The IRS has approved the Austin Technology Council’s application for 501 C3 or nonprofit status for the ATC Community Foundation.
ATC created the public charity in response to its members request for a nonprofit organizations to handle donations from the greater Austin technology industry.
“The ATC Community Foundation will educate, inspire and lead Central Texas’ next generation of technology students into developing the skills required by current and next-generation employers,” according to a news release. “ATCCF provides Central Texas technology companies and professionals a vehicle through which they can match their experience and passion to give back with the demand for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.”
The foundation’s board includes Sam Coursen, recently retired from Freescale Semiconductor, who will serve as its chairman. Other board members include Michael Chawner, CPA, Edward Doan, senior technical program manager at Google in Austin, Steven Moore, partner with Jackson Walker, Trevor Schulze, corporate vice president of IT/Engineering at AMD and Julie Huls, president of the Austin Technology Council.
ATC’s foundation will operate in a similar manner to the Silicon Valley Education Foundation.
Category: San Antonio (Page 54 of 62)
TechStars has incubators in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, New York and San Antonio.
Hey wait, how did San Antonio snag a high-tech incubator?
The investors demanded it, said Nicole Glaros, managing director of TechStars Boulder. She relocated to San Antonio for three months to aid Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud.
And by all accounts, the inaugural TechStars Cloud, which held its Demo Day this past Wednesday at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre downtown, was a smashing success.
The 11 teams occupying the 11th floor of the Geekdom in downtown San Antonio have packed up and plan to depart for their hometowns which include Portland, San Francisco, Reno, New York, Boston and Madison, Wisc. But one team from Virginia, Emergent One, which makes a platform that allows companies to easily create an Application Programming Interface or API, plans to stay in San Antonio for a few more months and maybe longer.
Several of the entrepreneurs that I spoke with during the Demo Day After Party at the Weston Centre talked fondly of the time they spent in San Antonio. Most of them lived downtown and they loved being able to walk along the river walk to restaurants and to explore. A few of them regretted they didn’t have more free time to visit all of the local attractions. They were spending 18 hour days working on their ventures. Still, they leave the city with fond memories.
And although the majority of the teams will depart they take with them the tech magic that TechStars Cloud created. In fact, Seats will already go to work preparing for the next TechStars Cloud class. And the desks that the TechStars Cloud companies vacated at Geekdom will quickly fill with local technology entrepreneurs looking to create the next big thing. Also, all of the out of town visitors who attended the TechStars Demo Day leave the city with a great impression of what is possible here.
“It’s super impressive,” said Brian Gorbett, with Microsoft Bizspark, during an interview at TechStars Demo Day. “Being a first year incubator they’ve managed to capture some interesting companies. I think they found some of the best cloud companies at least that I’ve seen.”
Gorbett, based in Chicago, has travelled to several Demo Day presentations around the country and said the San Antonio presentations were among the best he had seen.
And this is only the beginning. TechStars Cloud has a four-year commitment to remain in San Antonio.
Tech starscloud
View more PowerPoint from Laura Lorek
Rackspace wants to do for San Antonio what Dell has done for Austin, said Graham Weston, its chairman.
“You’re here at the very beginning of something big” Weston said.
That was evident Wednesday at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in downtown San Antonio when 11 teams took to the stage to showcase their cloud-based businesses at the first ever TechStars Cloud Demo Day.
Throughout the nearly three hour event, the audience of about 350 people, which included angel investors and venture capitalists, applauded their accomplishments and they laughed a few times too.
Jason Seats and Nicole Glaros served as managing directors for the TechStars Cloud and another 75 entrepreneurs volunteered to mentor the companies. Glaros spent three months in San Antonio, relocating here from Boulder just weeks after having a baby.
While most of the companies asked for financing, Seats asked the audience not to report the details of the deals because of Securities and Exchange Commission rules on fundraising. In general, though, all of the companies have already raised money to finance their operations.
To kick things off, Dirk Elmendorf, co-founder of Rackspace, introduced the first company.
“I liked Keen from the very beginning,” he said.
Keen.io gives mobile developers the data they need to optimize their applications.
“The Keen team has that magic” Elmendorf said.
That team includes Ryan Spraetz and Dan Kador, formerly with Salesforce and Kyle Wild, formerly with Google. All of them are engineers, best friends and they have been working together since high school 13 years ago. All three quit their jobs within three days of starting the TechStars Cloud program. They relocated from San Francisco and moved into an old 4,000 square foot bed and breakfast in the King William neighborhood.
“What we came in with three months ago is so far from what we have created today,” Spraetz said. “The Tech Stars Cloud program has just been amazing.”
Keen.io reinvents analytics for mobile applications, Spraetz said.
“Every mobile application is its own universe filled with information generated by millions of users,” he said.
Keen.io allows companies to create their own custom analytics using its platform.
“In the last three months we’ve designed and built the first version of our program,” Spraetz said. Today, more than 100 mobile apps use Keen.io to track their analytics.
“We’re looking for active mentorship from smart and engaged investors,” Spraetz said.
The next presenter, Emergent One created a platform that allows any company to easily create an Application Programming Interface or API, which is a set of tools for building software applications.
“APIs are immensely valuable for all kinds of businesses,” said Kevin Pfab, its CEO. Best Buy recently introduced an API that it projects will double its business, he said.
But right now, building APIs is hard, Pfab said.
“What may seem like a small project turns into a massive one,” Pfab said.
That’s where Emergent One comes to rescue. It has an API generation platform that allows a company to create a custom API in hours instead of months and years, Pfab said. He showed a technical demo to illustrate how easy the process was. The platform also provides deep analytics on how a company’s API is being used, he said.
“The entire API solution is being offered right out of the box,” Pfab said. “And you can get started in minutes.”
Emergent One’s platform allows a company to build a new API faster and cheaper than ever before, he said.
The baby-faced Pfab also drew the loudest laugh from the crowd when he announced that between himself and his partner, Mike Taczak, they also “share 46 years of experience being alive.”
Mentor Paul Ford with SoftLayer introduced Callisto.fm, a real-time engagement analytics site for media creators and distributors. Its platform can tell them who’s using their content and for how long. It wants to replace Neilsen and Arbitron’s media ratings services.
Callisto.fm provides real-time metrics for online content.
“When your video goes viral in Japan you will know it before anyone on the planet,” said Michael Sitarzewski, Callisto.fm’s cofounder and CEO. The platform also provides information on social activity like how many times the content has been tweeted or posted to Facebook, he said.
“This stuff is amazing and we’re having a blast building it,” he said.
Callisto.fm is the only company measuring real time user engagement across all media platforms, Sitarzewski said. It offers its products with pricing starting at $50 a month.
The other team members include Travis Silverman, Richard Jones and Chris Roth. Callisto.fm is fully funded. It has already raised $700,000 from DFJ Mercury and TechStars. But it might seek another round of funding later on this year.
Conductrics, which helps companies increase their customer conversions via its platform, has already snagged Pfizer and Under Armour as customers, said Matt Gershoff, co-founder.
The company’s software allows companies to tailor their website to different customers depending on where they are coming from and what their interests might be. For example, Under Armour can tailor its site to offer cold gear to people from snow states and heat gear to people from sunshine states, Gershoff said.
Conductrics has created a very simple API that lets developers build apps customized for different customers, he said. The company has already optimized 12 million decisions for its customers.
In addition to Gershoff, Nate Weiss is a co-founder and chief technology officer.
CloudSnap is tackling the Software as a Service, known as Saas, marketplace with a Saas in a box solution, said Colin Loretz, co-founder.
“Saas spending is projected to reach $16 billion in 2013,” Loretz said.
Cloudsnap allows web applications to connect together. About 60 percent of companies are trying to integrate their web applications and they find the process time consuming, expensive and risky, Loretz said.
“We know these issues firsthand as we used to be those expensive consultants,” Loretz said.
For example, Unbounce can’t take leads and put them into Salesforce. Cloudsnap fixes that. It makes it easy to snap together your application with out writing any code, Loretz said. CloudSnap supports more than 100 applications today, he said.
“Cloud adoption is next space race,” he said.
Cloudsnap connects Basecamp and Salesforce together and allows them to share files, Loretz said. It’s the glue for applications on the Internet.
Distil.it is a content protection network that stops malicious web scraping bots from stealing content from digital publishers like CNN and Engadget.
On the Internet, web scrapers can steal what used to be unique and valuable content and as a result digital publishers lose 146 million visitors daily, said Rami Essaid, co-founder and CEO. That equates to $5.5 billion annually stolen, he said.
“Existing hardware solutions are not effective in real time,” Essaid said. “Distil is the answer.”
Distil, through customized algorithms, identifies malicious bots and stops them from taking a website’s content, he said.
“Our platform is easy to step up,” Essaid said. “Our network is extremely intelligent.”
The market in the U.S. is worth $1.3 billion, Essaid said. It has struck recent partnerships with SoftLayer, Rackspace and ZippyKid.
Next, Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace introduced Andrew Cronk, cofounder and CEO of Tempo DB.
“The demand for the solution for this problem is about to explode,” Moorman said.
Tempo DB is a big data analysis company that is a database service for time series data.
“We make it possible to store and instantly analyze the massive streams of measured data that break traditional databases,” Cronk said.
“If you thought we had big data today you haven’t seen nothing yet” Cronk said. He calls it “massive data” that is being generated by all kinds of connected device or “the Internet of things,” he said.
“This is an incredible opportunity to measure and learn more about our tools,” Cronk said.
Temp provides visualization, analysis and storage of data in a set of tools “that are an analyst’s dream” Cronk said.
“We’ve got everything you need to start getting real value from your data today,” he said.
For example, one customer, InThrMa operates smart meters that generate a half a billion data points per thermostat per year, Cronk said. With Tempo, InThrMa is able to capture and analyze that data. With the data, InThrMa is able to provide all kinds of new insights including energy use forecasting for customers.
“We are working with companies like this in three markets today – energy, networks and sensors,” Cronk said. “We’re currently streaming in over 25 million new data points everyday.”
The team includes Cronk, Michael Yagley, CTO and Justin DeLay, CMO
“We are finally building a system we wish had existed years ago,” Cronk said.
Appsembler is a platform that allows software companies to launch “Software as a Service” or “SaaS” applications in minutes, not months, said Nate Aune, the company’s CEO and founder.
Appsembler offers a “Saas in a box solution” that includes hosting, billing, support and provides and overall integrated solution, Aune said.
It already has 5,000 customers using the platform and 3,000 more on a wait list, Aune said.
Flomio makes it easy to build NFC and RFID enabled applications, said Richard Grundy, its co-founder and CEO.
“We extend the web into the physical world,” he said.
Flomio allows developers to early create NFC enabled applications and cloud-based updates are easily deployed to all devices, Grundy said.
He used a neighborhood coffee shop as an example. The owner might want to create a mobile loyalty app for the business. That’s easy to do with Flomio, Grundy said.
It has already sealed partnerships with Texas Instruments, Motorola, Trimble and ACS, he said.
The other members of the Flomio team include Jonathan Hilley and John Bullard.
Weston, chairman of Rackspace, introduced Vidmaker, an online video collaboration site.
“When you think of Vidmaker, I want you to think about one company: Instagram,” Weston said. He’s already an investor in the company, which he thinks will do for video what Instagram did for still photographs. Facebook recently bought Instagram for $1 billion.
Vidmaker makes it easy to manage and edit video on any device, anywhere with anyone, said Dale Emmons, its cofounder and CEO.
“It’s going to unleash a wave of creativity,” he said.
Vidmaker is targeted at video hobbyists and enthusiasts, Emmons said. A need exists for an easy to use collaborative video service online, he said. Everyday, people do 300,000 searches on Google for video editing software, he said.
Vidmaker hasn’t launched yet, but when it does it expects to offer a fermium version of its software for people who post content with a creative commons, allowing others to use it. It will also offer a starter package at $10 a month for 10 gigabytes of storage for a private account. It’s rates scale up from there.
Emmons and Ryan Bolyard previously worked on video editing software at Sony. The other cofounder, Yuri Zapuchlak worked at Intuit.
“When we joined TechStars we had no user interface,” Emmons said. But in three months of 18 hour days, they built a beautiful user interface and they expect to launch the site in a beta test soon.
The last company to present was introduced by Pat Condon, cofounder of Rackspace.
Cloudability was one of the most seasoned companies on the stage. It had already graduated for an incubation program in Portland, its hometown and it had closed on a $1.2 million round of financing from Trinity, Walden plus Portland investors. Cloudability makes a platform that allows companies to monitor and manage how much they spend on the cloud. It’s free for companies that earn less than $2,500 a month and pricing goes up from there with a small business edition, enterprise edition and partner edition. It has already signed up 2,200 companies in more than 80 countries.
“We want to get this tool into the hands of every cloud business user,” said J.R. Storment, cofounder with Mat Ellis and Jon Frisby.
Along those lines, Storment announced Rackspace, one of its partners, will begin offering Cloudability to all of its 175,000 users for free.
“That’s really just the beginning,” Storment said.
Cloudability has nine employees and has a clear path to profitability this year, Storment said.
Three months ago, a group of entrepreneurs moved into Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.
Since then, the inaugural TechStars Cloud participants have been toiling away and working to create blockbuster cloud businesses that will change the world.
Some have iterated, pivoted and overhauled their operations countless times. Names have changed. Teams have mixed it up.
But in the end, 11 companies stand ready to present today at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in downtown San Antonio.
The event kicks off at 9:30 a.m. and ends around 2 p.m. But a reception later in the evening at the Weston Centre will celebrate the accomplishments of this group of entrepreneurs and their leaders, Jason Seats, founder of SliceHost and Nicole Glaros, managing director of TechStars in Boulder, Colo. Seats and Glaros ran the TechStars Cloud program.
The TechStars Cloud focused on cloud computing and cloud infrastructure. Its mentors included Pat Condon, founder of Rackspace, Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio, Brad Feld, head of the Foundry Group, George Kardis with SoftLayer, Rajat Bhargava, founder and CEO of StillSecure and dozens more.
All of the companies received $18,000 and access to more. Today, some of the companies will ask for investment capital, while others are fully funded. The audience will include venture capitalists and angel investors.
BY SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Bijoy Goswami has a strange role in Austin startups.
With his wild mop of hair and ubiquitous jeans and t-shirt, the bootstrapping guru has a rock star quality to him. He’s written a book used by Leadership Austin and made a movie. He’s known for his mental models of how the universe works. He incorporates his spiritual journey into everything he does and has officiated at the weddings of four of his friends as a member of the Universal Life Church.
People are usually inspired by his message and dazzling intellectual display, though some are disgruntled that among all the talk of journeys and anecdotes of successful bootstrapping was no concrete, five-point plan.
But Goswami isn’t about the five-point plan. He’s passionate about the bootstrap method of starting a business as a road to enlightenment. Greatly condensed, his bootstrap message is:
“I don’t know what your resources are. I don’t know what your idea is or who your customers are. I don’t know what obstacles you’re facing. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, you don’t have to wait for somebody to give you a lot of money. You can look for the right person to embark on the entrepreneurial adventure with you, build something with the resources you have, tweak it until customers are willing to buy it and begin the sometimes painful, arduous but exciting journey of birthing a business. Along the way, you will find answers, work out problems, experience emotions, grow immensely and discover yourself.”
Of course, when he says it, there’s a fugue involved, and Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey, James Madison the fourth President of the United States, Apple’s Steve Wozniak and Southwest Airlines, just for starters. When he says it, many people leave feeling as if their struggles and fears are just part of the progression of something brave and exciting.
At the same time, Goswami doesn’t just pump people up with empty expectations. These days, he says, we’re moving into a period of “Entrepreneur Porn.”
“It’s like ‘I’m so cool, I’m an entrepreneur,’” he says, sucking in his cheeks and raising an eyebrow for effect. “But the truth is it’s hard fucking work. It’s a lifelong thing. And it’s even harder because most of the stories that are told are wrong. People are seduced by the story of entrepreneurship but entrepreneurship will destroy you. It will break you down. It will get you in touch with your false ego. You’re going to be transformed.”
Goswami was formally introduced to bootstrapping in the 1990s while a student at Stanford. But he was informally introduced to it long before.
He was born in Bangalore, Southern India, to a Hindu father and a Catholic mother, a duality he said set up a theme for his life. When he was in 4th grade, his parents moved to Taipei, Taiwan. He attended Catholic schools, then American schools–his mother’s idea. To afford it, she became a teacher at the school. His parents, he said, have always embraced the idea of adventure and possibility—from their intermarriage, to leaving India for Taipei, then Taipei for Hong Kong International School.
“My parents are fellow travelers on a journey… they travel all the time. Their life has been about an opening up of possibility rather than a closing down. That’s a great gift they gave us. From (my mother’s) perspective, Taiwanese schools were more rigid. They were about a stifling of creativity. She wanted her boys to get an American education. “
Goswami attended high school in Hong Kong where he met his “partner in crime” Desmond Chu, with whom he began bootstrapping. They’d get a shipment of Korean shoes and sell it to friends.
“Des was a total entrepreneur and we were living in the most free market in the world,” Goswami said. “I think that’s when I got the first inkling of the ‘Power of Two’” another model that explains the exponential growth in potential when you have two people working on the same goal. In school, Goswami served as president of the class, then president of the school, always with Chu as vice president.
From Hong Kong, he went to Stanford in the Silicon Valley when it was just emerging as the Silicon Valley.
That’s where he fell in love with bootstrapping as a path. By the time he’d arrived, venture capital had become the dominant story. But he would go out of his way to hear Scott Cook talk about the Valley’s bootstrapping history, including his own company, Intuit.
“They couldn’t get funding, so they didn’t get funding. They had to figure out how to make it work. For a while they sold printing paper for checks to survive. There was just something about that that resonated with me.”
When he finished school, he needed a sponsor to stay in the U.S. and found one with Trilogy, a company that had been bootstrapped by some people from Stanford. But they needed to send him to a town he’d never heard of called Austin, Texas.
“Austin is the city of self discovery,” he said. “It’s all about letting go of what you were holding on to before and picking up new things. No one judges you here. It’s like, ‘I can love yoga and do two-stepping?’”
The rest of his story is a merging of many things. First, his spirituality.
By the time he was 20, he was an agnostic if not an atheist, which meant “a separation from my mother on the one issue that mattered to her.” This was the beginning of a model he constructed about the way people live. First, they receive ideas about the world from the external—parents, school, a mentor, an employer. Some people stop there.
Others wind up releasing everything they’ve been taught. Laying it all down, deconstructing it. That’s the next phase.
Finally you begin to build a new idea for yourself and of yourself, incorporating as you choose, bits from your past. This could go on forever.
Bootstrapping, especially in Austin, is the same process, Bijoy said. You separate from the security of someone else’s ideas and funds and build something based on your passion, using your own ability to navigate the questions and the issues.
Austin is the best place to do that because it invites people to create not for money or power—both of which are iffy when you start a business—but for the joy of creating a business. For the journey and what you learn from it.
When you’re looking for venture capital, he said, the question is “are you going to build the next big thing?” But in bootstrapping, especially in Austin, it’s “Did you express the thing you wanted to express?”
“It’s not about getting rich…. for bootstraps, getting rich is incidental to getting to do what you’re passionate about.”
Goswami left Trilogy and started his own company, Aviri, but it didn’t take off. A half a million dollars was spent and his cofounder left. So he carried on for awhile on his own, bootstrapping, in that phase of spiritual development like Gotama Buddha when he goes to the forest. No money, no food. The hard part of enlightenment.
He kept it going for awhile and found that other people who were bootstrapping companies kept asking him to have coffee, lunch, breakfast, to talk about their challenges, discoveries and anxieties about bootstrapping. It was then that he started Bootstrap Austin. He thought it would be one meeting. It turned into a regular meetup group.
And he met…everyone.
“He is so well networked,” said Bjorn Billhardt, CEO of Enspire which was a new company with three or four people when Billhardt met Goswami. The two became fast friends and Goswami officiated at Billhardt’s wedding. “He is like the glue that pulls people together. I would say a vast network of my professional friends came through connections initially made by Bijoy. Professional recruiters charge an arm and a leg for just one connection….”
But it wasn’t only his connections that made a difference. It was the bootstrap mental model.
“I was thinking about seeking funding when I met Bijoy and he changed the way I thought about it,” said Billhardt, whose company has grown to more than 50 employees with an office in Berlin and global fortune 500 companies as clients. “It wouldn’t have been possible without Bijoy,” he said. “He lets you just talk it out and that is what a lot of entrepreneurs need. That’s one thing a lot of VC companies provide and professional coaches charge $400 an hour for. Bijoy does a lot of that work for free. He gave me advice to release a product even if it has bugs in it. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas…a lot of entrepreneurs are terribly afraid to do that. But then, Bijoy points out, if you keep a product under wraps, people don’t know about it and they don’t join your company.”
A lot of the work Goswami does—such as helping with RISE—he does for free. He does have a few clients, including Leadership Austin who use his book “The Human Fabric” with each new class of Austin leaders. The book, written with David Wolpert, focuses on identifying your ‘core energy’ and how you can use it to build something—a business or a community. Goswami also leads groups with Leadership Austin and is a cofounder with the organization’s CEO Heather McKissick, of the Austin Equation Initiative which was created to answer the question “What Makes Austin, Austin?”
“Running a small nonprofit is often like bootstrapping a startup,” McKissick said. “Bijoy’s expertise helps us understand how to do that well. In a down fundraising environment, it’s very helpful to have his unique skills and advice.”
He is everywhere. And he knows everyone. But if you ask him what his goal in life is, he’ll tell you, “It’s learning to Be Joy.”
And that’s a whole other story.
This weekend a special 3 Day Startup takes place at Home Away’s headquarters in Austin.
And another 3 Day Startup is scheduled for the weekend of April 27 at Geekdom at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
The deadline to apply to participate is April 18th. And there’s a top secret meet up at Trinity on April 12 to learn more about the event.
Alan Weinkrantz, a PR expert who resides at Geekdom, has written this post on what 3 Day Startup is and why you should apply to attend.
To get a glimpse of what it was like at the last 3 Day Startup in San Antonio last November, check out this story I wrote about it. I was impressed with the level of passion and commitment the participants had and their creative ideas and execution in a short period of time. At the end of the weekend, the entrepreneurs pitched their companies to a group of judges and investors. In fact, several companies have spun out of 3 Day Startup including Hoot.me.
InnoTech San Antonio has grown dramatically since it started five years ago, said Sean Lowery, the event’s executive director.
This year 65 exhibitors showcased their technology on the exhibit floor including Geekdom, a collaborative downtown workspace, Sirius Computer Solutions, a San Antonio-based information technology solutions provider and Nuboso, a startup cloud computing hosting company.
The show also served as a platform for a handful of startup companies to present their companies to potential investors and others interested in technology companies.
The day-long education program also featured dozens of speakers talking about everything from mobile apps to cloud computing and hiring high tech workers.
About 10 years ago, Sino CES started operating in China.
“We realized we couldn’t stop them,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on the world’s biggest electronics show in January in Las Vegas.
“We couldn’t sue them,” Shapiro said. “So we entered into a partnership with them.”
That’s how a lot of business is done in China, Shapiro told about 100 people attending his morning talk at InnoTech San Antonio Thursday.
Every year, Shapiro travels to China for the show. But a few years ago, an encounter with a Chinese politician, who spoke no English, shook him up so much he decided to write a book. The Chinese politician, in a few simple hand gestures, indicated that China was on the rise with a thumbs up sign and that the United States was on the decline with a thumbs down signal.
“There was some truth to it,” Shapiro said. “We’re not leading innovation the way we should be.”
Shapiro, 55, and his wife had children late in life. He has a four year old and another child on the way. His children make him have a laser-like focus on the future of the country. Last year, he wrote the bestselling book “The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream.”
For years, the United States has feared the rise of various countries like Japan, Korea and Mexico. All of those countries threatened to extinguish the U.S.’s powerhouse economy. But they didn’t, yet China has made a dent in it. But even China is suffering now because of the subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. market and because of China’s enormous growth, Shapiro said.
Manufacturing jobs have fled the U.S. in favor of cheaper labor in China, and those jobs are not coming back, Shapiro said. In China, a worker might spend all day doing one repetitive task on a manufacturing line.
“Americans are not going to be doing that kind of repetitive work – not with our education,” he said.
That’s why our national strategy should be focused on creating an innovation economy, Shapiro said.
“The thing about innovation is that every new idea challenges something in the past,” he said.
That’s why the U.S. has fewer travel agents, newspaper reporters and plant workers than years ago.
“As Americans we have a culture of doing things better,” Shapiro said.
To encourage innovation, the U.S. school system needs improvement, Shapiro said. Kids need to be taught to ask questions. The teachers that allow students to ask questions and challenge them are the best teachers, Shapiro said.
The U.S. entrepreneurial system also encourages innovation. The U.S. should not punish people for being successful and making money, Shapiro said. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, whose estimated net worth is around $60 billion, should be applauded, Shapiro said
“We reward people by letting them get wealthy,” he said. “It encourages the best and the brightest.”
But the focus on innovation has changed since Sept. 11, Shapiro said.
To remedy that, the U.S. also needs to change its immigration policies so that it doesn’t kick out the smartest people in our society who earn advanced degrees in science, engineering, technology and math. The National Science Foundation spends $6 billion a year on research and a lot of that research is done by foreign graduate students attending U.S. universities. Upon graduation, those students must go back to the countries they came from instead of being allowed to stay in the U.S., Shapiro said.
The U.S. also must increase its high bandwidth transmission capabilities to remain competitive, Shapiro said
And the signing of the JOBS Act by President Obama on Thursday was a step in the right direction in making it easier for entrepreneurs to raise money for their businesses through crowd funding.
“Innovation is so important for our country,” Shapiro said. “What’s really important for the future of innovation and technology companies is the health of the U.S. economy.”
Right now, all countries look to the U.S. for innovation, Shapiro said. They all want to emulate the U.S. That’s why he created Innovation-Movement.org to keep the focus on that strategy.
“Every company, every country, every individual needs a strategy,” Shapiro said. “Our strategy should be innovation.”
(InnoTech San Antonio was an advertiser with Silicon Hills News)
A self-described “motley crew of passionate developers, marketers, mattress testers, and professional eaters” took home the top prize at the fourth annual InnoTech San Antonio Beta Summit Thursday.
CallGrader, a 9-month old startup, won the three judges over to claim first place in the competition. The founders include Daniel Garcia, Ben Niemietz, Chip Mobley and Jonathan Dobbertin.
CallGrader has created a software application that allows companies to track the performance of advertising campaigns using its grading system. The software tracks phone calls to a designated number and then grades the quality of those calls to tell whether the advertising is on target and delivering the desired results.
CallGrader launched its beta version of its product in January and quickly signed up about 300 non-paying customers. It has focused on plumbers and heating and air-conditioning markets so far.
The team is currently finishing out building the platform. So far, they’ve bootstrapped their operations, but they plan to seek about $350,000 in venture financing within a few months, said Garcia.
ZippyKid, a WordPress hosting company, and SnappTours, a smartphone platform targeted at art museums, came in second and third respectively.
All of the top three companies reside at Geekdom at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
In all, six companies competed at the San Antonio Convention Center. They delivered eight-minute pitches. But the summit dragged on longer because of technical difficulties in loading up the computer presentations.
The other companies included BudgetDoc, a healthcare referral service, Making Sense, a mobile app developer and REDU Concepts, which makes a Kinect rehabilitation game aimed at those with traumatic brain injury and autism. REDU Concepts, formed by a group of University of Texas at San Antonio students, just advanced to round three of the Microsoft XBox/Windows competition.
“Today is all about showcasing innovation,” said Richard Perez, president of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. The winner received a one-year membership in the chamber.
SnappTours took home third place in the InnoTech San Antonio Beta Summit. The 18-month old startup has created a mobile app platform aimed at museums to share their art collections with visitors via a smartphone.