In the old days, people yelled at their TVs.
In the digital age, people can tweet their opinion to a television show.
And the show just might tweet back with a special offer or advertisement.
That’s the sweet spot of an Austin-based startup called Mass Relevance.
“It’s a growing trend to integrate social conversations into content streams and advertising,” said Sam Decker, the company’s founder and CEO.
Recently, Mass Relevance worked with Paramount Pictures for the release of Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol movie with a “Flock to unlock” social media campaign. People who shared content about the movie on Twitter or Facebook earned a reward. They got to watch a special clip of the movie in advance of its release. That kind of campaign can increase brand awareness while engaging an audience, Decker said.
Mass Relevance, which has 20 employees, now has 100 clients that use its real-time social media curation platform. It also signed a deal with Twitter in November that officially made Mass Relevance Twitter’s first curation partner licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content.
“We’ve been working with them over the years, working with them in parallel,” Decker said. “For us, it just formalized the relationship.”
In addition to publishing Twitter content, content publishers working with Mass Relevance can earn money from the content through sponsorships and advertising.
“Media companies are tied to creating and curating an audience,” Decker said. “Twitter can be part of their audience to drive advertising dollars.”
Mass Relevance’s platform allows content publishers to create new revenue streams around curated and integrated experiences on TV, web, mobile and large screen displays. Mass Relevance’s platform allows publishers to aggregate; filter and moderate content in real time and then broadcast it to an audience.
Mass Relevance’s clients include NBC Sports, NFL Football, Cisco, Samsung, and Pepsi and media companies like CNN, Boston Global, New York Times and Washington Post. Sports teams using the platform include the New York Giants, San Francisco Giants and the Boston Celtics.
President Obama even used Mass Relevance’s platform when he did his Twitter Town Hall last July. And television shows like NBC’s The Voice and Fox’s The X-Factor used Mass Relevance’s platform to get real-time feedback on air from the at home audience.
“The whole idea here is there are more and more people participating and creating real-time content,” Decker said.
But the advertising networks have not kept pace with new ways of delivering content, Decker said.
“This is just the first inning for media companies to create much more integrated social experiences for their audiences,” Decker said. “They haven’t maximized the potential of the platform yet.”
Working after hours in Austin coffee shops, developers Barry Cox, Brian Dainton and Eric Falcao started TweetRiver, a social media curation platform, in 2009, according to Mass Relevance’s “Our Story.” Then Decker, who had left his job as chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice, joined them. All of them became founders of what evolved to become Mass Relevance except Cox who remains a strategic advisor.
A year ago, Mass Relevance raised $2.2 million in a large seed stage round of funding from Austin Ventures, Floodgate and angel investors.
In 2012, Mass Relevance plans to seek another round of funding, but Decker declined to state the amount. The funds will go to expand Mass Relevance’s business.
“We’re looking to roughly triple in growth,” Decker said.
Mass Relevance plans to hire 20 to 30 people in 2012 including developers, sales people and client account managers.
“We’re nearing profitability and forecast to be so next year,” Decker said. “We’ve proven out the model and now it’s about scaling it and growing it much bigger.”
Category: Austin (Page 310 of 318)
Joshua Bear, CEO of Other Inbox
By ISADORA VAIL
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
While boasting the free solution to endless and unwanted emails, Austin startup OtherInbox, has had nearly 2 million users since the service began in 2008.
Founded by Austin entrepreneur Joshua Baer, the company offers two ways to instantly organize and prioritize email. The Organizer product looks for lower priority messages, such as newsletters, e-receipts, social media notifications or coupons, into one folder. An email summary is sent to the Organizer user each day, summarizing important and unimportant emails.
The second free product, Unsubscriber, is named quite literally for the product’s duty of automatically removing your personal email from a mailing list. The service works with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and other email providers.
OtherInbox didn’t start with organizing emails, said Hoon Park, client services manager. At first, the company helped protect emails by using other emails to sign up for sites online while protecting the main address.
Park said some email unsubscribe lists create a lot of hoops to get your email removed, and some even require a login. But OtherInbox users place the unwanted emails into an unsubscribe folder and the rest is history. “You will never receive an email from them again,” Park said.
Since 2009, the company has generated revenue by selling market data two different ways: to email marketing companies, and by advertisers who pay to target OtherInbox users that receive specific coupon deals. Park said all user identification is kept private.
OtherInBox has also raised $4 million in funding during two rounds of venture financing, according to its Crunchbase profile.
“It was just a very powerful way to protect emails, but as a startup company that creates products for clients,” Park said. “We think we can be very useful for clients who are getting a ton of unimportant or unwanted emails everyday.”
After the company reached a landmark earlier this year of 1 million users, the numbers continued to quickly rise. Park says they expect to have 2 million users by the first quarter of 2012. Customers of OtherInbox primarily use it personally rather than for business or large corporations.
The company grew from six people when it started in 2008 to 10 employees by 2010, and Park says there are plans to add at least two more to their team. The diverse group of workers have ranging backgrounds from linguistics to human biology to political science majors. There are no plans to move the team from their office space in downtown Austin.
Their operation not only runs concise, but inexpensive — everything is done in The Cloud, Park said. Having servers purely online can also be the source of unavoidable technical issues.
“Sometimes we’ll have a hiccup in our service and we just have to figure out a way around it,” Park said.
With three people for customer support, including Park, he says it is important for them to communicate about the customer’s issues. “That is where we find out something is wrong and through day-to-day collaboration we have to fix the problems,” he said.
One of Park’s favorite perks of working at OtherInbox is the company’s compassion for other startups. He said found Baer reaches out to newbie startups to help them, and often ends up being somewhat of a mentor by offering advice on public relations, branding, marketing, and how to network.
“For about three years we’ve done this thing where we team up with startups, sometimes even letting them work out of our space, and incubate them until they can stand on their own feet. I just enjoy being able to help out the community of my peers,” Hoon said.
As for future email products that may further de-clutter your inbox? Stay tuned. While Park said there is nothing to “officially announce,” he assured us that OtherInbox programmers are always experimenting.
At the Capital Factory’s Demo Day, Mason Arnold gave a quick pitch on Greenling, the organic grocery delivery service.
“Our food system is broke,” Arnold said.
He estimates more than half the population in the U.S. will die from food-related disease, primarily obesity-related illnesses. He founded Greenling to change the way people eat. And he says Greenling “makes it easy, fun and delicious to change the way you eat.”
If you’re making resolutions for the new year to eat right and exercise, you might want to check them out. The Austin-based startup has more than 5,000 customers. Some of their most popular products are their seasonal veggie boxes and complete meal kits. Greenling recently partnered with Austin-based Whole Foods, which also works with local and organic farmers to bring fresh produce to customers in the Austin and San Antonio region.
This video is from the Capital Factory’s Demo Day.
And if you still want to know more, check out Greenling’s video.
Startupstowatch
View more presentations from Laura Lorek
Rodney Gibbs, CEO of Ricochet Labs
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
CEO Rodney Gibbs calls it “a scrappy little startup.” But Ricochet Labs got on the radar fast with its social-mobile-knowledge based game, Qrank.
The company was barely in its alpha stage when the BBC called on Ricochet to create Qrank trivia games surrounding the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton to engage its audience. Esquire magazine listed Qrank among its “80 people, places and ideas that matter right now.” And the University of Texas used it to test knowledge retention. So imagine what will happen when the company really goes live in first quarter 2012.
“That’s when we’ll begin offering it for third party use for people who have some form of content who are struggling with how to engage people using a mobile device,” said Gibbs.
Considering that knowledge and trivia games have been around forever—Gibbs says it goes back to Socrates–it’s kind of amazing that Qrank has taken the world so by storm. On the other hand, maybe it’s not. Qrank–which Ricochet Labs calls a social-mobile, location-aware platform–is a knowledge based game you can play anywhere, any time against friends, acquaintances, or strangers, on Facebook, your mobile phone or the web. The game can be built around any kind of content. It can center on a place: on a topic like politics, the arts or pop culture, or it can mix it all up. You might get a question about where you can play Chicken Shit Bingo in Austin, with a question about a recently deceased dictator, another about who wrote Canterbury Tales and another about the founders of H&R Block tax company.
And it’s new every time you play it, which is a secret to its success. Ricochet prides itself on having 30-40 percent new content every time, much of it current events.
“You see it in your morning paper, and there it is on the game,” Gibbs said.
The company curates a Qrank game all its own but it has also worked with several alpha clients to create games around those clients’ content. Instead of just words or videos as a content medium, Qrank snags customers and potential customers, getting them competing against each other, rewarding them with a squirt of dopamine and a ranking among their peers. Ricochet plans, by early 2012, to roll out a scaleable version for companies that want a new way to engage customers, on down to individuals creating a game for Mom and Dad’s 25th wedding anniversary.
One of Qrank’s alpha clients was the Texas Tribune, whose Qrank game lets readers compete over Tribune knowledge. At the end of the month, the paper gives a prize to the ranking Qranker. In December, it’s an electric guitar. Analytics says 300-to-500 people finish the game every day. The numbers rise if you add in the players who don’t finish.
“Part of the mission of the Texas Tribune is to create a more informed, aware Texas population…and one way to do that is incentivize participation with fun and humor. That’s how the Daily Show (with Jon Stewart) works,” said Reeve Hamilton, the Tribune reporter who has taken on the job of creating the Tribune’s Qrank content.
As the official Qrank curator for the paper, Hamilton creates a dozen questions based on the news from the day before and posts them to the Tribune’s Qrank game. But he started as a Qrank player.
“Everyone in the capitol community was playing this game,” he said. “We were in internal competition with each other. My goal was to beat my boss. I always used to tweet my score…that’s a bit gauche.”
“I think it’s more and more the rise of nerd culture,” Hamilton said. “I don’t really follow sports. I follow random bits of knowledge.”
Bits of knowledge are going back the other way, too. Higinio Maycotte, founder of Umbel and many other Austin startups, said his company mines information about players to provide a clear picture of who the Tribune’s audience is.
“It takes a reporter five minutes to write a question about an article he’s working on and immediately create a ton of engagement with very little effort,” he said. “We can provide really rich data back to the publication… we can tell them everything about their readers…we can tell them what (the readers) eat.”
Gibbs has a background in studying people and engaging content. He has a degree in sociology from Rice University and a master’s in fine arts from UT. A Houston native, he worked for a Public Broadcasting System channel in Chicago and as a screenwriter for various television productions before joining Human Code (now Sapient) writing stories for games.
“I love the story telling,” he said. “You have all these characters and they can make different choices based on who they meet along the way…writing for games is a lot like writing for television with all these people sitting around coming up with ideas and creating the script.”
From Human Code he launched his own company, Fizz Factor, which made handheld games for the DS. His game titles included the Incredible Hulk, Spongebob Squarepants and the Tale of Despereaux. In 2004, Amaze Entertainment, looking to expand, set it sights on buying Fizz Factor and Gibbs worked as studio director. Then another technology caught his eye: the iPhone. He could see that the end was in sight for expensive, relatively static boxed games.
With his technical director at Fizz Factor, Michael Baird, he formed Ricochet Labs in 2009. They didn’t know, for awhile, what they meant to create. They liked the Foursquare idea, and knew they wanted a mobile game that was location based. And they knew they wanted something social and experiential. But what?
“We spent a lot of time talking to smart people,” Gibbs said. The company has four advisers with many credits to their names among them: Ross Fubini of Kapor Capital and Success Factors; Jason Goldman of Twitter and Google; Maycotte; Kip McClanahan of Silverton Partners and Tipping Point and Jason Reneau of Mindbites and Freemarkets. Baird and Gibbs traveled to the west coast to meet with those partners and talked to Maycotte and Reneau in Austin.
“We wanted to focus on a single solution,” Gibbs said. “These guys could talk to us about ‘Here’s what’s coming up, here’s what’s going on, this has been tried, people want that, here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not, here’s an opportunity….’”
One of his inspirations was the Alamo Drafthouse Theater which had created trivia games for its customers. The trouble was, the games were labor intensive to create and only changed about once a month. That frustrated die hard Alamo fans who visited the theater more frequently. The cofounders knew that constantly changing content was key.
When Gibbs and Baird settled on an idea, they bootstrapped it for a bit. They raised $400,000 in the seed round in spring of 2010 and are preparing to go for a series A round in early 2012. Austin, Gibbs said, is perfect soil for starting something new. Tech businesses support each other rather than scavenging talent.
“One of the things I love about Austin,” Gibbs said, “is with so much entrepreneurialism going on here there’s an acceptance of failure. There really is a culture of ‘fail faster.’ So if you try something and it doesn’t work you can just try something else. You can use half of this idea and half of that and that might work. Which is great because it’s hard to put things out whole.”
Maycotte, one of the company’s advisers, even recommended that they get some early successes going with Qrank before making the game widely available for other company’s content.
This spring, Gibbs said, one of the top three game publishers is releasing a major mobile quiz title and the BBC has a game coming out, both based on Qrank’s technology. They’ll be branded in some way connected with Ricochet Labs or Qrank.
So, for 400 points: “Which scrappy Austin startup based in a funky office under the gables of an old building looks like it’s about to take off?”
Steve Papermaster (left) and Dr. Jiren Liu (right)
This time, Appconomy has landed $10 million in a first round venture debt funding deal designed to accelerate its operations in China.
Appconomy has created a merchant payment system called AppWallet and offers an app for smartphones, tablets and feature phones. The company has a Chinese corporate headquarters in Shanghai and a development center in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Its U.S. headquarters is in Austin.
Qiming Venture, based in Shanghai, led the round and its managing director Gary Rieschel will take a seat on the company’s board of directors. Neusoft Corp. also took a stake along with existing investors Western Technology Investment and True Ventures.
“With these two, new cornerstone commitments from Qiming and Neusoft, Appconomy will move rapidly to bring our unique AppWallet marketplace for global brands and local merchants to China,” Steve Papermaster, Chairman and co-CEO of Appconomy, said in a statement.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
Left: Larry Wikelius, cofounder, vp software engineering Right: David Borland, cofounder vp hardware engineering
Existing data centers–often giant buildings filled with servers that store, analyze and process information for individual companies, the internet and cloud computing systems–pump out tremendous amounts of heat but require cooling to protect the data. Globally they consumed 31 gigawatts of energy last year—roughly the same amount as New York City consumed on its highest peak day back in 2006. Evans’ idea is to switch from giant, sweaty workhorse servers to small, efficient servers on tiny batteries.
At first people tell him he’s crazy. Not only that, but the recession causes all venture capital funds to dry up for early startups and it looks like Evans has a much longer row to hoe than he anticipated. But he and his partners continue to experiment with the idea and two years later, recession or not, his company raises $48 million in venture financing—a huge sum for a startup that doesn’t intend to manufacture its own product. A year after that Calxeda announces who will be handling the server side of its venture: server giant Hewlett Packard.
“Companies were building data centers by rivers, in Finland…everybody was working to solve the issues around the problem but nobody was working to solve the problem,” said Larry Wikelius, Calxeda cofounder and vice president of software engineering . “This is the first time somebody said, ‘We can take power out of the equation.’”
Evans is a 20-year veteran of the semiconductor industry who started Calxeda after leaving his position as vice president and general manager of Marvell’s Application Processing Business Unit in the Cellular and Handheld Group (acquired from Intel). He spent a year talking to end users about using a mobile-type power source for servers, one that would only require a tenth the energy of existing servers and would work better with servers fluctuating energy needs.
His first partners were his cofounders, Wikelius and David Borland, vice president of hardware engineering. The company planned to model the chip somewhat after those being produced by British mobile chip manufacturer, ARM, and made several attempts before figuring out how to do it. It was crucial to the founders to create a solution that could be plugged into existing data centers without major overhauls, Wikelius said.
“Too many companies say ‘If you just remove your software and change all your infrastructure we have a great product for you,’” he said. “We support standards so it’s easy to plug in to the existing infrastructure.”
But it’s not exactly plug and play, according to Fichera.
“ If you mean recompile, reload and it works fine, with some applications it works that way,” he said. “Others will have to be completely recoded.”
Still, Borland said, finding the simplest solution is part of Calxeda culture. “Calxeda is a loose Latin translation of the name we started with—Smooth Stone. “ In the David and Goliath story, he points out, when everybody else despaired in the face of a big problem, David applied the simplest answer, a smooth stone.
“We’re not interested in science projects, ideas that make you say ‘That’s really cool, but how do you apply it” Wikelius said.
Finding the simplest solution, however, has required building a complex network of partners who can speak to all the development issues. And that, too, has become part of Calxeda’s culture. The company has a dozen or so partners it talks about in its Trailblazer initiative. But it has many more it doesn’t talk about. One it has connected with is Pervasive Data Rush, a big data solution of Pervasive Software.
“Calxeda and Pervasive have a shared interest in providing solutions for one of the key challenges of IT today – the economics and energy consumption of data centers,” said David Inbar, senior director of sales and marketing of Pervasive Big Data Products and Solutions. “The problem is, typically only 15 to 30 percent of processor capacity is being utilized at any given time. The rest of the capacity is idle, but still burning energy. Pervasive DataRush technology gives people the ability to build programs that run in parallel, taking full advantage of processors to get lower costs and better energy efficiency.”
That’s the kind of problem Calxeda’s been hashing over with its partners to make sure its solutions work. The founders were deliberate about the order in which they moved forward, building the company for three years before announcing its server partner. They kept their options open as long as they could, Wikelius said, because things change fast in this industry and you may have knowledge and information next year that’s missing this year.
When it did finally announce its server manufacturing partner November first, it put the little Austin startup in a whole new class. To come out of the gate with the most prominent dance partner on the floor sets the company well ahead of competitors.
And it does have competitors. Other companies in the game include Applied Micro which has an intermediate level ARM based chip for servers. But, said Fichera, Calxeda’s offering a lot of different pieces of the architecture on one server which sets them ahead in reducing the footprint and the need for power. Calxeda has other advantages. One was Evan’s experience in the mobile space. Another, Wikelius said, was the company’s intense focus on producing this product for internet and cloud server industries. Big companies couldn’t afford such focus. And finally, Evans said: “You just have to go faster than everybody else.”
Teaming up with HP puts Calxeda on a new playing field. HPs new servers will be called Redstone. They’ll take up a fraction of the space a rack of servers formerly required and will share resources. As a Wall Street Journal story put it they will “sip energy lightly.” HP announced that a typical server project of 400 servers in 10 racks would cost $3.3 million to purchase, install and operate. Redstone runs four times as many servers in half of one rack and draws a tenth the energy, dropping the price to $1.2 million.
In the near future, Fichera said, the impact of Calxeda’s work will be seen more in the transformation of the way the industry thinks about data centers, rather than in big profits. After a few years, however, it’s likely to be lucrative niche.
In the meantime, Calxeda and its partners are thoroughly enjoying themselves. The variety of working with all these partners makes Calxeda a fascinating ecosystem.
“There are a bunch of people who would never work for the same company in our partnerships, it makes a whole ecosystem,” Borland said. “It makes us much more than a chip provider.”
From the partner perspective, Inbar said, “it’s fun (working with Calxeda). We share a lot of culture.”
The partnerships work for a couple reasons. For one, Wikelius said, Calxeda is very transparent with partners and employees. For another, they’ve created a culture that invites people to rethink everything. Just because a server has always been a giant box and a small chip runs mobile phones doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.
Working in that environment, with these people is Evans’ favorite part.
“I love it,” he said. “I’m enjoying the ride.”
A bit of good news this week for San Antonio from the Milken Institute. San Antonio tops the list of best performing cities in 2011 out of 200 metropolitan areas surveyed. You can read more about it in Jennifer Hiller’s story in the San Antonio Express-News. Austin ranked fourth. But Austin continues to pump out most of the local tech news. San Antonio needs to attract more technology startups and venture funding.
And on that note, the Texas Entrepreneur Network put out a report this week that showed Austin dominates when it comes to startups receiving venture capital funding, according to this story by Lori Hawkins in the Austin American-Statesman.
More good news for Austin on the venture capital front. Texas Tech Pulse reports that Dell is launching a venture capital arm.
This story makes me want to sing “Why can’t we be friend, why can’t we be friends?” Samsung’s 1.6 million square foot nearly $4 billion memory chip factory in Austin is making the guts of the iPhone 4s and iPad 2. The Daily Tech has an interesting story on how Apple and Samsung are embroiled in a lawsuit and yet Samsung continues to pump out parts for Apple’s flagship products.
Got a bunch of snail mail that you wish you could put onto your tablet computer to sort through? No? Me neither. But a couple of entrepreneurs think it’s a problem and some venture capitalists agree with them. So Austin-based Outbox has landed $2.2 million to digitize all the stuff that comes into your mailbox and Lori Hawkins of the Austin-American Statesman has got the scoop.
Another California company relocated to Austin. This time it’s a manufacturer, Superconductor Technologies is relocating its corporate headquarters and opening up a plant in Austin.
And Bryan Mennel at AustinStartup has a post about 10 startups to watch in 2012 which includes InfoChimps, Appconomy, BlackLocus, Sparefoot, Mass Relevance and Famigo.
The Austin Post’s Scott Leighton reports on Austin-based Cinsay’s acquisition of LaunchFish of Dallas.
Rackspace’s CEO Lanham Napier was on the move last week. He travelled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act, known as SOPA. The bill has many supporters who say it protects copyright online and many critics who say that it threatens to bog down Internet Service Providers with costly regulations. Politico had a story on the legislation and mentioned Napier’s visit. Napier also visited CNBC to talk about the company’s growth during the past few years.
Susan Strausberg, CEO and co-founder of 9W Search in Austin
Susan Strausberg knows how to dig into financial information and make it accessible to the masses.
She founded Edgar Online in 1995, grew the company to 200 employees, took it public in 1999 and then left in 2007 to pursue other passions.
Two years ago, Strausberg and her husband, Marc, moved from New York to Austin and created a startup called 9W Search, a sophisticated financial search engine primarily for mobile users.
“We’re enabling a huge underserved market to access financial information in the easiest possible way,” Strausberg said during a recent interview and meeting at Lola Savannah coffeehouse in Austin. 9W provides key company information, five years of financial data, people information for each company, a live stock quote as well as footnotes to financial statements.
To illustrate the ease of use, Strausberg showed off 9W Search’s capabilities on her iPad. She compared the financial results of three companies: Rackspace, Dell and IBM. 9W Search’s database contains information on approximately 12,000 US public companies. The tool gave real-time financial results in an easy to understand format. It culled and compiled data like revenue per employee, market capitalization, share price, earnings and more.
What differentiates 9W Search from other financial search engines is its ability to pull select metrics that Strausberg has deemed extremely valuable from vast and incomprehensible amounts of online data. She has selected the metrics based on her years of experience in working with financial data.
9W Search has the ability to sort through all the data because of a new data standard, extensible Business Reporting Language, known as XBRL. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has mandated that companies provide financial statement information in this format which vastly improves the transparency of reported data. Strausberg’s former company, EDGAR Online, played a key role in making the data interactive by creating “sets of definitions, or taxonomies, to enable the automatic extraction and exchange of data. Interactive data taxonomies can be applied — much like bar codes are applied to merchandise — to allow computers to recognize that data and feed it into analytical tools,” according to the SEC.
“Most financial information companies have hand-keyed their data.,” Strausberg said. “This new technology changes the way we can take data and turn it into actionable information.”
That’s the sweet spot for 9W Search.
“9W Search identifies a manageable set of key financial items from the thousands of different data points that are important in accessing a company’s financial picture,” Strausberg said. “We democratize access to financial information and make it usable for the average person.”
Who wants access to this information?
“People who need to see a picture of the market at given moment in time, ” Strausberg said.
Sales people, potential employees researching a company, students, companies, analysts, private
wealth managers, individuals, nonprofit organizations, real estate agents, anyone who needs to
do financial research, she said.
“Data equals information, equals knowledge, equals power,” Strausberg said. “If anything, there is too much data, she said. “It’s difficult to do competitive analysis and complete research easily with most financial search sites. 9W Search culls the gems from the ocean of data and arms our users with actionable information.”
And what exactly does 9W Search mean? It’s an old Vaudeville joke, Strausberg said.
Here’s a version:
“9W is the answer to a question.What is the question?”
Q: “Herr Wagner, does your name begin with a V?”
A: “Nein, W!”
9W Search has four employees currently and is seeking $600,000 in funding to further develop and market its product, Strausberg said. The company has a pilot test of the search engine available on its website. 9W Search plans to first provide a free version and subsequently charge for later releases.
Superconductor Technologies, based in Santa Barbara, Calif. announced Monday plans to move its corporate headquarters to Austin along with a new manufacturing plant.
The company, which makes high performance wires for power systems and cell phones, considered the “technical talent pools, facilities, and energy costs in a number of states” and determined Austin was the best location, said Jeff Quiram, STI’s president and chief executive officer in this news release.
“We believe Austin is an ideal location to initiate the production of our Conductus superconducting wire on a commercial scale,” he said “STI is excited to become a contributor to the region’s continued high-tech success.”
Superconductor Technologies will move into its new headquarters by the end of March next year. It’s moving into a 94,000 square foot plant, previously occupied by Applied Materials. It’s also planning to keep a research and development facility and other operations in California and it does not expect any layoffs associated with the move.