Category: San Antonio (Page 21 of 62)

Kids and Parents Learn to Code at San Antonio Youth Code Jam

September 21, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Luke Wright, 16, a volunteer at San Antonio Youth Code Jam at Rackspace

Luke Wright’s eyes lit up with excitement.

“I just helped this 11 year old learn HTML and it reminded me of how I learned HTML in middle school,” he said. “Two high school students came to our school and taught us how to code.”

Wright, a 16-year-old student at Austin High School, now works as a web developer and participates in Hackathons around the country. He spent Saturday afternoon volunteering at San Antonio Youth Code Jam, a free community event sponsored by Rackspace and the 80/20 Foundation. He was one of more than 100 volunteers.

Debi Pfitzenmaier started Code Jam three years ago at a library with 30 people attending. Her teenage son, Aaron, is a programmer who volunteers at the event. This year, Rackspace hosted Code Jam with 300 kids attending and another 150 on a waitlist.

“Every year we’ve doubled in size,” Pfitzenmaier said.

Code Jam is San Antonio’s largest youth coding event for elementary and middle school students, Pfitzenmaier said.

Rackspace has sponsored the event since the first year, said Daniel Sherrill, its spokesman.

“This is another great opportunity for us to build the technology pipeline here in San Antonio,” he said. “The secret sauce for this event is the parents participate with their kids. The parents stay and learn as much as their kids.”

Code Jam featured hands on learning at different stations on coding in Java, HTML, WordPress, Javascript, Scratch, Python and more.

Debi Pfitzenmaier, founder of San Antonio Youth Code Jam with John Saddington, partner with The Iron Yard

John Saddington, partner with The Iron Yard, gave the keynote address to the kids at the beginning of the event. He started coding at 11.

“I love video games and I began asking the question how do these video games work and how do I make them,” he said.

He learned to hack the code on PC games to create his own.

By 15, he landed a job working for a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson creating marketing websites. After high school, he attended Georgia Tech University to study engineering.

“I thought that was the right thing to do,” he said. “But I was challenged in many ways. I’m autistic so I struggled in school.”

He failed his Freshman year and attempted suicide. But he got help. He went back to school and graduated with a liberal arts degree.

Saddington became an executive of a Fortune 50 company when he was 25. He then launched his own company. And he sold his second startup, Datecraft, a World of Warcraft dating website, for a big paycheck, he said.

Today, he runs the The Iron Yard, a technology accelerator, incubator and investment group in Atlanta that runs 12-week coding bootcamps that take students “from zero to hero,” he said. He’s grown the company to nine campuses nationwide with more than 30 employees.

One of the biggest challenges for young technology kids, and even professionals, is their worldview is too small, Saddington said.

“Events like this open their minds to what is possible,” he said. “And then their imagination can take them the rest of the way. I think most opportunities are lost simply because people are unaware of them.”

Children have a limited exposure to the working world, Saddington said.

“But here it’s about video games, blogging, writing, storytelling and making worlds,” he said. “Kids see they can do this for a living. It expands their horizons.”

These events also begin to plant seeds in the bigger education system about a need for change to accommodate these tech kids, Saddington said.

Michelle Lowery, co-founder of Passion Fruit Creative Group, volunteered at Code Jam to teach kids WordPress. She helped kids as young as six.

“I really liked seeing them get excited about writing something and getting it published,” she said.

Ted Oakley with his son Nathaniel at San Antonio Youth Code Jam

Ted Oakley brought his son, Nathaniel, 12, to Code Jam to feed his love for technology, coding and programming.

“He’s really taken this on,” Oakley said.

Nathaniel first learned to code when he jailbroke his Playstation Portable device and then made his own games when he was ten.

At the Code Jam event, Nathaniel worked on HTML and CSS. Josh Singer, a high school senior who co-founded Apps for Aptitude and School’s Out Hackathon, helped him.

“They went way past what was on the schedule,” Oakley said. “They posted a website today. He burned through the lesson like that. Josh stuck with him all the way until after this was over.”

That’s the idea, said Pfitzenmaier.

“We want kids to take this as far as they can,” she said.

Code Jam is creating a community for parents to support their kids and their passion for computers and coding, she said.

“We are trying to equip those parents and kids to get to where they want to be,” she said. “If we can just introduce them early and get them excited about technology the possibilities are endless.”

Dallas also launched a Dallas Youth Code Jam on Saturday, based on the San Antonio event, Pfitzenmaier said. Code Jam, which is now a project of SASTEMIC at Geekdom, is expected to branch out to other cities in Texas as well, she said.

Daniel Sherrill, spokesman with Rackspace Hosting

NASA’s Mission to Mars Goes Through Mississippi

September 19, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

The historic B-1/B-2 Rocket Engine Test Stand at Stennis Space Center, photo by Laura Lorek

NASA doesn’t get to Mars without first testing its rocket engines in Mississippi.

About an hour bus ride from New Orleans, Stennis Space Center, near Bay St. Louis, is the nation’s largest rocket engine test facility comprising 13,800 acres with another 125,000 acres serving as a perimeter buffer zone. The government relocated 660 families to create the site back in the 1960s.

“Stennis has a rich history of testing, aside from the Apollo 8 rocket, every American built rocket or engine that has ever put humans into space has been tested here at Stennis Space Center,” said Richard Gilbrech, its director.

A giant hunk of metal and concrete almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty is getting a lot of attention at the site these days. The historic B-2 rocket engine test stand, built in 1966, has tested Saturn V and Space Shuttle main engines.

Now it’s being refurbished to play a huge role in NASA’s mission to deep space and eventually Mars.

The 264 foot tall stand will test NASA’s Space Launch System core stage by simultaneous firing four RS-25 engines, generating two million pounds of thrust. The test will last 550 seconds or just over nine minutes, the same time required for a regular launch, said Rick Rauch, manager of NASA’s B-2 Test Stand project. That testing is scheduled for 2016, he said.

The rocket testing has an Austin connection too. NASA is working with a team of industry and academic partners, including University of Texas Cockrell School of Engineering assistant professor Charles E. Tinney, to learn about the performance of the RS-25 engines upon launch.

The Stennis rocket engine testing area is vast and desolate. A series of canals snake throughout the land linking all of the stands, which are connected with underground tunnels, to the Pearl River. And a lock and dam system allows the transport of large rocket stages on barges. The Pegasus barge, which once carried external tanks and other hardware for the space shuttle, will ferry the SLS core stage from the Michoud Assembly Center in New Orleans to Stennis for testing.

Rick Gilbrech, Stennis Space Center Director, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot at Stennis, photo by Laura Lorek

Last Friday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s associate administrator and Gilbrech, held a press conference at Stennis for an update on the refurbishing of the B-2 test stand. That project is about 40 percent done, Gilbrech said.

In the last few years, NASA’s SLS and Orion spacecraft have made tremendous progress on NASA’s path to Mars, Lightfoot said.

“We’re going to go to Mars,” he said. “It won’t be next week. It won’t be next year. But we’re putting the capabilities in place to take folks to Mars and we’re pretty excited about it.”

“The overall goal for us is to get to a position where we are Mars ready, the other phrase I like to use is we’re earth independent,” Lightfoot said. “If you think about going to Mars, it’s a two to three year mission. The return time, because of the way orbital mechanics works, is months. We don’t get to come home in a day or two. We have to put all the technologies in place. We have to really understand our systems before we take off and go to Mars with humans. That’s our goal.”

The first stage is earth-reliant with a mission that lasts six to twelve months and returns to earth in hours. That’s the International Space Station missions. That has already been accomplished.

The B1/B2 Rocket Engine Test Stand at Stennis Space Center, photo by Laura Lorek

The ISS also lets NASA test technologies routinely, Lightfoot said. It gives NASA information on how humans will deal with microgravity. It has also allowed NASA to bring in commercial companies to provide services in the lower earth orbit area. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences provide cargo shuttle service now. And earlier this week, NASA awarded a $6.2 billion contract to Boeing and SpaceX to provide crew shuttle services.

“Jumping from earth reliant all the way to Mars ready is a pretty big step,” Lightfoot said.

So for NASA the next stage for human exploration is the proving ground. The missions can be one to twelve months and they can get back to earth in days, Lightfoot said.

“By the 2025 timeframe, we want to be actively in the proving ground, testing our technologies whether it’s going to the asteroid, whether it’s just proving out the technologies we need,” he said. “And, hopefully by the mid-2030s we’re Mars ready and we’re heading that way with humans.”

Editors note: I attended a #NASASocial at Stennis Space Center last Friday with a group of space enthusiasts and NASA staff. We traveled to Stennis after a tour of the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

Rackspace Isn’t For Sale, Appoints New CEO

September 16, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Rackspace Tuesday announced that it is no longer for sale and it’s going to remain independent.

The San Antonio-based Web hosting company also named Taylor Rhodes as its new CEO and a member of the board effectively immediately. He’s been with Rackspace for seven years and previously served as its president.

In May, Rackspace announced in papers filed with regulators that it “had been approached by multiple parties who expressed interest in exploring a strategic relationship, ranging from partnership to acquisition.”

Then the company’s board retained Morgan Stanley and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to examine ways to maximize shareholder value.

“After a comprehensive review, the board decided to terminate M&A discussions,” according to a news release. “Based on Rackspace’s reaccelerated revenue growth and its potential trajectory for the coming year, the board concluded the company is best positioned to maximize shareholder value by executing its strategy as the #1 managed cloud company.”

“We ran a thorough process under the direction of our board of directors, independent advisors, and a Strategic Transaction Committee of the Board,” Graham Weston, Rackspace co-founder and chairman, said in a news release. “In this process we talked to a diverse group of interested parties and entertained different proposals. None of these proposals were deemed to have as much value as the expected value of our standalone plan. We concluded that the company is best positioned to drive value for shareholders, customers and Rackers through the continued execution of its strategic plan to capitalize on the growing market opportunity for managed cloud services.”

“The board also considered a share repurchase program and determined that, based on the company’s significant opportunities, it is prudent to maintain flexibility at this time to ensure that the appropriate investments can be made to drive our strategy forward. We will continue to evaluate the benefits of implementing a buyback program in the future,” Weston said.

NASA’s On Track to Build the Most Powerful Rocket Ever

September 16, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Inside the Michoud Assembly Facility, photo by Laura Lorek

NEW ORLEANS – In a former sugar plantation on the eastern outskirts of New Orleans sits one of the city’s hidden gems.

NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility is known as the gateway to space.

Although most people know New Orleans for Mardi Gras, great Jazz music, art, Bourbon Street, gumbo, hurricanes, beignets and chicory coffee, it’s also a hub for rocket scientists. Yet tourists rarely get to see this site. Some of the best and brightest in the space program work at Michoud. But even some of the locals don’t realize the important role this place has played throughout the nation’s space history.

“Every rocket that has taken humans to space since the ‘60s has come through Michoud,” said Malcolm Wood, the facility’s deputy chief operating officer.

“During the Apollo program in the 1960s, Michoud built the first stages of the Saturn 1, 1B and Saturn V rockets,” according to NASA. Later, Michoud designed and built the 15-story tall external tanks for the space shuttles. One of the last tanks, a bright rust colored mammoth sits behind a building onsite, a monument to its past.

But Michoud is preparing for the future.

Major components of the Space Launch System (SLS) NASA’s most powerful rockets that will send astronauts into deep space and eventually Mars, are being built at Michoud, said Roy Malone Jr., director of the facility. Michoud is building the core propulsion stage for the SLS, and they are also building the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, he said.

The 832-acre campus, which houses one of the nation’s largest manufacturing plants, is about 20 minutes from the French Quarter. The plant has more than 43 acres under one roof. It’s so vast that workers use bicycles to get around.

And it’s evolving, Malone said.

Michoud escaped major damage from Hurricane Katrina thanks to its employees working around the clock to pump water from the grounds, which like most of New Orleans sits below sea level.

At Michoud, Malone is like the mayor of a small city with 3,500 employees based at the facility, only 300 of them belong to NASA. The rest are contractors, employees of other federal agencies or private companies.

“We’re really changing the way we do business with a NASA facility,” he said.

NASA has nearly one million square feet for lease on the site. Its tenants include military contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but also Big Easy Studios, a film company. Big Easy has 250,000 square feet of studios and has filmed the sci-fi flick Ender’s Game, and Planet of the Apes and plans to film the upcoming Jurassic World here.

The site includes the Port of Michoud, which connects to the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. NASA recently gave the U.S. Coast Guard half of the port. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture with more than 2,600 employees is one of the largest tenants on site.

Despite its transformation into a multi-purpose facility, Michoud still plays a major role in the space program. And all eyes last Friday were on the site for the dedication of a new facility.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, photo courtesy of NASA

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Louisiana Senator David Vitter and Mississippi Congressman Steven Palazzo and other dignitaries gathered to cut the ribbon on the brand new Vertical Assembly Center, the largest spacecraft welding tool in the world.

“Right here we begin the next great march to the next great exploration to space,” Mayor Landrieu said. It’s a symbol and concrete example of New Orleans’ innovative future, he said.

“This is the beginning of the trip to Mars,” Bolden said. “This is not for any of us sitting here today. What we’re doing and what we’re about is for the young people of this nation. We are on our way to Mars and I really mean that. The state of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans along with neighboring states are key parts of building the core stage of the SLS.”

The Vertical Assembly Center at Michoud, photo courtesy of NASA

The Vertical Assembly Center is 170 feet tall and 78 feet wide and will be used to build the core stage of the SLS.

“The SLS Program continues to make significant progress,” said Todd May, the SLS program manager.

The NASA SLS rocket is expected to launch in 2018.

“At a fundamental level, space exploration, the mission of NASA, is about inspiration,” Congressman Palazzo said. “This inspiration fuels our desire to push the boundaries of the possible and reach beyond our own pale blue dot. The Space Launch System will be the most powerful rocket ever built and will carry humanity into the next phase of the exploration of our solar system.”

Inside the VAC, photo by Laura Lorek

The SLS isn’t just drawings on a sketchpad, it’s real, Palazzo said.

“You can see the hardware being built and the components being assembled,” he said.

This is all progress on NASA’s goal of sending humans to Mars, he said.

Editor’s Note: This is a field trip outside of the Silicon Hills. Occasionally I will visit another pocket of innovation that relates to all the work being done in Central Texas. I attended a NASA Social last Friday for the ribbon cutting on the Vehicle Assembly Center at the Michoud Assembly Facility. We also travelled to the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. I will be writing another story from that trip.

Bloomberg Reports CenturyLink is Considering Acquiring Rackspace

September 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Rackspace Hosting’s stock closed up nearly 7 percent on Monday after Bloomberg News reported the company was talking to CenturyLink, a Louisiana-based Internet and telecommunications company, about a possible buyout.

Rackspace’s stock, traded under the symbol RAX on the New York Stock Exchange, closed at $39.79 on Monday.

Citing sources familiar with the talks, Bloomberg reported that CenturyLink wants to acquire Rackspace to expand its cloud computing business.

“CenturyLink has discussed the idea with San Antonio-based Rackspace, which last month said it is still conducting an internal review of its strategic options, according to the people, who asked not to be identified talking about private information,” according to the Bloomberg story. “One person said a deal may not be reached for the company, which had a stock-market valuation of $5.33 billion at the end of last week.”

Cafe Commerce of San Antonio and Dreamit Ventures of Austin Win SBA Grants

September 4, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Cafe Commerce, the nonprofit focused on helping entrepreneurs in San Antonio and Dreamit Ventures of Austin have just won U.S. Small Business Administration grants.

The SBA received more than 800 applications for its first Growth Accelerator Fund competition. Cafe Commerce was one of 50 winners and the only one in San Antonio. Dreamit Ventures was the only winner in Austin. The SURGE Accelerator in Houston was the only other Texas winner.

“The SBA is empowering accelerators and startups that are on the cutting edge of successful, innovative new endeavors,” SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet said in a news release. “We’ve seen the enormous success of the accelerator model in communities like Silicon Valley. We believe we can export this type of sophisticated support structure across the country to help start-ups become commercially viable and create jobs more quickly.”

A panel of seven judges chose the winners.

All 50 organizations will receive $50,000 each in cash. They will be required to submit reports to the SBA on “jobs created, funds raised, startups launched and corporate sponsors obtained among other pieces of information.”

The SBA concentrated its support in parts of the country “where there are gaps in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

Dreamit Ventures, founded in 2007, operates an annual accelerator program in Austin as well as other cities around the country like Philadelphia. Dreamit Ventures provides $25,000 seed stage investment in the companies in its portfolio.

Cafe Commerce, based at the main library in downtown San Antonio, launched this year and is run by Accion Texas and funded, in part, by the City of San Antonio.

Peter French, president of Cafe Commerce, and Ryan Salts, community strategist, created this video announcing their SBA grant win. Cafe Commerce plans to use the funds for a new accelerator program focused on the food industry called “Break Fast and Launch.”

San Antonio-based Storific Wins People’s Choice Award at M2M Conference

September 3, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Zachary Stovall and Kyle Cornelius, cofounders of Storific.

Storific, the startup that relocated recently from Paris to San Antonio, won the People’s Choice Award last month at the Machine 2 Machine Evolution Conference and Expo in Las Vegas.

Storific has created a free mobile phone app that lets people order and pay for food and skip the lines at a restaurant.

The M2M Conference, sponsored by AT&T, lets startups pitch their technology to AT&T executives and audience members. More than 100 people attended the conference which featured 15 teams pitching their technology.

“As the winner of the Audience Choice Award, Storific received $5,000, a Samsung tablet and a future partnership with AT&T and Samsung,” according to a news release.

“We are in collaboration with AT&T and Samsung to help small businesses across America leverage the power of mobile,” Co-founder Zachary Stovall of Storific said in a news release. “Stores need a tablet with Internet to accept Storific mobile orders. This partnership will accomplish that by helping us equip small businesses with Internet-enabled tablets powered by AT&T and Samsung.”

Storific is based at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.

San Antonio’s Code for America Fellows Create “Homebase” App

August 29, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 6 Comments

Since January, the Code for America fellowship team has worked with the City of San Antonio.

The team made up of Maya Benari, David Leonard and Amy Mok have met with citizens and city officials. They spent a few months here working and then went back to San Francisco to complete their project.

Now they’ve completed an early version of it and they want citizens in San Antonio to test it. They’ve created an app, Homebase, that makes it easier for homeowners to make home improvements in cooperation with the City of San Antonio. They’ve tested the app with homeowners. It streamlines the home building permit process and lets homeowners easily apply for building permits.

The Code for America team wants more people to try the Homebase app and give them feedback, according to Benari.

To participate, please fill out this form.

AirStrip Closes on $25 Million in Venture Capital

August 26, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

AirStrip announced Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in venture capital.

The San Antonio-based company received the funding from the Gary and Mary West Health Investment Fund, Sequoia Capital and Wellcome Trust. Airstrip, founded in 2004, has raised $65 million in four rounds of investment, according to Crunchbase.

AirStrip’s main focus is taking all the data that flows through hospitals and doctor’s offices and putting on mobile devices so they can easily access it.

AirStrip’s technology enables healthcare providers to give patients better car, more efficiently and at a lower cost, according to the company.

The latest round of funding will let AirStrp expand into the home health space and expand internationally. It also plans to focus on integrating its products with leading analytics engines.

“The success of this investment round shows deep industry support and validation of the AirStrip strategic vision,” AirStrip CEO Alan Portela said in a news release. “Right now one in six babies born in the U.S. is monitored with AirStrip, and at-risk patients were monitored 1.2 million times in 2013 alone using AirStrip.”

For more on AirStrip, please read the profile Silicon Hills News did on the company.

InCube Labs Plans to Expand Into Manufacturing

August 24, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By JONATHAN GUTIERREZ
Reporter for Silicon Hills News

San Antonio has fostered innovative medical practices for decades. In June 2010, InCube Labs announced its plan to open a branch facility in San Antonio. InCube Labs originated in Silicon Valley and saw San Antonio as an attractive location to establish a branch.

“We could attract people here,” said Mir Imran, InCube Labs’ chairman and CEO. “One of the challenges for California is the cost of living is so high. It’s very hard to attract people from outside the state. We found in San Antonio it’s such a beautiful city to live in, and the cost of living is very low and manageable. From a family standpoint, there are also a number of attractions.”

InCube Labs is a multi-disciplinary research center for medical practices in therapeutic areas, drug delivery, and medical devices. Imran has created 20 companies with InCube in the past 25 years, and he plans to help establish more.

Phillip Morgan, Ph.D, vice president for InCube Labs in Texas, said InCube wants to make a major difference in areas of unmet clinical needs for patients.

“The way we approach it, is we try and understand the problem and we view technology agnostically,” Morgan said. “The process we use is if you really understand the problem, then the solution will come out of the problem.”

When InCube identifies a medical area it can improve, it begins the process of developing new approaches such as targeted drug delivery or interventional devices to solve clinical problems.

InCube’s research focuses on innovative solutions from basic research through pre-clinical development to clinical trials. The solutions it is developing include a unique mix of traditional device technologies such as electronics, software, mechanical engineering and material science, as well as pharmaceuticals, protein chemistry and cell biology.

When InCube Labs branched into Texas, the state invested $9.2 million from its Texas Emerging Technology fund into a trio of InCube’s spin-off companies.

The three companies – Corhythm Inc., Fe3 Medical Inc., and Neurolink Inc. – received this money to assist in the development and commercialization of their respective products.

Corhythm focuses on developing devices to detect atrial fibrillation and chronic heart failure, Fe3 Medical develops drug delivery technology to aid people with iron-deficiency anemia, and Neurolink develops an implantable device that predicts seizures and treats the underlying disease through intracranial drug delivery.

Morgan said it’s great for InCube Texas to be based in a place where there is a lot of support.

“One of the major factors in us coming to San Antonio is that there was a lot of support within the community ranging from the mayor, Julian Castro, and the city manager, Sheryl Sculley,” he said. “Both of them made trips to San Jose where InCube is based, and persuaded us to come to San Antonio.”

In addition to the city council support InCube has received, local universities have also committed to helping grow the life sciences sector in the city.

“If you look historically at where incubators are located, they’re nearly always located near academic institutions,” Morgan said. “I think it’s a major advantage being so close to the Health Sciences Center, UTSA and some of the other colleges around. They’ve been instrumental in helping us progress.”

In terms of investing in InCube either directly or indirectly, the city of San Antonio, the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio, USAA, and UTSA have all made significant contributions for the development of InCube’s companies, Morgan said.

InCube Ventures, one of InCube’s venture arms, is a specialized fund focusing on breakthrough innovations in medicine.

Just like InCube Labs, its venture arm aims to grow and nurture companies with potential to dramatically improve patient lives.

Imran said the next move for InCube Texas is to expand its operations to include manufacturing.

“We also run a manufacturing company in California,” he said. “We will bring a branch of that to (San Antonio). We’d like to get to the point where we’re establishing two companies a year. But, it requires a lot of infrastructure to support that many companies.”

One thing missing in San Antonio is the lack of significant venture capital, Imran said.

“The challenge has nothing to do with San Antonio,” he said. “Since the 2008 crash, the recovery has been slow. What that does to (startup companies) is it impacts the availability of equity dollars from other sources of venture capital. We’re hoping the companies we are building will attract new investors to come and take a serious look at San Antonio.”