Category: Austin (Page 80 of 318)

The National Science Foundation has awarded $60 million to the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin to create one of the country’s fastest supercomputers.

“Computation is critical to our nation’s progress in science and engineering,” according to the NSF grant. “Whether through simulation of phenomena where experiments are costly or impossible, large-scale data analysis to sift the enormous quantities of digital data scientific instruments can produce, or machine learning to find patterns and suggest hypothesis from this vast array of data, computation is the universal tool upon which nearly every field of science and engineering relies upon to hasten their advance.”

With the grant, UT will create a new system, known as Frontera (Spanish for “frontier”), a hybrid system of conventional Central Processing Units, and Graphics Processing Units. TACC is building the computer in partnerships with Dell EMC and Intel. It will begin operations in 2019.

“Supercomputers — like telescopes for astronomy or particle accelerators for physics — are essential research instruments that are needed to answer questions that can’t be explored in the lab or in the field,” Dan Stanzione, TACC executive director said in a news statement. “Our previous systems have enabled major discoveries, from the confirmation of gravitational wave detections by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory to the development of artificial-intelligence-enabled tumor detection systems. Frontera will help science and engineering advance even further.”

Once the computer is up and running, UT will work in partnership with 10 academic partners and leading computational scientists and technologist from all over the country.

U.S. Army Futures Command Center, based at the University of Texas at Austin, is officially open.

In a ceremony last Friday, the U.S. Secretary of the Army Mark T. Esper activated the center which will serve as the hub of innovation for the military.

The center plans to work with academia, industry, and entrepreneurs to create new products and solutions for soldiers and the Army. The U.S. Army officially announced it selected Austin as the site for the new command center in July following an extensive nationwide search for the best location.

Four-star general Gen. John M. Murray leads the center. He most recently served as deputy chief of staff at Army Headquarters in Washington.

In addition to the Secretary of the Army Esper and Gen Murray, several key officials attended the ceremony to dedicate the new command including Governor Greg Abbott, Austin Mayor Steve Adler and Senator John Cornyn.

“There is a deep and enduring bond between the State of Texas the United States Military, and the opening of the Army Futures Command represents the next step in that partnership,” Governor Abbott said in a news statement. “With innovative technology companies, emerging startups, a rich pool of talent and world-class universities, Texas is the ideal choice to help launch the Army’s most significant reorganization effort in more than four decades. I want to thank Secretary Esper, Undersecretary McCarthy and all those involved in bringing the Army Futures Command headquarters to Austin.”

The Army Futures Command Center is based at UT and will have a staff of 500 including both active duty military and civilians.

“In a world with rapidly evolving threats distinct from others we’ve faced throughout our nation’s history, the Futures Command could not come at a more pivotal time,” Sen. Cornyn said in a news release. “The Army chose Austin because it wanted to be close to a hub of innovation… There are major academic institutions nearby like the University of Texas at Austin, St. Edwards, Texas State, and Texas A&M, with thousands of students graduating each year with degrees in STEM fields.”

“It’s also worth noting Austin has become a hub for start-up culture and is ground zero when it comes to youthful talent, technological ingenuity, and path-breaking ideas that are changing industries, institutions, and what our normal ways of doing things were in the past,” Cornyn said.

“But Austin, let’s not forget, is also a military city,” he said. “We know Camp Mabry is there, the headquarters of the Texas Army and Air National Guards and the Texas State Guard. Not far away is the ‘Great Place’ called Fort Hood, as well as Joint Base San Antonio to the south. Those military installations will now be joined by the Army Futures Command in Austin giving the bustling, live music capital of the world an entirely new brand and reason for attention.”

“If San Antonio, my hometown, is Military City, USA, you might call Austin Military Innovation City, USA,” Cornyn said.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

While studying drug cartels in Mexico City, Cory Siskind noticed the city lacked transparency on reporting high crime areas.

That’s when she came up with the idea for Base Operations, which has been called “the Waze for Crime.” Waze is a traffic app that advises drivers on the least congested routes based on real time information.

“Base Operations helps people navigate high crime, low transparency cities,” Siskind said last week during the first Techstars Impact Demo Day. Base Operations was one of nine startups that participated in the inaugural Techstars Impact cohort in Austin. They presented their ventures last Thursday at 800 Congress during a pitch event to family, friends, investors, mentors, media and others in the tech community.

“We’re keeping people safe which helps businesses expand internationally,” Siskind said.

While CyberSecurity continues to innovate, physical security is 15 years behind, Siskind said. Base Operations targets global cities in Latin America, right now, that have high crime but lack good reporting and data.

“An increase in crime precipitates a decrease in information,” Siskind said. “This is a problem with cities across the world.”

Base Operation’s patent-pending platform provides a visualization of a city’s security problems in real time and routes people around problem areas. Its platform aggregates data from government statistics, news reports, crowdsourced data and partner organizations. It also offers a premium version for businesses.

Base Operations, based in Boston, is working with Bain & Co., Techstars and the International Center for Journalists as its customers. It has rolled out its service in Mexico City, Mexico, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Montevideo, Uruguay, Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

“At Base Operations we believe everyone needs to feel safe wherever they are,” Siskind said. “So get out there and explore the world, Base will have your back.”

Base Operations participated in the first Techstars Impact program focused on for-profit mission-driven entrepreneurs building technologies that solve social and environmental problems.

“Tonight is the culmination of 12 weeks of hard work,” said Zoe Schlag, managing director of Techstars Impact in Austin.

Techstars Impact had a diverse array of founders from Boston, Denver, D.C. Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, Nigeria and Singapore, Schlag said. It had six companies led by serial entrepreneurs and eight with female or minority CEOs.

The startups are tackling huge problems ranging from providing access to quality childcare and creating gender equity in the workplace to providing healthcare in Africa and providing quality working conditions in plants in Asia.

Jamee Herbert, CEO of BridgeCare Finance, based in Seattle, spent the past three months in Austin working on her startup that breaks down the cost barriers of high-quality childcare for working families.

Today, 43 percent of mothers leave the workforce and childcare costs are the primary reason they leave their jobs, Herbert said. At a downtown Austin center, childcare costs for one child costs $1,100 a month, Herbert said.

“For a lot of families that feels out of reach,” she said.

But families pay another price too when moms stay home. Women with just two years out of the workforce will lose one-third of their total lifetime earnings, Herbert said.

“And it’s not just women and their families that are struggling with these problems, it’s employers too,” Herbert said.

For every employee that companies lose, it’s costly, Herbert said. It’s costing them up to 30 percent of each person’s salary just to replace them, she said.

“This is not just a problem, this is a crisis,” she said.

BridgeCare Finance has the solution. It provides simple and affordable employee benefit plans. It provides interest-free financing for childcare.

MDaas Global, based in Nigeria, provides diagnostic and primary care centers with the latest technology throughout Africa, especially targeted at under-served communities.

The demand for healthcare in Africa is shifting from infectious diseases to lifestyle diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease and stroke, said Oluwasoga Oni, co-founder and CEO.

“Existing hospitals are not equipped to deal with these diseases,” Oni said.

MDass launched its first center in Nigeria last November and it has already served 3,500 patients, Oni said. It grew revenue by more than 500 percent since January of 2018, he said.

“Our patients and doctors love us,” he said. “With 95 percent of patients recommending MDass to a family member or friend.”

MDass is launching a new center in December of 2018. It costs $90,000 to set up a center which will serve 9,000 patients a year, Oni said. It takes just three months to break even at a center, he said.

Over the next five years, MDass plans to launch 100 centers with revenue of $30 million a year, Oni said.

“And this is just a small fraction of the market,” Oni said.

Pipeline Equity, based in Denver, works to drive gender equity throughout companies.

For every 10 percent increase in gender equity, there is a two to three percent increase in revenue, said Katica Roy, CEO and Founder of Pipeline Equity.

While CEOs recognize this economic opportunity, they are struggling to make it a reality for their companies, she said.

Enter Pipeline, a Software as a Service platform built for big companies that increases their financial performance by closing the gender gap, Roy said. It helps companies with hiring, pay, performance, potential and promotion, she said.

Pipeline provides companies with a human resources platform that compiles internal candidates for open positions with real-time recommendations. It’s an HR dashboard that is billed per employee, per year.

To date, 3,800 companies have signed a public pledge committed to gender equity, Roy said.

During the Techstars Impact cohort, Pipeline Equity increased the number of large companies it’s working with from seven to 21, Roy said.

The only Austin-based startup in the program, Better Living Technologies, is focused on helping patients and families manage Diabetes. Michael Maniscalco, the founder and CEO, said his whole life changed when his son, Zach, got diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes at 18 months old.

“We were sent home and our lives were changed forever,” Maniscalco said.

Maniscalco, whose former startup iHiji sold to Control4 Corp. earlier this year, decided to tackle the problem of keeping track of his son’s blood sugar levels through wearable devices, Alexa, his home automation system and other technologies.

Diabetes is a constant struggle of managing blood sugar levels, Maniscalco said.

Better Living Technologies provides peace of mind to caregivers, Maniscalco said. With the startup’s technology solutions, Maniscalco has his son’s data wherever he is. If his son’s blood sugar levels go dangerously low, it turns on the lights in his home automation system, he said.

Better Living Technologies launched its product beta eight weeks ago.

For families with children diagnosed with diabetes, it has meant less stress, more sleep and fewer trips to the hospital, Maniscalco said.

Clair designs devices that tell you what’s in the air from the stuff in the atmosphere that causes big global problems, said Anna Scott, climate scientist and CEO.

It’s $89 WiFi-enabled home device detects pollutants such as smoke, pollen, mold or chemicals and changes color to alert the homeowner when air quality changes. The company has already generated more than $150,000 in revenue, Scott said.

Today, the company is in four countries and that’s just the beginning, Scott said.

“The air that we breath is our most important asset,” she said.

Kutumbita, based in Singapore, has created a communication and engagement platform and mobile app for factory workers that allows managers to communicate with workers in real time using a mobile app and text messages.

It’s a software as a service platform sold to the factory managers based on the number of workers and it’s device agnostic and that allows it to scale quickly, said Rameez Hoque, co-founder and CEO of Kutumbita.

So far, Kutumbita has performed worker sentiment analysis at five factories in Bangladesh with more than 5,500 workers on its mobile app, Hoque said.

“We’re making the fashion industry more sustainable through worker engagement and analysis,” he said.

TommyRun, based in Atlanta, Georgia, is an on-demand delivery service for construction supplies from Lowe’s and Home Depot and other stores. It’s not just for homeowners, it scales up to general contractors, said Bernard Parks Jr., founder and CEO.

In 2016, Parks remodeled a house. As a result, he was always running to the store to get more supplies and in that process, the idea for his startup took flight.

General contractors report going to the store nine times a week for additional materials, Parks said.

“This is a real problem,” he said. “It costs contractors $18 billion in lost productivity annually.”

TommyRun solves that problem. It makes deliveries that start at $29 for up to $250 pounds and $79 for up to $2000 pounds plus $79 for an additional 2000 pounds.

Launched in August of 2017, the startup has had 1,500 orders and $100,000 in revenue, Parks said. It’s on pace to do 15,000 deliveries and $1 million in revenue, Parks said.

TommyRun plans to expand to Austin in January and then Charlotte, North Carolina, followed by Nashville, Dallas and Houston.

Caroline Caselli, founder and CEO of Haven Connect, changed California law to launch her company, Haven Connect, which makes property management software to streamline the affordable housing application process.

Caselli, a former social worker, created an affordable housing online portal for people looking for housing and property managers.
It can take two to ten years for applicants to get into housing, Caselli said.

And there’s no way for an applicant to update information on excel spreadsheets, she said.

The Haven Connect platform allows property managers to efficiently communicate with people looking for housing. It allows them to fill their affordable housing units faster.

With the Haven Connect platform, applicants can update their information online for the first time, which reduces phone calls for property managers, Caselli said. Haven Connect charges per unit, per month.

Over the last three months, Haven Connect has seen 70 percent growth of the number of units on its platform, Caselli said.

“Changing the law is just the beginning,” she said. “We’re bringing property management into the future.”

RetailMeNot has appointed Vivek Sagi as its chief technology officer and Sharon Brogdon as its new director of diversity and inclusion.

Sagi previously worked as the head of product and engineering for Amazon Business Procurement Solutions and as chief technology officer for Woot.com, an Amazon company.

Before Amazon, Sagi worked at Vungle, a Google Ventures-backed mobile video ad network; NewBrandAnalytics, an NEA-backed social intelligence platform; and ServiceLive, a U.S. home services marketplace and Sears Holdings subsidiary. Sagi holds a Master of Business Administration from Wharton Business School, a Master of Science from Penn State University and a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.

“It’s exciting to join a company with a solid core mission and great culture that’s poised for growth,” Sagi said in a news release.

In addition, RetailMeNot recently announced Sharon Brogdon, formerly with Microsoft and Intel, has joined the company to lead and expand diversity and inclusion efforts.

“When we incorporated ‘diverse and inclusive’ as an official company value in 2016, it was met with excitement from our employees,” Cotter Cunningham, founder, and CEO, RetailMeNot, said in a news statement. “Since then, we’ve worked hard to make it more than just words on the wall, instead making it something we live and breathe every day. I am excited we have hired Sharon, an accomplished leader, to expand on these efforts and help us continue to carry out that mission.”

Brogdon previously worked as director of global diversity and inclusion strategy for Microsoft. Before that, she worked at Intel. She is an ASCENT Fellow with the Tuck School of Business and a Cornell University Certified Diversity Professional. Brogdon is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and a recipient of the Navy Commendation Medal and the Navy Achievement Medal. She holds a Bachelor of Science in biology from Purdue University.

“RetailMeNot has established a strong commitment to an inclusive culture and I look forward to building on that foundation,” Brogdon said in a news release.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Building a startup is like riding a roller coaster of emotions for most founders.

Monday it was a particularly difficult ride for more than 15,000 founders because of a technical glitch by Y Combinator.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based accelerator created a free online Startup School to pair startups with advisers and those selected to participate in the 10-week program would then go on to qualify to compete for $10,000 grants.

Early Monday, about 11,000 startups worldwide received emails notifying them that they had been accepted into the program. Another 4,000 received rejection emails.

The ones accepted into the Startup School happily shared the good news with spouses, investors, team members and many posted to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and on other social media channels about the great news.

Then two hours later, those 11,000 startups received rejection emails from Y Combinator with a do-not-reply email address.

“We are deeply sorry to have to send this email, but unfortunately an error occurred in the software that triggers acceptance emails. The acceptance email was sent to you even though we are unfortunately not able to include you in the Startup School Advisor Track.

Although you are not in the Advisor Track, you have, in fact, been accepted to audit Startup School and will have access to all of the content just as soon as it is made available.

Again, we regret having made this error and raised your expectations unnecessarily. We hope you continue working on your startup and that Startup School is a huge help,” according to the Y Combinator rejection email.

Many startup founders were upset.

In Austin, several startup founders posted in the Female Founders ATX Facebook Group about their delight at being accepted into the program, only later to reveal that the offer got rescinded and they got the rejection email.

Dozens of startup founders posted on a thread in Hacker News about the incident. They made jokes, created Slack channels to provide feedback to each other, wrote words of encouragement and commiserated about the bad news.

“I think you can use this as a teachable moment for the course. Lesson 10: when a launch goes wrong – the YC Startup School Story” – ModernMech posted on Hacker News.

“Pretty certain I incorrectly received the “Ooops, you didn’t actually email” Please confirm this bug. My company is basically a unicorn” – HelloJebus on Hacker News.

“My cofounder and I were cheers-ing about our acceptance an hour ago and now we’re texting about this y-combinator screw-up–we’re not accepted after all!,” Callend6 wrote on Hacker News. “For all the other founders and teams who had that momentary confidence of outside reinforcement — remember how unstoppable and brave you felt in that moment! That glow doesn’t have to go away with a retraction email. Hold onto the feeling. Go make great things, go make a difference.”

To add to the confusion, the 4,000 startups that had been originally rejected, were in fact accepted into the program. They were elated but still in shock and disbelief. Y Combinator staff responded to posts on Hacker News asking those in doubt to email them and provided a correct email. Y Combinator staff apologized for the technical error.

And Monday night, Y Combinator decided to accept all those startups that applied to the program, more than 15,000, into the Startup School.

Y Combinator wrote a blog post “Startup School: All Applicants are Now Accepted.”

“We messed up and sent acceptance emails to many Startup School applicants who we didn’t previously have a place for,” according to the post. “We’ve decided to use this error as an opportunity to try something new: we’re going to let in every company that applied to Startup School.”

“Many apologies for the back and forth – to be clear: you are in.”

The startups accepted into the program get access to all the course materials, the private community forum in which advisors and YC partners will also participate and they’ll be able to compete for one of the $10,000 equity free grants if they complete the eligibility requirements.

“The most important thing is that you will have a group of fellow founders to connect with so you can support one another,” according to the post. “Unfortunately, we’re still constrained by number of advisors who volunteered to lead each group, which means your group won’t have an advisor. But having peers in a batch is what founders tell us is truly special about YC. We’re going to give you instructions on how to organize the group yourself and get nearly the same experience.”

Y Combinator is a highly-selective startup that accepts a tiny percentage of the companies that apply to its bi-annual residential program. Its investments include Dropbox, Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Reddit, Instacart, Twitch, Cruise Automation and many others.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

The MassChallenge Texas accelerator transformed re:3d’s business.

“We’ve grown by more than 30 percent since we’ve been in the program,” said Samantha Snabes, the startup’s co-founder.

re:3d took home the $10,000 USAA Vetrepreneur Award in the MassChallenge Texas finalist awards ceremony held Wednesday evening at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Austin. Snabes is a reservist in the Air National Guard.

Eight other finalists received a total of $500,000 in awards. Altogether, 84 startups participated in the inaugural MassChallenge Texas accelerator program. The accelerator picked 16 finalists that competed for the prize money.

re:3D now makes an industrial 3-D printer that can print using four types of recycled plastic garbage, Snabes said. It launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign while participating in MassChallenge. Additionally, the company was able to migrate its customer relations management program to the cloud for free using Google Cloud credits, Snabes said. And the company also was introduced to two strategic partners, she said.

And the entire team now has healthcare insurance for the first time through TriNet, which it was introduced to through the program, Snabes said.

“They took care of our team. They took care of our product. They took care of our community,” Snabes said. “MassChallenge helped us lay the framework for a really promising future.”

re:3d, with 23 employees, manufactures out of Houston and has two offices in Austin and one office in Puerto Rico. The company is bootstrapped, and runs on revenue, Snabes said. It also won $1 million in the WeWork Creator National awards last year. It has also received National Science Foundation funding.

“We like having the ethos of being scrappy and agile,” Snabes said.

The two biggest winners of the night were EQO and Sempulse, which each took home $100,000 Diamond awards.

EQO, an Austin Technology Incubator startup, creates molecular solutions to fight aquatic invasive species.

“Austin is a community that really fosters innovation and we’re so proud to be a part of it,” said Stefan Schuster, founding team member of EQO

EQO, founded in 2016, has four employees and it hasn’t raised any capital yet, Schuster said.

EQO has developed an eradication technology to kill invasive aquatic species without harming the environment or other species, Schuster said. The company is piloting a trial of the technology, he said.

The $100,000 will allow the company to generate momentum and get its product out into the field, he said.

“We’re going to save the damn world,” Schuster said.

Sempulse, founded in 2015, makes a medical device that applies to the ear and monitors vital signs within a few seconds. The startup has been testing the device with the military.

“It’s estimated that over half of our causalities in Afghanistan or Iraq were potentially survivable,” said Sean Bauld, Sempulse chief product officer.

The prize money allows Sempulse to continue to minimize the device, Bauld said. The military is the first market for the device for triage kits, he said. But there’s a huge commercial market too, he said.

The company has four employees, based in Austin and San Diego, and has raised about $400,000 to date including National Science Foundation’s SBIR grants.

Sempulse benefited greatly from the MassChallenge Accelerator, Bauld said.

“The French military is flying us out there because of an introduction made through MassChallenge,” he said.

“Our product design has been strengthened because of MassChallenge,” Bauld said. “Across the board, MassChallenge has been able to provide expertise.’’

Another healthcare startup, NovoThelium, which means new skin, out of San Antonio, took home one of the $75,000 Platinum awards. NovoThelium is working to provide nipple grafts to breast cancer survivors after a mastectomy.

NovoThelium, founded in 2015, has raised about $250,000 so far from National Science Foundation’s SBIR grants and breast cancer donations, said Lauren Cornell, cofounder, and CEO.

“This is very important to us,” Cornell said. The money will go to helping the company complete its animal studies and then go into human trials, she said.

The MassChallenge Accelerator provided NovoThelium with helpful mentors and a curriculum on marketing and commercializing products, said Bianca Cerqueira, cofounder, and COO. And UPS helped with shipping and packaging, she said.

“They helped us with critiquing our pitch and getting to that next level to do fundraising,” Cornell said.

Austin-based Cloud 9, a healthcare startup, won the other $75,000 Platinum award. The company has created an app to help provide mental healthcare to those who need it most, said JC Adams, the founder, and CEO.

“The reason we need accelerators like this is that we’re in mental healthcare which is even more broken than our healthcare system,” Adams said. “Healthy minds are often an afterthought. We forget how important they are.”

Cloud 9 needs community support through MassChallenge because sales cycles are so long with healthcare and government agencies and funding sources are uncertain, he said.

“This helps us get that initial inertia and momentum going,” Adams said.

Cloud 9 has shown that cities and counties can save money by investing in mental healthcare. Its customers include community and mental health centers. It is also working with first responders like police officers and firefighters to quickly provide mental health help in a crisis.

A few weeks ago, Cloud 9 won $100,000 in the Smart Cities Challenge put on by Capital Factory. Now it’s talking to multiple cities and counties around the state. It plans to use its prize money to invest in business and product development, Adams said.

And Austin-based GrubTubs took home a $50,000 award in the MassChallenge Accelerator Awards.

GrubTubs, which also participated in the Tarmac TX Accelerator and won $360,000 in the WeWork Creator Awards in Austin last year, is planning to scale its business nationwide, said Robert Olivier, founder, and CEO.

With the help of the MassChallenge Accelerator, GrubTubs was able to hire its first salesperson, he said. That has led to $50,000 in monthly reoccurring revenue, he said.

GrubTubs collects food scraps from restaurants and then takes that waste to local farmers, who feed it to their livestock. The process keeps waste out of the landfill and helps farmers lower the cost of feed for their animals.

During the accelerator, GrubTubs learned a lot about logistics and how to scale its business from UPS, Olivier said.

“What we realize is there is no national food waste solution in this country,” Olivier said. “Now we’re putting together an entire team. Brainstorming how to take Texas first and then the east and west coasts.”

Less than 10 facilities nationwide take food waste to recycle and there are 60,000 farms in the country that need cheaper animal feed, Olivier said.

“Working with the farmers we can scale nationally,” he said.

GrubTubs, with 11 employees, has raised $325,000 in seed stage funding.

Its customers include Facebook’s corporate cafeteria in downtown Austin, which it helped save 53 dumpsters of food from going to a landfill last month, Olivier said. GrubTubs is also working with hotels and convention centers.

“You’ve got billion-dollar trash companies,” Olivier said. “It’s about time we have a food waste solution,”

The Mentor Method, a Washington, D.C.-based, mentor network that creates inclusive workplace cultures, took home a $25,000 award.

“MassChallenge is an incredible accelerator that helps open up a lot of opportunities with access to mentors and resources,” said Janice Omadeke, CEO of The Mentor Method.

The network of entrepreneurs participating in MassChallenge also helped Omadeke.

“We’re like family,” she said. “We help each other through the trenches.”

MassChallenge helped The Mentor Network with customer acquisition and access to mentors, she said.

“We’re impacting lives and helping companies save over $500,000 a year in diversity retention,” Omadeke said.

“Diversity and inclusion are no longer a nice to have but a true business imperative,” Omadeke said. “And by winning this award and by creating the Austin Mosaic Awards that happened in July, we’re energized, and we’re thrilled that corporations are starting to recognize that and are making the correct moves to make sure that diverse talent is seen as assets and not tokens or checked boxes.”

The other winners of this year’s MassChallenge awards included Augmenta, based in Greece, which won $50,000 for its technology that monitors the application of fertilizers and pesticides. And Popspots, based in Austin, won a $25,000 award for its AdMob product for retailers.

In addition, ZPEG, a video compression company, won the People’s Choice Award.

And the event included talks by Cristal Glangchai, founder of VentureLab and author of VentureGirls, Julia Cheek, founder of Everlywell, and Bryan Daniel from the Office of Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

The fourth industrial revolution is one in which machines and humans work together to solve problems and accomplish tasks.

And it’s already here.

One of the leaders in the space is CognitiveScale, a five-year-old Austin-based startup, that announced Tuesday it is partnering with Dell to create a new way to interact with customers using its software platform.

CognitiveScale’s Cortex 5 software relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence to cull through massive databases to find the golden nuggets of information companies need to better serve their customers.

“We are pairing humans and machines to improve customer relations,” said Ganesh Padmanabhan, vice president of market development at CognitiveScale. He previously was general manager of Converged Solutions at Dell and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Capital Factory.

Dell, based in Round Rock, chose CognitiveScale and its Cortex 5 software to handle its customer relations.
But CognitiveScale’s Cortex 5 software delivers much more than just a customer relations management program, Padmanabhan said.

“How do we help customers get disruptive value out of disruptive technology,” Padmanabhan said. “In a nutshell, we make AI practical, scalable and valuable.”

Dell, which merged with EMC in 2016 to form the world’s largest tech company, is on a massive transformation journey, Padmanabhan said. And CognitiveScale has built the next generation customer intelligence platform to help them serve all their customers on a variety of platforms, Padmanabhan said. It can deliver a personalized experience to Dell’s customers easily and efficiently, he said. The software taps into multiple sources of data from transaction history, support history, call center interactions, browsing on the website, and more to deliver a custom-tailored customer experience, he said.

CognitiveScale’s technology is like Waze, the intelligent traffic app, Padmanabhan said. Waze sources information in real time and makes recommendations to drivers on the best alternative route to take in traffic. That’s similar to the role CognitiveScale’s Cortex 5 software plays in making the customer’s journey better, he said.

“Dell is committed to leveraging emerging technologies to transform customer experience while helping our marketing and sales professionals meet the rapidly changing expectations of today’s empowered customers,” Cameron Sojan, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Engagement Platforms at Dell, said in a news release. “We are pleased to partner with CognitiveScale on this innovative initiative that will apply artificial intelligence in a practical, scalable and responsible manner to build deeper, more profitable customer relationships by providing real-time insights into rich behavioral data across every phase of the customer lifecycle.”

CognitiveScale, with 150 employees and 90 in Austin, also has offices in New York, London, and Hyderabad, India. The company is hiring and has 62 open positions listed on its Website.

Overall, Austin is becoming a hotbed of activity in the AI industry with companies like CognitiveScale, Cerebri AI, OJO Labs, SparkCognition, and Hypergiant. And AI Global, a nonprofit organization focused on accelerating the adoption of AI, is based in Austin.

“The Austin scene around AI is emerging and talent is hot, and hiring is hard,” Padmanabhan said. But the atmosphere is more collaborative than competitive, he said.

CognitiveScale has raised $50 million to date from Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, the Westly Group and USAA.

Manoj Saxena, formerly general manager of IBM Watson, is the company’s chairman and Akshay Sabhikhi is its CEO. Previously, Sabhikhi was the global leader for Smarter Care at IBM.

CognitiveScale focuses on creating AI solutions for financial services, healthcare, and digital commerce markets. Its customers include 25 Fortune 500 companies including USAA, Morgan Stanley, NBC, JPMorgan Chase, ExxonMobil, and MD Anderson.

The promise of flying cars may become a reality a soon.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering has teamed up with the U.S. Army Research Labs and Uber Elevate to develop the technology behind Uber’s new rideshare venture: UberAIR.

By 2020, Uber plans to demonstrate the first flying rideshare vehicles in Dallas and Los Angeles with a full rollout of the service by 2023.

Uber launched its Elevate program in 2016 to build a network of all-electric, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft powered by distributed electric propulsion. To make the UberAIR program a reality, Uber has partnered with aircraft manufacturers and NASA and now UT and the U.S. Army Research Labs.

“UT is uniquely positioned to contribute to this new technology, and Uber has recognized that,” Jayant Sirohi, associate professor in UT’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and the UT team leader on the project, said in a news release. “In addition to the technical expertise we bring to this area, we also already have a rig to test new rotor configurations right here on campus.”

IBM has always been at the forefront of cybersecurity since the earliest days of the Internet.

At the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, I interviewed Nick Simicich, an ethical hacker on the IBM staff, whose day job consisted of breaking into company computer systems to expose the vulnerabilities. That was in 1999. Since then, cybersecurity has grown increasingly important as companies face an onslaught of threats from both domestic and foreign sources.

That’s why the announcement by IBM Security that it has established an X-Force Red Lab in Austin is such an important one. The lab is one of a network of four secure labs focused on testing the security of devices and systems including consumer and industrial Internet of Things technologies, automotive equipment, and Automated Teller Machines. The other labs are in Hursley, England, Melbourne, Australia and Atlanta, Georgia.

The new Labs will be operated by X-Force Red, an autonomous team of veteran hackers within IBM Security. The X-Force Red Labs offer secure locations where X-Force Red’s seasoned hackers will work to find vulnerabilities in hardware and software devices before and after they are sent to customers.

“IBM X-Force Red has one mission – hack anything to secure everything,” Charles Henderson, Global Managing Partner, IBM X-Force Red, said in a news release. “Via X-Force Red Labs, we have the ability to do just that, in a secure and controlled environment. Whether it’s the newest smartphone that hasn’t been released, an Internet-connected refrigerator or a new ATM, we have the capability to test, identify, and help our clients remediate vulnerabilities before the bad guys can exploit them.”

In particular, IBM has seen a huge increase in attacks on ATMs. “In early 2018, law enforcement alerted financial institutions of increased threats targeting ATMs in the U.S. that allow criminals to “jackpot” the machines and steal their contents on demand,” according to IBM. “These attacks have been known to use both malware and physical access to the ATM device to empty all of the cash from the machine. Since 2017, X-Force Red has experienced a 300 percent increase in requests for ATM testing due these emerging threats.”