Category: Austin (Page 282 of 318)

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.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

He’s told the story numerous times but it never makes it into print: Hugh Forrest became director of South by Southwest Interactive—possibly the largest entrepreneurial conference in the world—because he owned a computer.
When he got the gig, in 1988, SXSW was a brand-new music festival, Forrest was a newspaper publisher and the digital revolution wasn’t even a glint in anyone’s eye. Forrest, an Austin native and English major from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, had started an alternative newspaper in town, The Austin Challenger.
“The most alternative thing about it was the publishing schedule,” he quips.
He’d started the paper several years before, burning through borrowed money when his father—his primary investor—convinced him that his typesetting costs were killing him and he needed to get a computer. Forrest bought a MacPlus, a LaserWriter Plus and Pagemaker 1.0 and managed to keep the paper alive, despite competition from its friendly rival, The Austin Chronicle.
Then in 1988, Nick Barbaro of The Chronicle decided that with nearly a thousand SXSW registrants, the event needed a computer. And Forrest had one.
“I originally got hired because I had a computer and they didn’t,” Forrest said. “So I was the tech person. And seven years later when they launched multimedia (Interactive) everybody said ‘He knows computers because he has one. So he should head up this thing.’ “
And that’s how Hugh Forrest became director of a conference that has grown like some geek teenager on steroids. What was once the red-haired stepchild of SXSW Music and Film has outpaced both, fueled by the digital revolution. It covers 15 campuses, about a thousand panels and tens of thousands of attendees. Not to mention the parties.
Forrest—who has a liberal arts background–always envisioned the event as a place where a diverse community of creative people from various disciplines could cross-pollinate and birth new ideas, solutions, inventions and relationships. It wasn’t about how a specific technology worked or the latest computer language. He wanted a big-ass salon where geeks and philanthropists, entrepreneurs and artists, social media experts and musicians could create the tools and systems that solve our problems and fuel our dreams in the future. And where they could meet and build meaningful relationships, a community. Like TED, only less expensive, so the technorati who have yet to be discovered could afford to attend.
“That was one of the original weaknesses of the event,” he recalled. “People would say ‘What are you?’” And his response was “We’re a little bit of everything.”
But, as the event outgrew first the Convention Center then other venues, it became tougher to sustain that vision. More and more campuses were added to accommodate the crowds and people tended to hunker down in one spot with their tribes: tech people with tech people, non-profits with non-profits and so forth. That put the kibosh on the cross pollination and forging of relationships across industries. Also as the attendance grew, the number of panels swelled and some people complained the quality dropped…a lot. At the same time, various interest groups started imposing their own agendas on the event. Investors sought the next Facebook, startups hoped to get discovered, companies hoped to launch the next Twitter.

And then there were the parties.
Some veterans of the event complain that it has gotten too big, that the panels suck, that it costs too much or that it should cost more to restrict the size. They complain it’s more of a networking event than a learning experience, that all the good stuff happens in the side events where you don’t need a badge to get in, that the side events are a parasite on the main event and—a common refrain in Austin —that it’s not as good as it used to be.

Victim of Its Own Success
Forrest is familiar with all the criticism and issues surrounding the event. He has watched the number of panels swell and wants to bring the number down for 2013 with the emphasis on quality, not quantity. A few years ago, he introduced the Panel Picker model in which people can propose sessions and SXSW participants vote on which ones they would like to attend. The problem is, many people canvass their friends to vote for them, making the Panel Picker process more a popularity contest than a pitch for interesting ideas. But he’d also like to get to the place where the conference organizers can work with panelists beforehand to ensure a top notch presentation.
“One event I would compare this to is TED. The bottom line for the two events is very similar: They draw people who are very smart, very creative and interested in different ideas. Ours tends to be very open source and particularly with the Panel Picker model, once you’ve been accepted to speak much of the onus falls on the person who has proposed the panel in the first place. What TED does really well is to curate a lot of their content and really work with their speakers…each one gets 40 hours of training. We don’t have that kind of bandwidth. So some presentations are really, really great and some that seem like they’ll be great don’t put the time in beforehand.”

In 2012, he said, SXSW had more than 1,000 events including the panels and meetups. He’d like to reduce that to 550 panels and about 300 meetups and mentor sessions for 2013 to make handholding easier.
But another reason people might find panels disappointing, Forrest said, is that they only go to presentations within their own campuses and disciplines. Instead of being exposed to new ideas from all different disciplines, they’re only learning what the brightest minds in their own arenas have to say—insights they probably already knew about.
Forrest tries to get people to mix it up a little panel-wise. “I tend to encourage people to go to sessions they don’t know anything about,” Forrest says. “If you’re a social media expert, go to the panels on transforming the health industry, or sessions on government and technology, something slightly out of your wheel house. “
Susan Davenport, Senior Vice President of Global Technology Strategies for the Chamber of Commerce pointed out that, among people making SXSW Interactive a priority event are thought leaders, investors and companies doing new releases (hoping to be the next Twitter or Foursquare) as well as federal officials and health care executives. Their interests are multi-dimensional and often cross from one sector to another.
“The lines are blurring,” she said. “For example people are studying technologies to move healthcare forward, how will sensor technology impact life sciences? It’s where biology meets technology. Then there’s clean tech and gaming and various pieces of that find their way into many different sectors.”
But, Forrest points out, human nature is such that people tend to respond to such a giant event by sticking with their friends and their industry. If all your friends are checking into one event on Foursquare, that may be where you head, instead of to another event where you might meet new people in an unfamiliar industry. Individuals have to make a decision to step out of their comfort zones to get the most from the event.
“I think (Forrest) is doing really a great job of managing SXSW, but in a way, it’s a victim of its own success” said Josh Baer, founder of the Capital Factory. “You have to do things to break it up and make it manageable but you do lose the cross pollination….
Things in life are either getting bigger or they’re getting smaller; getting better or getting worse. What you can’t do is keep everything exactly the same. Then it would stagnate and that wouldn’t be good either.”
Still, Forrest hopes to keep on top of the growth and make the event more navigable. With so many people and sessions, he said, it can be difficult to find the people you want to meet and make a meaningful one-on-one connection.
“Whether that person becomes a friend or you end up making business with them or they’re just someone you can call up and they’ll tell you the best restaurant to go to …those one-on-one relationships are one of the most important things to come out of SXSW. A lot of people come to the event and say, ‘Hey, I met this person and they were directly responsible for me getting this new job or they inspired me or changed my viewpoint on this issue….

Startup Village
Another aspect of human nature that Forrest and his team of 20 must contend with is our attraction to things that glitter. He does a poor job of masking his frustration with the fact that startups threaten to swallow the event.

“Startups are a big driver in the U.S. and international economies at this point,” Forrest says. “There’s an energy, a vibrancy, a robustness around startups. Our addition of startup stuff was one of the big drivers of our continued growth…. But what is to some degree concerning is that startups are so sexy and intoxicating I worry they will overshadow other things we do.”
Last year’s introduction of Start-Up Village, on the fourth floor of the Hyatt Hotel was enormously successful. So successful, Baer points out, that if it hadn’t been at SXSW, it would have been its own huge event. And that’s what Forrest worries about. “What happens if the startup economy completely craters? I’m not saying that will happen but we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket. We want many different things going on.”

Managing Crazy Growth
On the other hand, one of the many different things that go on include extra-SXSW events that piggyback off the success of the conference. One of the hot political issues of SXSW is dealing with the parties and meetings staged around the event that don’t require badges. Forrest said he would prefer to pull all of those into the main event. But they are a natural byproduct of an event as large as SXSW. And however many are pulled in, more are likely to spring up.
“One of our biggest challenges is to create a structure that continues to foster the kind of growth we want to see as we move forward,” Forrest said.
“Just by seeing the kinds of ideas in the Panel Picker serves as barometers where the industry is,” he said. “The biggest single category is entrepreneurialism and business. There’s so much interest excitement, momentum in the startup space and that’s good. By comparison, one thing we added this year to the Panel Picker was science and space exploration. … A lot of the entries in that category are very, very exciting. There’s lots of stuff about space exploration, big data, mobile, gamefication….”
Some people have argued that, with the conference’s success, they have the clout to invite CEOs from huge tech companies to speak. But that defeats an idea that Forrest loves that—as one attendee commented—SXSW is where he goes to see what will be big two years from now. It’s the birthplace of new ideas, not the celebration of institutions.
While he is passionate about that idea, he has also struggled to learn to delegate to his growing team, Forrest said.
“I don’t want to just be representative of the tech companies. I want to create an ideal world within SXSW where you don’t have to necessarily agree with everyone. The more different ideas you can bring into the event the stronger it becomes. We have to talk all these things out. ‘Hey, here’s the Blank Blank who wants to talk this year. ‘We have to decide, would that push us too much in one direction?”
“We’re not the stars of the show,” he said, referring to himself and his staff. “The stars of the show are the creative people who come to Austin in March and the creativity of the community that makes the event what it is. The organizers try to pull the pieces together. In some places we’ve done a great job and in other cases we didn’t make the right moves.”
On the other hand, the team has created a huge success, for an English major with a computer.
“I always had this idea that I would never do any job for more than four years,” he said. “I thought it was important to move on and test myself. Having done this approximately 20 years, some days I think I would like to challenge myself in other ways; go back to writing more. I do think that when I do step down, hopefully it will survive and thrive and prosper. It’s the community that pushes this thing. There are so many people in the community who care so passionately about this event.”

Editor’s note: WeAreAustinTech.com recently featured an interview with Hugh Forrest in its weekly series of video releases on Austin-area technology visionaries. With their permission, I’ve posted the video below.