Category: San Antonio (Page 42 of 62)

The TechStars Cloud is open for business and accepting applications, said Jason Seats, managing director.
“If someone puts in their application right now the deadline is in November, the chances of me having meaningful interaction with the team is much higher,” he said. “That’s the value of hitting me up right now.”
The TechStars Cloud, a branch of TechStars based in Boulder, Colo., is an accelerator program aimed at startup companies focused on cloud computing. The first class of 11 teams to go through the cloud-themed program graduated last April.
The TechStars Cloud focuses on creating new “plumbing” or infrastructure products for the Internet. But Seats also sees great growth opportunities in the consumer side of the cloud.
“I don’t want people to be overly restrictive,” Seats said. “While I do think the sweet spot is infrastructure stuff it’s a whole big world.”
Services like Dropbox, Spotify, AppleTV have changed consumer habits. Seats see so many other areas ripe for disruption including e-mail.
Seats did this post a week ago on TechStars explaining why startups should apply for the TechStars Cloud accelerator.
The next program begins Jan. 14th. TechStars Cloud will take approximately 10 to 12 teams. Solo founders are at a selection disadvantage, Seats said. Teams of two or more people are given greater consideration, he said.
Each team receives $18,000 and access to $100,000 convertible debt. They also get a package of services including free hosting, valued at more than $200,000.
In addition, a group of local investors backed nearly all of the companies last year. A fund set up to invest in the TechStars Cloud companies raised $2.5 million from 25 investors and awarded an average of $250,000 to 10 of the companies. The fund did not invest in one company.
Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace, and Graham Weston, co-founder and Chairman of Rackspace, are the anchor investors in a new fund that is going to be supporting both the next TechStars class and other investments in cloud computing. The fund is expected to be around $6 million to $8 million.
“Our hope is to invest it in the first half of next year,” said John Mosher, managing partner of the fund.
“It’s a fund of San Antonio based investors that are going to be investing in the majority of the TechStar companies,” Mosher said.
Out of the 25 investors in the last fund, all came from San Antonio except one, Mosher said.
The application deadline for TechStars Cloud is Nov. 4th. Seats will host TechStars Cloud for Day Nov. 3rd at Geekdom, the 10th and 11th floors of the Weston Centre in downtown, featuring some alumni from the previous class. TechStars Cloud will be based on the 10th floor next year.
“If anybody is interested and just wants to ask a question, I’m very receptive to that,” Seats said. “Now is the time because I have the time.”

Years ago, companies operated their own power plants to ensure they would have electricity.
Today, they simply plug into the local utility.
That’s the trend happening with nonprofit organizations and cloud computing. Instead of running their own servers at their offices, nonprofit organizations are hosting their e-mail, software, hardware and other applications in the cloud, said Graham Weston, co-founder and Chairman of Rackspace Hosting in San Antonio.
“Our goal is to help charitable organizations here in town utilize the cloud and lower their costs,” Weston said. “There’s so much money wasted on IT every year.”
The cloud is the ability to buy software and storage on the Web, Weston said.
“Computing is about power. It’s like electricity. Computing is turning into a utility,” Weston said. “There’s really an opportunity for your IT folks to add a lot more value. IT goes from something slow to the ability to do things in seconds.”
Weston delivered the opening speech at the third annual Nonprofit Technology Summit on Friday at Rackspace’s headquarters. Rackspace and the San Antonio Area Foundation’s Center for Nonprofit Support sponsored the event, which attracted a few hundred nonprofit officials.
Some of the nonprofit organizations attending the day-long event included Family Services Association, Accion Texas, South Texas Blood and Tissue Center, SAMMinistries, San Antonio Children’s Museum and Communities in Schools.
The hour-long sessions included advice on leveraging the Cloud, building culture, project management, tips for building an effective website, marketing and social media tips and resources for nonprofit agencies.
“This is about modernizing IT infrastructure to keep pace with change today,” Weston said.
In the past, to send out e-mail to 1,000 people, a nonprofit agency had to buy a mail server and get an IT person to get it up and keep it running, Weston said. But today, in the cloud world, nonprofit organizations can pay for e-mail service and an e-mail newsletter by the month.
The “pay as you go” software as a service model and cloud computing services and hosting that can ramp up to meet the demands of a growing nonprofit organization has made life easier for nonprofit agencies, Weston said.
“All of the things that the IT department had to do for you in the last 20 years are really low value stuff,” Weston said.
By putting services into the cloud, a nonprofit agency can then focus on what they do that matters, Weston said.
“It’s so you can do valuable stuff,” he said. “No donor cares about your IT stuff…..Because what you do is really important.”
Everyone has IT problems and Rackspace has built its business on solving them, Weston said. The company has grown so rapidly to become the largest Web hosting company in the world hosting more than 1 in 100 sites online, he said.
“In a decade, there will be no one using their own server,” Weston said. “It’s a transformation in the way IT is done.”
Weston also gave the nonprofit leaders some background on how Rackspace has transformed itself from a startup company with just a handful of employees 13 years ago into San Antonio’s largest technology company with 4,500 employees and $1 billion in annual revenue.
In 2005, Rackspace made the decision to expand into the Windsor Park Mall in Windcrest, on the Northeast side.
“It was a mall. It went downhill and now it’s an office building,” Weston said. “It’s the biggest recycling project in town.”
Rackspace transformed a run-down mall into a vibrant tech campus and donated more than 1,100 tons of steel to Habitat for Humanity and other goods like old toilets, shelving and fixtures, in the process.
“We’re also recycling this entire part of town,” he said.
In 2005, Rackspace had to decide whether to build a new building that wouldn’t be ready for years, expand in Raleigh, North Carolina, or refurbish the old mall. Despite initial opposition within Rackspace, the company decided to move into the mall.
“We were ready to come out of the garage. We had been running the place like a startup,” Weston said. “We needed a place we could go where the furniture worked.”
Every Racker, as Rackspace employees call themselves, wanted the future headquarters to be a place of pride, Weston said.
But many Rackers felt they deserved to “be somewhere better than an old mall on the NE side,” Weston said. “There was really violent opposition to coming over here.”
Safety was one of the concerns. And the site developer quoted Weston a price of $4 million to $5 million to build a fence around the property to secure it. Instead, Weston put that money into a Rack-Gives-Back Foundation.
“We wanted to embrace the community rather than fencing ourselves off from it,” he said. “By being here, maybe we can make it better than it is.”
The area has improved since Rackspace moved in. Starbucks put a coffee shop right across the street, which Weston says is the second busiest in town behind the one at USAA. And the YMCA moved into an old abandoned Target store. Rackspace also works with all the schools in the area.
“Any Racker you talk to today will have tremendous pride” Weston said. “This became an inspiring mission. Instead of a negative today it is positive.
And Rackspace’s motto is to make sure that Rackers feel like they are “valued members of a winning team on an inspiring mission,” Weston said.
Following the day of seminars, Rackspace provided a tour of its headquarters for the nonprofit agencies including trips down its circular slide.
Monica Vasquez, operations manager for the San Antonio Children’s Museum, attended the summit to learn about the latest technology offerings and how they can enhance the museum’s early childhood development efforts.
“We’re like many other nonprofits that have technology that’s old and needs to be refurbished,” Vasquez said.
The museum wants to incorporate new technology into its exhibits when it moves from Houston Street downtown to Broadway across from Lion’s Park by 2015. It wants to explore technology interfaces like touch screens and interactive displays that can help a child learn ABCs, Vasquez said.
“How can technology be an additional component to enhance the tools we already have,” she said.
During the session on Rackspace’s cloud services, Jason Mata, IT infrastructure manager for the San Antonio Area Foundation, told the crowd that his foundation has already switched from managed servers to the private cloud at Rackspace.
“Literally Rackspace is my IT team,” Mata said.
Rackspace’s customer service is worth the price, he said. Someone at the foundation lost a file and 20 minutes later Rackspace found it and restored it, Mata said.
One person can’t handle software, hardware, network computing and more for a huge nonprofit organization, he said.
“I can’t be an expert at everything,” Mata said.
But because of Rackspace’s customer service, the foundation’s website is always up and programs are up to date, he said.

At the Weston Centre on Thursday, the community came out in force to help make Alan’s Make a Wish of pushing the buttons on the elevator at the tallest building in San Antonio come true.
Rackspace Hosting’s Chairman Graham Weston, owner of the Weston Centre, reports in this video made by Rackspace, that hundreds of Rackers showed up with signs and decorations to cheer Alan on.
The building’s tenants turned out on every floor to cheer Alan on.
Four-year-old Alan Sanders suffers from a life threatening disease. An earlier post detailed his wish.
Make A Wish Foundation of Central and South Texas worked to grant the request along with Weston and folks at Rackspace and Geekdom.

Two startups sprung forth from Trinity University’s eight-week Tiger Hatchery program.
Cabstr, a ride sharing program aimed at college students and Marco Polo, an RFID-based system to track children, both pitched their companies Thursday night at Trinity University.
Cristal Glangchai, Ph.D., Director, Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Trinity University and 3 Day Startup San Antonio, started the Tiger Hatchery program to give students a chance to pursue their business idea during the summer. Each startup received $5,000 in funding, office space at Geekdom and mentoring from entrepreneurs like Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace, Jason Seats, co-founder of Slicehost and Nick Longo, founder of Coffeecup Software and director of Geekdom.
The idea began at 3 Day Startup San Antonio, Glangchai said. The Tiger Hatchery program allowed some of the teams to go on to pursue their ideas.
“It provides an infrastructure and set timeframe for startups to work on their project,” she said.
Cabstr plans to launch its service shortly, said Joshua Schechter, one of the founders along with Nick Honegger and Ralph Minderhoud. They all met at 3 Day Startup and their company won the competition.
Cabstr currently is working with two of the city’s major cab companies, Minderhoud said.
“We see this as a complementary product not a competitive product to the cab companies,” Honegger said.
Cabstr provides a way for college students to share cabs by using Cabstr bucks or a prepaid account. A student can post that they want to share a cab to a mall, restaurant, airport or any other venue and see if other students want to hop in the cab with them. They have up until 40 minutes before the scheduled departure to cancel the cab. The idea is that by sharing the cab fare with others, they all save money and get to ride to places with their friends. The site makes money by taking a transactional fee on each ride and through sponsorships and advertising, Schechter said.
Cabstr plans to launch initially at four San Antonio universities: Trinity, St. Mary’s, University of Texas at San Antonio and Incarnate Word. The service will then expand statewide and then eventually to other cities and states, Honegger said.
The biggest inhibiting factor preventing students from taking more cab rides right now is cost, Honegger said.
“I can’t afford to go to the mall to buy shoes, if my cab rides are going to cost more than my shoes,” he said.
Cabstr offers a solution to students who want to explore the city beyond their campus, Minderhoud said.
“Everybody’s on campus and they do have the habit of sharing rides,” he said. “We’re just changing who is driving.”
Cabstr plans to approach parents to set up an account for their child so the students can simply log on, arrange a ride and spend their Cabstr bucks.
Pat Condon served as a mentor to Cabstr and likes the idea.
“I remember when I was a college student,” he said. “You end up getting stuck in your bubble on campus and it’s tough to get out.”
Cabstr lets the students safely explore the city with others from their university and that makes it appealing, Condon said.
“Nobody wants to get in a cab with a creep,” he said. “This takes that creep factor away. Everyone’s starting from the same place and they’re all students. There is a built-in safety net.”
The other benefit is that students pay for the cab ride through their Cabstr accounts online. Everything is taken care of by the time they get in the cab.
“The real magic is money doesn’t have to change hands for the experience,” Condon said.
The other startup, Marco Polo is working on a wireless system to help parents, teachers and childcare workers keep tabs on children in public places, said Leon Dacbert, one of the founders. Ernest Aguillon is the other co-founder. They plan to continue working on the project and hope to eventually land some angel funding to take it to market, Dacbert said.

Vid Luther started Zippykid in 2010 to meet a need for dedicated hosting of WordPress sites.
The San Antonio-based startup has quickly grown. It now occupies one of the largest offices at Geekdom and has nine employees. During a recent meeting, Luther proudly showed off one of the company’s latest coups: healthcare benefits from Blue Cross.
Zippykid is the kind of high-tech startup that San Antonio technology leaders hope to incubate by the dozens at Geekdom, a new collaborative coworking space at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio. For more on Zippykid, check out this Q&A I did with Luther almost a year ago. A lot has changed since then.
500 Startups recently invested in Zippykid. The company has received additional funds from Geekdom and several angel investors including Slicehost Founder Jason Seats and Rackspace Co-Founder Pat Condon. That money has enabled Zippykid to hire additional employees and re-architect its services.
Among its new features, Zippykid reports it takes less than five seconds to get a site deployed with them. It’s also offering free hosting with no credit card required.
As long as the site doesn’t get more than 5,000 page views a month, it’s free. The site gets the same support including malware scanning and removal, the managed upgrades, patches and backups.
Since Zippykid launched the free hosting earlier this month it has been getting more than 100 new sites a day, Luther said. Zippykid has also beefed up its security to keep hackers at bay.
For more information check out WPCandy, which has written this post with a thorough discussion of Zippykid’s new features.

“We know that you can’t be pro-business unless you’re pro-education,” San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro at the Democratic National Convention.

To innovate and prosper, San Antonio needs an educated workforce.
That sentiment permeated Discovery SA: The City of Innovation panel Wednesday morning at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.
Yet despite the focus on innovation, the panelists acknowledged that city, educational and business leaders face huge hurdles in preparing San Antonio’s workforce for the innovation jobs that now drive the economy. They spoke at the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce’s economic outlook conference.
San Antonio’s high school dropout rate is around 27 percent and higher in some schools districts such as San Antonio Independent School District.
Only 24 percent of San Antonio adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher, lagging far behind Austin, which reports 44 percent of adults with a college degree, according to the 2010 U.S. Census.
Just last week, General Motors cited Austin’s workforce of information technology professionals as the main driver in its decision to open an innovation center there and hire up to 500 workers.
So what can San Antonio do to compete?
Nick Longo, director of Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space that nurtures high-tech startups and an education center downtown, thinks the focus should be on seventh and eighth grade students. And not the self motivated kids but the ones who are at the greatest risk of dropping out.
To help them succeed, Geekdom has launched SparkEd, a program aimed at middle school kids at 30 of the worst performing city schools. During the SparkEd program, those kids will join a team, build a robot and create a website and sell it.
“We want to make geeks into rock stars,” Longo said.
But first he needs to make the kids into geeks. SparkEd seeks to do that through a series of weekend workshops with the kids and mentors from local high-tech companies.
Longo envisions teaching kids skills they need to become the “blacksmiths” of the Internet. He says San Antonio, with Rackspace Hosting, has a stronghold in the cloud computing industry, which provides the plumbing of the Internet. Kids don’t need a college degree to become the electricians and plumbers of the Internet, Longo said. But they do need exposure to the right tools, the right training and the right mentors to learn the high-tech trade, he said. That’s the void Geekdom seeks to fill. Fast Company just published an article detailing the goals of Geekdom, founded by Longo and Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston.
Another panelist, Mir Imran, founder of InCube Labs, a biotech incubator, also wants to tackle San Antonio’s dropout problem by targeting 6th to 12th graders in the San Antonio ISD. He’s forming a nonprofit organization to teach innovation to the students through a set of courses.
Imran, who has five children, thinks innovation can be taught to the city’s most at-risk of dropping out children and can motivate them to stay in school.
It’s important not to beat up on the city’s teachers, but to support them and give them the help they need to help the kids succeed, said Jim Brazell, founder of Ventureramp.
San Antonio has a history of innovation in the aerospace, computer and biotechnology industries, Brazell said. He details that history in the San Antonio Heart of Innovation website.
Central Texas could be one of the nation’s next big technology hubs if Austin and San Antonio tech leaders worked together, Brazell said. But the region’s leaders act provincially and that’s a major roadblock to innovation in the face of global competition, he said.
The lack of venture capital in San Antonio also poses a problem in igniting the city’s startup economy, said Imran with InCube Labs. Silicon Valley has more than 500 venture capital firms and countless angel investors. San Antonio has no venture capital firms. The city has tremendous wealth but potential investors are risk averse when it comes to technology and biotechnology, Imran said.
“Instead of 10 startups a year in San Antonio, there should be hundreds of startups,” he said.