Category: Austin (Page 287 of 309)

TechStar’s Nicole Glaros helps startups succeed

May 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Nicole Glaros showing off her TechStars Cloud belt buckle in San Antonio

The only woman in the TechStars Cloud program, Nicole Glaros relocated from Boulder, Colorado to San Antonio with her husband, two-year-old daughter and one month old baby boy.
“It’s not a hard sell for me,” Glaros said. “To pick up and move for four months is not a big deal for us.”
Her husband Mark loves adventure and discovering new places too, she said.
“From our perspective it was an adventure,” Glaros said.
Adventurous is the perfect adjective to describe the outgoing Glaros, who is accomplished, smart, athletic and pretty and a powerful force in the technology startup world.
“TechStars is such a great environment,” Glaros said. “It doesn’t feel like work. I love what I do. “
Glaros moved into a house near Basse Road and San Pedro in January. She had just given birth to her son, Jackson, in December. Her mother also moved in, relocating for four months from Florida to help out with the kids.
“She put her life on hold,” Glaros said.
Family members are the unsung heroes of TechStars, Glaros said. While the entrepreneurs toil away 12 hour or longer days, seven days a week, spouses, kids, other family members and friends often have to adjust their lives.
Glaros knows their pain. She has worked with more than 100 startup tech entrepreneurs. Before joining TechStars, she founded three startups and worked at a technology business incubator, CTEK and other incubation programs in Colorado.
One day, Dave Cohen, a successful entrepreneur, angel investor and cofounder of TechStars, came to CTEK to pitch his idea for a new kind of technology incubator. CTEK’s leaders didn’t care for the idea much, but Glaros did. She sent an email to Cohen asking if he had time to meet her for a beer. He agreed to meet her for 30 minutes.
When Cohen arrived, he asked Glaros what her startup idea was. She said she didn’t have one. She just liked his TechStars idea and wanted to chat.
“That 30 minutes turned into three hours,” Glaros said.
Glaros ended up joining TechStars in 2007 and now serves as the managing director of the TechStars program in Boulder. She agreed to relocate to San Antonio to help Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud with its inaugural program.
TechStars is a highly selective startup accelerator that takes about ten companies per program and provides seed funding from more than 75 different venture capital firms and angel investors. It has five TechStars programs in Boston, Boulder, New York City, Seattle and San Antonio.
The TechStars Cloud was the first accelerator program exclusively focused on cloud-based computing startups. The first class ran from January through April 11th. Each of the companies received $18,000 and access to $100,000 credit line along with thousands of dollars worth of perks including free website hosting, marketing and other services.
“The goal for me to be here was just to give Jason the resources he needed to launch the TechStars Cloud program,” Glaros said. “Working with Jason has been pure joy. He did a wonderful job.”
Seats enjoyed working with Glaros too.
“I will miss working with Nicole immensely,” Seats said. “We had very different styles that gelled quite well together. She is demanding, tough, detailed, insightful and almost always right. I tried to internalize as much of her thought processes as I could to make myself better.”
Glaros said the TechStars Cloud program was the smoothest launch of a new program in TechStars history and she credits Seats, an accomplished entrepreneur who founded Slicehost and sold it to Rackspace, with that.
Glaros was also impressed with the 11 companies to graduate from the TechStars program.
“It was really cool watching them develop,” she said. “I think the highlight is always seeing the progress of the companies. You literally see them evolve from raw potential to a real thing.”
And they appreciated her.
“She’s brilliant,” said Matt Gershoff, founder of Conductrics, in the TechStars Cloud program. “She’s super smart, confident and incredible at being able to distill complexity into a simple narrative.”
Glaros played a key role in helping the companies hone their eight minute pitch to investors.
“She’s not a pushover,” Gershoff said. “She’s definitely respected. She will tell you the truth even if it’s hard to hear. She’s honest.”
Colin Loretz, founder of Cloudsnap in the TechStars Cloud program, also had high praise for Glaros.
“She was awesome to have around,” Loretz said. “She’s seen more pitches and more startups all the way through to Demo Day than anyone.”
“She sees all the problems you can possibly see,” Loretz said.
Glaros has watched entrepreneurs launch a company, exit the company through sale or acquisition and then come back to serve as a mentor in the TechStars program. She calls the mentors – successful technology entrepreneurs who volunteer their time to help the startups – the secret sauce of TechStars.
“It creates a sort of unified cycle of giving back,” Glaros said.
The startup movement gives Glaros hope that these bright entrepreneurs will go on to create jobs and innovative products that will revive the economy.
“The one thing you cannot outsource is brains, talent and creativity,” she said.
The TechStars program has a 92 percent success rate, Glaros said. TechStars latest stats show that 109 companies still operate, nine have failed and eight have been acquired.
The competition is really stiff to get into TechStars. Glaros had just finished selecting the latest companies for TechStars Boulder. She reviewed 1,172 applications for 10 spots.
“The idea is really quality over quantity,” Glaros said.
So how does an entrepreneur make the cut?
“When we’re looking at a company we’re going to take the best team,” Glaros said. “We want a really great team that is super passionate about what they do,” Glaros said. “The idea doesn’t matter much. Ideas aren’t worth anything. It’s the execution of the idea that is important.”
That means the background of the founders count the most even more than the idea they are pitching, she said. And a lot of those founders have a background in engineering, she said.
And few female engineers apply, she said.
Glaros said women also tend to be more risk-averse than men and not as likely to risk everything to startup a company. And they don’t have huge egos and ego plays a big role in being entrepreneur, Glaros said.
“You have to believe you are the only one on the planet that can solve the problem you’re trying to tackle,” she said.
But women make some of the best entrepreneurs, Glaros said.
“Women tend to underestimate how much they can do,” Glaros said. “They outperform their objectives.”
Women also tend to be very open and they ask for help when they encounter a problem, Glaros said.
Now that the first TechStars Cloud program has wrapped up in San Antonio, Glaros has packed up and returned home. But she remembers her time fondly in the city. She enjoyed visiting local restaurants with her family. She thinks San Antonio is a great place to raise kids.
And although TechStars Cloud enters it quiet period, Glaros thinks San Antonio’s startup scene is heating up under the leadership of Seats and Nick Longo at the Geekdom and others.
In Boulder, TechStars has been able to create a technology startup community. How can San Antonio replicate that?
“Community matters,” Glaros said. “When a community comes together and rallies all kinds of entrepreneurial magic happens.”
The community can help by becoming a customer of a startup, volunteering time and expertise and money.
“Embrace them – open up your address book and wallets,” Glaros said “That’s the best thing you can do.”
When successful entrepreneurs mentor and help startups a vibrant startup community can thrive, Glaros said.
“In Boulder, you can get a meeting with just about anyone,” Glaros said. “Accessibility to leadership is huge.”

Tech starscloud

View more PowerPoint from Laura Lorek

UT’s Texas Venture Labs receives $6 million gift

May 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Photo courtesy of the University of Texas by Jill Johnson

The University of Texas at Austin announced today that the Texas Venture Labs at the McCombs School of Business has received a $6 million gift from Fort Worth businessman Jon Brumley.
And the incubator will be renamed the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs.
“This investment is a game changer that enables us to expand the scale and accessibility of the Texas Venture Labs model,” McCombs Den Thomas Gilligan, said in a statement. “It’s a vote of confidence as well, because of the reputation of Jon Brumley as an entrepreneur, a business build and a distinguished graduate of McCombs and the Wharton School of Business.”
Brumley made his money in the oil and gas industry. He founded six companies.
“Texas Venture Labs is a gem in the Texas entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Brumley said in a statement. “It provides critical, hands-on experience for aspiring entrepreneurs who learn as students the effort required to get a new venture through the financing process. For me, this gift is an opportunity to build our capacity to grow the economy of Texas, while giving a leg up to young entrepreneurs, who remind me a lot of myself at that age.”
Founded in 2010, the Texas Venture Labs has worked with 40 companies that have raised more than $25 million in investment capital. The incubator provides help to graduate students in business, engineering, law and natural sciences. Texas Venture Labs also sponsors the annual Venture Labs Investment Competition, being held this week.

The Open Compute Project helps data centers save energy and increase efficiency

May 2, 2012 / / 2 Comments

By L.A. Lorek

Data centers gobble up energy.
But some of the smartest minds in the information technology industry want to change that.
They are meeting in San Antonio today and tomorrow to rethink the old ways of putting together servers, power and cooling units and the rest of the guts of data centers to save energy and increase efficiency.
It’s called the Open Compute Project, launched last April by Facebook with the goal of creating the most efficient computer hardware and software for data centers. Of course not everyone has joined the project. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are not on board. But lots of major players like Facebook and Rackspace are.
And in just a year, the Open Compute Project has made data centers 38 percent more efficient to run and 24 percent less expensive to build, according to the organization. The group comes up with new hardware and software standards and then they share those with everyone else. The entire data center industry benefits from the open collaborative work of the best engineers in a variety of companies.
About 500 data center leaders from Intel, AMD, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Facebook, Rackspace and more met today at Rackspace’s headquarters in San Antonio for the third summit designed to hammer out designs and think up projects to improve the way data centers operate.

Frank Frankovsky with Facebook

Wednesday morning, Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook, gave the keynote address on the progress made in the last year.
First off, Frankovsky showed a slide listing dozens of new companies that have joined the movement including HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, HP and others. Frankovsky wrote a blog post on May 2 providing a full list of new members and detailing all the accomplishments in the past year.
And later on the stage, executives from HP and Dell both unveiled their newly redesigned servers dubbed Project Coyote and Project Zeus respectively.
The objectives of the Open Compute Project are scale, value, simplicity, sustainability and openness, Frankovsky said. That involves rethinking the entire data center from the racks that house the servers to the electrical systems that connect them together.
“We’re ditching the 19 inch rack design,” he said.
A big part of that is creating new 21-inch width standard for racks inside data centers to replace the outdated 19-inch racks, which date back to the 1950s, Frankovsky said.
“We want people to differentiate less and innovate more,” he said.
Following Frankovsky, Glenn Keels, HP, director of marketing of its hyperscale business unit, said the reason HP joined the Open Compute Project was because “leaders do not sit on their laurels” and “leaders develop standards.” HP is number one or number two in the data center markets it serves, Keels said. HP powers some of the largest cloud data centers in the world including Facebook, he said.
The cloud market is small but growing exponentially between now and 2020, Keels said.
“HP has begun to think differently,” Keels said. HP is transforming servers and changing the experience with projects like moonshot, voyager and odyssey aimed at improving efficiencies in the data center, Keels said.
“Open Compute Project is the most robust group of problem solvers focused on the data center space and moving from technology and form factors of 1995 to today to reclaim stranded time, space and power,” Keels said.
“We have to reinvent ourselves every time and Open Compute is a fantastic forum for us to do that,” Keels said. “Standardization has the ability to unlock innovation.”
Keels unveiled HP’s Coyote open rack standard at the conference.
Then Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group, showed off Dell’s new server and storage designs that meet the Open Rack specifications.
“Dell is deeply rooted in our support for open alliances,” Norrod said. “It’s in our DNA…We are very active in our support for open source.”
Rackspace is also active in the open source movement and in creating less expensive and more efficient data centers. Late Wednesday morning, Mark Roenigk, Rackspace’s chief operating officer, detailed the company’s plans in an interview.
Rackspace has nine data centers globally including two in the United Kingdom and one in Hong Kong. Its U.S. data centers are in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and the Washington, D.C. area,.
“We shuttered two in San Antonio in the last six months due to inefficiencies,” Roenigk said. “There’s a great example of how quickly this technology is moving.”
In the last two years, Rackspace has seen a 22 percent efficiency improvement in its data centers, Roenigk said.
Rackspace plans to leverage the Open Compute Project designs for computer servers, storage, network and utilities in its next generation data center, which it plans soon, Roenigk said.
Overall, Rackspace has 80,000 servers online serving 172,000 customers today.
“We want to be influential in the design of the hardware,” Roenigk said.
So Rackspace works closely with original equipment makers like HP and Dell, he said.
“Most recently we’ve increased the density of a rack from 7 kilowatts to 18 kilowatts a rack providing more computing power coming out of a smaller footprint,” Roenigk said. “That means less cost which is passed on to our customers.”
Sustainability and saving energy is a core covenant of the Open Computer Project, Roenigk said.
“We were recently judged by Greenpeace in a report “How Clean Is Your Cloud,” Roenigk said. “We’re pleased that even though we’re a small player in the market, we’re in the middle of the pack.”
“We think we can be a big influencer in data center efficiency and the power used to power those data centers,” Roenigk said.
Those decisions on being green stem from the sources that Rackspace uses to power its data centers. That’s why it has bypassed states, which provide cheap power from coal sources in favor of hydro electric, wind and natural gas sources.
“We’re really about serving customers,” Roenigk said. “They pull us and push us in different directions all the time.”
Two years ago, only one in 25 customers ever brought up the subject of sustainability when talking about hosting, Roenigk said.
“Today it is more like six or seven in ten,” he said. “It is now a real part of the sourcing and procurement process.”
On Thursday, engineers attending the summit will hammer out their ideas in special sessions that go very, very deep, Roenigk said. The Open Compute Project has a formal process for people to bring forth their ideas, he said. The board decides which projects are going to drive the most value to the open source community. Then the engineers meet once or several times a week. When they are done, they publish their design specifications to members of the Open Compute Project to use, Roenigk said.
“Linux took 20 years to become a standard,” Roenigk said. “We will do what Linux did in 20 years in five years or less.”

The following video is from Rackspace and explains its role in the Open Compute Project.

Rackspace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Entrepreneurial Insights from Dr. T of National Instruments

May 1, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Photo courtesy of 1 Semester Startup

James Truchard couldn’t find a job that he liked so he created one.
That’s what the co-founder, known as Dr. T, president and CEO of National Instruments, said last week during an interview with Bob Metcalfe, University of Texas professor of innovation and coinventor of Ethernet and cofounder of 3Com.
Unlike some of today’s technology billionaires by the name of Bill, Michael and Mark, both Truchard and Metcalfe finished college and obtained PhDs before becoming entrepreneurs.
Metcalfe interviewed Truchard at 1 Semester Startup Demo Day last Thursday evening in the Lady Bird Johnson auditorium at the LBJ Library and Museum. Metcalfe said Truchard played a huge role in convincing him to move to Austin from Boston more than a year ago.
Metcalfe quizzed Truchard on his background. He was born and raised in Austin County. Neither of his parents had a college degree. He received his bachelors and masters degrees in physics and a PhD in electrical engineering from UT. And in 1976, he cofounded National Instruments, in his garage in Austin with Bill Nowlin and Jeff Kodosky. The company makes test equipment and software including LabVIEW, a graphical development program. The company just reported revenue of $262 million for the first quarter of 2012, up 10 percent from a year ago and a profit of $18.6 million. It had revenue of more than $1 billion in 2011.
“I was always determined to be successful, I never thought of any other option,” Truchard said.
Truchard didn’t have a business plan when he started National Instruments.
“We just started working,” he said.
They also never sought out venture capital. Instead, they secured a $10,000 bank loan and they ran the company by bootstrapping operations.
Truchard also read hundreds of books on entrepreneurs including Crossing the Chasm and Thriving on Chaos. He also consulted with the IC2 Institute at UT.
“Keep as much of your capital to yourself as possible.” Truchard advised the crowd of student entrepreneurs. He also told them to make sure they have a good idea and to find as many mentors as possible. And great technology is at the base of innovation.
And nothing beats dumb luck, he said. “Don’t exclude it.”
Truchard took National Instruments public in 1995 to offer liquidity to its employees, not because they needed to raise money.
The company culture was born when National Instruments started, Truchard said. He tries to make the company a fun place to work and focuses on cultivating a leadership culture as the company grows. The company regularly makes it on Forbes’ best places to work lists.
In response to a question from a student about how he communicates the company vision to 6,200 employees.
“Well, I’m very repetitive,” Truchard said.
To share his ideas, Truchard has used 1,500 slides throughout the years in presentations to employees. His employees took all of those slides, shrunk them and then they made a portrait of him out them and presented to him as a gift.

The ATC Startup Showdown at the CEO Summit

May 1, 2012 / / 3 Comments

The Austin Technology Council is giving six startup companies a chance to present their businesses at the upcoming CEO Summit.
UPDATE: Any qualifying founder or high level executive of an early stage company based in Austin can submit an application to pitch at the ATC Startup Showdown. The deadline to submit an application is 5 p.m. central time on May 11. The six companies chosen to pitch will receive free registration to the conference.
The Austin Technology Council CEO Summit will be held at the Austin Hilton on May 17th and 18th. On Friday, immediately following a panel discussion of several national Venture Capitalists about investing in Texas, the six selected participants of the ATC Startup Showdown will each get six minutes on stage to present their businesses. A panel comprised of venture capitalists will provide the companies with feedback and name a winner of a competition.
For startups looking for early stage investment, the ATC Startup Showdown provides exposure to potential investors. The ATC board of directors will chose the six finalist selected to present.
“The Startup Showdown is a direct result of conversations that happened at SXSW this past March. ATC member companies, board and staff met dozens of investors from outside Texas looking to invest aggressively in local tech— and our local investors welcome the influx,” Austin Technology Council president, Julie Huls said in a statement. “This Showdown allows us to gain valuable outside insight about how we can better position our companies for competitive, and investment, success; we increase visibility for our market as a tier-one player; and we showcase our local innovation and talent. Besides, as Texans, we are always looking to up the ante!”
An estimated 300 CEOs and other executives are expected to attend the Austin Technology Council CEO Summit 2012 on May 17-18 at the Hilton Austin. It costs $399 to register through May 4 and $599 through May 11. Registration, will close at 5 p.m. May 11. Companies that purchase a membership to ATC will receive $100 off of registration.

The revival of Leisure Suit Larry thanks to Austin-based Replay Games

May 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

It looks like Leisure Suit Larry will make a comeback in the 21st century.
On Kickstarter, Austin-based Replay Games has raised more than $600,000 exceeding its goal of $500,000 to remake the popular game from 1987. It has 13,610 backers showing that Leisure Suit Larry is still in demand.
Al Lowe, the game’s original developer, has agreed to come out of retirement to work on the new version. And the game developers have secured the license to reinvent Larry for the modern world.
Replay Games is giving away all kinds of perks to people who pledge to its Kickstarter campaign including the chance for a $5,000 contribution to be a character at Lefty’s bar where Larry hangs out. Only 13 hours remain before the campaign wraps up but since it already met and exceeded its goal it’s a sure thing that Leisure Suit Larry will prowl again.
And the game makers have cut prices on perks during the last day to lure even more backers and money to the project.

The WP Engine team knows how to have fun

April 30, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Back in February, Susan Lahey did this profile of WP Engine, the wordpress hosting site founded by Jason Cohen.
The startup is growing by leaps and bounds. And today they posted a video showing their team spirit and showcasing why Austin is a great place to work. The entire staff ran a 5K around Town Lake, including the wet guy, which you’ll have to watch the video to see what he did. I love all the geeks mapping out and caching their routes with their laptops.
San Austin Productions, a business that clearly sees the opportunity in the combined Austin and San Antonio technology community, shot the video.

Software skills, especially Java, in demand in Austin

April 30, 2012 / / 0 Comments

In Austin, software, hardware, semiconductor and information technology skills are in demand, according to Door64, a 20,000 member technology organization, which Monday released a Hiring Priority Survey of technology companies.
Startups were not included in the survey.
For the first three months of 2012, software is the biggest skill in demand. Companies are specifically looking for Java, User Interface/User Experience, Software Quality Assurance, and .NET experience.
“We all know, it is often one or two key holes in a company that can impede growth,” Door64 founder Matt Genovese said in a statement. “We are stepping up and surveying the hiring managers of a set of sizable Austin area technology companies every quarter starting now with today’s survey results, to get deliberately granular about what these hiring shortages are.”
More than half of the 54 managers surveyed reported software as their main hiring priority, followed by information technology with skills like systems administration, network engineering, project management, security.
The third priority was the hardware or semiconductor category, at 14%, meaning chip design, verification, embedded software.
The biggest software category was Java, at 16% of all respondents, 30% of the software needs. Java is still king in Austin, used for developing in a variety of business needs, from enterprise Java to mobile technologies built in Java.
Door64 will be holding the Austin Pain-point Job Fair on June 29 at the AT&T Conference Center at University of Texas.

At Longhorn Startup Camp, UT Students found Clay.io, a platform for games

April 30, 2012 / / 1 Comment


Austin Hallock and Joe Vennix, both juniors at the University of Texas majoring in computer science, have founded Clay.io, a platform for HTML5 games.
Their startup is based at the Longhorn Startup Camp, a 30,000 square foot building at 1616 Guadalupe St., which has housed 27 student run companies during the Spring Semester. Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at UT, secured the space, which also served as an incubator for ten 1 Semester Startup companies. Its goal is to foster student entrepreneurship and collaboration among startups.
Clay.io is a marketplace for HTML5 games.
“The beauty of HTML5 games is they’re completely cross-platform, meaning they’ll work on mobile, as well as desktop, without having to port the game,” Hallock said. “We want to take advantage of that, and act as the app store for those games.”
Clay.io also offers an Application Programming Interface, a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications known as an API, for developers to add game features. “With just a few lines of code, developers can add leaderboards, achievements, payment processing, user login, social integration with Facebook and Twitter, screenshots, and a few more features,” Hallock said.
Clay.io has released three games so far including Word Wars, which is like the popular game Boggle. People compete against others in real time.
“Since it’s an HTML5 game, it will work on your phone or tablet just as well as on your desktop,” Hallock said. “It’s gotten a great reception so far, and even made it to the front page of Hacker News.”
The other two games are Slime Volley and Falldown.
Clay.io differentiates itself from competitors like GameSalad, another game platform developer which sprung out of UT, because they’re more focused on enhancing games that can use any engine.
“There are dozens of HTML5 game engines out there so we plugin to all of the open ones and add in our extra features,” Hallock said. “If they were to open their marketplace up to other game engines then we would be competitors.”

Creative people converge and collaborate at #BlogathonATX

April 28, 2012 / / 0 Comments

To get an idea for what it’s like to attend BlogathonATX, you’ve just got to peruse some of the posts from attendees on its blog.
Those posts include “I just ate a 40 year old sandwich,” “New Study finds Bumper Stickers Linked to Driving Skills” “They used to call me an editor” and one of my favorites: “Why Am I a Vaginal Surgery Consultant.”
To say that this is a “quirky” group of writers is an understatement. But creativity and innovation springs forth from having fun. This event generates lots of good times.
But BlogathonATX has a serious side. Corporate bloggers attend to find out tips on everything from using social media to the importance of hashtags and cultivating an online audience. A late afternoon session is devoted to blogging for business.
“If I can learn a few things, why not ?” said Jake Wengroff, social media editor with Frost & Sullivan in San Antonio. He attended with Laurel Brewer, an intern at Frost & Sullivan. They plan to share their newly acquired knowledge with others at their company next week.
BlogathonATX started off as a free grass roots movement but has evolved into a twice a year organized event that costs $40 to attend but includes breakfast, lunch, sushi and a happy hour. It’s quite social.
In 2010, Ilene Haddad held the first BlogathonATX at Conjunctured coworking to network and swap ideas with other bloggers. Since then, she’s held two other events that have all sold out at various coworking spaces around Austin.
This is the fourth BlogathonATX and the largest one yet with 120 attendees. It’s being held Saturday at TechRanch, a technology company incubator in North Austin.
In the main conference room, dozens of people hunch over laptops tweeting and blogging and checking their e-mail. In a world full of screens, it’s difficult to really know what people are doing behind them all. But at least a few have tweeted out links to their blog posts.
“It’s the same group of people, but it’s bigger,” said John McElhenny, a social media consultant who writes the Uber.la blog. The big draw is “being around people that are all doing it,” he said.
But he doesn’t like the label blogger. He just wrote a post “Nobody’s going to read your blog.” Because he thinks blogging is a dated term.
“We’re building websites,” McElhenny said. “We’re building content. We’re building narratives. I don’t think we’re blogging.”
Haddad is not a hardcore blogger.
“I am a fan of bloggers. I am a fan of their creativity,” she said. “I admire writers. I want to be a better writer so I hang out with them hoping some of it will rub off.“
Haddad also has a slew of sponsors that back the event including Tech Ranch, Neuro, Lonely Gourmet, Writers’ League of Texas, Dirty Dog, Yelp, Fit Club Austin, BuildASign, Beanitos, Mass Relevance and Firecat Studios. Neuro offered up passion in a bottle, a red punch that quickly got snapped up.
Roanna Flowers, known on Twitter as @LegsMagee, didn’t need to drink bottled passion. She has her own for blogging. She writes the LegsMagee.com blog about her life and times in Austin.
Every Sunday, she dedicates an “observation day” on her blog to go to a different part of Austin and write a poem, take pictures or write about her observations.
“I like to get away from the computer and get away from the smart phone,” she said
Magee has been in Austin for six years and works as a project manager at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. Just like exercise, she sets aside 30 minutes every day to write.
“It’s just part of my routine, the same as working out,” she said.
Christine Cano came to BlogathonATX for inspiration and motivation. It’s her first time attending the event but she had heard quite a lot of buzz about it. She’s been blogging for two and a half years. She pens FormFittingFashion.com about fashion and style. She really liked the session by Lauren Modery on “Branding Yourself Online.”
“It’s about being honest about your blog and your writing,” Cano said. “Your audience doesn’t want something cookie cutter. They want you to be yourself.”

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