Alereon has closed on $ 6 million in financing led by Enhanced Capital Partners, Pharos Capital Partners and Duchossois Technology Partners.
The Austin-based company reports the capital will allow it to expand its wireless monitor docking station technology used in products such as Samsung Central States and the Samsung Smart Station.
The money will also be used for the development of new technologies for industrial, medical, networking and gaming products.
Alereon is a fabless semiconductor company using industry standard Ultra Wideband (UWB) radio technology to develop low-power, fast wireless solutions ideal for connecting media rich products and displays.
Category: Austin (Page 284 of 310)
The 2012 Summer Olympic Games will kick off July 27th in London.
But you don’t have to wait that long.
Some of the best geek athletes in Austin will be demonstrating their athletic prowess this Saturday at the Summer Austin Startup Olympics.
(And if it’s anything like the Winter Austin Startup Olympics, held last January at UShip’s headquarters, these Olympics involve prodigious amounts of beer drinking, Tito’s vodka swilling and merry making.)
And it’s all for a good cause.
Each startup chooses a charity and all the money raised to goes to support those charities. Here’s a list of this year’s competitors and their charities.
· Adlucent – Austin Pets Alive
· BuildASign – Austin Pro Bono
· Boundless Network – Capital Area Food Bank
· uShip – Communities in Schools of Central Texas
· Spredfast – Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas
· SpareFoot – Kure It
· Mass Relevance – Livestrong/Lance Armstrong Foundation
· Whaleshark – Austin Children’s Museum
Photos courtesy of Austin Startup Olympics
The summer games take place at the Krieg Softball Complex at 517 S. Pleasant Valley Road. Opening ceremony starts at noon. Events will last all day.
The summer games include sprints, kickball, basketball, tug-a-war and tetherball.
The after party and awards ceremony starts at 5:30 p.m. and will be held at the Krieg Softball Complex also.
This is a slideshow from the last startup Olympics in the parking lot across from Uship.
MapMyFitness, which makes fitness apps, has received $9 million in venture capital.
Austin Ventures and Milestone Venture Partners led the Series B investment round. Competitor Group, Inc. and The Running Specialty Group, LLC also announced their participation in the funding as part of larger business partnerships.
Susan Lahey, reporter with Silicon Hills News, recently did a profile of MapyMyFitness.
The Austin-based company has a series of fitness mobile phone apps with more than nine million registered users. They use the apps to measure their workout plans, measure their fitness activity and track their progress over time. An estimated 25,000 new users sign up every day.
MapMyFitness, which is privately held, reports its revenue has doubled every year for the past four years and is projected to nearly triple in 2012. The company makes money through strategic partnerships and advertising. The fitness app is free.
MapMyFitness plans to use its latest funding round to grow globally and to develop new products, Richard Jalichandra, chief executive officer of MapMyFitness, said in a news release.
“MapMyFitness has built the leading fitness activity tracking technology platform for consumers and enterprise alike,” Mike Dodd, partner at Austin Ventures and MapMyFitness board member, said in a news release. “The company has also proven its ability to build the business, with growth in audience and revenue far exceeding expectations.”
MapMyFitness recently announced a new platform with features like “Courses, which allows users to “check-in” during workouts, and an advanced integration of Google Maps API for Business, which provides route details like traffic patterns and temperature in real-time on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile or iPad devices.”
Xtreme Power, based in Kyle, has secured $10 million in financing, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The company, founded in 2004, designs, engineers, manufactures and operates integrated energy storage and power management systems, called Dynamic Power Resources.
It sells its products to independent power producers, transmission and distribution utilities and commercial and industrial companies.
The privately-held company has raised more than $50 million in the last eight years from Sail Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, The Dow Chemcial Co., Fluor, Dominion Power, Spring Ventures, BP, Posco and Skylake Incuvest Co.
When your product helps light up the crowd at a Coldplay concert, you know you’re cool.
And Silicon Laboratories in Austin has created embedded technology that powers Xylobands LED wristbands that thousands of Coldplay audience members wear to the band’s concerts.
The actual Xylobands use wireless ICs and ultra low power microcontrollers from Silicon Labs to receive and process wireless signals that trigger each wristband’s LEDs to light up in sync with the music and stage lightshow, according to Silicon Labs.
A Coldplay Fan, Jason Regler, created the Xylobands to bring audience interaction to the concerts. He is co-owner of RB Concepts, based in the U.K., the maker of the Xylobands.
The wireless LED wristbands can be controlled remotely through special software and a laptop computer connected to a radio transmitter. The technology lets fans be a part of the show.
Civitas Learning has raised $4.1 million in funding to launch a new data analysis service to help college students succeed.
The Austin-based startup launched in late May and is working with community colleges, four-year universities and other schools.
Civitas Learning combines student demographic, behavioral, and academic information with the latest analysis and recommendation technologies, and sophisticated data modeling approaches to help students make academic decisions.
Austin Ventures led its investment round along with First Round Capital, and Floodgate.
Charles Thornburgh, a former senior executive at Kaplan, Inc. founded Civitas Learning.
Civitas Learning is working with more than a dozen institutions, including Austin Community College and University of Maryland University College.
Josh Baer introduces a new coworking and collaboration space downtown
It’s part of the Austin TechLive initiative by the Austin Chamber to create a tech-focused coworking site. Capital Factory will oversee the 22,000 square foot space on the 16th floor of Austin Centre at 701 Brazos Street. The wide-open floor offers spectacular panoramic city views. It’s furnished with Herman Miller desks and chairs and even has a full cafeteria. The workspace should appeal to creative people who like bright, expansive and beautiful office space. Smiley Media formerly occupied the offices.
“This is confirmation that coworking has moved beyond the emerging stage and is here to stay,” said Liz Elam who runs Link Coworking in Austin. She also organizes the Global Coworking Unconference Conference.
Coworking spaces provide workers with shared desks, conference rooms and other work areas. The number of co-working spaces has nearly doubled each year since 2006 to 1,300 worldwide in 2011 and projected to increase to 2,150 this year, according to Deskmag, which follows the industry.
The Capital Factory coworking site already has 60 desks filled and a waiting list from entrepreneurs wanting to rent a desk there, said Josh Baer, managing director of the Capital Factory, an Austin-based accelerator for tech startups. He referred to the coworking site as the “community entrepreneurial center of gravity.” A desk at the coworking center costs $750 a month and a community membership, which allows a person to work in the common areas, costs $150 a month. The site provides round the clock access everyday to members.
The Austin Chamber of Commerce selected the Capital Factory as its strategic partner for Austin TechLive. A few companies including Baer’s startup, OtherInBox, which Return Path acquired earlier this year, and WP Engine are already moving into the space. It will be fully launched within a few months.In addition to the Capital Factory, the University of Texas at Austin and the General Assembly of New York are helping out with the new center. The General Assembly will offer certified educational programs at Austin TechLive.
During a press conference Thursday morning, Baer talked about the need to create “healthy vibrant strong companies” in Austin. And said there’s been a lot of talk lately about Austin versus Silicon Valley and other places. By creating a dense tech environment downtown, the new coworking center can foster interaction, connections and collaboration among the city’s high tech workforce, Baer said. That will lead to new companies and more high-tech jobs, he said. His goal is to have 250 companies occupy the space.
The other companies moving into the Capital Factory coworking space include Swoosh Traffic, Agent Pronto, Tweet.TV and Swimtopia.
The Capital Factory coworking space will also be the site of tech events, meetups and training, Baer said. The goal is to bring together tech events that happen all over the city into the central coworking site, he said. For example, Capital Factory used to host Austin on Rails but it got too big and moved to a bar. He plans to host that again in the new center.
The idea of the central coworking space focused on the tech sector is similar to an initiative launched last November in San Antonio called Geekdom. It’s a collaborative workspace with more than 300 community members and it recently expanded to another floor at the downtown Weston Centre. But while Geekdom is run as a nonprofit organization, the Capital Factory coworking space is a business, Baer said. A group of successful Austin entrepreneurs put up the money to launch the site. They include Baer, Bill Boebel, Andrew Busey, Ross Buhrdorf and Dan Graham.
“Nobody is trying to make a lot of money off this,” Baer said. “The people who did this really want to help entrepreneurs in Austin.”
“The mission is to create this great entrepreneurial center downtown,” said Bryan Jones, chair of the Austin Chamber’s Technology Partnership.
In addition to launching the coworking space, the Chamber’s Tech Partnership is focused on creating 5,000 new technology jobs, up 5 percent from last year and to attract 50 new technology startups to the Austin region, including 10 at the new Capital Factory space. It also wants to recruit 15 new entrepreneurial companies to the Austin region.One of the biggest challenges startup companies face is hiring great talent, Baer said. The Capital Factory coworking space will attract that talent and help the new startups grow, he said.
Chuck Gordon, cofounder of Sparefoot, a Capital Factory company from 2009, has seen firsthand how being in a shared workspace with other tech companies can help a startup grow to a large company.
“It’s possible. We did it,” said Gordon.
Sparefoot recently moved out of the Omni building to 5,600 square feet in a neighboring building. The company now has 45 employees.
“Tons of companies in San Francisco and New York go to incubators,” Gordon said. Those spaces serve as entrepreneurial ecosystems that strengthens the entire technology industry in those cities, he said.
“This is going to make it happen here,” he said. “The networking opportunities of getting a bunch of smart people in one space are incredible.”
Boebel, managing director of Capital Factory, will manage the new coworking space in partnership with Cospace, an Austin coworking site.
Capital Factory will leverage Cospace’s expertise for IT services, furniture, assigning workstations and all the nuts and bolts that go into running a coworking center, Boebel said.
“I’m mostly excited about working with the startups,” he said. One of the benefits of working at the site will be access to successful entrepreneurs like Boebel, who sold his e-mail hosting company to Rackspace. And Baer, who has founded and sold several startups.
“I wish there was a space like this when I started my company,” Boebel said. He founded what eventually came to be known as Webmail.Us in the basement of a townhouse in Blacksburg, Va.
“It’s nice to be around other entrepreneurs who are going through the same things,” Boebel said. “Friends and family don’t understand what it’s like to bootstrap a company.”
The coworking environment allows the startups to learn from each other’s mistakes and that can accelerate their progress, Boebel said.
Also, the space allows them to share resources, he said. Three companies might be able to hire one User Interface Designer, he said.
Boebel is also working on setting up a fund to provide access to seed stage investment for startup companies at Capital Factory.
Jason Cohen started Capital Factory with Baer in 2009. In surveys of the program participants, the entrepreneurs always reported access to mentoring and the close working proximity of the other startups as the top benefits of the program, Cohen said. The Capital Factory coworking space provides both, he said.
“It’s an insane space,” Cohen said. “It has just the right kind of attitude and energy for creative people.”
That helps WP Engine, a hosting service for 40,000 WordPress blogs, which has 15 Austin employees and 20 overall, Cohen said. He founded WP Engine a few years ago. It’s adding two new employees every month, Cohen said. The space will help in recruiting, he said. “Who wouldn’t want to work here?”
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Richard Jalichandra, Chief Executive Officer of MapMyFitness.com
MapMyFitness has stuff other fitness apps have: You can count your calories and log your workouts, for example. And it has a stellar map function integrated with Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version). So users can not only plan, track, and share their routes with friends, they get real time info on traffic and weather.
But MapMyFitness is working to be a premier, deluxe site that integrates your social network so you can share what you ate and ran or biked or lifted—and plan workouts with others. Using the mobile app, you can see if a friend is jogging close by, and meet up. There are analytics for tracking your progress. Last week, MapMyFitness introduced gamification functions such as a leader board. You can use the app for free, or get a bronze, silver or gold membership for between $6 and $20 per month. And there’s a retail section for apparel and fitness accessories. It’s a gold standard fitness site.
Registering for a site and app like MapMyFitness is a no brainer for athletes. But the company is positioning itself as a solution to the nation’s obesity epidemic. Jalichandra said more than 50 percent of its users fall under the “overweight” category. (The app asks about your height, weight, age and gender when you build your profile.)For people trying to get in shape, he said, even adding 30 minutes of activity a day can dramatically improve health. The tracking and social sharing rev up your motivation to get out there and move.
“After you log your activity for a couple of weeks it becomes addictive,” said Jalichandra who said he lost 17 pounds since he joined the company a year ago. And he was fit to begin with.
David Middaugh, a doctor of physical therapy with Austin Manual Therapy, said he started using the app with MapMyRide when he commuted to work on his bicycle.
“I think it’s a great tool to use to track your fitness progress,” he said. “It gives you objective measures to see if you’re working out longer, going farther, burning more calories. You can see your progress over time. I think for a patient interested in weight loss it would really help them reach their goals.”
Dixie Stanforth, a personal trainer and lecturer in physical education, kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas acknowledged the motivation potential of the site.
“The goal setting aspect of the application could be helpful,” she said. “In the research world it’s called ‘setting intentions.’ When somebody actually makes a concrete intention and publicly commits to it, it can affect their behavior…. It’s a very simple thing but it has quite a bit of power.” She also thought the anonymity of being able to track your fitness and be—in a sense—part of a community without having to go to the gym or a class while you’re just starting out would be helpful.
For new exercisers who like processes and the idea of community support, MapMyFitness works as a solution. But there are barriers. The site, she said, obviously attracts fitness buffs who want to connect with other fitness buffs. They recognize and can connect with other members of their “tribe.” But for someone new to fitness, it might be overwhelming with myriad features and very little education. “I haven’t seen anything on the site yet that would draw that beginning person in and help them become a part of that tribe,” she said.
The app, however, is intuitive, according to Middaugh. “You just push a couple buttons and you’re good to go.” The app uses your phone’s GPS system to track and record your runs or rides.
MapMyFitness recently introduced a beta site that’s significantly more user friendly than its previous version which gave no explanation how to use it and only people who already connect exercise with data and track their workouts could follow. Jalichandra said he’s using the free version of the beta site, rather than the gold. He wants to share the interactive experience with the bulk of his customers so he can keep in touch with how it’s working.
MapMyFITNESS did start out as the collaboration of two fitness buffs: Kevin Callahan’s company MapMyRUN and Robin Thurston’s MapMyRIDE, both started in 2005. Callahan created his app to keep track of his progress while training for a marathon. Thurston conceived his idea while abroad on a cycling vacation. Callahan, Jeff Kalikstein, and Thurston joined forces in 2006 to form MapMyFITNESS. In 2010, the company received $5 million in venture funding from Austin Ventures.
The app’s new functionality benefits hard core exercisers and newbies alike. But MapMyFitness isn’t just aiming for individual registrants. Jalichandra believes they’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. With obesity costing the business world so much in medical costs and insurance premiums, he sees the app becoming a tool for whole corporations to make their businesses healthier by starting company leaderboards and other initiatives. He envisions insurance customers using it to lobby their companies to lower insurance rates.
He sees MapMyFitness being used by schools, corporations, enterprises with a vested interest in inspiring healthy lifestyles.
Each of the meeting rooms at MapMyFitness offices are named for sites where people practice fitness: Parks and trails. Jalichandra’s is called “Redbud.”
“I named it that because it’s a particularly steep, hard hill to bike up,” he explains. So far, with more than 9 million visitors, he seems pretty good with hills.
Austin-based SolarBridge Technologies has received $25 million in venture capital.
The company, which makes micro inverters used in solar panels, has raised a total of $71 million.
Shea Ventures led the latest Series D round, and previous investors including Battery Ventures, Rho Ventures and Osage University Partners, also participated.
“AC modules powered by SolarBridge microinverters are the clear choice for residential and light commercial solar,” Ron Van Dell, president and CEO, SolarBridge, said in a news release.
SolarBridge plans to use the money to launch new hardware and software products, for marketing and sales and global expansion.
“As the market for rooftop solar continues to grow, we are excited to partner with SolarBridge, which provides innovative and reliable microinverter technology and a highly differentiated business model,” said Jason Schoettler, managing director of Shea Ventures.
About SolarBridge Technologies
By YASMIN GHAHREMANI
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
Larry Warnock, CEO and president of Gazzang
Something was bothering Larry Warnock. It was 2010 and the former CEO of Phurnace Software had recently finished leading his company through a successful sale to BMC. His next challenge was advising two Houston entrepreneurs on how to realize their business idea.
Mike Umansky and Chris Gillan had come up with an encryption solution for open source software that filled a gaping hole in the cloud computing market. But Warnock felt the name they’d chosen for their company, Critotech, was all wrong. It wasn’t just that it sounded like a relic from a Cold War spy novel. It was that the name’s security connotations would hamstring the company’s growth outside the encryption space, a goal the startup veteran considered crucial to its long-term success.
“I didn’t want to be known as Encryption, Inc.,” says Warnock.
So when he joined the firm as CEO that year, one of the first things he did was look for a fresh web brand name. In a request that sounds like it’s straight out of Seinfeld, he asked his team to come up with a name that meant nothing. He didn’t want the company typecast as it continued to find itself. After some fruitless brainstorming, the team began to look through comic books for words used to denote sounds.
“Sure enough a guy went home and his son found in a comic book a picture of a good guy punching a bad guy and it said ‘Gazang,’” recalls Warnock. “And it was in a little cloud. So we said that’s it.”
Gazang.com was already taken, so they added another Z to make the name Gazzang.
Blank slate in hand, the team has since been writing its own story in the cloud. Management has narrowed the market focus to customers who need Big Data solutions. And it’s got two new cloud tools in the works – one of which will debut in July.
Encryption pays
Not that the founders are ashamed of their encryption roots. On the contrary, their flagship platform-as-a-service software, recently renamed zNcrypt, is turning heads. Gazzang was one of 10 vendors recently selected for the MIT Sloan CIO Innovation Showcase. What’s more, the company recorded its strongest quarter to date in Q1 and its customer base has expanded to 220, including Philips Electronics, the United States Department of Health and Human Services and Boston Children’s Hospital. Healthcare, finance and government are target sectors because they’re required to protect data.
“Compliance was a huge thing for these folks – PCI, HIPAA, SOX – all those guidelines were big challenges,” says Umansky.
He and Gillan first got the idea for zNcrypt while talking with people involved in grid computing and virtual machine automation – the predecessors of cloud computing. Users needed encryption that wouldn’t interfere with the performance of their databases and other applications.
“Chris and I did market analysis and realized that MySQL was the database of choice for these guys,” says Umansky. “It had such huge traction and really there was no way to encrypt that data at rest, so we went out and built our transparent data encryption platform and key management platform.” Transparent data encryption is a process that happens on the fly and behind the scenes so the developer doesn’t have to change the database or underlying application.
“It just happens auto-magically as the data goes to the disk,” explains Warnock. “Then when the data is requested back for processing, its magic key determines if that requester is authorized.”
Because zNcrypt secures the data instantly, it leaves less room for breaches than products that only encrypt periodically. The tool now protects all LAMP-based applications and data. Wendy Nather, research director of the enterprise security practice at 451 Research, says no one else is specializing in database security for the open source community, and it’s a problem that badly needs an answer.
“Every enterprise has open source software somewhere incorporated,” says Nather. “Even if they’re writing their own software, chances are a developer has incorporated some open source components in it. When you’re developing things and you need a lab to play with you’re generally going to turn to open source components because they’re cheaper and you can have as many as you want when you need them.”
Chasing Big Data
Gazzang has continued to refine its direction, shifting slightly when Big Data began to gain
attention. Big Data refers to huge data sets that are not well suited to be handled by current relational databases – usually petabytes or exabytes of information. Much of the data created today couldn’t be processed in a relational database anyway because it is unstructured. It comes from smart phones, tablet computers, cameras and numerous other connected devices.
Data and distributed file system technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB can turn these otherwise lost bits of data into valuable information that companies, governments,science organizations and the like can analyze for insights. Marketers use Big Data to understand aggregate buying behavior and computer scientists use it to analyze the interactions of thousands of nodes in a network.
Gazzang realized that its zNcrypt architecture would fit with technologies like Hadoop and decided Big Data is the way of the future. It’s a change from what the founders initially envisioned but Warnock says that’s par for the course in startup-land.
“Every startup I’ve been in, when we ultimately had great success it was different than what we thought it was going to be,” he says.
Investors are happy with the way things are turning out too. Austin Ventures provided Gazzang with Series A funding worth $3.5 million and has been pleasantly surprised by the turn of events.
“The customer set they’ve gotten has been a little bit different than we originally thought it would be but better in some ways because the deals are larger and the sales cycle is frankly a little bit shorter,” says Thomas Ball, general partner at Austin Ventures.
With all the hype around the cloud and Big Data, Ball concedes that Gazzang risks getting lost in a game of lingo bingo.
“I think positioning and rising above the clutter is the biggest challenge because everyone wants to use the term cloud now,” he says. “But when people see how good the product is and how easy it is to scale, it’s an easy sale.”
In the pipeline
Next up on Gazzang’s agenda: zTrustee, a universal key manager for a wide variety of applications. zNcrypt manages keys for data it encrypts but zTrustee will work with any kind of key, certificate or token used for a wide array of computing processes. It’s intended to be a “single point of trust” for keys and the policies around them, and it will launch in July.
Later this year the company will roll out zOps, a console to monitor and diagnose issues with cloud computing functions.
It’s all part of Warnock’s vision for market expansion beyond the encryption space.
“A lot of the data center tools that exist were never built for the cloud,” he says. “So there’s actually a market opportunity to rebuild all the tools people have been relying on but in this new architecture.”
If Warnock has his way, when people say the name Gazzang they’ll hear a bat hitting a home run.
“What we’re doing with Gazzang and what I think works best in early-stage is to swing for the bleachers,” he says. “We are going to be wildly successful or an epic disaster.”
Whatever the outcome, one thing is for sure. The game will certainly be interesting.
