In 72 hours, a group of strangers met, brainstormed ideas and then built working prototypes for six companies.
The companies included Spear Guard, an e-mail security firm, Renew Couture, a recycled clothing line, Stride Sync, a music sharing app, Golf Average, a statistical analysis app to improve golf performance, SimpLingo, a browser plug-in to learn a foreign language and Approachab.ly, a professional networking app made for conference attendees.
The newfound entrepreneurs took part in 3 Day Startup weekend in San Antonio at Geekdom, a downtown co-working and collaborative workspace.
“This is the best one we’ve had in San Antonio by far,” said Cam Houser, one of the founders of 3DS. “The crop of ideas were really strong. The execution was just great.”
That’s impressive praise considering the last two 3DS weekends in San Antonio created at least two companies that are still running and that have received venture funding. One of those is FanDash, a site for band promotion and Console.FM, formerly known as HelloWorld.Im. Console.FM, created in the Spring of 2011, is now part of Dave McClure’s 500Startups incubator.
The 3DS weekend teaches students and young professionals about entrepreneurship and creates real ventures that go on to further develop their products and services, said Cristal Glangchai, a professor of entrepreneurship at Trinity and one of the organizers. Trinity, Rackspace, TechStars and Geekdom sponsored the event.
Successful entrepreneurs also lent their expertise to the various groups throughout the weekend. The mentors included Pat Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, Jason Seats, founder of SliceHost, Nick Longo, founder of CoffeCup Software, Todd Morey, founder of Mosso, a cloud company within Rackspace and Alan Weinkrantz, a public relations expert who runs his own firm.
In addition, several members of 3DS, a nonprofit organization which puts on the events worldwide, helped. The next 3DS is next weekend in the Netherlands.
Throughout the weekend, participants experienced “a lot of extremes,” Houser said. Some entrepreneurs got their ideas extinguished early on. Others discovered, after a lot of work, that their idea wouldn’t work. One guy stayed up for 27 hours straight to work on programming a new site. Some people never left the building except to interview potential customers.
On Friday, the groups voted on the best ideas and decided who they wanted to work with to develop the idea into a company. But on Sunday, some of the original groups no longer existed like Hole in the Wall, a local restaurant review app. After doing some research, they decided the market was too saturated with similar apps so those team members went to work on other projects, Houser said.
And a new company emerged on Saturday.
Vyjayanthi Vadreavu originally pitched the idea for a documentary on homeless people and a recycled clothing line. Her idea did not get enough votes to make the final projects.
But Saturday morning, she found some people who wanted to work on it. She talked to Glangchai, one of the organizers of 3DS San Antonio, who encouraged her to pursue the idea, but with a different focus.
On Sunday, Vadreavu pitched Renew Couture with a new team. The group collects gently used clothing, delivers the items to student clothing designers at local universities and then sells the clothes made from recycled material.
An estimated four million tons of clothes get discarded every year, Vadreavu said. The opportunity to take some of the clothes and make them into new garments is huge, she said. The company would work with five local fashion schools to create the clothes.
“The clothes get a second life and the customer gets a one of a kind item,” she said.
This was the first time Vadreavu, 26, who works at Rackspace, participated in a 3DS. She plans to continue to work with her group to get the company launched and funded.
“I think it’s such a fantastic experience,” she said. “I wish I knew about it earlier in my career.”
Another woman-led venture, SimpLingo, started out as Babbling on Friday, but changed its name and refined its focus after doing a lot of research and talking with mentors, said Amando Wolf, a junior majoring in Chinese language studies at Trinity.
SimpLingo is a simple way to learn a foreign language, particularly Spanish. It’s a browser-based plug-in to translate portions of text online based on a person’s level of proficiency.
“You don’t have to deviate from your daily routine to learn the lingo,” Wolf said during her pitch.
SimpLingo was the only company to ask for money outright.
“I did the last 3 Day Startup,” said Cassie Robinson, a sophomore at Trinity studying religion, entrepreneurship and business and a team member of SimpLingo. “One of the ideas that did really well, they asked for money.”
So Robinson put up a slide requesting $10,000 and provided a bank account and routing number.
The panel of judges liked the idea and the fact they asked for funding. The panel included Jay Campion, a venture capitalist, Sheridan Chambers, one of the founders of The Denim Group, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, Suizo Mendler, a former Rackspace executive and now TechStars mentor and George Karutz, an investment banker.
SimLingo has a lot of potential, said Alex Butler, a senior majoring in engineering at Trinity and one of the team members. “It’s really scalable.”
After the pitches, the various groups worked the crowd to talk to potential investors.
Luke Carriere, head of Approachab.ly, started out pitching the app as a dating app and then switched to a professional networking app after researching the market.
“The problem was adoptability,” Carriere said. “Partnering with events organizers was a way to ensure there was a critical mass of users.”
Approachab.ly is planning a beta launch of its product in the Spring of 2012, said Carriere, a graduate business student at Fordham University who is doing a internship at the Austin Technology Incubator. He says he has $10,000 in funding from an angel investor to pursue the idea.
“It’s a way to reach out and meet new people at the same events,” Carriere said. “We think there is a market for that. And this is just the beginning.”
Category: Austin (Page 313 of 318)
Twitter wants to harness the power of TV to encourage people to log on to the micro-blogging site.
To that end, it struck up a partnership with Austin-based Mass Relevance today. Mass Relevance created a content curation system for an estimated 250 million tweets each day.
For example, NBC’s The Voice used Mass Relevance’s platform to feature tweets about its show during its live broadcast. The ability to get real-time feedback from viewers during the show made it edgy, fresh and plugged in.
Mass Relevance also worked with E! Online during the Oscars to publish the best and most relevant tweets to a microsite the broadcaster created for the show.
The startup works with companies to curate Twitter streams about their brand, product or show and display the content on TV and other devices.
Sam Decker, CEO of Mass Relevance, left another Austin startup Bazaarvoice, to found the company in 2010.
Twitter published this blog post about the partnership saying it extends Twitter’s reach and fills the need from brands, publishers and TV networks looking to expand their content. Twitter also announced a partnership with Crimson Hexagon, which created a social media monitoring and analysis system for brands.
Vid Luther started ZippyKid, which hosts and services WordPress websites.
Starting at $20 a month, San Antonio-based Zippykid provides fast and secure hosting on Rackspace’s servers.
Ten Questions with Luther, founder and CEO of ZippyKid.
1Q. Where did you come up with the idea for Zippy Kid?
A. Basically the idea came about because I was getting a lot of customers calling me and asking for help.
2Q, When did Zippy Kid launch?
A. The first version of ZippyKid launched in 2009. It wasn’t called that. It was called PSD2Live
3Q. Where did you get the ZippyKid name?
A. Wes Wilson runs a site called Brandstack and he put up weekly posts of the top domain names on the site. I saw ZippyKid and it reminded me of a customer comment. They said “my website is so zippy now I love it.” So the name seemed perfect.
4Q. What does ZippyKid do?
A. We are a WordPress hosting company. We only do WordPress as a content management system targeting 60 million users. We make sure your website is stable. We make sure your website doesn’t get hacked. People want a secure website. Lately, the number one thing people come to us for is speed. If your page loads slower than two seconds, you’re going to lose customers.
5Q. How many customers does ZippyKid have?
A. We have 1,000 from all over. We’re getting a lot customers from Europe. We’ve got customers from Australia and India. (Only 20 customers are from the local area)
6Q. Who are your customers?
A. We’ve got large enterprise customers and small individual bloggers and journalists. Virginia Tech is a customer. Anyone who is making money on the Internet they host with us. They don’t want to spend time managing their server.
7Q. What is your relationship with Rackspace?
A. We’re a partner with Rackspace. We handle all the server stuff for you. We do everything for you so that you can focus on your content rather than your server. Our slogan is “You post, we host.”
8Q. Who is your competition?
A. WPEngine in Austin and some others. But overall, Godaddy is my competition.
9Q. How do you market ZippyKid?
A. Our number one customer driver is actually word of mouth. We’re doing a lot of search engine optimization for when people are looking for WordPress solutions. We’re like a drug, people try us out and they get hooked. They can’t get enough.
10Q. What was the hardest part about launching ZippyKid?
A. Deciding to do it. Deciding to stop being passive aggressive and just go ahead and do it. If it fails, it fails.
ZippyKid has partnerships with other companies like Torbit. For $60 a month plan, ZippyKid’s customers get Torbit included. It also has partnerships with GravityForms, Woothemes and Backup Buddy. ZippyKid has six employees and is based at Geekdom. Luther applied for the TechStars Cloud program. That’s John Gray, ZippyKid’s Chief Technology Officer, sitting across from Luther.
In our backyard, under a giant oak tree, my husband built a marvelous sandbox.
My son spent hours playing there and I never worried about his safety.
The sandbox in today’s fast-paced digital world has become the cell phone, laptop or tablet computer. So parents need new tools to ensure their children are safe.
That’s the idea behind Famigo’s new virtual sandbox for kids.
The Austin-based startup released the Famigo Sandbox app for Android cell phones today. It provides a safe environment for kids to explore apps on their parents mobile devices.
The app creates a virtual wall between the kid-friendly apps on a device and the rest of the applications such as e-mail, phone contacts and web browsing.
Famigo, founded in 2009 and a graduate of the Capital Factory, an Austin startup accelerator, specializes in reviewing kid friendly applications for mobile devices. Its flagship product is the Famigo Family App Review identifying more than 30,000 kid-friendly apps.
Calxeda introduced its high-performance low power semiconductors Tuesday to power Hewlett Packard’s servers.
The Austin-based start-up held an event in Palo Alto to introduce its new products along with its partner HP.
But in its hometown, employees, customers, analysts and others gathered to watch a live stream broadcast of the event and to celebrate. They met up at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar in downtown Austin at 2 p.m.
Calxeda, formerly Smooth Stone, closed on $48 million in funding a little more than a year ago.
HP’s new server platform, called Project Moonshot, is designed to reduce costs and energy use for data center customers.
The HP Redstone Server Development Platform uses Calxeda EnergyCore ARM Cortex processors. HP plans for future versions to include Intel’s Atom-based processors among others. The platform is expected to be available by June of next year.
The money is flowing to start-ups in Austin.
At the Texas Ventures Labs’ annual expo on Thursday, the big bucks came out. And I’m not talking deer.
Accenture gave a $600,000 three-year grant to foster more start-ups. Texas Venture Labs, part of the University of Texas, launched a year ago and has already helped 63 graduate students. The grant will allow it to expand and help more students.
AustinStartup also reported that the University of Texas has invested $10 million intoMyEdu.com. The site provides students with a free management platform to oversee their college studies.
On Monday, the Austin American Statesman reported that Main Street Hub raised almost $2.6 million to expand its social network reputation monitoring company.
The Texas Wireless Summit held its annual event featuring start up companies, students, researchers and venture capitalists on Tuesday at the AT&T Conference and Education Center. For more on that event, read our story.
TechCrunch reported on Tuesday that Austin-based Loku launched its local search engine service in a public beta test.
Last week, OwnLocal, an Austin startup that builds advertising platforms for small publishers, announced that it has secured $2 million in funding from a variety of sources including the Knight Enterprise Fund.
In San Antonio, the San Antonio Business Journal reported that World Wide Technology opened a 6,000 square foot office in the city to market and sell a variety of technology products to customers in the Southwest.
An explosion of demand for data on mobile devices has put a real strain on wireless network carriers and infrastructure.
Worldwide 5.7 billion people subscribe to a wireless device, said Roberto Padovani, executive vice president at Qualcomm.
“It’s truly the biggest platform in the history of mankind,” he said, during a Tuesday morning keynote address at the Texas Wireless Summit in downtown Austin.
The biggest growth comes from smart phones, Padovani said. The number of 3-G subscribers is expected to grow from 1.4 billion currently to 3.2 billion by 2015, he said.
The number of devices, applications and services and network capabilities continues to grow, Padovani said. Smart phone users will download an estimated 100 billion applications by 2015. Smart phone makers will sell 4 billion devices by 2015. And the days of the “all you can eat” data plans are going away.
“This is what is creating the perfect storm,” Padovani said.
The number of 3-G subscribers is expected to double every two years, he said. Today, 730 3-G networks exist in more than 200 countries. And more than 6,000 devices exist to connect to those networks, he said.
“3G brought connectivity to a point where we can consider it broadband,” Padovani said. “A lot of people will have Internet connectivity for the first time on a mobile device. The smart phone is becoming a dominant computing platform.”
Just this year, device makers launched more than 90 new smart phone models, Padovani said.
The growth in demand for data on mobile devices is coming from China, India, the Middle East and Africa, Padovani said. And sales of smart phones that cost less than $300 are growing at 40 percent annually, compared to 15 percent growth for smart phones that cost more than $300. And Google’s Android phone dominates the market with phones that cost less than $150, Padovani said.
But the growth in wireless devices is not just coming from phones but from everything from e-readers to blood glucose monitors to Mi-Fi devices and smart picture frames. And the wireless tablet market is projected to grow between 50 percent to 80 percent annually.
Data traffic growth doubled last year and is expected to grow ten to twelve times between 2010 and 2015.
“If you look at these numbers it’s just mind boggling,” Padovani said. “This is definitely challenging on the network side.”
Lots of opportunities for innovation exist for companies in the wireless industry, Padovani said.
Augmented reality and 3-D animated content on smart phones will put further constraints on the network, he said.
“The demands on the computing components of these devices is only going to get bigger,” Padovani said. “How do we deal with the spectrum crunch to support the explosion of data demands?”
The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates spectrum in the United States, is already exploring ways to free up more spectrum for the wireless industry, Padovani said.
Padovani was one of many speakers at the Texas Wireless Summit, which brings together companies, university researchers and venture capitalists. They gather to learn about the latest trends in the industry, said Kyle Cox with the Austin Technology Incubator, the event’s sponsor. About 200 people attended the day-long event at the AT&T Conference and Education Center. It’s the 10th annual Texas Wireless Summit and some companies exhibiting in the past have met funders at the event, Cox said. Austin-based companies showcasing their wares at this year’s event include Famigo Games, GameUp, Evernote, Digby and Digital Harmony Games.
The Austin Innotech conference and expo kicks off today at the Austin Convention Center.
The show featured an opening keynote by Manoj Saxena, general manager of Watson Solutions at IBM’s Software Group. IBM is putting the technology behind its supercomputer Watson in the workplace in industries such as healthcare and finance.
The Innotech show also provides a platform for a handful of Austin-based tech startups to pitch their companies during its Beta Summit.
Dell is like the Central Intelligence Agency of customer monitoring.
At Dell World, Amy Heiss, executive producer with Dell’s Social Media Ground Control Center, spends her days “listening to customers” on social networks.
In fact, the software that powers Dell’s social media listening station comes from Radian6 and allows Dell to listen, like a fly on the wall, to conversations about itself on social networks. Radian6, based in Canada and founded in 2006, provides software that allows companies to analyze how their customers are talking about them on social media networks and to respond to them quickly.
For example, Dell monitors Twitter with the @DellCares Twitter account and every time someone mentions the company on that social network, an alert gets sent to one of the screens at Dell’s social media monitoring center. Dell also watches a screen filled with people deemed influential because of their reputation and the number of followers they have on Twitter. If one of those influential people tweets something negative, a red box appears around their name on the monitor. If they tweet something positive, they get a green box. If they tweet something neutral, the box is black.
Heiss says that the color-coded system allows Dell to respond immediately to people who have problems with the company or its products.
Dell launched its social media command center last December at its Round Rock headquarters.
Once criticized for its lack of customer engagement, Dell has fully embraced social media in the past decade. The company sees huge opportunity in engaging customers online. Even Founder and CEO Michael Dell regularly tweets.
Dell is number one worldwide in Healthcare technology solutions.
Dell partners with other companies like Citrix, VMWare and others to provide complete technology packages to hospitals, clinics, doctor’s offices and other healthcare providers. The company offers electronic medical records, medical archiving and mobile clinical computing.
Employees with the Dell healthcare division donned blue scrub outfits at Dell World and had a mock patient room set up to talk to people about its healthcare solutions. Sara Schaeffner, director of Dell’s healthcare services, talks about the company’s latest offerings at Dell World.