedicated team of employees and our tens of thousands of loyal advertiser and publisher partners,” Paul Forster, co–founder, said in a statement. “We are excited to work with Recruit to build on our leadership position.”
Founded in 2004, Indeed.com attracts 89 million unique visitors per month and is the number one job site in the U.S. and other countries. It is available in more than 50 countries and in 26 languages. It has more than 25,000 customers.

Full disclosure: Silicon Hills News runs Indeed.com technology job listings, but Indeed.com has never paid us a dime. 🙂

In 24 hours, about 70 volunteers produced new logos, website redesigns, brochures and more for seven charities during CreateAthon Austin.
BuildASign.com and AIGA Austin sponsored the event held at BuildASign.com’s headquarters last Thursday and Friday. It’s the first time Austin held a CreateAthon. Other events have taken place during the second week of September in cities nationwide. The event started in 1998 in Columbia, South Carolina as a way to offer pro-bono services to nonprofits organizations in a round the clock creative marathon.
Several charities applied to participate and seven were chosen: Austin Clubhouse, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Texas, Con Mi Madre, Echo, Hope Alliance, The Wine & Food Foundation of Texas and Without Regrets.
“We looked for charities that may not have the budget to get the marketing materials they need,” said Bobby Chu, art director at BuildASign.com.
The event began at 6 p.m. on Thursday. The volunteers, divided into teams of eight to nine people, met with the nonprofit organizations before the event. They received a wish list from the charities. In many cases, the volunteers exceeded their expectations.
Kristin Bender, interactive art director at Ad People in Austin, spent 24 hours working with a team on creating a new logo and website and other marketing materials for Without Regrets, a foundation that helps children and families with terminally ill parents.
“You end up doing additional work because you feel so passionate about the work these nonprofit organizations are doing,” Bender said.
Her group created a brochure, business cards, stationary, postcard, business forms, website redesign and new logo and a running bib for a charity race the foundation hosts.
“We literally worked until 5:55 p.m. putting everything on the board,” Bender said. At 6 p.m. on Friday, representatives from the nonprofit agencies showed up to see the work. BuildASign.com also hired a DJ and provided food and drinks donated by various sponsors. Everyone celebrated their accomplishments.
In a conference room, a white board contained all the marketing materials Bender’s group created on display for Che Heinroth and Tara Ballard, the cofounders of Without Regrets to review.
“It’s amazing what they did in 24 hours,” said Ballard. “They’ve helped our organization in more ways than we can express. There are no words.”
“We needed help,” Heinroth said. “Some of the stuff we didn’t know we needed help on.”
Up until the event, Heinroth and Ballard did all the creative work for the year old foundation and they’ve never had a budget to hire a professional.
“They did the whole gambit in 24 hours,” Ballard said. “That’s like six months of work.”
The CreateAthon event exceeded the expectations of Dan Graham, founder of BuildASign.com.
“I’ve been blown away by the quantity and quality of art put out by these volunteers in 24 hours,” he said. BuildASign.com was able to print the materials for the teams as they came up with the ideas and designs.
To have the finished products to present to the nonprofit organizations added credibility to the work, said Molly Wilson, spokeswoman for BuildASign.com. It wasn’t just designs on a computer but actual printed-paper products.
Many of the volunteers spent the entire 24 hours at BuildASign.com working on the projects. Some of them slept for a few hours on couches.
“This kind of event self-selects the designers who are the most passionate,” Graham said.
Sarah Bucheit, a student at Alamo Community College studying graphic design, created a logo of a heart with a knotted rope through it for Without Regrets.
“It was a really great experience,” she said.
The Wine & Food Foundation of Texas received 20 products ranging from logo redesign to iconography and type fonts, said Marshall Jones, its executive director.
“They took it upon themselves to make our materials more youthful and hipper to reach a younger demographic,” he said. The redesign helps to dispel the image of the foundation as an old boys drinking club, he said.
“In 24 hours, they did $25,000 worth of work,” Jones said.
But they also changed a foundation that takes a long time to change and they saved Jones eight months of pain and agony in trying to convince a nonprofit board of directors to redesign and change the marketing materials, Jones said.
“They made the process of change painless,” he said.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Serial Entrepreneur Jean Anne Booth gave members of Austin Women in Technology the straight skinny on what it takes to become an entrepreneur Thursday night including some advice that a lot of entrepreneurs fail to stress such as:
• If you hope to raise real money from a venture capitalist—more than $3 million—don’t do a friends and family investment round. It only confuses things when the VC comes in.
• Never offer percentages of the company to employees during the startup phase.
• VCs will want to see that you have skin in the game. If you’ve quit your job and have no other source of income, that counts as skin in the game.
Booth, whose most recent startup, Luminary Micro, sold to Texas Instruments in 2009, was the featured speaker at AWT’s Intelligent Talks with Smart Women Dinner at Chez Zee. About 50 AWT members attended.
Booth has nearly 30 years experience in high tech including P&L business unit management to marketing; product definition; systems, software, and applications engineering; silicon development engineering; and operations and product engineering.
Luminary Micro created Stellaris® microcontroller (MCU) platform and the first to market with ARM® Cortex™-M3-based microcontroller solutions. Before Luminary, Booth was an executive founder and marketing head for startup Intrinsity—bought by Apple in 2010– and was part of the management team for startup Exponential Technology. She has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from UT and a masters in computer engineering from National Technical University. She left TI in November 2011 after serving as General Manager for TI’s Stellaris products.
Besides some of the obvious requirements of being an entrepreneur, such as tenacity and thick skin, Booth said, you have to have other things like the support of your family.
“Expect to hear 20 no’s for every yes,” she said. “You’ll go in to a meeting with this idea and expect everyone to be excited about it. But in fact they’ll all tell you why you can’t do it.”
With that kind of discouragement, and 80-hour workweeks, you’d better have complete buy-in from your family. Booth’s companies invited families of prospective employees to come in and interview the company, in fact.
An entrepreneur has to be able to weather every storm of knowing that, in the beginning, every single decision you make could kill the company.
“You have to be able to deal with the fact that one day it’s a great day; the next day, we’re dead; it’s a great day! We’re dead….”
An entrepreneur has to be able and willing to empty the trash, lease office space, plan the company picnic, buy health insurance for everyone, build a website, understand SEO….
Anyone who doesn’t know if she’s cut out to be an entrepreneur, Booth said, should take a job at a startup—but only if she believes in the company’s vision.
“Startups sell the payoff, “ she said, “maybe that will happen and maybe it won’t. You must believe in their vision enough to happily work 80 hours a week for it. You must expect and demand openness in leadership. You deserve to know how the funding is going, how the company is doing. You have to be able to go home and say “I’m meeting the commitment we made when we joined this company.”
You know you’re not cut out to be an entrepreneur, she said, if you need structure, regular raises and reviews, HR training and leadership development and if you prefer to avoid conflict.
Anyone interested in being an entrepreneur should use her network, she told the group, even if they’re not in tech.
“The fundamental issues in business are the fundamental issues in business.”
Look for mentors, ask specific questions. If an advisor is helping, ask him or her to be on your advisory board. If not, don’t continue to meet with them.
You need a good lawyer, she said, but don’t believe the ones who promise they’ve got the VC contacts and can get you funding.
“I don’t know anybody who got funded because of their lawyer,” she said.
When you hire people, Booth recommended, offer shares, not percentages. But make sure you retain most of the shares of your company.
“The person who owns the vision drives the company,” she said. “With Luminary, I chose not to be the CEO. But make no mistake, I had the most shares.”
That’s especially important for entrepreneurs who have the idea but not the technical know-how to bring it to fruition.
Finally, Booth said, you need luck. If you have a great idea but the economy tanks, you aren’t likely to succeed.
Booth, who “loves creating products and bringing them to market” said she will create another company, but she hasn’t figured out yet what that will be.
In the meantime, she’s scuba diving.