Category: San Antonio (Page 33 of 62)

San Antonio Youth Code Jam Gets Kids Into Coding

October 16, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

San Antonio Youth Code Jam - photos by Kara Gomez, Open Book Studios

Code Jam San Antonio – event photos by Kara Gomez, Open Book Studios

You have probably heard of sports camps, science camps, or math camps — events designed to both spark interest and teach the subject material. But what about kids who like to write code? Up to a year ago, there was no such event geared towards young programmers such as Debi Pfitzenmaier’s son Aaron.
As a result, Pfitzenmaier founded the San Antonio Youth Code Jam — a three hour event designed to get kids and their parents hooked on coding.
On September 28, Pfitzenmaier held her second annual Code Jam event at Geekdom of San Antonio. Eighty kids and 60 parents attended the event and learned about game design, cyber security, and coding in Java and Python. Pfitzenmaier sees the event both as a fun opportunity for existing code enthusiasts and as a way to interest kids who have not been exposed to writing code.

Code Jam Photos by Kara Gomez, Open Book Studios

“This gives them an opportunity to see where they fit, what interests them the most,” Pfitzenmaier said. “The goal being that they go home and learn more. I’m trying to spark imaginations.”
Pfitzenmaier plans to focus the events on middle school students, but kids attending the event could be anywhere from ages 7 to 15. In a special effort to get more girls into coding, Pfitzenmaier reached out to KLRN – the local PBS affiliate – to bring their local SciGirls club to the last event and reserved 25 seats for them. Pfitzenmaier hopes the opportunity will relieve some of the social pressure girls face regarding tech fields.
“My daughter, for example, really likes science. But it’s not ‘cool’ to like science,” Pfitzenmaier said. “So it was important for me to, this year, find a way to bring more girls into Code Jam, and get more girls interested in seeing how they can participate in STEM fields and careers.”

San Antonio Youth Code Jam events take a free spirited, and somewhat chaotic, approach to code education. After the event introduction, kids and their parents could spend as much time as they wanted on each of the five different learning stations around Geekdom. A team of 45 volunteers from Denim Group, the U.S. Air Force, the University of Texas at San Antonio and other organizations helped teach kids at each station.
E-Line Media Learning Content Producer Katya Hott came all the way from New York to volunteer at the Gamestar Mechanic station. Gamestar Mechanic is an E-Line Media program that lets kids create 2-D games by manipulating characters on a grid, creating game levels, and giving their characters obstacles to face. While the program did not require actual lines of code, Hott wants to inspire the kids to one day make their own games and programs.
“Giving youth the opportunity to explore coding and programming as something they can study for a career path or extracurricular interest is really important,” Hott said. “Not every city has ready opportunities for kids to try out game design or try out programming in other settings to see if they like it.”
Some of the other stations had kids writing Java and Python. To get their feet wet in Java, kids could try out the Code Spells station. In this game, the user helps out friendly digital gnomes by making their wizard cast different spells with lines of Java Code. Denim Group CTO Dan Cornell, who volunteered at the station, was impressed at how quickly the kids learned the fundamentals of coding.
“The most important thing to take away is learning how programs are structured – a type of algorithmic thinking to solve problems,” Cornell said. “From my perspective, working with the kids, it was interesting to see how quickly they learned.”
Cornell hopes that teaching kids the basics will inspire them to develop a passion for coding.
“The people who are really good in the technology industry are the ones that are always forcing themselves to learn more because they are interested in it, because it speaks to something in them at a fundamental level to be able to build things and solve problems,” Cornell said.
To round out the experience, Air Force volunteers taught the kids about cyber security. Their station covered password strength, Facebook safety, e-mail fraud, and mobile device safety. To reinforce the material, kids took quizzes on a website that tested their knowledge of security threats in several different scenarios. A perfect score would get their name up on the wall, and Cyber Security Station Lead Sean Williams was surprised at the dedication the kids showed to get those perfect scores.
“They kept taking it over and over again until they understood what was going on and kept asking questions and stuff,” Williams said. “That made me feel like it sunk in and was worth it.”
While the Code Jam events are aimed at a youth age level, Pfitzenmaier says the event is about the parents just as much as the kids.
“What makes Code Jam very distinctive is the parents have to stay with their children,” Pfitzenmaier said. “What you will see is parents sitting side by side with their children, learning right along with them.”
Pfitzenmaier says that she wants the event to be a welcoming place for children who are introverted or have social anxiety issues to learn around other kids. Parents stay with the kids for the whole three hours, giving them a safety net in a somewhat chaotic social situation. It’s also a great place for parents to bond and learn with their kids over an exciting activity — especially if the parents write code as well.
“It gives the parents an opportunity to show their kids, ‘this is what I do all day long. And it’s fun!’” Pfitzenmaier said. “For the parents to sit there and engage in something that their kids enjoy – that’s huge.”
Pfitzenmaier will hold the San Antonio Youth Code Jam again next year and is currently looking at ways to create similar events in the coming months.

Full disclosure: Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Finding Your Noble Cause

October 14, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 6 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Nick Longo, co-founder and director of Geekdom, photo courtesy of TEDxSanAntonio

At TEDxSanAntonio, Nick Longo, co-founder of Geekdom, walked onto the stage, sat on a chair and started to read from a book labeled “Hope, Dream and Inspire.”
But the story he told wasn’t a fairy tale. In fact, it was Longo’s own entrepreneurial journey and how his experiences and those of Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, led them to create Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space for geeks in the heart of San Antonio. The two-year-old startup has come to be known as “a place where startups are born.”
“Every entrepreneur has a story,” Longo said. “A story of their success and a journey of their failures to get there.”
“I believe we are all entrepreneurs,” Longo said. “We were born this way. It’s in our DNA – some a little and some a lot.”
Kids learn from an early age how to become entrepreneurs from running lemonade stands, mowing lawns, working jobs and lessons in school, Longo said.
“Entrepreneurship is not just business,” he said. “Business is the mindset. Entrepreneurship is the heart set. Because of frustration, desperation or a passion you cannot let go.”
To succeed as an entrepreneur, Longo said he believes people need to find their “noble cause.” But they can only do that when they conquer their fears, he said.
Next, Longo shared “a little bit” of his story.
He recounted how he grew up poor in rough neighborhoods and lived in the projects. And when he was 12, he had a friend named Roman, who was a pale kid with black hair, “who everyone took turns picking on,” Longo said.
“We collected baseball cards together,” he said. “We added aluminum foil to the ends of walkie-talkies to talk to space and into the unknown. We were the different ones.”
Longo told a tale about going to Roman’s house one day and how he stole a $100 bill from Roman’s birthday card. He avoided going over to Roman’s house for the next few weeks for fear of being found out. Then Roman’s mother showed up at his house with all of Roman’s birthday cards in her arms. Longo thought he was in big trouble.
“She told me Roman had an asthma attack the night before and died,” Longo said. “And she handed me those cards and said he would have wanted me to have them. I was never able to say goodbye, never able to say I was sorry and never able to give him that $100 bucks back from his birthday card. I held those cards in my arms like they were him. I was lost. And to this day, I still have those cards.”
For the next 15 years Longo struggled and wandered to find his way. He tried to start different businesses.
“I was in the Air Force. I was a racing Greyhound trainer – the dogs, not the buses,” Longo said.
Then, in 1994, he opened a coffee house in Corpus Christi by maxing out his wife’s credit card.
“After a year, like a lot of other things I tried to do, the coffee house wasn’t really working,” Longo said.
He decided to offer free Internet access.
“What I didn’t know is we ended up being one of the first Internet cafes in the world and I ended up making the first commercial website in Corpus,” he said.
The story spread quickly through the local press and soon Longo’s phone was ringing off the hook with everybody in Corpus wanting him to create a website for them.
“So I started making websites for $500 to $1,000 a pop when I wasn’t making espresso,” Longo said.
No good tools existed for creating websites back then, Longo said. He created the websites but he realized that the work was really hard and time consuming because his customers wanted changes all the time.
“Then one day my world changed forever,” Longo said. “When someone asked for yet another change. I was angry. The coffee house wasn’t doing well and I was desperate not to fail again. In an outburst that could be heard a block away, I yelled these people need software so they can make their own bleeping websites.”
That’s when Longo realized that he should create software to let them do that.
“I found my noble cause,” Longo said. “I would empower and help people get on the web.”
With a dial up modem and a $500 home built computer, Longo set out to take on the software industry, but he didn’t know how to make software. That’s when he had an epiphany.
“No idea I had done alone had worked,” Longo said. “Maybe that was the problem all along. I needed to collaborate with other people that liked what I liked. That had the same passion, the same noble cause. I needed help.”
He teamed up with a regular customer who was a computer programmer. Together they created the Coffeecup HTML editor. They released it in 1996 and it was a hit, Longo said. He made more web design software. He helped “people fulfill their dreams just like I did. This was the noble cause that led me here.”
Next, Longo “skipped forward a few chapters” to recount how Geekdom was created to help entrepreneurs.
“A couple of years ago Graham Weston, the Chairman of Rackspace and myself got together and said wouldn’t it be cool if there was a place where startups were born – not the Internet but a physical place, a place where developers and designers and entrepreneurs could get together and work on their ideas in person,” Longo said. “We would call it Geekdom. You see in the urban dictionary it means a place where more than two geeks gather.”

Geekdom would offer memberships and desks at a low cost so everyone had a chance to meet their team, to build their dream, Longo said. Each member would be asked to give one hour a week of their time back to another member or do a workshop once a month on their expertise, he said.
“The noble cause of Geekdom is to empower people by creating a center where every kind of geek and entrepreneur can go to build a business,” Longo said. “A place where meeting someone in the hallway and sharing an idea would be happenstance and serendipity and something would get built right then and there.”
Geekdom is about creating an organic ecosystem that lets its members build and develop it, Longo said.
“I believe if we take people and place them together to collaborate and help each other they will change the world,” Longo said. “They will fulfill their noble causes.”
He also believes “mentorship is the new classroom.”
“We are all makers of something. Every person we meet knows something we don’t,” Longo said. “I learn from people that are likeminded that share my passions.”
Longo said he didn’t learn this lesson until after he sold his company and that he burnt out because he was working hard all the time.
“I needed someone to turn to who wasn’t there. I needed all of you,” Longo said. “There’s no reason to waste potential. Every person in the wrong job, or kid without a dream yet, can do what we do.”
It’s our responsibility to show them the way, he said.
“I’m an entrepreneur,” Longo said. “I was born this way. I was made this way. I cannot talk to myself or to the unknown for help. I can help you and we can help each other. So what would your story be?”
Longo ended his talk by pulling out a walkie-talkie with an aluminum foil antenna.
“Hey Roman, are we even yet?” Longo asked.

Full disclosure: Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Mind Blown Open at TEDxSanAntonio

October 13, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, welcomes the TEDxSanAntonio crowd to his company’s headquarters, known as The Castle.

TEDxSanAntonio spotlighted urban parks, courthouse architecture, mental illness, sex, death, jail, space exploration, entrepreneurship, antibiotic resistant bacteria and more on Saturday.
A record 500 people attended the daylong event at Rackspace’s headquarters. They listened to 18-minute talks on the overarching theme “Minds Wide Open.” The 19 speakers elicited a whole range of emotions from the audience including laughter and tears.
In addition to the talks, Julia Langenberg, an aerialist, performed an awe-inspiring dance routine in which she climbed, dangled and twirled on fabric hung from the rafters.
Myric Polhemus, director of human resources at H-E-B Grocery Company, encouraged leaders to embrace malcontents in their organizations to lead to greater innovation and creativity.

Nick Longo, founder of CoffeeCup Software and co-founder of Geekdom, shares his entrepreneurial journey at TEDxSanAntonio

Nick Longo, co-founder of Geekdom, a collaborative co-working space in downtown San Antonio, promoted the benefits of entrepreneurship.
“We are all makers of something,” Longo said.
This is for the fourth year for the local TEDx event, which is an offshoot of the exclusive invite-only TED conference held every year in Monterrey. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It is known as a place where people discuss big ideas. Susan Price with Firecat Studio organized the local event along with a group of volunteers.
Rackspace’s Chairman Graham Weston began by welcoming the crowd to Rackspace and acknowledging Jason Thomas, a hero and a former Marine sergeant who helped rescue people during 9-11.
Weston also introduced Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who spearheaded the effort to create BiblioTech, a bookless library filled with digital editions, on the city’s Southside.
Wolff announced the county would be installing a branch of the BiblioTech in the lobby of Rackspace, giving its employees access to all of its 10,000 digital volumes.
The juxtaposition of the first speaker, Anastasia McKenna, known as Miss Anastasia, a professional storyteller at the Twig Bookshop in San Antonio, following the BiblioTech presentation, was perplexing.
McKenna performed excerpts from the children’s classic book “The Gingerbread Man.”
“Joy is the sharing of books,” she said.
Then she pleaded with the audience to read books to their children and to minimize their time in front of screens.
“I want to see more books and less screens in the world,” she said.
People can touch the soul of a child with a book, she said.
“Stories can make a child believe anything is possible,” she said.
Tearfully, McKenna recounted the recent death of her niece and told the audience that no one knows how much time they have on this earth. Don’t plop a child down in front of a screen, when you could take that opportunity to engage them with a book, she said.
In an inspirational talk, Eric Fletcher, an author, speaker and marketing executive, told people not to let benchmarks and measurements lead to limits in their lives.
“Vision is not defined by what the eye can see but by possibility,” Fletcher said.

Jorge Amodio, a Geekdom member, shows off his DIY electronic TEDxSanAntonio name badge

Although his mother received the diagnosis that her son was legally blind at a young age, she didn’t accept it. She enrolled Fletcher in little league and had him participate in the same activities as his peers. That showed Fletcher a disability didn’t make him less of a human being and he shouldn’t allow benchmarks to define the boundaries of his life.
He encouraged everyone to look beyond the labels, boundaries and limits others might place on them and to create a life they want.
Jason Fischer, a psychotherapist, also told the audience that the most destructive word in the world is “need.”
In a rather controversial statement, he said there are no needs. Most people would argue that humans need food, shelter, clothing, love and some money. But Fischer doesn’t agree.
“We don’t need anything at all,” Fischer said, “Nothing is a prerequisite for happiness.”
The word “need” creates a negative emotional response in our psyches, he said. Just using the word can lead to unhappiness, he said.
“You never need to say the word need,” Fischer said. “Whatever you want is perfect. You can live your life accordingly to what you want.”
Except if you’re in prison.
Ryan Cox, an attorney, said one in 30 people are under court supervision or in jail in the U.S. with 2.3 million currently incarcerated.
“We are the largest jailer in the world,” Cox said.
And the problem is getting worse. Sixty percent of the people who leave U.S. prisons return to them within five years, Cox said.
“Our prisons are dehumanizing,” and that leads to recidivism, he said.
Cox said the U.S. should treat its prisoners better. He pointed to Norway’s prison system as one that the U.S. should emulate. They treat their prisoners with dignity and house them in cells that look more like dorm rooms.
“In the U.S. we already spend $40,000 per prisoner annually – we should get a better return on our investment,” Cox said.

Liza Long, an advocate for mental illness care, speaks out at TEDxSanAntonio

Liza Long, who penned the essay “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” in a blog post following the attacks on Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 20 children and six adults dead, gave a heart-wrenching talk on helping children with mental illness.
Long’s teenage son, who she calls Michael, not his real name, has struggled with mental illness since the age of 8 and has been arrested and jailed as a result of his violent outbursts.
“When you’re the mother of a child of mental illness you’re not supposed to talk about it,” Long said.
One in five children in the United States has a serious and debilitating mental disorder today, Long said.
This year, 4,600 young people, between the ages of 10 and 24, will die of suicide, ten times the 437 deaths from cancer, Long said.
Yet the largest treatment centers for mental illness in the U.S. are in the Cook County Jail in Illinois, Riker’s Island Prison and Los Angeles County Jail, Long said.
The reason Long, a single mother of four who lives is Boise, Idaho, wrote the essay and continues to speak out about mental illness is that she wants to change the world and put an end to the stigma about mental illness.
Long received a standing ovation from the crowd.

Dave Sims of Rackspace made this video recapping TEDxSanAntonio.

Full disclosure: Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

Rackspace Sees All Companies Moving to the Hybrid Cloud

October 11, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

All of Rackspace’s customers will be hybrid cloud customers in the future, said Gerardo Dada, the company’s product marketing leader.
San Antonio-based Rackspace, which calls itself the Open Cloud company and co-founded with NASA the Open Stack operating system, has seen its cloud computing business skyrocket in the past few years.
The cloud lets customers operate a “network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.”
Rackspace faces competition in the hybrid cloud market from Amazon Web Services, the number one leader, and other players such as Microsoft, HP Cloud and IBM’s SoftLayer.
Right now, customers can choose from public, private and hybrid clouds.
But a study just published this week from Gartner, a research firm, predicts that most big businesses will have hybrid cloud deployments by 2017.
“Virtualization reduced capital expenses, and standards and automation reduce operational expenses,” Thomas Bittman, vice president and analyst at Gartner, said in a news release. “However, taking the next step of adding usage metrics, self-service offerings and automated provisioning requires investment in technologies without a significant reduction in operational cost. With this in mind, the driving factor for going that next step should primarily be agility.”
Most companies are already using hybrid to an extent, Dada said. They already recognize they’re different types of cloud environments, he said.
“The question is not when hybrid but how,” he said.
Hybrid clouds, the combination of publicly and privately hosted servers and dedicated servers working together, can increase efficiency and save money, Dada said.
For example, many companies do not need exchange servers to host their own email, he said.
“They’re never going to be as good as a specialist,” Dada said.
Companies need to ask themselves what are the right technology applications to be publicly hosted and privately hosted, Dada said. There is not a single answer.
Rackspace recently started hosting Hubspot, a marketing service for small to medium-sized businesses, on a hybrid cloud from a private cloud setting. The company has realized a four times increase in efficiency with the public cloud at half the cost, Dada said.
“Chief Information Officers like public cloud servers because they are built around the “compute as a utility” model, where costs are generally low and users pay by the hour,” according to Rackspace. “But using public infrastructure means you may need to share resources with other tenants and you may lose some of the performance benefits that the private and hybrid clouds offer.”
There’s been so much buzz about the public cloud, Dada said.
“The cloud is powerful and transformational but it has its place,” he said.
The hybrid cloud offers more security than a pure public cloud, Dada said. And it gives companies a path to grow and expand in the future, he said.

UTSA Holds Biannual Entrepreneur Boot Camp

October 6, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Dirk Elmendorf and Pat Condon, co-founders of Rackspace, speaking at an Entrepreneurial Bootcamp at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

To launch a business in college, students must master all kinds of skills.
They might have to make a business plan, find funding, do market research, sell products or services, stay on top of legal issues and intellectual property rights and sometimes figure out manufacturing.
This weekend, 150 University of Texas at San Antonio students got an edge on their competition. They covered these topics in less than eight hours in UTSA’s CITE Technology Entrepreneur Boot Camp. The camp featured ten speakers, including Rackspace Hosting co-founders Pat Condon and Dirk Elmendorf.
“Follow your own path. Don’t follow conventional wisdom necessarily,” Condon said. “Some of the conventional wisdom that we did follow that we shouldn’t of was: don’t serve your customers because you can’t make money doing it. Our history is littered with doing things because a lot of other people were doing it. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should be doing it that way too.”
Condon and Elmendorf discussed the triumphs and pitfalls of their experiences, speaking at length about a time when Rackspace’s customer support was more abysmal than fanatical. They encouraged the students to push forward with their ideas even if they didn’t feel qualified or smart enough to see them through.
“When you read hacker news, Techcrunch, all that stuff — it always feels like the founders are these anointed geniuses that are passed down from – well, there is founder worship,” Elmendorf said. “Because we give this presentation inside Rackspace, I never want someone who is joining to think it was founded by geniuses and they couldn’t contribute. We were idiots! We got lucky and we worked hard. If you can stick it out and do all those things you can make it.”
Other presenters included YUMIX founder Alex Garner, Jackson Walker Attorney William R. Borchers, and It’s 2Cool Ltd. CEO Deb Prost.
“I hope that I can inspire some of these folks to really take that nugget of an idea that they have and do all the blood, sweat, and tears that you have to do to get to where you really can market a product,” Prost said.
Held biannually, the CITE boot camp is open to students and faculty members and is designed to both inform and encourage students towards a life of entrepreneurship. The students came from a wide variety of situations. Some were getting ready to enter the $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition with a team and a product. Others were part of the student CEO organization, part of the Certificate of Technology Entrepreneurial Management program, or simply entrepreneurship-minded students hoping to develop their skills.
“We’re taught in our program that whenever you have the opportunity to sit down and talk to people in the tech space that are from a different perspective, it’s always a good idea,” Business Senior Somer Baburek said.
Baburek is currently in the Business College’s entrepreneurship program and is preparing to enter the $100,000 competition with a medical device that wirelessly monitors fetal heart rates in labor and delivery. She attended the event to gain business knowledge and look for additional engineers for her team.
Engineering Senior Davis Richardson is also preparing for the competition, and attended to get better acquainted with the business side of startups. Richardson will be entering the competition with a device that trains students to design hydraulic systems.
“This is a really interesting opportunity because in the engineering college we spend all of our time looking at how to develop products internally,” Richardson said. “It’s not until here, or in electives, that we really get much insight into how this works outside the design process.”

Ramon Coronado and Tony Yuan at the UTSA Entrepreneurial Bootcamp

Ph.D. Biomedical engineering students Ramon Coronado and Tony Yuan also attended the boot camp to buff their business skills. The two students are in UTSA’s Certificate of Technology Entrepreneurial Management program – an optional track designed to give Ph.D. students extra entrepreneurial training so they can launch their own businesses. Coronado and Yuan are currently preparing to launch Mobile Stem Care – which will help veterinarians take advantage of stem cell advancements.
“We have a lot of science in academia but no one around the department can teach us about business,” Coronado said. “Before this course we didn’t have the chance to see how to translate the technology [to market].”
The event also attracted younger students as well. Sophomore David Barrick is not involved in a competition or an entrepreneurship class, but he does have a few ideas for a tech company and attended to learn more about obtaining patents and talking to investors for seed funding.
“I saw this conference on a Tweet in Twitter for UTSA. I have been thinking of starting a tech company, so I saw this and said, ‘yea, this is for me’” said Barrick.
As of this weekend, 1,300 students have now gone through the CITE Technology Entrepreneurship Boot Camp at UTSA. CITE, short for Center of Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship, is an interdisciplinary center for the colleges of engineering and business directed by Cory Hallam and Anita Leffel. While the boot camp is an achievement for the university, Hallam also sees the event as an essential part of an effort to grow the startup community, and the local economy, of San Antonio.
“We have to feed the pipeline of entrepreneurship in San Antonio, and these are students who will found companies now, found companies later, participate in three day startups, go be part of Geekdom,” Hallam said. “It’s great to be a contributor for San Antonio in that pipeline.”

Bone Bank Allografts Specializes in Tissue Sales

October 3, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

How do you repair a shattered leg, a ruined ligament, or severely burned skin? The answer is both simple, and a bit morbid: You need more human parts. Various bones, tendons, and other “parts” are obtained from organ donors by procurement companies, such as San Antonio’s Bone Bank Allografts, and provided to hospitals for surgery.
This year, however, Bone Bank Allografts has begun processing new human tissues for use in skin grafts and surgeries — and you aren’t going to believe where they get it.
The tissue is called amnion, and it is the innermost membrane in a human placenta – the same tissue that has direct contact with a child in the womb. The membrane is obtained, with consent of the patient, after a C-sections is preformed. The placenta is frozen, boxed up, and sent to Bone Bank Allografts where the amnion membrane is separated from the placenta’s chorion membrane and prepared for use in their new SteriShield product.
“We actually get the tissue from caesarean sections. This is donated tissue, by the mother, and that mother has done all the screening and workup that we would do for any tissue,” Chief Technology Officer James W. Poser said.
Bone Bank Allografts is not the first company to create an amnion product, but it is one of the few leading the way. While the medical benefits of amnion have been known for the last 30 years, the tissue has only started seeing use in the last four years – particularly in ophthalmic (eye-related) use.
So what are these benefits? Amnion membranes have unique biological factors that help heal wounds without producing scars. It contains particular elements, called cytokines and growth factors, which will regulate the body’s response to trauma, infection, and inflammation – resulting in better overall healing of a wound. The tissue is dried and sterilized into a thin, flexible sheet of material that surgeons can use in a variety of applications both topical and surgical.
Amnion can be used as a wound-cover in burns, skin ulcers, and general skin grafting procedures where it helps the graft better take to the patient’s body. In corneal abrasions or burns, the membrane can be placed over an eye wound to prevent the eye from scaring and permanently blurring a patient’s vision or causing them lasting pain.
Amnion is equally useful in surgery. Dr. Richard Guyer, an orthopedic surgeon at the Texas Back Institute, has been working with amnion for over two years.
“It prevents there from being any scar tissue over the sack that holds the nerves, called the Dura,” Guyer said. “So we use a lot of these amnion membranes almost routinely to prevent scars.”
Scar tissue around nerve clusters can cause pinched nerves and result in back pain after surgery. Typical surgeries, which can benefit from amnion, include disk herniation, neck fusions, and spinal decompressions.
Amnion is also very useful in tendon and ligament repairs. By wrapping tendons, ligaments, and any other moving components during surgery, a surgeon can prevent scar tissue buildup around those components and preserve a patient’s range of motion. Restricted movement is a common issue when repairing an Achilles tendon.
“One of the problems that is going to happen is this thing is going to freeze up on you,” Poser said. “All that scar tissue is going to grab that thing and hold to it. You want to prevent that from happening. One way to do that is to wrap it in Amnion.”
While Amnion products like SteriShield will be more expensive for surgeries in the short run, the tissue will unquestionably improve quality of life for the patients, Poser said. Previously, surgeons used “fat flaps” – which were literally thin slices of body fat – to protect tendons and nerve areas.
“We have used a number of other things that have not really been satisfactory. It seems to be the best thing that we have today,” Guyer said.
Because it has only been used for a short time, there is no definitive study that proves Amnion will create any cost savings for hospitals. It does, however, seem to reduce the need for secondary surgeries as well as reduce patent pain. According to Guyer, Amnion does make follow-up surgeries easier because of the reduction of scar tissue.
“In surgery we make different sizes of openings, so if we have to go back for another reason.. ..then the dissection is much easier because the properties of the membrane prevent scaring from adhering to whatever it’s covering,” Guyer said.

UTSA’s New Dean of Business Focuses on Entrepreneurship

September 30, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Gerard Sanders, the new dean of the College of Business at UTSA.

Last summer, Gerard Sanders became the new dean of the College of Business at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Sanders comes from the Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business and brings numerous credentials in management and finance, including a doctorate in management from the University of Texas. Working with Center for Innovation and Technology Director Cory Hallam, Sanders is pursuing some ambitious goals for student entrepreneurship.
In the next five years, the Business College wants to launch ten student tech startups annually. The school currently turns out two to three startups a year between its biannual $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition and its faculty research.
Sanders and Hallam have multiple objectives in mind to accomplish this goal, starting with changes to the College of Business.
“There are a lot of good things happening here. There is a lot of potential. But we are spread a little too thin, and we need to focus,” Sanders said. “Entrepreneurship is one area that will receive that focus.”
Sanders said the college suffers from an overabundance of majors, minors, and concentrations that often overlap and drain administrative resources. By pruning and simplifying those degree plans, he hopes to allow students more class options with fewer concentrations so they can get more out of their education.
“Students can get all these same classes within a smaller program infrastructure,” Sanders said.
Administrative and financial resources will now be focused more than ever on student entrepreneurship training. The college plans to double its entrepreneur-focused faculty and all new faculty hires, regardless of discipline, will need to have an interest in entrepreneurship as well as some private sector entrepreneurial experience.
The Business College is also working on a new, more flexible curriculum structure that would allow students to learn several entrepreneurial skills required to start a business in the same three hour course.
“We want the educational experience to mirror closer to the actual entrepreneurial problems, and address the educational need there,” Sanders said.
Hallam also wants to open up graduate level Business College classes to students in other departments such as computer science – giving those students more entrepreneurial tools while also adding diverse perspectives to the classes.
“It actually builds the quality of the class because you end up with very good students from different disciplines which then expands the thought process of the class,” Hallam said.
Hallam hopes to create a similar approach with the CITE (Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship) program’s $100,000 Student Technology Venture competition, which pairs business and engineering students to create products. The goal is to expand the competition to include students in computer science, material science, physics, and other tech departments who could work with business students to launch a technology company as well. In the five years since the competition began, 650 students have participated and a total of 85 business plans have been presented. Hallam believes getting students from other departments in the mix will significantly grow the competition and result in more companies.
Of course, none of those startups will get off the ground without some financial backing. To that end, Sanders and Hallam plan to create an endowed student startup seed fund. The endowment — which is simply a large chunk of money in a bank that generates interest — would have to be several million dollars to be effective, but once established it would provide a better way to fund startups.
“Right now, if we have student startups that are struggling for money, Cory has to get on the phone and call someone and say, ‘Hey, $2000 would really help this little company,’” Sanders said.
“We need to grow that donor base and endow it so that you are not having to ask every year but now know you have built an endowment that funds this many companies a year,” Hallam said.
There are a few more ways the College of Business will boost entrepreneurship as well. This October, the UTSA student CEO organization will partner with Venturelab to hold a 3 Day Startup event on campus similar to other 3DS events held at Geekdom of San Antonio.
To facilitate long-term entrepreneurial collaboration between students, Sanders wants to create an entrepreneur-only dorm space in one of the current residence halls. The space will even be equipped with offices and a board room where students can hold meetings with clients. The Business College is still in the initial planning stages for the space but plan to have it set up in three to four years.
While UTSA’s future goals for student entrepreneurship are important, it’s also important to look where it has been. UTSA’s student CEO organization has more than 100 student owned and operated business. The Business College’s CITE program has seen more than 1000 students go through their tech boot camp. The biannual $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition averages around 20 competing companies a semester and the exiting companies have applied for a total of 12 patents.
Multiple student startups exiting CITE have already gone on to hire experienced CEOs, create prototypes, and raise significant funding. Examples of such companies are Technophysics Solutions, Leto Solutions, Cyclosa, Lapara Medical, and Invictus – some of which have already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even if students do not move forward with their initial venture, Hallam is confident that they will be able to use their acquired entrepreneurial skills to start additional companies in the future.
“We are trying to unlock their inner entrepreneur,” said Hallam. “We would expect that the rest go out and work in companies and launch products or services – work five to ten years – and at that point they are in the right age bracket to understand the market niche they are familiar with, they understand the business they are in, and at that point they tap into their inner entrepreneur and spin off a company…and 10 years after that we ask them for a donation.”

A Storify Wrap-up of the Nonprofit Tech Summit at Rackspace

September 28, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Five Nonprofit Organizations Pitch Startups at Tech Summit

September 27, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Five nonprofit teams pitched their ventures at the Nonprofit Technology Summit Friday at Rackspace.
The teams went through a 3 Day Startup program at Geekdom to prepare their presentations.
Patrick Currie with Boy With a Ball San Antonio pitched a youth mentorship program to reach young people and transform them to be leaders.
Boy With a Ball San Antonio is seeking $70,000 in seed stage funding, Currie said. It plans to make money by charging companies a $5,000 program fee to train 15 young people to be employees.
Joshua Singer, 16, and Canzhi Ye, 17, two high school students, pitched Apps for Aptitude, which uses mobile phone apps to fight illiteracy.
The company’s first app is Flashcards for a Cause to help students study their course materials. Students provide the content to other students. The market is high school and college students with smartphones, Ye said.
Revenue comes from in-app purchases, Ye said. The company plans to market its apps through teachers and bloggers, he said.
Apps for Aptitude was seeking financial support, additional volunteers, legal support and help with marketing and advertising.
Charles Lewis Blunt pitched RoTenGo, a portable game that is a hybrid of ping-pong and tennis. He is seeking to get the game adopted at companies as well as schools throughout San Antonio.
The game originated in Barbados, Blunt said. It’s called “poor man’s tennis,” he said.
The equipment costs around $3,000 per company and RoTenGo can either train coaches at the company or they can facilitate it, Blunt said.

Five nonprofit teams went through the 3 Day Startup program at Geekdom and then pitched their ventures at the Nonprofit Technology Summit at Rackspace

Gemini Ink “helps people create and share the human story.” The company wants to create a literary lounge café, a community space that serves coffee, beer and wine and focuses on reading and writing, said Evie Reyes, managing director.
Gemini Ink already has a loyal audience of 15,000 annually and creating a literary lounge will allow it to expand its space and readers and writers in San Antonio need a space of their own, she said.
Gemini Ink needs a capital investment of $20,000 and estimates that it can generate net revenue of $19,800 a year.
Potential neighborhood competitors are Madhatters, Halcyon and Starbucks.
“We’re trying to be an art space that is also a café,” said Sheila Black, artistic director.
Lastly, Bob Deschner and Dottie Goodsun pitched Veterans Team Recovery Integrated Immersion Program, known as Vet TRIIP, to provide stress reduction massage services to veterans for free. The company wants to branch out into the corporate world and charge them to bring paid staff into the corporations to conduct massage programs.

Rackspace Adds Schlitterbahn and Other Hybrid Cloud Customers

September 23, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Rackspace announced Tuesday that it has landed Schlitterbahn Waterparks and Resorts as a new customer for its hybrid cloud hosting services.
Schlitterbahn, based in New Braunfels, has water parks in Texas and Kansas City. The company needed a computing infrastructure that allowed it to scale its operations during times of peak demand.
Rackspace already counted Six Flags as an amusement park customer.
“We love having local customers,” said John Engates, Rackspace’s Chief Technology Officer. “It makes us very proud.”
Rackspace was able to give Schlitterbahn a hybrid cloud that allows the company the flexibility to roll servers up or down, according to spikes in year-round activity.
“We chose Rackspace for the flexibility,” said Pat Symchych with Schlitterbahn. Its website gets three million visits during the season and a few hundred during the off-season. They moved to Rackspace after its site crashed on July 4th.
“Rackspace support is unbelievable,” Symchych said. “They are better than any other tech firm I’ve worked with or that I’ve had to work with. It doesn’t matter what time of day or who I talk to they get it done.”
Schlitterbahn is one of Rackspace’s newest enterprise customers. Another, Spencer’s with 700 stores in 48 states and a popular SpiritHalloween.com site, is already seeing heavy traffic for Halloween. CERN, Emerson Electric, Fidelity, Mazda and Sony Playstation were recently announced as customers as well.
“This idea of the hybrid cloud is something we’re seeing a lot more companies take advantage of,” Engates said. “We hear a lot about the move to the public cloud. But we think they’re a lot of companies that mix form factors in this hybrid cloud…We continue to add other products into that mix. Giving customers the right fit with the right infrastructure.”