CNNMoney, a service of CNN, Fortune and Money, reports that Rackspace Hosting ranks at number No. 67 on Fortune’s list of the country’s fastest growing companies.
Rackspace had three-year revenue growth of 25 percent and profit growth of 45 percent, according to Fortune. Rackspace reported revenue of $1 billion in 2011 and profits of $86 million.
Overall, 11 Texas companies made the list. Rackspace was the only one from San Antonio.
Cirrus Logic in Austin ranked second on the list. SolarWinds ranked 76 and Rush Enterprises in New Braunfels ranked 95.
Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace Hosting, gives a brief overview of the company in this ad for Cadillac Spirit of Innovation. Nick Longo, director of Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space downtown, is shooting an ad for the Cadillac innovation campaign next week.
Category: San Antonio (Page 43 of 62)
Car giant General Motors announced today plans to hire 500 people for a new Information Technology Innovation Center in Austin.
The Detroit auto maker is looking for software developers, project managers, database experts, business analyts and other IT workers to staff its new center.
The center is “intended to drive breakthrough ideas into GM vehicles and business processes globally.”
“We want IT to keep up with the imagination of our GM business partners, and to do that, we plan to rebalance the employment model over the next three years so that the majority of our IT work is done by GM employees focused on extending new capabilities that further enable our business,” GM Chief Information Officer Randy Mott said in a news release.
General Motors chose Austin because the city “already has people with the skills GM is seeking – 46,000, according to the May 2011 Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Report.”
One of the first recipients of the Geekdom Fund is Grapevine in San Antonio.
Geekdom announced the news Friday morning.
“This allows us to buy Ramen at the very least,” said Richard Ortega, one of Grapevine’s founders. “It gives us the opportunity to have enough wind at our back to fully dive deep into the product and idea.”
This allows Grapevine to take the company to the next level, Ortega said. The company plans to target the funding at new client acquisition in the food and beverage industry, Ortega said.
“We really appreciate the ability to grow and excel that being at Geekdom provides us and we’re thankful to the fund for giving us this runway,” said Erik Larson, founder of Grapevine.
The company, founded last year by Ortega and Larson, is a reputation management system right now targeted at restaurants and hotels. The site aggregates customer reviews from several different sites including Yelp, OpenTable, UrbanSpoon, GoogleLocal, CitySearch, InsiderPages and YellowPages and then sends an email alert to the restaurant or hotel manager.
The goal is to cut down the time that hospitality managers have to spend culling the Internet for information from customers. Grapevine also wants to help restaurant and hotel owners improve customer service by responding to customers in a timely manner.
The Grapevine service is for any industry that wants to provide better customer service. The startup just initially targeted the hospitality industry since Ortega has a background in hotel management.
Last week the members of the Geekdom Fund’s review board met with six startup companies applying for $25,000 in financing. They chose Grapevine, which has an office at Geekdom. Earlier this week, Grapevine’s founders presented at the inaugural San Antonio New Tech meetup.
The Geekdom Fund provides $25,000 equity investments and gives startups office space. The fund has the ability to invest in many startups, according to Nick Longo, director of Geekdom. So far, the fund has also invested in ZippyKid and Embarkly, which are both based at Geekdom. A condition of receiving the investment is the startup founders must be a member of Geekdom and they must set up an office there.
Jonathan Van, a student at UT Austin, co-founder of UT Entrepreneurship Week, is currently coordinating the Austin Lean Startup Machine.
The event takes place Sept. 21-23rd.
Jonathan Van, one of the organizers of Lean Startup Machine in Austin
The event is free and they’ll have pizza and beer, but you have to RSVP on Eventbrite. Van also answered some questions about Lean Startup Machine.
Q. What is Lean Startup Machine?
A. “Lean Startup” is a term coined by Eric Ries while an advisor to the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. It’s based on the new management processes he employed while he worked as chief technology officer at IMVU, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups.
Lean Startup Machine is a workshop and educational series. Our focus is on teaching founders a process through case studies and hands-on mentoring. Three days is an extremely short amount of time to reliably validate a new product or service concept, yet it’s enough time to get a significant amount done. While Lean Startup Machine and Startup Weekend share the same spirit of experiential learning over a few days, the two events have a different purpose. Some view Lean Startup Machine as the logical pre-cursor to Startup Weekend
Q. Who is putting it on?
A. We are graciously being hosted by HubAustin as it’s last hurrah event before it has to close its doors. Van, UT student and co-founder of UT Entrepreneurship Week, and Brent Weber of Red Spark Labs have partnered to coordinate round 2 of Lean Startup Machine in Austin.
Q. When does it take place and where?
A. It starts at Friday night at 6 pm on September 21 and runs through 6pm Sunday night September 23. It’s 54 hours of the most grueling, but useful learning experience of your life.
Q. How do people sign up and how much does it cost?
A. People can sign up at leanatx.eventbrite.com – It is not cheap, but we’ve had attendees say they got their $299 worth by the end of Friday evening. Included with your ticket is access to 20 of Austin’s best mentors, learning how to properly execute lean startup methods, and over $500 in products.
General Admission in most cities is $299. We offer significant discounts for students and early-bird ticket purchasers. Lean Startup Machine is more expensive than most startup events because it is more expensive to produce and is limited to a smaller audience
Q. How many people participate?
A. Most workshops have a cap of 50 participants to make sure we foster an intimate learning environment. We fly in our expert facilitators and also invest in product and curriculum development, which is noticeable after attending multiple workshops.
Q. What kind of results does Lean Startup Machine produce?
A. There is no hacking or coding during Lean Startup Machine. The winner of Lean Startup Machine is judged solely on the amount of validation achieved through applying the Lean Startup process. However, we’ve had teams craft a working product and many of the winning teams have already sold their minimum viable product to customers as a validation for the value they’ve created over the weekend. More recently, Lean Startup Machine alumni team, Branch has just raised capital from the founders of Twitter to scale their product.
Q. How often do you host Lean Startup Machine?
A. This is only our second time hosting Lean Startup Machine in Austin. At the moment our next one may be in January. In New York, where Lean Startup Machine was founded, a workshop is hosted every two months! I hope there’s enough traction in Austin to garner those sort of results!
Q. Why is Austin a hotbed for technology startups?
A. Keep Austin Weird. The openness to innovation and improvement is what makes Austin a hotbed for technology startups; not to mention the access to such a vibrant community, a top 30 university, and cheap living costs. It’s just a great place to be. The Austin startup community has been on a linear growth path and is just about to hit its stride to exponential growth as the “entrepreneurial density” as Brad Feld would put it, is growing.
Q. What are some of your favorite startup resources in Austin?
A. Well this is biased, but clearly Lean Startup Machine Workshops, but aside from that I know Tech Ranch has been running multiple programs out of their space.
Additionally, Joshua Baer’s Capital Factory has become the shining light to many scaling tech entrepreneurs.
If you’re working on a hardware, IP-driven startup, then the Austin Technology Incubator is the place for you. With a proven track record, they know how to help build companies that are venture capital worthy.
The Lean Startup Circle Meetup in Austin is one of the BIGGEST meetup groups in Austin. It’s a collection of 1200 people who are hungry to execute Lean Startup principles or already do.
Q. What else do we need to know about Lean Startup Machine that we
haven’t asked you about?
A. We have Dr. Bob Metcalfe, the founder of Ethernet and 3Com keynoting Friday night.
Additionally, we have a record 20 mentors for the weekend. That’s almost a mentor per team!
The stage is set for an amazing weekend! We don’t want any austinpreneur to miss out on this one of a kind event that will pay them back their ticket price in dividends as they navigate their way to success!
Tableau Software of Seattle has opened an Austin office and is hosting an open house on Thursday, Sept. 13.
The company, which creates business intelligence software, is hiring developers, sales and operations employees for its professional services practice based in Austin. It expects to hire more than 150 employees locally.
“Austin’s geography, talented workforce and reputation as a business and technology center make it an ideal location for our continued expansion,” Brett Thompson, Vice President of Human Resources at Tableau Software, said in a news release. “We are seeking candidates who share our passion to help people see and understand data.”
Founded in 2003 at Stanford, Tableau has seen double digit sales growth and plans to hire 300 new employees this year.
In addition to Austin and its Seattle headquarters, Tableau also has offices in Kirkland, WA and Menlo Park, Calif. It has international offices in London and Singapore.
Tableau’s temporary office in Austin is located at the Arboretum Great Hills Center at 9600 Great Hills Trail.
The Tableau Austin open house will take place at Maria Maria, 415 Colorado Street in Austin. Doors open at 5:00 p.m. and a presentation by Tableau CEO and co-founder, Christian Chabot, will take place at 6:00 p.m. Attendees are asked to register to attend. Tableau has also provided list of jobs available.
Photo of Cole Wollak at San Antonio New Tech meetup. Photo by Louie Pacilli of Geekdom
“I want people to meet new people,” said Cole Wollak, its organizer.
To that end, he had everyone introduce themselves to a stranger and chat for about five minutes. That got the room talking technology.
The 90 minute event also featured three speakers who gave five minute presentations on their ventures.
First up, Dirk Elmendorf, founder of Rackspace, gave an overview of his latest project, Trucking Office. The startup creates accounting and fleet management software for small trucking companies.
“Trucking is a highly fragmented industry,” Elmendorf said.
In the U.S., there are 10 million trucks on the road but the average company has five trucks.
“We focus on companies with under 20 trucks,” Elmendorf said. Right now, those companies are using paper, pencils or their wives to track their expenses, he said.
“We help the small businesses that are really the backbone of our economy,” Elmendorf said. “On the back end, we make their business better.”
While Trucking Office’s competitors use CD-ROM-based software, they do everything online in the cloud. They also make sure their software works well on mobile phones, iPads and any kind of mobile device since many of the truckers access it on the go, Elmendorf said.
To get the word out about Trucking Office, Elmendorf said the company attends trucking shows and takes out Google Adwords. The software starts at $20 per month for two trucks.
Then Troy Toman, vice president at Rackspace gave an overview of Open Stack, the operating system for the cloud. This Rackspace video summarizes the company’s push into the cloud nicely.
Grapevine founders Eric Larson and Richard Ortega gave the final presentation on their customer review aggregator aimed at the restaurant industry. The site culls customer reviews from ten different review sites such as Yelp, Google and Trip Advisers and then sends an e-mail alert to a restaurant manager once a new review is posted.
The site launched on July and has 22 customers so far.
Grapevine-NeverGonnaGiveYouUp-Video from Grapevine on Vimeo.
Cole Wollak, founder and organizer of San Antonio New Tech, a new monthly technology meetup at Geekdom.
Cole Wollak wants to help foster San Antonio’s growing technology community.
So he created San Antonio New Tech, a new technology meetup that takes place on the first Tuesday of every month at Geekdom, a downtown collaborative coworking site for geeks.
The first gathering takes place next week and 75 people have registered to attend. The event features short presentations from Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace who now runs a startup called Trucking Office, Troy Troman with Rackspace talking about its Open Cloud and Open Stack initiatives and Eric Larson and Richard Ortega, founders of Grapevine, a startup based at Geekdom.
The idea is to fill the Geekdom room with like-minded people who can discuss their ventures, bounce off new ideas, socialize, network and collaborate.
“That diversity could create awesome serendipitous events,” Wollak said Friday afternoon during an interview at Geekdom.
The San Antonio New Tech meetup is the kind of grass-roots events that Geekdom seeks to foster, said Nick Longo, its director. The coworking site, founded last November, has quickly grown to 425 members and is currently expanding from the 11th floor to include the 10th floor of the Weston Centre.
“I like when the community, the geeks, the entrepreneurs, creators, organize their own events,” Longo said. “Because that’s organic.”
Wollak, a 2011 engineering graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio, previously worked as program manager for TechStars Cloud, headed up by Jason Seats. He also interned at FlashScan3D. He’s working on his own stealth startup and plans to announce it publicly in coming months.
Wollak has always had an interest in entrepreneurship. He help start the entrepreneurship club at Trinity University and he worked on organizing the 3 Day Startups in San Antonio.
He learned about the New Tech meetups while helping to run the TechStars Cloud program. Meetups regularly take place in New York, San Francisco, Boulder, Colo. and Denver. He wanted to create the same kind of community building event here. Wollak also hosts the San Antonio Open Coffee gathering every other Tuesday in San Antonio. It’s a group of people interested in talking about technology whether it’s a local startup or the latest news coming out of Google or NASA.
The focus of the San Antonio New Tech meetup is to foster the city’s tech community, create awareness about what’s happening locally and to provide a destination for newcomers to San Antonio who are technology and entrepreneurially focused to get to know the community, Wollak said.
Editor’s Note: Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio is a nonprofit research and engineering organization with more than 3,000 employees and revenue of $581 million last year. It’s one of the gems of San Antonio’s technology community. You can read more about the organization here. They do work for companies and government agencies and they have more than 4,000 projects open at any time.
By Michael Girdley
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Southwest Research Institute’s Robotic Operating System – Industrial, known as ROS-I by Michael Girdley
A new initiative from Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) Robotics and Automation engineering group called “Robot Operating System – Industrial or ROS-I” aims to change that: SwRI recently announced the formation of a consortium of robot manufacturers, integrators and others interested in cooperating on ROS-I.
ROS-I is based on the Robot Operating System led by Willow Garage in Menlo Park, CA. ROS was introduced about 5 years ago and has since spread like wildfire through the research community.
In cooperation with Motoman of Japan, a manufacturer of industrial robots, SwRI Senior Research Engineer Shaun Edwards spent a year at Willow Garage learning ROS and developing the basis for ROS-I for industrial application.
While the controllers running the proprietary software that come with the industrial robots from vendors like Motoman or Panasonic do a great job with basic tasks like moving to fixed points or applying a weld, they are lacking in the more complex problem solving that ROS does well. ROS-I leverages those strengths to excel at the hard problems involved in operating a robot like path planning or image recognition. For example, most efficient path planning is a difficult problem when you’re dealing with three dimensional spaces, confined operating spaces and a robot with six or seven degrees of movement.
The hope from SwRI is for a win for all the parties involved in the consortium. For robot manufacturers and consulting companies, they can see new applications of their product. For example, the first initiative from SwRI is around bin-picking, where a robot has a mixed set of objects to choose from and visually picks the one needed.
The open source robotics consortium effort is currently taking applications and hopes to have its first meeting early next year. For more information, please visit the SWRI site.
About Michael Girdley: He’s an entrepreneur, budding technology investor, reformed programmer and author, part-time Crossfit instructor and writer living in Southtown San Antonio. He can be reached at Michael@girdley.com and his personal website is Girdley.com.
Rackspace’s cloud is getting cloud-based email services.
San Antonio-based Rackspace announced today its purchase of Mailgun, a Y Combinator startup based in San Francisco.
Rackspace recently launched its Open Cloud and this acquisition will further enhance its product portfolio, Mailgun makes it easy to “integrate cloud-based email services into applications and websites within minutes.”
“Rackspace is dedicated to providing the tools that our customers need to build their technology stack on the Rackspace Open Cloud,” Pat Matthews, senior vice president of corporate development at Rackspace, said in a news statement. “Mail is a core component of nearly every website and application today. Our customers are asking for this and Mailgun is the right company to help us deliver it in a tightly integrated way.”
Mailgun’s customers include 37Signals, Parse, Financial Times and many others.
“Mailgun is excited to join the Rackspace family. We believe in their open cloud strategy and we love the customer support mentality that permeates the company,” Ev Kontsevoy, CEO and founder of Mailgun said in a news release.
TrueAbility Team photo at the Weston Centre — with Dusty Jones, Luke Owen, Frederick Mendler and Marcus Robertson. Photo courtesy of TrueAbility
TrueAbility, a cloud-based technical assessment tool can help hiring managers and recruiters assess technical skills of job candidates, said Frederick Mendler, one of the company’s cofounders and its CEO.
It puts “candidates in a real environment to test their practical know-how,” he said. “TrueAbility™ eliminates the use of resume key word searches and written tests.”
TrueAbility, which is based at Geekdom in the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio, just launched its new website. It is targeted at companies looking to hire technical staff. The site features a product demonstration and more information about the company’s services.
“In most of the case studies TrueAbility performed, the IT recruiting cycle has over five steps,” Co-Founder Marcus Robertson say in a news statement. “It takes many weeks to get through it all. TrueAbility, in many cases, removed at least three of the steps–giving recruiters the ability to screen more.”
TrueAbility lowers the cost to hire new technical talent and helps assess job candidates abilities more accurately, he said.
In addition to Mendler and Robertson, other TrueAbility founders include Dusty Jones and Luke Owen. All of the founders are former employees at San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting.