Category: San Antonio (Page 25 of 62)

San Antonio Ranks Third on Forbes List of the Nation’s Tech Hot Spots

May 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Forbes names San Antonio-New Braunfels as one of America’s technology hot spots.

The greater San Antonio area earned the number three spot on the list behind number one, Washington, D.C. and number two, Riverside, Calif.

Forbes reported that San Antonio-New Braunfels gained 18.3 percent in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math jobs between 2011 and 2012. The growth during the last two years has been 4.5 percent.

Forbes hired Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group to examine the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan statistical areas.

“Notably absent from our list of the 10 metro areas that enjoyed the strongest growth over that period: the country’s largest cities,” according to Forbes. “Chicago, New York and Los Angeles all lost tech jobs over the past 11 years. Silicon Valley? For all the buzz over Facebook and other hot social media companies, the San Jose area has 12.6% fewer tech jobs today than in 2001.”

San Antonio has a large biomedical industry and cybersecurity industry. The city has also nurtured its technology startup community with the founding of Geekdom, nearly three years ago.

Rackspace Entertains Buyout Offers

May 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Rackspace Hosting may be sold.
The San Antonio-based company hired Morgan Stanley to evaluate potential partnerships and acquisitions.
“In recent months, Rackspace has been approached by multiple parties who have expressed interest in exploring a strategic relationship with Rackspace, ranging from partnership to acquisition,” according to a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week.
“Our board decided to hire Morgan Stanley to evaluate the inbound strategic proposals and to explore other alternatives which could advance Rackspace’s long-term strategy,” Rackspace wrote. “No decision has been made and there can be no assurance that the Board’s review process will result in any partnership or transaction being entered into or consummated.”
Rackspace, which provides web hosting and open cloud services, reported it did not intend to comment on the situation until its board approves a specific partnership or transaction. The company has faced increasing competition from giants Google and Amazon, which provide cloud hosting services.
In February, Lanham Napier, 43, retired as Rackspace’s chief executive officer. He had led the company since 2000 from a small startup to a large publicly traded company with more than 5,000 employees worldwide and more than $1.5 billion in revenue.
A year earlier, Lew Moorman, Rackspace’s president, left the company because of health issues with a family member.
Since February, Graham Weston, Rackspace’s chairman and co-founder, has served as its CEO.
Rackspace, founded in 1998, is the largest technology company in San Antonio with more than 3,000 employees occupying the old Windsor Park Mall in Northeast San Antonio. It also has an office in Austin and has international offices in London and Hong Kong.
Rackspace’s stock, traded under the symbol RAX on the New York Stock Exchange, soared on the news of the possible sale last week. Rackspace’s stock closed at $36.12 on Friday, up nearly 18 percent. The company’s stock traded as low as $26 and as high as $54 in the last 52 weeks. The stock traded as high as $81 per share in January of 2013, according to Forbes.

Texas Proposes Equity-based Crowdfunding Rules

May 16, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 6 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Crowdfunding Photo licensed from iStockphotos.com

In Austin, one of the big issues facing startups, particularly in the technology industry, is lack of access to capital.

Last year, Austin companies received $626 million in venture capital, or 49 percent of the venture capital dollars for Texas, said Michele Skelding, senior vice president of global technology strategies at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

“That still represents just 2 percent of the nation’s venture capital,” Skelding said. “So we’re hungry for capital.”

Equity-based crowdfunding may help meet that need.

Skelding hosted about 50 people involved in Austin’s startup industry at a roundtable lunch discussion Wednesday focused on newly proposed Texas crowdfunding rules.

Crowdfunding is one of the hottest trends now for entrepreneurs, said Joy Schoffler, owner of Leverage PR and a board member of the Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates.

Soon entrepreneurs will be able to use equity-based crowdfunding to tap into investments from the general public. The U.S. Jobs Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2012, is making that possible. It will begin once the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issues its final rules governing the practice. So far, the SEC has missed several deadlines to enact the rules.

Meanwhile, Texas and eight other states have proposed regulations that would allow for intrastate crowdfunding.

“The term crowdfunding can really cause some confusion,” Schoffler said.

Several types of crowdfunding exist including reward-based crowdfunding on platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. And individuals can crowdfund for donations on platforms like GoFundMe.com. Some crowdfunding sites like Kiva.org allow people to provide loans to small businesses worldwide. And sites like AngelList.com allow companies to raise funds from accredited investors or individuals who make more than $200,000 annually and have a net worth in excess of $1 million, not including their house.

But the ability to raise money from the general public through equity-based crowdfunding is not yet possible in Texas. But in other states like Georgia it is legal. Georgia already passed its own rules allowing for equity-based crowdfunding.

The SEC has 175 pages of rules being proposed to govern equity-based crowdfunding, said John Morgan with the Texas State Securities Board. Texas’ rules would not supersede the SEC rules, but if Texas passes its own crowdfunding rules, the state would allow equity-based crowdfunding before the federal government.

In April, Texas proposed its own equity-based crowdfunding rules. The Texas State House Committee on Investments and Financial Services will hold a hearing on May 21st to discuss the proposed regulations.

“The great thing about the rulemaking process is it’s flexible,” Morgan said. “There’s time to tweak these rules to get the exact right product we want.’’

The proposed Texas regulations let a company raise a maximum of $1 million every 12 months. An accredited investor can invest any amount. But a non-accredited investor can only invest $5,000. They can only invest through a Texas-owned website, known as a crowdfunding portal, which holds the funds in a bank account until the company meets its funding goals.

And all investors must prove they are Texas residents by providing a valid driver’s license or voter registration card. The regulations also require companies looking to raise money to post a detailed business plan, financial statements and other documents including a list of risk factors.

During the roundtable discussion, Ben Dyer, a serial entrepreneur and entrepreneur in residence at the University of Texas, asked about the ability to raise funds from investors in other states.

With the proposed Texas equity crowdfunding rules, all of the investors in a company must reside in Texas, Morgan said.

Shari Wynne, founder of Incubation Station, a consumer products accelerator, expressed concerns about the filing of a business plan and freezing a business outlook for a certain time since so many startups constantly pivot and change.

“There’s any number of things that are shifting with these companies,” she said

Paul Trowe of Replay Games expressed concern about the $5,000 limit per un-accredited investor. He said his company received $650,000 in 30 days on Kickstarter in 2012 and multiple donors gave more than $10,000 each.

“My questions is why would I want to do equity based crowdfunding with such strict regulations when I can go onto Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or any of the other platforms and not have such restrictions?”

Jason Seats of Techstars said Kickstarter and IndieGoGo work well for certain types of businesses focused on consumer products. It’s more difficult for companies working on enterprise sales tools to raise money from rewards-based crowdfunding, he said.

The legislation isn’t just aimed at tech companies, said Nathan Roach, an attorney with the RAM Law Firm. It’s designed to help all small and medium sized businesses statewide that need access to capital to expand, he said.

The crowdfunding portals help standardize the process of raising money from investors, Roach said.

Investors need to be able to trust the information coming to them, Roach said. The crowdfunding portals provide an entrepreneur with the necessary tools to raise money in compliance with the securities regulations, he said.

The portals also have to vet investors to make sure they are qualified as residents under the Texas rules.

Rick Timmins, chairman of the Central Texas Angel Network, said his members would not invest in equity-based crowdfunding ventures because of the regulations and disclosure requirements.

He said he sees a bifurcation of offerings when equity-based crowdfunding is enacted. Companies will either go down the path of traditional fundraising from accredited investors or they will choose to do equity-based crowdfundng from non-accredited investors, Timmins said.

“I don’t see it being co-mingled at all,” Timmins said.

CTAN is one of the most active angel networks in the country. The organization’s members invested $9.7 million in 33 companies last year.

Crowdfunding is one more tool in the arsenal of tools that are being provided to small and medium sized business throughout Texas, said Amir Mirabi, director of the governor’s office for small business economic development.

Crowdfunding provides more ways for the entrepreneurs who are building things to get close to their customers, said Gordon Walton with Gaming SIG in Austin. Kickstarter has been the most successful platform for game companies. They make up the largest category on Kickstarter, followed by film and TV, Walton said.

But equity based crowdfunding for the gaming industry is going to be a challenge, Walton said. The regulations need to be simple and friction free, he said.

“We would love to have our consumers become investors if they can overcome the challenges,” Walton said. “But the hurdles are high.”

A conference on crowdfunding is being held later this month in Austin. The CFGE Crowdfund Real Estate Summit and Entrepreneur Summit will be held May 29th and 30th at the Hilton Austin.

Remote Garage Stores Clutter by the Box

May 13, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Jaakko Piipponen, founder of Remote Garage, photo by Laura Lorek

Mei Butler, a senior at Trinity University, needed to store some household goods while she studied in China for seven months.

“I didn’t want to rent out a storage unit since I didn’t have enough belongings to take up the whole space,” Butler said.

Instead, she signed up with Remote Garage, a San Antonio-based storage on demand startup. It provides a storage bin and even picks up the goods.

Butler’s storing kitchen supplies, bathroom supplies, decorations and other home furnishings with them while she’s studying in China.

Last year, Jaakko Piipponen, launched Remote Garage with his friend Valdas Galdikas. And in December, they received a $25,000 investment from the Geekdom fund. Since then, they have been marketing the company and enrolling more customers while working on the technology behind the site and securing partnerships.

Piipponen is from Finland. He earned his undergraduate degree from the Helsinki School of Economics and studied abroad at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles. He also worked previously for an investment bank in London and founded another startup, Kiitos Technologies, a marketing service for online videos. He moved to San Antonio in 2013 with his girlfriend. She is attending medical school at the University of Texas Health Science Center.

At first, the Geekdom Fund turned Piipponen down, but he came back the next month with customers and partners, said Cole Wollak, spokesman for the fund. They were also convinced of his expertise in the storage market and were impressed with the beta version of his product, Wollak said.

Storage is a $25 billion market, Piipponen said. About one in ten Americans use self-storage facilities, he said. But that’s doesn’t work for everyone, especially for people who don’t have a lot to store and can’t afford to pay $1,200 a year or more for a storage unit, he said.

That’s where Remote Garage comes in, Piipponen said. It’s there for the rest of the population with smaller storage needs, he said.

“They pay by the box,” Piipponen said. “We pick up, store their stuff securely and let them monitor it online and they can get their things back whenever they want.”

Remote Garage partners with well-known, professional storage and delivery companies. It charges $7 per box for a month with the average order of five boxes.

The company does face some competition from other on-demand storage services like Makespace, a New York-based micro-storage startup that has raised $1.3 million, Boxbee, based in San Francisco has raised $2.3 million for its storage on demand service and PODS. And Austin-based SpareFoot, which works with storage companies, to fill up their space through its online marketplace, is not really a competitor, Piipponen said.

Remote Garage has been marketing the company by working with apartment leasing agents. They are seeking to fill the niche for apartment dwellers that store things on their balconies, which is usually prohibited by the complexes. Now the apartments can offer up Remote Garage as an alternative storage source. Piipponen has signed up more than 50 apartment complexes in San Antonio including The Broadway, The Crescent and Mosaic.

Butler heard about Remote Garage from her boyfriend. She decided to try them out and she’s been pleased with its “excellent customer service.” She thinks the service has a lot of potential.

“Its appeal lies in the fact that it does not require you to make a big commitment in terms of rental length, or amount of space you rent,” she said.

Oracle Plans to Bring 200 Jobs to San Antonio

May 12, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Oracle has announced plans to bring 200 jobs to San Antonio by 2016 in a new operations center.
The deal is contingent on the approval of economic development incentives from local government. The San Antonio City Council will consider a $1 million grant for Oracle on Thursday and the Bexar County Commissioners Court will consider Oracle’s application for an economic development grant at its meeting on Tuesday.
“The negotiated agreement is expected to be brought back to Commissioners Court on June 3 for final approval,” according to a news release.
The Oracle center will hire finance and contractual support service workers.
“San Antonio is making tremendous strides in attracting companies in 21st century industries,” Mayor Julian Castro said in a news release. “These 200 jobs at Oracle will be a powerful addition to the city’s fast-growing IT sector.”
“Oracle’s interest in locating operations here is proof that our economy is strong and our business climate is attractive to such global companies,” County Judge Nelson Wolff said in a news statement. “This also affirms that we are building a diverse multi-industry economy where our residents can find meaningful career opportunities.”
“San Antonio offers opportunities for economic growth as well as a highly skilled workforce, making it an ideal location for Oracle,” Oracle Vice President of Real Estate and Facilities Randy Smith said in a news release. “This new location will bring new jobs to San Antonio and serve a critical financial function for our North America and Latin American businesses.”

Making Data Centers Smarter and Greener

May 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Facebook data center, photo courtesy of Facebook

Facebook has saved $1.3 billion in the last three years by making its data centers more energy efficient.

That’s enough energy to power 40,000 houses a year and saves on carbon emissions the equivalent of taking 50,000 cars off the road, said Charlie Manese, vice president of channel development for Facebook’s Open Compute Project and infrastructure.

Facebook’s data centers run on alternative energy including hydrodynamic and wind power.

The company has focused on making its data centers faster, leaner and better since it broke ground four years on its first “green” data center project in Prineville, Oregon.

Manese spoke Thursday morning on the last day of the two-day Open BigCloud Symposium focused on cloud computing and big data. The conference, held at the University of Texas at San Antonio, attracted about 200 people and featured presentations from Rackspace, Facebook, Gartner, Internet2, Dell, University of Texas Advanced Computer Center and others.

The Open Compute Project started at Facebook in 2011. A big focus of the Open Compute Project is to share best practices with software, hardware, networks and data center designs to increase efficiency and cut down on energy consumption.

“There’s a lot more data being created these days than ever before,” said Attilia Finta with Dell. His presentation focused on infrastructure cooling technology used in the data centers to keep the servers from overheating.

Ron Mann, a senior director of data center infrastructure with Hewlett-Packard showed off the container-sized data centers that HP can put in tight spaces and even on rooftops. Some of the data center containers have even been painted to look like mobile homes.

The efficient data centers are greatly needed because the world is awash in data, and the amount of data created has greatly accelerated in the last few years, said Frank Frankovsky, chairman of the Open Compute Project Foundation. It has grown from .8 zettabytes (one zettabyte equals 1 billion terabytes) of data in 2010 to 2.8 zettabytes in 2012. And it’s expected to hit 40 zettabytes in 2020, he said.

UTSA Hosts the Open BigCloud Symposium

May 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Some of the biggest trends in technology today are the cloud, a fancy name for data centers, and big data, the massive bits and bytes of information flowing through those data centers.

At the University of Texas at San Antonio, more than 100 people met Wednesday to discuss hardware, software and networks around those topics at the first Open BigCloud Symposium.

“This is about the future of cloud computing and big data,” said UTSA President Ricardo Romo.

He compared the ideas and innovation around the Open Cloud environment to Detroit during its heyday of the automotive industry.

“A collision of ideas that’s what’s going to happen here,” he said.

Romo also cut the ribbon to officially open the UTSA Open Compute Project Certification and Solutions Laboratory. The only other lab of its kind is in Taiwan.

Frank Frankovsky, president and chairman of the Open Compute Project Foundation, praised the project.

“There are incredibly innovative people in the state of Texas driving the industry forward,” he said.

The two-day Open BigCloud Symposium features more than 20 speakers in the HEB University Center Ballroom at the UTSA main campus. Most of it is highly technical with sessions like “Using ZeroVM and Swift to Build a Compute Enabled Storage Platforms” and “Composable Rack Scale Archecture Storage.” But some of the sessions address universal issues facing the technology industry like the shortage of women in technology and fostering entrepreneurship.

In 2012, Rackspace hosted the Open Compute Summit and hosted more than 500 people involved in the Open Compute Project, which Frankovsky and his team launched at Facebook in 2011. The project’s goal focuses on creating the most efficient computer hardware and software for data center. Major players like Facebook, Rackspace, Hewlett Packard, Dell and Microsoft back the project.

The Open Compute Project is driven by collaboration, contributions and consumption or the adoption of the technology by industry, Frankovsky said.

UTSA is becoming a nationally recognized hub of innovation in the Cloud and big data technology, said Lorenzo Gomez, director of the 80/20 Foundation and Geekdom.

The 80/20 Foundation has donated more than $4 million in endowed partnerships in cloud computing technology to UTSA, Gomez said.

The research, the academia and industry coming together at UTSA is extremely important said John Engates, Rackspace’s Chief Technology Officer.

“We at Rackspace believe open is supercritical,” Engates said.

Open and collaborative environments help companies innovate faster, Engates said. It also means freedom. It also allows people to do their work remotely easily, he said. An open environment also allows companies to share the risks and rewards of research and development and innovation, he said.

“Getting people on a bobsled together and going in together I think that’s supercritical,” he said.

In 2010, Rackspace and NASA jointly created the OpenStack , an open source cloud software. Today, Rackspace runs the largest OpenStack cloud in the world today, Engates said.

Competition Heats Up for the San Antonio MX Challenge

May 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Already 30 teams have registered to compete in the San Antonio MX Challenge, said Jesus Salas, head of the project.
Salas gave an update on the San Antonio MX Challenge Tuesday night at the SA NewTech meetup. About 50 people attended the meetup, which was organized by Cole Wollak and Michael Girdley.
The San Antonio MX Challenge begins in September and is a competition to see who can best foster the tech entrepreneurial connection between Mexico and San Antonio by fostering startups here.
The competitors will be judged on sustainability of the business plan, sustainability of the project in San Antonio, revenue generated and the number of jobs created, Salas said.
The San Antonio MX Challenge will award $500,000 to the team, business or organization that best meets that challenge.
The 18 month competition will officially kick off at a special San Antonio MX Challenge Summit in San Antonio on September 15th and 16th. The event coincides with Mexican Independence Day and will incorporate local celebrations of that holiday, Salas said.
Salas has visited Mexico City and Guadalajara to spread the word about the San Antonio MX Challenge, which is an offshoot of the HeroX challenge, a smaller and more localized version of the X Prize.
At his meetings, Salas emphasized San Antonio’s growing entrepreneurial community and its large workforce in the biosciences, cybersecurity and information technology industries.
In addition to Salas, three teams, made up of former Code Up students, pitched their capstone projects from their class. The teams graduated from the program recently.
The projects included Spotspy, a parking reservation app, VIND IT, a lost and found app and EatSafe-Sa.com, which provide restaurant ratings based on city health inspection reports.

Google Buys Austin-based Adometry

May 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

In 2007, a startup called Click Forensics began operations in San Antonio.
The company, founded by Tom Cuthbert and Tom Charvet, tackled the problem of click fraud online. Austin Ventures provided its initial $500,000 seed stage funding.
Click Forensics ended up moving to Austin and pivoted to become a marketing analytics firm called Adometry.
On Tuesday, Google announced it bought Adometry for an undisclosed price. Since its inception, Adometry has raised $29.1 million in venture funding from Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures, according to the company.
Adometry and Google both announced the deal it in separate blog posts.
“Adometry is joining Google, where they will build on the momentum of our existing measurement and analytics offerings, which include Google Analytics Premium as well as other products,” according to a Google blog post.
“Attribution solutions, like Adometry’s, help businesses better understand the influence that different marketing tools — digital, offline, email, and more — have along their customers’ paths to purchase (http://goo.gl/tXTliw). This heightened understanding, in turn, enables businesses to measure marketing impact, allocate their resources more wisely, and provide people with ads and messages that they’re likely to care about.”
Adometry moved into new headquarters last year at the Lakewood Center Building II on Capital of Texas Highway and has about 135 employees, according to this profile Silicon Hills News did of the company in March.
“We couldn’t be more excited to join Google — a company that shares our core values. Not only do they focus on innovation and solving big problems, but also like Adometry, they seek to provide brands and their agency partners with the analytics and insights to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns,” Paul Pellman, Adometry’s CEO, wrote in a blog post on its site.

Join a Special 3 Day Startup Focused on Cyber Security in San Antonio

May 5, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Did you know San Antonio has the second largest concentration of cyber security professionals outside of the Washington, D.C. area?

The bulk of them are at the National Security Agency’s (also nicknamed as No Such Agency) Texas Cryptology Center. The NSA leased and renovated the old Sony chip manufacturing plant in 2005 and was expected to hire as many as 1,500 workers. The NSA’s facility has two buildings for a total of 475,000 square feet, including a data center.

Even before the NSA, San Antonio had deep roots in the cyber security field with the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Agency at Lackland, nicknamed Security Hill and the University of Texas at San Antonio recognized by the NSA as a center for academic excellence in information assurance education.

So it just made sense for the first Cyber Security 3 Day Startup to take place in San Antonio. 3DS selects 45 people to participate in the weekend long program in which the group breaks up into teams and form startups, create a prototype and then pitch their companies. The 80/20 Foundation is sponsoring the Cyber Security 3 Day Startup.

The Cyber Security 3 Day Startup is now recruiting “passionate individuals with an entrepreneurial drive, including Computer Science (PhD, MS, undergraduate) MBAs, law students, graphic designers, PR, business undergraduates, etc” to participate in its program to be held May 23rd through May 25th at the old Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre.

To apply for the program, please visit Cyber Security 3 Day Startup.