Category: San Antonio (Page 30 of 62)

Silicon Hills News Launches a Kickstarter Campaign

January 18, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

This week, Silicon Hills News launched its first Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to create a slick print magazine to be released at South by Southwest Interactive.
At SXSW, Silicon Hills News is hosting a startup pitch competition in conjunction with the Austin Technology Incubator.
We plan to distribute the 32-page color magazine at the SXSW panel. The magazine will feature a dozen or so Austin and San Antonio startup companies along with information on technology resources in both cities.
The Silicon Hills News mission is to shine a spotlight on all of the innovation going on in the Central Texas technology industry. For the past two years and four months, we have worked tirelessly to cover the Austin and San Antonio region. We’re also evolving into a networking platform for the technology industry in Central Texas. We seek to foster collaboration among people doing interesting technology ventures. We do this through event coverage, news stories, tech profiles, calendar postings, job listings, resource listings, expert contributors and soon monthly, quarterly and annual events and a section devoted to aggregating all of the local technology news.
Veteran technology journalists with two decades of experience covering technology lead Silicon Hills News. Laura Lorek and Susan Lahey understand business, technology and news startups. We are also trained journalists with a strong code of ethics and adherence to traditional reporting values.
We also believe in being a part of the community we cover. We are storytelling entrepreneurs blazing a trail in the new media landscape.
But we need your help.
To produce 5,000 copies of the magazine, we need to raise $5,000 and another $2,000 to pay for stories and photos and $500 more for marketing expenses.
We can do all of this with your support of our Kickstarter Campaign. But you don’t just get a warm and fuzzy feeling for helping out another bootstrapped startup entrepreneur, you also get perks.
For just $120, a startup can advertise on our site for a year – that’s just $10 a month (that’s less than a case or 36 packs of Ramen noodles) even pre-seed stage entrepreneurs can afford that. The ad is for 140 characters with a link and it will run on the main page for a year.
Technology companies with a little more disposable income might consider the $500 full page ad in the magazine or the combo for $1,000 of an ad in both the print and digital version of Silicon Hills News. You also get invited to a happy hour where we will debut the magazine and give you some free drinks.
If you like the job we are doing, please become part of our mission and support our Kickstarter campaign at whatever level you like. We’ve even got a $1 offering. We appreciate you and your support. Thank you, in advance, for helping to make our first ever print magazine possible.

San Antonio MX Prize Officially Launches

January 18, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The San Antonio MX Challenge has officially kicked off.
Silicon Hills News broke the story about the first local X-Prize challenge late last year when some members of the HeroX organization briefed the technology community about the contest at Geekdom.
Now the contest has officially launched at Geekdom, a collaborative co-working space in downtown San Antonio that serves as the catalyst for the local technology startup community.
The San Antonio MX Challenge seeks to foster greater collaboration between Mexico and San Antonio in the technology industry.
The prize is worth $500,000 and will be awarded to the individual, team or organization that creates a model to assist Mexican tech companies with opening offices in San Antonio.
“This challenge will be the catalyst between the San Antonio startup ecosystem and Mexican Entrepreneurs wishing to expand into the US,” Graham Weston, Co-founder & Chairman of Rackspace Hosting said in a news release. “We are already famous for this in San Antonio. Now we are going to show the rest of the world.”
The San Antonio Mx Challenge is the first to be launched through HeroX, a spinoff of XPRIZE, the world leader in incentivized prize competitions.
“I am proud to see the first competition launched on HeroX. It has been my dream for years to offer a platform that allows anyone to use incentive competitions to solve problems and drive innovation,” Dr. Peter Diamandis, Chairman & CEO of XPRIZE and Co-founder & Board Member of HeroX, said in a news release. “By bringing in solutions from anywhere, I’m convinced that competitions like this one will have a bright future both for social issues and for driving innovation faster than we can imagine.”
The criteria for winning the prize is listed on the San Antonio MX website. The challenge runs for 26 months and with early registration ending on Aug. 25th and final registration ending on Jan. 14, 2015.
A San Antonio MX Summit will also be held on Sept. 16, 2014.
The final winner will be announced on May 4, 2016.

Texas Had 150 VC backed Deals Worth $1.3 Billion in 2013

January 18, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Texas reported 150 venture capital backed deals worth $1.3 billion in 2013, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.
The number of deals in Texas fell nearly 9 percent from 163 but increased 37 percent in the dollars invested from $948.8 million in 2013.
The report found venture capitalists in the U.S. did 3,995 deals worth $29.4 billion, up four percent in number of deals and seven percent in dollar volume from a year earlier.
In the fourth quarter, Texas had 47 deals worth $315.9 million; up nearly 24 percent in number of deals and a 54 percent increase in dollar volume. Overall, $8.4 billion went to 1,077 deals nationwide in the fourth quarter.
The bulk of the money went to software and Internet companies.
The money invested in software companies reached the highest level since 2000 with $11 billion invested in 1,523 deals last year.
“Dollars going into software companies accounted for 37 percent of total venture capital invested in 2013, the highest percentage since the inception of the MoneyTree Report in 1995.”

Rackspace Hosting Appoints Taylor Rhodes as President

January 14, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting has filled a top spot in its executive ranks.
On Tuesday, the company announced the appointment of Taylor Rhodes, formerly its Chief Customer Officer, as its new president effective immediately.
“Taylor is a proven operational veteran with outstanding strategic and leadership skills,” Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said in a news statement. “He has generated strong growth in all the businesses he has led. Our international business, for example, grew 30 percent a year under his leadership. His relationships with customers and his deep understanding of the market and where it’s headed will be invaluable as he steps into this new role. Taylor’s promotion represents a successful example of the company’s long-term talent-development plan.”
Last summer, Lew Moorman stepped down as Rackspace president, citing family reasons. Moorman had been with the company for 13 years. He still serves on its board of directors. Napier has served as acting president until Rhodes appointment.

Apps for Aptitude Releases Cards for a Cause

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

Three San Antonio high school students last year created Apps for Aptitude, a nonprofit organization aimed at kids helping other kids combat illiteracy by creating mobile apps.
Joshua Singer, a junior at the International School of the Americas and Abhinav Suri, a junior at St. Mary’s Hall created the organization and brought Canzhi Ye, a senior at Reagan High School, on shortly afterward. Silicon Hills News did a story on the organization when it was just starting out. Since then, they have won some additional funding, secured nonprofit status through an affiliation with FreeFlow Research and brought on some more students to help with the development of their projects.
Cards for a Cause is Apps for Aptitude’s first iPhone app, Ye said.
“It is the premier way for students to study flashcards while making a difference in the community,” he said.
Apps for Aptitude plans to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from the app sales to local illiteracy fighting organizations.
“San Antonio’s illiteracy rate is astoundingly high, and we’re out to bring it down as much as possible,” Ye said.
The app provides access to the largest flashcard database in the world, Quizlet, according to Ye. The app also lets students study flashcards using a scientifically proven memory algorithm, SuperMemo2, he said. It also lets students print flashcards to use offline. It features a beautiful user interface designed for iOS7, Ye said.
The Cards for a Cause app costs 99 cents and will be available in the Apple App Store on Tuesday.

San Antonio’s Top 10 Tech Stories for 2013

January 2, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

The entire region is booming.
As evidence, check out the Forbes story listing Austin and San Antonio number one and two metro areas, respectively, when it comes to booming economies for 2014.
San Antonio’s technology industry got a huge boost from Geekdom, a downtown incubator and coworking space that helps startups. It also got a boost from the Eagle-Ford Shale Boom in fracking which is prompting a technology and energy boom in South Texas, which benefits San Antonio, the largest city to the energy-producing region.
So as we enter the New Year, it’s also important to look back and see all that was accomplished last year. So without further ado, these are the top stories listed below for San Antonio in 2013, as determined by Web traffic and a few editor’s picks.

1. Geekdom to Move Into the Historic Rand Building

2. Geekdom’s Geekbus Rolls Out in San Antonio

3. Rackspace Launches the Open Cloud Academy in San Antonio

4. HeroX to Launch First in San Antonio with a $500K Prize

5. Riding the Rails Between Austin and San Antonio

6. TechStars Cloud Class of 2013 Shines at Demo Day (Featuring two San Antonio-based startups: TrueAbility and ParLevel System. And Rackspace acquired ZeroVM)

7. Code for America Coming to San Antonio

8. Startup Grind Features Graham Weston of Rackspace

9. San Antonio-based TrueAbility Lands $2 Million in Funding

10. Insight from “The Unstoppables: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial Power”

Disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

HeroX to Launch First in San Antonio with $500K Prize

December 19, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Christie St. Martin and Nidhi Chaudhary with HeroX, Tito Salas, projec manager of San Antonio MX Prize and Lorenzo Gomez, head of Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation.

Christie St. Martin and Nidhi Chaudhary with HeroX, Tito Salas, project manager of San Antonio MX Prize and Lorenzo Gomez, head of Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation.

HeroX, a platform for competitions to solve local and global problems, plans to launch its first project in San Antonio on January 15th.
The project is called the San Antonio MX prize.
And it’s worth $500,000.
“The coolest part about it though, is that we, the Geekdom community, get to be the first customer,” said Lorenzo Gomez, head of Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation. “We get to launch our prize on this before anyone else in America.”
The founder of XPrize, Dr. Peter Diamandis raised a $10 million prize for the first team to create a rocket for private spaceflight. That prize changed the aviation world, Gomez said. Now Diamandis has launched HeroX to take all of those lessons learned in awarding big prizes and to crowdsource ideas to solve local and global problems, Gomez said.

On Wednesday night, Nidhi Chaudhary, HeroX challenge design manager from New York and Christie St. Martin, digital strategy and community development manager from Toronto, gave a sneak peak into the contest, which will run for 14 months.
Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace and founder of Geekdom, put up the money for the San Antonio MX Prize through his personal foundation, the 80/20 Foundation.
A panel of judges will award $500,000 to the team that comes up with the best solution to develop a strong entrepreneurial network connecting Mexico and San Antonio.
“We want to give this money to an organization, or a team, that can actually remove barriers that can increase the amount of tech entrepreneurs coming in from Mexico to San Antonio,” Gomez said. “And the barriers that really hold people back are access to capital, access to Visa support, access to connections through the entrepreneurial ecosystem – how can I meet people that are already doing this or have done this. We want the winning team and all the teams that are competing to solve those problems.”
The network already exists between Mexico entrepreneurs and San Antonio, Gomez said. This prize is meant to accelerate efforts underway, he said.
“As a city so often we try to get the attention of Silicon Valley, Austin and what we should be doing is looking South,” Gomez said.
San Antonio wants to be the gateway for Mexican tech companies to launch into the U.S., Gomez said. And when a U.S. company wants to launch in Mexico, they go through San Antonio, he said.
For Geekdom’s challenge, the teams don’t get money for their ideas. They go out and solve the challenge, Chaudhary said. Then they must prove that they solved it and a panel of judges will decide the winner after 14 months, she said. To compete, the teams will register on the San Antonio HeroX page. They have until August 30th to register.
For example, if 500 Startups put an incubator in San Antonio for Mexican startups they would be a contender for the prize, Gomez said. Or if a Venture Capital company set up a fund to provide financing for the startups, they could compete, he said.
Geekdom will post the guidelines for the competition on its website by Jan. 15th listing the criteria to win.
“Our goal is not to make it so hard that no one wins the prize,” Gomez said. “We want someone to win.”
This competition is to shine a light on one of San Antonio’s biggest strengths, Gomez said.
“There is an existing network of Mexicans here already,” said Tito Salas, project manager of San Antonio MX Prize. Mexican companies like the proximity of San Antonio to Mexico, he said. They also like the culture here, he said. And it’s easy for non-native English speakers to communicate since many people in the city also speak Spanish, he said.
BioVideo of Monterrey, Mexico, located its U.S. headquarters to San Antonio at Geekdom, Gomez said. The company has gotten funding here and all of its U.S. connections are out of San Antonio, he said.
HeroX plans to launch other community-based challenges next year, Chaudhary said. The company is a for profit startup which makes money through fees for each campaign.
“We at Geekdom are honored to be the first guys to do something so progressive and innovative,” Gomez said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of SiliconHillsNews.com

Geekdom Gets a Hip Makeover at its New Digs in the Historic Rand Building

December 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

A mock-up of the new open community space at Geekdom, once it moves into the historic Rand building. Courtesy of Alamo Architects

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Converting a historic building into a modern-day tech coworking space to incubate hot new startups in downtown San Antonio isn’t an easy task.
But Irby Hightower of Alamo Architects and his team have managed to do just that. They took a former bank building and are transforming the seventh floor into a modern day workplace for geeks.
It’s a work in progress right now. In fact, it’s a hard-hat construction zone. But once finished, the new Geekdom at the Rand will have bike racks, showers, lockers, changing rooms, a nap room and transparent glass sliding doors on the offices to give the entire floor a wide-open feel.

Irby Hightower with Alamo Architects shows off the new design for Geekdom at the Rand building.

“The center offices open up from a smaller office to a larger office as a startup grows,” said Hightower. He presented drawings of the new space at a town hall meeting for members at Geekdom on Wednesday night.
The 1,200 square foot space will have 20 offices available for tech startups. Desks will rent for $200 a month. Community membership will remain at $50 a month. At the new site, the community space is larger and snakes throughout the floor.
An open kitchen also encourages interaction among the members. The entire place is built to encourage community collaboration.
The space also includes a large conference room and smaller conference rooms.
“The whole place really is meant to be one big community work environment,” Hightower said.
The new Geekdom is a little grungier than the 11th floor of the Weston Centre, current home of the site and a former law office.

A packed house turned out for the town hall meeting at Geekdom to unveil the new design for the site at the Rand building.

“We think that’s the right approach,” Hightower said. “The ceilings will have more character…It’s the kind of space you can experiment in and have more fun in.”
The space will also contain a lot of writeable surfaces and reliable high-speed Internet with lots of outlets for wired service as well as Wi-Fi.
The main floor of the building will also contain an events center with two Tricasters, portable live broadcasting studios, from NewTek for live streaming programming. The events center will also house a Ping-Pong table and other games.
The new Geekdom is expected to open on March 31st. It will feature the events center, the sixth floor for established tech companies and the seventh floor for new startups and community members.
In another 18 months, the entire Rand building will be vacated and will belong to Geekdom, said Lorenzo Gomez with Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation.
They’ve talked about putting an electric sign on the roof of the building then with one letter that continues to flicker on and off, harkening back to the 1930s, when the building served as a department store.

Geekdom is a sponsor of SiliconHillsNews.com

TrueAbility’s IT Job Prediction Trends for 2014

December 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

TrueAbility Monday released its predictions for hiring trends for technology workers in 2014.
The San Antonio-based startup, founded in 2012, has analyzed data on more than 5,000 IT workers in the past year. It makes a cloud-based platform that evaluates the technical aptitude of IT employees by testing their skills online for job openings.

Team photo of TrueAbility, courtesy of the company.

TrueAbility, based at Geekdom, foresees an increase in demand for workers with configuration management skills and cloud computing skills.
In addition, companies will focus more on hiring the right people, than buying the right hardware, according to TrueAbility.
Workers who can demonstrate their skills and knowledge will trump those who might have years of experience.
For more predictions, visit TrueAbility’s blog.

Introducing AbilityScreen by TrueAbility from TrueAbility on Vimeo.

TrueAbility is an advertiser with SiliconHillsNews.com

Rackspace Cloud Predictions for 2014

December 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace Hosting in San Antonio

John Engates, the Chief Technology Officer with Rackspace, has made some predictions for cloud technology trends in 2014.

The cloud ushers in a new era in wearable technology.

Under Armour’s late 2013 acquisition of mobile workout app MapMyFitness and Nike’s continued sponsorship of TechStars Nike+ Accelerator validates that wearable technology is heating up and here to stay. Athletic apparel manufacturers will attempt to catch up with one another in a war for data about users’ exercising habits. This will also continue in other areas such as smart watches, glasses and goggles, and other medical devices. This staggering amount of data generated by the growing number of these devices need to be stored and analyzed somewhere and what better place than the cloud, where it can be seamlessly transferred between device and server? This will also usher in other ecosystems of app developers and plugins as these devices emerge as platforms and APIs are exposed. The vendors that help users make the most of this data will be the winners.

Specialized clouds will emerge in 2014.

Until now clouds generally fell into two buckets: public and private. In the new year, the idea of workloads running where they perform the best will prevail as new clouds that focus on specific application tasks and workloads will rise. There will be a cloud for high I/O needs, CPU performance, GPU, etc.

Open source projects will get even more prevalent and popular.

As the world begins adjusting to new realities around online privacy, developers will gravitate more and more to open source projects where source code is immediately available for anyone who so wishes to check on anything suspicious by inspecting the code directly. The NSA spying scandal and the lack of trust of foreign and even domestic technology will drive more and broader adoption of open source. With the added benefit that the community propels innovation faster, it’s hard not to feel good about the future of open source in this day and age.

IT will soon mean Information Transformation.

More and more enterprises will need to adopt tactics normally associated with startups (e.g.: devops, continuous integration and delivery) in order to handle the need to support ever-changing digital fields such as mobile application development, web analytics and social media. In this transformation, system administrators will need to brush up their coding or get left behind with the legacy applications. Database admins will need to make the jump to Big Data and NoSQL. The enterprise CIO who realizes how to make devops and agile work in their organization will lead the way. This will take root in 2014 and continue to grow over the next 5-10 years as applications are replaced.

Small packages, big time-savings.

Container technology such as Docker and ZeroVM will begin to simplify the way application deployment and portability works, allowing applications to be spun up and down at break-neck speeds. Containers will be used heavily in production starting in 2014 and beyond.