SecureNet Payment Systems has opened a new technology and innovation center in Austin and plans to hire 200 new employees in the next year.
The company also plans to open a client operations center in Silicon Valley later this year.
SecureNet reports that it has more than 14,000 merchants and $12 billion in annual processing volume.
“Austin and Silicon Valley are a perfect fit for SecureNet’s future as they are home to top technology talent, are both renowned entrepreneurial centers situated near some existing clients as well as prospects; and move us closer toward being a dominant player in the payment technology market,” Brent Warrington, CEO of SecureNet said in a statement.
SecureNet recently raised $18 million with Sterling Partners leading the investment.
Category: Austin (Page 283 of 318)
The online marketing and advertising firm, Yodle, announced Monday that it 
The Internet marketing and advertising firm, Yodle, announced Monday that it has moved into a new 100,000 square foot office in Austin and plans to hire nearly 400 more employees.
The company moved into a building at 12234B North Interstate 35 and plans to almost double its current workforce of 350 employees to 750 employees over the next five years.
“Yodle’s expansion adds to the growing list of innovative technology companies that have chosen to make a significant investment in Austin,” Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell said in a statement.
Yodle acquired ProfitFuel, a search engine optimization firm, in Austin in May of 2011. The company, with offices in New York, Boston, Charlotte, and Scottsdale, has since doubled the number of employees at its Austin office. The company plans to add new jobs in sales and client services as well as tech, human resources and marketing operations.
“Yodle’s operations in Austin have already grown significantly over the last year,” Yodle CEO Court Cunningham said in a statement. “We’ve chosen to accelerate our expansion in Austin because of the deep talent pool, innovative culture, and ideal economic environment that the city offers. Making this investment in Austin will further enable Yodle to put itself at the forefront of the fast growing and sizeable local online marketing space.”
Yodle handles online advertising and marketing for more than 30,000 small businesses nationwide.
CNNMoney, a service of CNN, Fortune and Money, reports that Rackspace Hosting ranks at number No. 67 on Fortune’s list of the country’s fastest growing companies.
Rackspace had three-year revenue growth of 25 percent and profit growth of 45 percent, according to Fortune. Rackspace reported revenue of $1 billion in 2011 and profits of $86 million.
Overall, 11 Texas companies made the list. Rackspace was the only one from San Antonio.
Cirrus Logic in Austin ranked second on the list. SolarWinds ranked 76 and Rush Enterprises in New Braunfels ranked 95.
Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace Hosting, gives a brief overview of the company in this ad for Cadillac Spirit of Innovation. Nick Longo, director of Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space downtown, is shooting an ad for the Cadillac innovation campaign next week.
Car giant General Motors announced today plans to hire 500 people for a new Information Technology Innovation Center in Austin.
The Detroit auto maker is looking for software developers, project managers, database experts, business analyts and other IT workers to staff its new center.
The center is “intended to drive breakthrough ideas into GM vehicles and business processes globally.”
“We want IT to keep up with the imagination of our GM business partners, and to do that, we plan to rebalance the employment model over the next three years so that the majority of our IT work is done by GM employees focused on extending new capabilities that further enable our business,” GM Chief Information Officer Randy Mott said in a news release.
General Motors chose Austin because the city “already has people with the skills GM is seeking – 46,000, according to the May 2011 Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Report.”
Jonathan Van, a student at UT Austin, co-founder of UT Entrepreneurship Week, is currently coordinating the Austin Lean Startup Machine.
The event takes place Sept. 21-23rd.
Jonathan Van, one of the organizers of Lean Startup Machine in Austin
The event is free and they’ll have pizza and beer, but you have to RSVP on Eventbrite. Van also answered some questions about Lean Startup Machine.
Q. What is Lean Startup Machine?
A. “Lean Startup” is a term coined by Eric Ries while an advisor to the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. It’s based on the new management processes he employed while he worked as chief technology officer at IMVU, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups.
Lean Startup Machine is a workshop and educational series. Our focus is on teaching founders a process through case studies and hands-on mentoring. Three days is an extremely short amount of time to reliably validate a new product or service concept, yet it’s enough time to get a significant amount done. While Lean Startup Machine and Startup Weekend share the same spirit of experiential learning over a few days, the two events have a different purpose. Some view Lean Startup Machine as the logical pre-cursor to Startup Weekend
Q. Who is putting it on?
A. We are graciously being hosted by HubAustin as it’s last hurrah event before it has to close its doors. Van, UT student and co-founder of UT Entrepreneurship Week, and Brent Weber of Red Spark Labs have partnered to coordinate round 2 of Lean Startup Machine in Austin.
Q. When does it take place and where?
A. It starts at Friday night at 6 pm on September 21 and runs through 6pm Sunday night September 23. It’s 54 hours of the most grueling, but useful learning experience of your life.
Q. How do people sign up and how much does it cost?
A. People can sign up at leanatx.eventbrite.com – It is not cheap, but we’ve had attendees say they got their $299 worth by the end of Friday evening. Included with your ticket is access to 20 of Austin’s best mentors, learning how to properly execute lean startup methods, and over $500 in products.
General Admission in most cities is $299. We offer significant discounts for students and early-bird ticket purchasers. Lean Startup Machine is more expensive than most startup events because it is more expensive to produce and is limited to a smaller audience
Q. How many people participate?
A. Most workshops have a cap of 50 participants to make sure we foster an intimate learning environment. We fly in our expert facilitators and also invest in product and curriculum development, which is noticeable after attending multiple workshops.
Q. What kind of results does Lean Startup Machine produce?
A. There is no hacking or coding during Lean Startup Machine. The winner of Lean Startup Machine is judged solely on the amount of validation achieved through applying the Lean Startup process. However, we’ve had teams craft a working product and many of the winning teams have already sold their minimum viable product to customers as a validation for the value they’ve created over the weekend. More recently, Lean Startup Machine alumni team, Branch has just raised capital from the founders of Twitter to scale their product.
Q. How often do you host Lean Startup Machine?
A. This is only our second time hosting Lean Startup Machine in Austin. At the moment our next one may be in January. In New York, where Lean Startup Machine was founded, a workshop is hosted every two months! I hope there’s enough traction in Austin to garner those sort of results!
Q. Why is Austin a hotbed for technology startups?
A. Keep Austin Weird. The openness to innovation and improvement is what makes Austin a hotbed for technology startups; not to mention the access to such a vibrant community, a top 30 university, and cheap living costs. It’s just a great place to be. The Austin startup community has been on a linear growth path and is just about to hit its stride to exponential growth as the “entrepreneurial density” as Brad Feld would put it, is growing.
Q. What are some of your favorite startup resources in Austin?
A. Well this is biased, but clearly Lean Startup Machine Workshops, but aside from that I know Tech Ranch has been running multiple programs out of their space.
Additionally, Joshua Baer’s Capital Factory has become the shining light to many scaling tech entrepreneurs.
If you’re working on a hardware, IP-driven startup, then the Austin Technology Incubator is the place for you. With a proven track record, they know how to help build companies that are venture capital worthy.
The Lean Startup Circle Meetup in Austin is one of the BIGGEST meetup groups in Austin. It’s a collection of 1200 people who are hungry to execute Lean Startup principles or already do.
Q. What else do we need to know about Lean Startup Machine that we
haven’t asked you about?
A. We have Dr. Bob Metcalfe, the founder of Ethernet and 3Com keynoting Friday night.
Additionally, we have a record 20 mentors for the weekend. That’s almost a mentor per team!
The stage is set for an amazing weekend! We don’t want any austinpreneur to miss out on this one of a kind event that will pay them back their ticket price in dividends as they navigate their way to success!
Tableau Software of Seattle has opened an Austin office and is hosting an open house on Thursday, Sept. 13.
The company, which creates business intelligence software, is hiring developers, sales and operations employees for its professional services practice based in Austin. It expects to hire more than 150 employees locally.
“Austin’s geography, talented workforce and reputation as a business and technology center make it an ideal location for our continued expansion,” Brett Thompson, Vice President of Human Resources at Tableau Software, said in a news release. “We are seeking candidates who share our passion to help people see and understand data.”
Founded in 2003 at Stanford, Tableau has seen double digit sales growth and plans to hire 300 new employees this year.
In addition to Austin and its Seattle headquarters, Tableau also has offices in Kirkland, WA and Menlo Park, Calif. It has international offices in London and Singapore.
Tableau’s temporary office in Austin is located at the Arboretum Great Hills Center at 9600 Great Hills Trail.
The Tableau Austin open house will take place at Maria Maria, 415 Colorado Street in Austin. Doors open at 5:00 p.m. and a presentation by Tableau CEO and co-founder, Christian Chabot, will take place at 6:00 p.m. Attendees are asked to register to attend. Tableau has also provided list of jobs available.
Macheen Inc.. a provider of cloud-based services and broadband connectivity, has closed on $10 million in funding.
The Austin-based company reports its existing investors including GemVentures, North Bridge Venture Capital and DFJ Mercury participated in the latest funding round.
“Also among Macheen’s investment group are prominent angels and industry figures Tom Meredith, Mike Maples Sr. and Yechiam Yemini,” the company disclosed in a news release.
In addition,Philippe Vallé with GemVentures will join the company’s board.
Macheen, founded in 2010, provides broadband connectivity to mobile device makers like Lenovo and its Thinkpad laptops. The company provides the Internet connectivity ready as a service which ships with the device. So when the customer gets the mobile device they have immediate access to the Internet.
Noesis Energy Wednesday unveiled a free website for companies to control energy costs in their buildings using big data services and analytics.
Noesis’ site, which underwent a five month beta test, already has more than 4,400 buildings being managed.
The Austin-based company also announced that it closed on a $8 million funding round led by Black Coral Capital and also an investment from Austin Ventures.
“There is no shortage of data in the energy industry. What is lacking are the practical insights required to make both big and small energy decisions so organizations can start realizing the tremendous amount of pent up savings,” Rob Day, partner with Black Coral Capital, said in a statement. “We believe this is why Noesis Energy has seen such impressive growth with energy managers and consultants during their beta period. This has shown us just how much these experts have been looking for a solution like this.”
E-commerce platform Bigcommerce Wednesday closed on $20 million in funding.
The Austin-based company received the funds from existing investors General Catalyst Parnters and a new investor, Mike Maples of Floodgate.
To date, Bigcommerce has raised $35 million.
“E-commerce is already booming and we’re really focusing on how to help our clients sell more while leveraging affordable online channels that drive qualified traffic,” Eddie Machaalani, co-founder of Bigcommerce said in a news release. “Small and medium businesses shouldn’t need a degree in design and web development to run a successful online store. They want it to be easy and intuitive. We’re radically simplifying the e-commerce experience, enabling the small business not just to compete with larger competitors, but win.”
Bigcommerce plans to use its funding to develop products and expand its sales and marketing teams and hire new employees.
Bigcommerce also announced a “brand overhaul” including a new web site, app store and product design features.
Bigcommerce’s customers include Gibson Guitar, Pandora Jewelers, Collette Dinnigan and Willie Nelson’s Shop.