Category: San Antonio (Page 40 of 62)

A year ago, Graham Weston and Nick Longo created Geekdom to build a startup community in San Antonio.
“We wanted to put entrepreneurs and geeks together and watch the sparks fly,” said Weston, chairman and founder of Rackspace and co-founder of Geekdom.
“It way exceeded our expectations,” Weston said.
Geekdom is now the state’s largest co-working space and technology incubator with 500 members occupying 45,000 square feet at the Weston Centre downtown.
“We’re adding 40 members a month every month,” Weston said. “We look forward to doubling again next year.”
On Wednesday, hundreds of people turned out to celebrate Geekdom’s one-year anniversary at the Weston Centre downtown. The Spazmatics band entertained the crowd along with Comedian Steve Trevino. At the party, Geekdom showed off its new Geekbus, which SparkEd’s Louie Pacilli heads up. Starting in January, he will visit area schools three times a week in the bus to teach technology skills. Geekdom also provided tours of the co-working site. And rides on a mechanical bull.
In just a year, Geekdom has helped more than 50 startup companies.
“We really think Geekdom can create a heartbeat for the technology community in San Antonio,” Weston said. “So many people believed that Geekdom wouldn’t work in San Antonio. Little did we know there was so much pent up demand for a place for the geek community to come together to rally around.”
Geekdom has become the place where technology entrepreneurs connect and collaborate, said Nick Longo, mentor-in-chief, cofounder and executive director of Geekdom. He joked that he started the site so he could live vicariously through the startups and founders.
“In my mind, I’ve done 200 startups,” Longo said. “It hasn’t cost me a dime. I don’t have to guess about the future. I have a bright outlook that I’m going to succeed.”
In reality, Longo has helped mentor dozens of companies at Geekdom during its first year. He’s also volunteered at 3 Day Startup and he has spent countless hours consulting with startup founders. Geekdom has held more than 220 tech events and programs so far including SparkEd, a weekend program which teaches at-risk middle school students how to build a robot, program it, build a business and a website.
Geekdom also recently created a video and sound studio on its 10th floor. It also has a 3-D printer and other equipment in its Makers Lab focused on robotics and circuit work on the 11th floor. And early next year, Geekdom will open the Open Cloud Academy on the 6th floor to train and certify military veterans and the public to become system administrators.
Geekdom is a magnet that’s drawing people from all over the state interested in
technology and startups, said Shelly Brenckman, marketing director for Startup Aggieland. She drove from College Station with four Texas A&M students for the Geekdom party. They spent the night at the Hyatt Regency on the Riverwalk. The trip was all worth it because the students got to meet and talk with Weston, a graduate of Texas A&M and highly successful businessman, and visit Geekdom, Brenckman said.
“Everything we’ve done at Aggieland Startup, we’ve modeled after what Geekdom has done,” Brenckman said.
Weston is changing the landscape of Texas technology and education, Brenckman said.
“I don’t think people realize how much Graham is doing to help Texas,” she said.
Geekdom has also expanded to San Francisco and will open that site in April, Longo said. And it’s eyeing expansion into Asia, South America and Europe.
“We’re considering other cities as well,” Weston said. “I think the exciting thing is that so many people have heard the name Geekdom and they know just a little about it. Yet it resonates so quickly they want to be a part of it.”
Other cities have approached Weston about establishing a Geekdom in their communities.
“It’s really the pioneer of open ideas,” Weston said. “Everyone is working on different things but everyone around you at Geekdom wants you to succeed. They will take the time to help you.”
Geekdom is about going from an idea to a fundable startup, Weston said. To support that, Geekdom offers a fund, which invests $25,000 in startups. Every month, a board meets to review the applications and interview the entrepreneurs.
“A number of companies that have been started are from former Rackers,” Weston said. “Geekdom has been part of helping them realize their entrepreneurial dream.”
The Geekdom process has happened naturally, Weston said. It’s a supportive, collaborative environment and company founders can learn and grow with the help of seasoned mentors. The entrepreneurial process is not easy, but it can be rewarding.
“It’s exciting to be in charge of your destiny,” Weston said.
ZippyKid’s CEO and Founder Vid Luther would agree with that statement. He moved his company into Geekdom when it opened. He had five employees. Today, he has 10 employees.
“It’s just a cool working space from ZippyKid’s perspective,” Luther said.
For the community, Geekdom has served as a catalyst to bring together the city’s technology industry and to put a spotlight on all that’s going on here.
“A lot of people didn’t realize how much technology talent was here until Geekdom,” Luther said. “I think Geekdom is a movement and people will remember this as what made San Antonio show up on the nation’s technology map. This is just a start.”
Paul Ford, vice president at Soft Layer, agreed.
“This is the new style of doing business and Geekdom has been at the forefront of the technology movement in San Antonio,” Ford said. “It’s remarkable what they accomplished in a year.”
Rebecca Schenker, an architect with a self-described geeky side, joined Geekdom last Spring because she liked the community.
“I like the idea of having a place where you can be a part of something bigger,” she said. “It’s fun and it’s educational.”
Jon Dobbertin and Dan Garcia, two of the co-founders of CallGrader, which just completed the DreamIt incubator program in Atlanta attended the party and credited Geekdom for helping the company get off the ground.
“For us, Geekdom was the starting point,” Dobbertin said. “We moved in last December and we were one of the first companies based there. It helped us immensely. It’s definitely a great catalyst.”
Being around other startups and like-minded people helped a lot, Garcia said.
Monk’s Toolbox, a software start which automates the back end of breweries, just recently moved into Geekdom following its formation at 3 Day Startup.
“Geekdom’s about mentorship, collaboration and camaraderie,” said Zac Harris, Chief Monk. “It’s probably one of the best things to happen in my career trajectory. It’s a breath of fresh air for San Antonio.”

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Lapara Medical beat five teams to win first place at the University of Texas at San Antonio biannual $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition.
The Lapara Medical team includes business majors Warren Norket, Shelbi Chrislip and Duncan Hughes, and engineering majors Richard Canty, Adam Daufen, Luis Davila and Justin Ernest.
“We thought we had a really good chance of winning, but there was some healthy competition,” Daufen said.
Lapara Medical created a prototype for a laparoscopic cooling system for kidney surgeries. The system is more effective and less invasive than the current method, which involves making a large incision in the patient and placing ice packs next to the organ. The student’s laparoscopic device requires much smaller half-inch incisions, cools the organ more easily, and keeps the organ at a more consistent temperature — allowing surgeons a larger window of time to operate without risking damage to the organ. It also results in less scarring, less pain, and a shorter hospital stay.

UTSA engineering students Davila and Canty designed the device with the help of Yusheng Feng – who runs the Computational Bioengineering and Control Lab at UTSA. The students worked on prototypes for more than a year.

Following the competition and finals, the students have little time to rest — their startup needs to incorporate, move into new offices, restructure and hire a seasoned CEO like their mentor, Mr. Rubén Zamorano, currently CEO of Bexar Medical Inc. He has mentored five teams in CITE competitions. Lapara Medical might also change its name to avoid sounding limited to laparoscopic devices.
As the winners, the team will receive $100,000 in cash and services from the competition’s sponsors. They will receive legal help from the Cox Smith law firm and office space for a year from the San Antonio Technology Center.
The Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship – or CITE – hosted the competition to give students hands-on experience as early stage entrepreneurs.
“It pairs up seniors of engineering and seniors of business to turn their innovations and business plans into real start-up potential,” CITE Director Cory Hallam said.
In addition to Lapara Medical, Jack Rabbit and Western Immersion Engineering finished second and third. The other teams included Gear Flux, Minesweep and Wind Hawk.
The Jack Rabbit is a remote controlled vehicle jack designed by engineering student David Hughes. It can be driven under a disabled vehicle and, while working in tandem with another Jack Rabbit, can lift the disabled car and actually move it across a vehicle shop floor. Justin Ernst, Luke Walker and Brooke Forest and Hughes founded the startup. They plan to move forward with their product after conducting additional market research and making design improvements. Jack Rabbit has just recently brought on marketing major Alan Schaffler and finance major Tim Nieland. The team was excited to get second place.
“Once we placed, we just were like ‘whoa we just placed!’ — we can actually start this company, we can actually go somewhere with it,” Walker said.

So far, the team has spent $1,200 and they need around $1,500 more to create a fully functioning prototype. Hughes said that if they could raise around $25,000, they could work with a manufacturing company and get the product to market much faster.
Western Immersion Engineering’s RowdySim 240 is a motion gaming chair that moves and pitches when used with racing games or flight simulators. Team lead Breanna Oliver is confident that the product will sell. She has some interested investors and has already sold the prototype that her team presented.
CITE Director Hallam said that while a few of the many startups created in the CITE competition are in the process of becoming successful companies, the students will more often license their inventions to an established company.
“We are equipping our undergraduates with the ability to analyze and prototype any new product,” Hallam said.
In the program, the students learned to work together, negotiate and take a product to market by researching price and competition. Just like a real business, the teams can fire members who are not cooperating or pulling their weight. At mid-semester, industry professionals visit and drill students with questions.
“I think I learned more in the (CITE) program than all my classes combined,” Walker said. “You actually take what they tell you and put it to use. You go through problems and have to figure them out yourself; no one’s going to help you, really. It’s hands on learning is what it is.”
For first place winner Lapara Medical, the future is exciting but still very uncertain. At present, the team needs to raise $330,000 in their first round of funding to start the animal clinical trials for their product. And eventually, they can go to the Food and Drug Administration seeking approval for human trials – a step that will cost them a total of $3.4 million. The team plans to pitch in the first $49,000. It’s a big step for the students, but for now they are just grateful for the opportunity.
“Thanks to UTSA’s CITE competition we get to just go in and just have our own business,” Daufen said.

By RANDY LANKFORD
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Magaly Chocano, CEO of Sweb Development, knows success sometimes requires reinvention, whether it’s of herself or her business. After coming to San Antonio from Spain to get her college degree in communications, Chocano saw her first iPhone and realized communications was about to move in an entirely new direction.
“I lived in San Antonio for four years and then left and came back in 2004,” the Madrid native explains. “I didn’t really have a specific career path or trajectory.
“I worked at Bromley Communications for about four-and-a-half years and I learned a tremendous amount there. But I wanted to get out on my own. I thought, ‘If I don’t try to do something now, then when?’ So I resigned and started my website development business in late summer of 2008. No sooner did I get the doors open, than the economy tanked. My timing couldn’t have been worse. I had to really think fast and make a quick turn.”
Chocano credits a three-day weekend startup workshop with the brainstorm that saved Sweb.
“I had my iPhone and I was as tech-savvy as the average consumer. I liked what mobile technology could do but I didn’t know a whole lot about it. I was first introduced to Twitter in 2008 at a startup workshop. When I saw what was possible I was thinking, ‘This is nuts. I really need to understand this.’ There were aspects of mobile communications I hadn’t even begun to realize but I felt like we were just on the tip of the iceberg and I wanted to dive in. I could see mobile apps were going to be huge. That opened up a whole new area of marketing for most companies.”
And a whole new line of business for Chocano. Sweb Development would start creating smartphone applications in addition to traditional websites.
As is the case with most visionaries, there were plenty of people telling Chocano hers was a bad idea. “Everyone was saying ‘iPhones are too expensive. They’ll never catch on. They’re just a fad.’ But I could see they were going to be a key part of the way people communicated in the future.”
Chocano started small, creating apps for some of her existing website customers in San Antonio. The earliest ones were novelties attracting a small but enthusiastic audience. “No one was putting any budget into developing apps. Most people didn’t know what they were or how they could impact their business,” Chocano says.
“We got our first big hit from a company in Washington, D.C. They commissioned an app from us that was our breakthrough. It was built for iPhones and when I went back to sell them a second version for Blackberry (Androids weren’t even on the horizon back then), they said no. They didn’t have the budget for it.
“I was thinking, ‘If they can’t afford another app then nobody can.’ That must have been spring of 2009 and I thought I really had to refocus and come up with something that would sustain my company. That’s when I had the idea of creating this online do-it-yourself application building tool. That’s when Sweb Apps was born. It was the very first online platform where you could build your own app.”
Even with the growth of the use of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, many consumers still consider apps something just short of voodoo.
“We get a lot of that,” laughs Chocano. “People are definitely a lot more educated about websites and apps than they used to be but there’s still a lot of confusion about what’s the real difference between the two. Native applications are true software development if you will, where a mobile-optimized website is really just a mobile viewing of your website.
“We have clients who already have their web systems in place and they want to build an extension of that. AJE – Al Jazeera English is one of our clients and they needed an iPad app to stream all of their programming. So we built that for them. We also built an ABC app to teach people Arabic for them.
“Other clients, like U.S. Global Investors, wanted to have all their blogs and tickers and all of their information in applications so we built that for them. And some clients start with a website and then realize it really makes sense to move over to mobile as well. So we develop pretty much everything for them.”
Molly Cox, a marketing and communications consultant working with the city’s SA2020 volunteer coordination project, says the work Sweb did in updating the initiative’s website and creating the accompanying native smartphone application went beyond awesome to “stupid awesome.”
“We had an idea for a volunteer sign-up website that was sort of Match.com meets Netflix meets Groupon but couldn’t find the technology to do it anywhere. Magaly was not only able to do what we wanted, but created the whole thing from scratch. It’s just stupid awesome.”
Sweb Development also provides social media marketing for clients who want to have a presence in communities like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Chocano, now 38, feels like she’s found her place in the high-tech community and is looking forward to the next opportunity.
“We’re just moving at lightspeed with what we can do within native applications themselves. It’s really exciting to see how it’s growing. It’s just amazing. Little by little, we’ve built our knowledge base to where we are today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?”

BY RANDY LANKFORD
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Dr. Cameron Powell, a San Antonio obstetrician, likes to joke about the only time he was ever propositioned in a church parking lot. When Trey Moore, a software developer, invited him to have coffee in 2004 Powell assumed it was to talk about a doctor for his wife.
But Moore wasn’t concerned with just one baby. He wanted to talk about thousands.
Referring to the cutting-edge mobile technology of the day, a PalmPilot, Moore asked, “If you could see any information on a device like this, that would transform the way you practice medicine for yourself and for your patients, what would it be?”
Powell had a ready answer.
“I’m never just sitting at the mom’s bedside while she’s in labor. I’m seeing patients, I’m scrubbing up, I’m in surgery, I could be in my office, I could be anywhere. And I generally rely on the nurse to relay to me the condition of the mother verbally; just describe what’s happening with the baby’s heart tracing and the mother’s contraction patterns. If I could see that waveform data on a device like that in real-time that would change everything.”
And it has.
Fast forward 18 months from that initial meeting and Powell and Moore were keynote speakers at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, explaining their new way in which doctors could monitor patients’ conditions from anywhere in the world.
Today, the company Moore and Powell founded, Airstrip Technologies, serves thousands of patients in hundreds of hospitals with its AppPoint software platform, securely sending patient information directly from hospital monitoring systems, bedside devices and electronic health records to a clinician’s mobile device.
Airstrip’s development platform enables the creation of device-neutral applications able to scale and adapt to an ever-changing world of mobile operating systems and hardware. FDA-cleared, CE-marked and allowing for compliance with HIPAA regulations, the AirStrip platform delivers live waveform and other relevant clinical data, not just to obstetricians, but to healthcare professionals in numerous fields such as cardiology, telemetry, home healthcare and geriatrics.
“The OB application is the proof of concept for the broader suite of what we do,” explains the company’s Chief Strategy Officer Bruce Brandes. “In fact, one in six babies born in the U.S. today is protected by AirStrip OB.”
Most of that meteoric growth has taken place since the introduction of Apple’s iPhone in 2009. “We had a handful of customers,” says Brandes, “but when the iPhone came out and opened up Apple’s Software Developer’s Toolkit, Trey saw that and shifted all the development from Windows to the iPhone. ‘This is the future of mobility,’ he said, ‘this device.’ That’s when we really started to scale in earnest.”
AirStrip has not only increased its size, according to Brandes, it’s also expanded its scope.
“We’re expanding the platform to include all the other elements of data a physician or team of physicians needs to see. Not only when they’re within the hospital but increasingly, as the reimbursement model of healthcare shifts from yesterday’s that’s based on an episode of care to today, where it’s based on clinical outcomes and ultimately to tomorrow, when it will be based on population health from chronic diseases, you’re going to see a shift in the use of our application.
“AirStrip will be of use not only in the hospital but across the entire continuum of care, so that we’re mobilizing data pre-hospital, before the patient ever arrives, in the ambulance for example, all the way through monitoring those patients who are at high risk in their homes so we can proactively intervene before an event happens that sends them to the hospital.”
Dr. Jane Atkerson, a San Antonio physician who has seen AirStrip work at the Baptist Health System, says she wouldn’t want to be without it. “I’ve been an AirStrip user since it started. The speed at which the screens upload, going seamlessly between data and tracings, is wonderful. I’ve made it part of my everyday care for my patients in labor.”
Brandes sees a day when mobile technology will render distance irrelevant in patient care.
“We’re riding the coattails of this mobility revolution. What we’re uniquely focused on doing is riding that revolution to specifically leverage mobility to address the challenges healthcare’s always faced that have never been able to solve because it took a transformational technology like mobility to change the way in which things work.
“We like to say our technology essentially eliminates all the traditional geographical boundaries that have historically restricted healthcare. You could have a cardiologist in New York City consulting on a patient in rural West Virginia. It could be someone in a remote area of Africa. And we’re seeing that today. Our clients are using this now.”
And it all started with a cup of coffee.