Category: Austin (Page 77 of 318)

This is a sponsored post.

The Formula 1 Pirelli 2018 United States Grand Prix starts Friday in Austin and thousands of people are in town to watch the racing.

Among them, Acronis, a data protection and storage company, hosted an event Thursday night at Trulucks Restaurant in downtown Austin featuring a talk by the Williams Martini Racing Team’s Chief Technology Officer Paddy Lowe.

At the event, Lowe said it’s 50 percent the car and 50 percent the driver that determines who wins the race. And technology plays a key role in today’s Formula 1 races, Lowe said.

Also at the event, Acronis’ President John Zanni did a podcast with Silicon Hills News’ Ideas to Invoices talking about its technology partnership with Williams Martini Racing Formula One team.

Acronis, which is based in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, provides the team with data protection solutions, including backup, disaster recovery, software-defined storage and file sync and share.

“Formula One is one of the world’s most technologically advanced sports,” according to Acronis. “Every Grand Prix weekend Formula One teams capture hundreds of gigabytes of telemetry data and produce terabytes of engineering and test data at the factory. Data analysis fuels innovation and technological development. The ability to interpret the data and make informed decisions is often what sets teams apart, making data the most valuable asset in the race toward the finish line.”

Acronis’ expertise in data protection will assist Williams to deal with the growing volumes of data without compromising the security and flexibility mandated by Formula One.

Editor’s note: This is a sponsored post by Acronis.

Oracle this week announced six startups will join its inaugural class as part of the Oracle Global Startup Ecosystem hub in Austin.

The startups include data.world, Eventador, Pilosa, ROIKOI, Senseye and Transmute.

“The six startups entering our inaugural Austin program are ready to scale innovative enterprise technologies, and we are looking forward to being a catalyst for their next phase of growth,” JD Weinstein, head of the Oracle Global Startup Ecosystem in Austin, said in a news release. “We will work closely with each startup to create a personalized journey that enables them to tap into Oracle’s rich enterprise ecosystem, cloud solutions, global customers, and market expertise.”

The startups will be based at Oracle’s hub at Capital Factory. The Oracle program does not provide any investment and doesn’t take a stake in the companies in its program. The startups will work closely with Oracle’s research and development and enterprise sales teams, according to a news release.

“We are honored to be selected into this exclusive startup program,” Brett Hurt, CEO, and Co-Founder of data.world, said in a news release. “Oracle can help us continue to innovate, scale and improve our ability to help enterprises create data-driven cultures faster.”

The startups will also receive mentoring from technical and business experts, free Oracle cloud credits, and access to Oracle’s more than 430,000 global customers, as well as partners and investors.

In addition to Austin, the Oracle Global Startup Ecosystem has co-working spaces in Bangalore, Bristol, Delhi, Mumbai, Paris, Sao Paolo, Singapore, and Tel Aviv. It also works with startups virtually.

Health insurance is broken from administration to customer experience and Sana Benefits wants to fix it.

“Health insurance is awful,” said Will Young, co-founder of Sana Benefits. “It’s expensive. It’s opaque. It’s backward. We’re making something that is easy to use, saves money and still is really good insurance.”

The healthcare insurance company recently moved to Austin from San Francisco and has four employees working out of its office at WeWork Barton Springs. It has another five employees working remotely.

“We got to Austin because it was just the best place for this business,” Young said. “Texas, from an insurance standpoint, is a great state for innovation. There aren’t a lot of constraints.”

“Within Texas, Austin is just this Tech talent hub and we thought our message would resonate with them,” he said.

Young and Nathan Hackley, who formerly worked together at Justworks, benefits and payroll company in New York, founded Sana Benefits in 2017. The co-founders have complementary skill sets, Young said.

Young led sales, licensing and operations while Hackley did all the product development and engineering.

“While he was working on partnerships with companies I was working on integration with the companies,” Hackley said.

“It basically took us a year of behind the scenes setup work,” Young said. “It wasn’t until the middle of this year that we’ve had a product that began to resonate with people.”

They developed a health insurance platform that allows small to medium-sized business to access benefits and save money. Sana has landed three customers so far including a tech startup with 100 employees and two established businesses with 20 employees each, Young said. And it’s open enrollment season so Sana is adding new customers now, he said.

SANA Benefits first customers have gone live, Young said.

“We’re a full health insurance solution,” he said. “People have health insurance through us. When they go to the doctor, Sana is paying their claims. We are running health plans for people right now.”

Sana also recently raised a seed round of investment for a few million dollars, Young said.

“We are pleased to support Will, Nathan, and the growing team at Sana as they apply their expertise in employee benefits, customer experience, and software development to address the needs of an underserved market,” Greenlight Re CEO Simon Burton said in a statement. “Sana is one example of a great opportunity to use tech to transform the customer experience, and we’re delighted to be partnering with them.”

Sana Benefits is competing with other insurance providers like Aetna, Blue Cross, United Health, and is creating an alternative to them, Young said.

“We’ve got so many ideas on how to improve health plans,” Young said. “One of them is transparency. We want all of our customers to see their data which is a big step forward from what you get with current insurance.”

Showing companies transparency first is important, Young said. They are spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on health insurance every year and they have no idea what they get, he said.

Sana also offers an innovative network structure called Sana Anywhere that allows people to see any doctor they want, Young said. And they use this transparent reimbursement methodology to let people know in advance what things are going to cost, he said.

Big insurance providers don’t have an incentive to provide transparency to consumers, Young said.

“Insurance carriers are not on your side,” Young said. “They are playing a game to confuse you and to charge you more money.”

Sana Benefits is disrupting the way health insurance is done, Young said.

“The way we are able to do this is we don’t have these networks we are trying to manage,” Young said. “We don’t have these complicated provider relationships that mean our incentives are misaligned with our members. We are just on the side of the members trying to get them a fair price.”

Sana Benefits charges a flat fee per employee, per month, rather than making a profit off the difference between the premium and claims paid out, Hackley said.

“Health insurance companies make more money when they charge you more money,” Young said. “We are aligned with our incentives to keep costs down.”

Businesses are in such pain, Young said.

“Healthcare makes businesses confused and frustrated and they are paying way too much,” he said. “We can come in and share our vision. We’re trying to change the norms.”

Sana’s goal is to change the way health insurance is done, Hackley said.

“I would like to set a good example for how to run a properly incentivized health plan,” Hackley said.

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Editor’s note: Sana Benefits is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News

Rollick announced Thursday that is has closed on $8.3 million in venture capital funding.

The Austin-based company, which has created an online platform for dealers and retailers to sell powersports, RV, marine and industrial equipment, has raised $14 million to date.

Austin-based LiveOak Venture Partners led the Series A round with participation from new investors Anthem Venture Partners and ManchesterStory Group and existing investors Silverton, Autotech Ventures and Capital Factory.

In addition, Krishna Srinivasan, founder partner of LiveOak Venture Partners, will join the Rollick board of directors.

Rollick plans to use the funds to expand its product offerings to dealers and manufacturers as well as to further expand into the Powersports and RV industry.

The company also used some funds to buy AVALA Marketing Group last month. AVALA specializes in the marine, RV and industrial equipment industries.

“We like to back exceptional teams targeting large and underserved markets. Rollick embodies that with an accomplished team, deep domain expertise and an innovative solution for the entire ecosystem of dealers, manufacturers, and buyers,” Krishna Srinivasan, founding Partner, LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a news release. “Given the rapid impressive traction, Rollick is poised to become a market leader across these categories,” Srinivasan added.

“We’re fortunate to have LiveOak, ManchesterStory, and Anthem join our investment team,” Bernie Brenner, founder, and CEO of Rollick said in a news release. “Krishna will be an incredible asset to our board of directors as well – he’s one of the most impressive venture capitalists I know, well-respected, and has deep experience in helping tech companies grow.”

OJO Labs, an artificial intelligence and machine learning startup, has turned down multiple acquisition offers because it’s building a big company in Austin, said John Berkowitz, its co-founder.

“We believe that we have the beginning of one of the largest companies ever to come out of Austin,” Berkowitz said. “We’re not selling early. We’re building something big and world-changing here.”

And on Wednesday, OJO Labs announced it is merging with real estate data giant, WolfNet Technologies, based in St. Paul, Minn.

OJO Labs, which has raised about $26 million since its founding in 2015, did not disclose the financial terms of the transaction.

The combined company will have about 290 employees including OJO Lab’s 46 employees at 720 Brazos and it will be headquartered in Austin. WolfNet will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary with its office in St. Paul. OJO Labs also has an office on the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean.

When OJO Labs entered the real estate market it quickly realized WolfNet was ahead of everyone else in the real estate data market and that no matter how good OJO Lab’s engineering resources OJO Labs couldn’t replicate what it had done, Berkowitz said.

So OJO Labs partnered with WolfNet a couple of years ago. During that time, the two companies have grown closer, Berkowitz said. He has also gotten to know the founders Joel and Jenny MacIntosh.

“We realized how incredible they were as leaders and owners and our cultures really matched,” he said.

WolfNet, founded in 1996, manages real estate databases with more than 100 million property records that cover 99 percent of all active Multiple Listing Services, known as MLS, in the U.S. and Canada. Nearly a half million real estate agents use apps or websites that are powered by WolfNet data services. Its clients include real estate franchises, brokerages, teams, agents and real estate technology providers.

WolfNet decided they wanted to be part of a much bigger opportunity by combining with OJO Labs, Berkowitz said.

“The employees were very excited,” Berkowitz said. “The industry is saying wow. It’s not every day a small AI startup acquires a giant data provider to create a much bigger company.”

WolfNet gives OJO Labs a real competitive advantage, Berkowitz said.

“Now we get to deliver to consumers and the real estate industry something people have been asking for, for a while, much cleaner data,” he said.

OJO Labs plans to share its data with the industry and to collaborate more with its data, Berkowitz said.

“We’re going to open up the advancements we make for ourselves for others,” he said.

The main sources of residential real estate information come out of more than 700 MLS services in the country that control various markets. It becomes increasingly complex to search that data at scale because of different formats and systems. OJO Labs and WolfNet are going to streamline the data to make it faster and easier to search through than ever, Berkowitz said.

WolfNet has a process for data mining that is the fastest industry standard for keeping data accurate and updated and OJO is adding to that and supercharging the data across the country, Berkowitz said.

“No other data provider that keeps it as near real-time as possible,” he said.

Waiting 24 hours to access data on a home that has been in a market can be a problem and result in lost opportunities for potential homebuyers.

OJO Labs has created a home assistant powered by artificial intelligence that is free to consumers. Its technology lets homebuyers ask all kinds of questions of the OJO assistant about home features ranging from things like swimming pools, views of downtown, larger kitchens, large lots, school districts, etc. The OJO assistant then mines through data to send the homebuyer texts of potential homes with photos and listings. The more interaction with the homebuyer, the smarter the assistant becomes in providing tailored recommendations.

“We’re sending them specific homes and having conversations about the homes,” Berkowitz said. “The speed and accuracy about that is a pain point for consumers.”

OJO Lab’s product is in its infancy, but it is way ahead of anyone else in the real estate industry, Berkowitz said.
Although it’s early, there is a real technology shift happening that OJO is on the front line of, Berkowitz said.

“This afternoon in one of our 12 markets, a man or woman will be browsing for real estate and will come into OJO and will have a conservation with a machine that will lead to one of the biggest decisions of their lives,” Berkowitz said. “OJO is on the front line of a real shift of how consumers interact with technology. We believe we are just at the beginning of a very large company.”

Here are some of the biggest mistakes people make when creating and giving presentations, according to Luke Goetting, founder of Puffingston Presentations, in Austin.

“It comes down to respect for your audience,” Goetting said. “Would you want to sit through this presentation that you’re about to give?”

1. Failure to Strategize the Big Picture – Presenters don’t take the time to strategize the big picture – they just start creating. And that results in a fragmented, disjointed experience for the audience.
2. Competing with the Slides – Slides are a standalone resource. Creating slides that are complementary and help further the point vs. a substitute for hearing the presenter speak.
3. Too Many Lists and too Much Text – When it comes to visuals, the biggest mistake is treating a presentation like a document. Lists, full sentences, full paragraphs – something the audience will never be able to sort out when they are seeing it on screen. Driving a visual emotional connection with your content is what should be done, and it’s so rarely done. I partially blame corporate templates because you are put in a box from the start.
4. Bad Visuals – The difference between a photo that is a half a screen and a photo that is a full screen is immense. You get much more immersion in the content when it’s a full-screen photo. So not paying attention to the visual emotional part of it.
5. Too Much Jargon – Corporate jargon, tagline, and branding. People are afraid to go outside the template set up by companies.
6. Jamming too Much Into a Presentation – Less is more absolutely when it comes to in-person presentations.

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

After graduating from college, Luke Goetting worked in sales for RSI Video Technologies in Chicago, selling a wireless alarm system throughout the Midwest.

“When I got into the real world, I thought all the presentations I would see would be very high quality,” Goetting said.

Yet most of the presentations he attended had PowerPoint slideshows that were awful, he said. That’s when he got interested in creating more dynamic presentations, especially for sales.

In his presentations, Goetting focused on success stories and use cases rather than going into product specs and he created more visually appealing slide decks that featured images instead of bullet points and text. He did that for four years and built up his sales network, but his true passion was for creating effective presentations.

That passion led Goetting to eventually found Puffingston Presentations, an award-winning presentation design firm based in Austin. The name Puffingston comes from a childhood nickname for Goetting’s little sister. Since launching, Puffingston has created presentations for TEDx events and SXSW winners as well as for executives at Dell, Western Union, IBM, Concur, Siemens, CDK Global and the National Restaurant Association.

“What I was most interested in is the premise that all presentations are not created equal,” Goetting said.

That led him to create presentations on Prezi, a presentation software company, based in Budapest and founded in 2009, that focuses on delivering visually stunning, interactive experiences.

“In 2013, everyone was just buying up iPads and handing out iPads to their sales teams,” Goetting said. “It was the solution to all sales. But what frustrated me – they would just kind of give these iPads out – and they wouldn’t provide any strategy on how to utilize those tools.”

Prezi worked beautifully on the iPad and it worked beautifully on the big screen, Goetting said. At the time, there wasn’t even a Microsoft PowerPoint app for the iPad. So, salespeople couldn’t load a PowerPoint presentation onto an iPad. Prezi filled that huge need, Goetting said.

Goetting won an award for the Best Business Prezi of 2013 and his company became part of the Prezi expert network. He still travels to Budapest every year for an annual Prezi conference.

“All of sudden I started getting people all over the country interested in Prezi asking me to help them create their presentations,” Goetting said.

For the first two years, it was just Goetting freelancing. Then he got to the point where he needed to add people. Since then, Puffingston Presentations has grown to six full-time graphic designers and a team of ten total. In March, they moved to bigger headquarters in a building at 2550 S. Interstate 35 Frontage Road.

“We still specialize exclusively in presentations,” Goetting said. “We do all types of presentations now including PowerPoint and Google slides.”

Most of its presentations are conference keynote and sales presentations, Goetting said. At conferences and industry events, often competitors are pitching right next to each other and it helps to have the most compelling presentation, Goetting said.

“Our clients lean on us to give them a different look and feel,” Goetting said. “Everyone shows up with the same old PowerPoint that looks the same, feels the same, it’s uninspiring and we help our clients come up with something new, fresh and much more engaging than everyone else. And people remember that.”

Courtney Lowell, head of communications at Dealerware, hired Puffingston to design a PowerPoint deck for an on-stage presentation that would then be built out to a longer form sales deck.

“It’s a challenge to find a design-minded agency that’s comfortable working PowerPoint,” Lowell said. “We needed a PowerPoint that presented more like a dynamic website than a boring B2B presentation.”

The project turned out “spectacular,” Lowell said. The presenting team’s comments ranged from “the best sales presentation I’ve ever given in my career” to “the deck brought our vision to life in a whole new way. We’re playing on a different level now.”

“What Puffingston has helped us create underscores everything we are as a brand, as a product – intelligent, modern, elegant,” Lowell said.

The emerging category for presentations more recently is internal employee engagement conferences, Goetting said. Or companies looking to inspire and excite their own workforce, he said.

“They turn an obligatory have to be here event into something exciting and engaging,” Goetting said. “It makes a big impact and some companies are recognizing that.”

It takes a great message, compelling design, and an effective delivery to make a great presentation, Goetting said.
“It takes all three firing on all cylinders to drive that impact,” Goetting said. “We really specialize in working on the design working very closely with the message and the delivery. “

Design is often a customer’s biggest weak spot, Goetting said.

Dan Morton, Chief Marketing Officer of ipDatatel, hired Puffingston to create an interactive presentation for sales calls and trade shows.

Puffingston really spent the time to understand his company’s needs and help them build out their story, Morton said.

“The outcome was a clean and organized presentation which allowed people to easily click objects to navigate the deck based on the needs of their audience,” Morton said. “This means that our sales and events team no longer need to create a custom presentation every time they have a sales call.”

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named Livia Eberlin, 32, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, as one of its fellows for 2018.

In all, the foundation awarded 25 fellowships, known as MacArthur Genius awards, and Eberlin was the only recipient in Texas.

“Working in diverse fields, from the arts and sciences to public health and civil liberties, these 25 MacArthur Fellows are solving long-standing scientific and mathematical problems, pushing art forms into new and emerging territories, and addressing the urgent needs of under-resourced communities. Their exceptional creativity inspires hope in us all,” Cecilia Conrad, Managing Director, MacArthur Fellows Program, said in a news statement.

The Eberlin Lab at UT Austin has developed the MasSpec Pen, which provides a better way for surgeons to rapidly perform and diagnose cancer biopsies. It allows surgeons to extract molecules from tissue and test samples in real time. The sample is then analyzed through a database to see if it matches a cancer type.

“This platform identifies cancerous tissue with a high degree of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and speed, and Eberlin is currently refining and testing the MasSpec Pen for use in surgery,” according to the foundation. “Her technological innovations have the potential to improve health care by decreasing the time between diagnosis to treatment and increasing the accuracy of cancer diagnoses and surgical interventions.

Silicon Hills News first wrote about the invention in 2016 after Eberlin presented the invention at the Innovation Center’s Startup Studio.

Eberlin received a B.S. from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil and a Ph.D. from Purdue University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 2012 to 2015, and in 2016 she joined the faculty of UT Austin.

The MacArthur Fellowship comes with a stipend of $625,000 paid out over five years.

The three criteria for choosing a fellow include exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

Since 1981, 1014 people have been named MacArthur Fellows.

Austin’s universities play a critical role in the city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

At the first university tract during Austin Startup Week, Ashley Jennings, program manager in the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin, led a panel discussion on the importance of entrepreneurship on campus with experts from local universities.

The University of Texas at Austin recently launched an entrepreneurship minor for undergraduate students.

Jennings asked the panelists what kinds of universities are good at entrepreneurial programs.

There are many kinds of universities and for some, it’s a natural fit and for others, it’s not, said Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at UT Austin.

The U.S. has 100 first-tier research universities and those are good candidates for having active entrepreneurship programs because they are building new knowledge, Metcalfe said. Not all universities are good candidates for this, he said.

MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and UT are all good at new venture creation, Metcalfe said.

New venture creation is a part of entrepreneurship, said David Altounian, interim dean of The Bill Munday School of Business and MBA program director at St. Edward’s University.

“Not all entrepreneurship is technology driven,” Altounian said. “Somebody that starts a new service business or a new type of food business, CPG, is in my mind, an entrepreneurial venture. There are some schools that are better at that type of new venture creation and there are some that are better at changing the world types of technology changes.”

St Edwards is a liberal arts college that doesn’t have an engineering school but its students are entrepreneurially focused, Altounian said. They are most likely to create the next consumer packaged goods company, he said.

Entrepreneurship is a direct route to exporting innovation and expertise on campus into the business community, said Kirstin Spindler, director of IncubatorCTX and business faculty at Concordia University Texas.

The University plays an important role in entrepreneurship, said Hector Gomez Macfarland, director of the Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Huston-Tillotson University. His center focuses on minority groups and women to increase their representation in tech entrepreneurship, he said.

The center is new and plans to be open to the community with training programs and mentoring programs, Macfarland said.

There is also a big difference between the definition of a small business and a startup, Metcalfe said.

“Startups begin with the intention of being huge,” he said. “Whereas many small businesses are going to be small forever. And so there is a different biology to these startups.”

Many startups also face a “Valley of Death” in which it’s difficult to get funding, traction or they face other obstacles. The successful startups can cross that valley, he said.

“If there is a valley of death, I advise you not to ride down into it,” Metcalfe said. Build a bridge or find another way to go around it, he said. There are a number of programs at UT Austin that can help startups get across the valley of death, he said.

When Metcalfe moved to Austin eight years ago, he looked up the biggest venture capital firm in town: Austin Ventures, which has since quit making new investments. They told him that they don’t do business with the University of Texas because it’s too difficult and not worth it, Metcalfe said. Today, UT is overflowing with entrepreneurship ventures and it is actively working with the venture capital community, Metcalfe said.

St. Edwards focuses on small and mid-sized businesses and new venture creation, social enterprise and family-owned business, Altounian said.

“We are focused on new venture creation as opposed to inventing the next Facebook,” he said.

Concordia University will celebrate its 100th year anniversary in 2026, Spindler said. It launched its incubator a little over a year ago, she said. It really caters to serial entrepreneurs in their late 30s, 40s, and 50s. It also focuses on student startups. Most students work with the startups in the community, she said. Concordia’s Incubator partners with G51 Partners and Tech Ranch, she said.

UT Austin is creating a new post-doctoral fellowship that will allow students from the sciences to work on entrepreneurial efforts at UT Austin for two to three years, said Melissa Taylor, assistant dean for strategy and planning in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin.

It’s also launching the University of Texas Inventors program this year aimed at getting undergraduate students involved in entrepreneurial ventures, she said. Students will work on problem statements from faculty members, companies and the US Army Futures Command Center, Taylor said.

“We envision this serving thousands of students,” she said.

Jennings asked the panelists what students need most to pursue entrepreneurial ventures on campus.

Funding is one of the biggest obstacles to students becoming entrepreneurs, said Macfarland, director of the Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Huston-Tillotson University.

Metcalfe agreed that funding is a key problem, but he thinks the problem lies with the quality of the startups.

“We need better startups,” Metcalfe said. “The money will come if the startups are better.”

Concordia needs mentors and opportunities for hands-on learning with companies, Spindler said.

St. Edwards teaches students math and entrepreneurial skills to bootstrap their ventures and understand profit and loss statements so they can land a micro-loan or angel investment to get their ventures launched, Altounian said.

Jennings asked the panelists about entrepreneurial success stories spinning out of their programs.

Metcalfe mentioned a former student who had visited him this week to say thanks. The former student had gone through the Longhorn Startup Lab program five years ago and has since moved to San Francisco. He recently raised $2 million in seed stage funding and had seven figures in revenue. Other startups success stories spinning out of Longhorn Startup Lab include Cerebri AI, which has raised $9.5 million in funding and has more than 40 employees. Professor-led startups spinning out of UT Austin include Apptronik, Diligent Droids and GenXComm.

Altounian mentioned Xelpha Health, co-founded by Lauren Welch, a student at St. Edwards. Xelpha Health that provides a healthcare platform for patients and healthcare providers in Kenya, Africa.

Concordia’s latest success story is HopZero, a data security company, Spindler said. They went through Tech Ranch’s Venture Forth program and one of the founders got his MBA from Concordia and they are incubator member, she said.

Some students have already started businesses at Huston-Tillotson University, said Macfarland. One of the students from Africa launched his own clothing line which has met with great success in Texas, he said.