Doreen Lorenzo, Director of the University of Texas at Austin’s new Center for Integrated Design and Design educator and designer, James Victore, are the keynote speakers during Austin Design Week. Photos courtesy of Austin Design Week.

And Austin takes design seriously.

That’s why a team of creative minds launched the first Austin Design Week, which kicks off on Monday. The week includes a variety of events where people can share their work, ideas and work spaces and learn from one another.

“Each day we’re inviting the community to participate in riveting design talks from local leaders, hands-on workshops like jewelry making, or interesting new topics like design in government,” according to a post by Danielle Barnes, Austin Design Week organizer and co-founder.

Doreen Lorenzo, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s new Center for Integrated Design, will deliver the keynote address at the Austin Design Week Kick-Off Party at Austin Beerworks on Monday.

Design educator and designer, James Victore, will deliver the keynote talk at the Austin Design Week Closing Party on Friday at Canopy.

The rest of the week features a variety of speakers, workshops, studio tours and parties. It even includes a silk screen workshop in which attendees are encouraged to bring their our shirt to design. And Isa D’Aniello is teaching an introduction to hand lettering session to teach typography basics and lettering styles.

IBM Design has also created The HUB, an interactive installation, to inspire design exploration and learning at the E. William Doty Fine Arts Building, 2301 Trinity St. on UT’s campus.

Another highlight is the Fisterra Projects Studio Tour, a collaborative project between the Design Institute for Health, Fisterra Studio, the Thinkery, ThinkEAST, and Johnson & Johnson. It looks at ways to improve health at the community level.

There’s even a storytelling event which seven Austin designers will give five to seven minute lightning style talks about how design has affected their lives.

Check out the full schedule for Austin Design Week here and make sure to RSVP for events.

Austin-based HealthTronics this week announced it has acquired Plymouth, Minnesota-based HealthTech Solutions.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Acquiring HealthTech Solutions further enables HealthTronics to make available a wide array of clinical treatment options to doctors and hospitals of any size – from comprehensive medical centers to offices in remote, rural communities,” Russell Newman, president of HealthTronics, said in a news release.

Founded in 2002, HealthTech Solutions’ technicians deliver, set up and monitor laser and surgical technology. The company also offers workshops and training, as well as cosmetic products. The company has operations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota. It has a staff of 14 employees who will join HealthTronics’ staff.

HealthTronics, founded in 1989 in Austin, has made five acquisitions in the past two years. The company provides mobilized medical technologies and services as well as physician partnership opportunities.

“Expanding HealthTronics’ technology fleet and geographic reach through the acquisition of HealthTech Solutions will help us put the best tools available into the hands of even more physicians,” Newman said in a news release.

A fresh baked cookie startup in Austin is attracting a lot of dough.

Tiff’s Treats, launched by a couple of graduates from the University of Texas at Austin, just closed on $11 million in funding.

Dallas-based CIC Partners led the round. Tiff’s Treats with 22 stores in Texas and two stores in Atlanta plans to use the funds to open more locations nationwide. Last year, the company raised $14 million.

In 1999, Tiffany and Leon Chen founded Tiff’s Treats 16 years ago while students at the University of Texas at Austin.

The company is known for baked-to-order cookies and brownies delivered warm to a house or office in about an hour.

To date, Tiff’s Treats has raised $32.9 million, according to its Crunchbase profile.

“Tiff’s Treats is adored by everyone that knows it, and that doesn’t happen by chance,” Mike Rawlings, partner at CIC Partners, former CEO of Pizza Hut and current Mayor of Dallas, said in a news release. “From my days at Pizza Hut, I can appreciate the immense complexity of the delivery business, and the Tiff’s Treats team makes the customer experience seamless. At CIC Partners, our goal is to partner with top management teams, and this team fits the bill.”

Localeur, a travel recommendation service aimed at millennials, has raised nearly $4.2 million of a $4.6 million offering from 43 investors, according to papers filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Austin-based startup, founded in March of 2013, previously raised $1.2 million, according to its Crunchbase profile. Silicon Hills News did this profile of the company in 2013. Localeur is now in 30 cities and is available as a mobile phone app.

Joah Spearman, Co-Founder and CEO, formerly worked at Bazaarvoice with Co-Founder and President Chase White. They saw an unmet need for a travel site with recommendations by locals. A void left by travel and recommendation services like need Yelp and Trip Advisor.

Spearman has been vocal in the Austin startup community about difficulty in finding funding and at one point talked about moving his startup to California.

Localeur didn’t send out an announcement after it raised the funding last week, which Spearman wrote took “forever to raise,” in a post on Hacker Noon’s Medium Site, a San Francisco-based blog for Hackers. Instead, in that same post, he listed seven reasons why startup fundings are overrated.

The number one reason Spearman listed: “people think raising money is success rather than fulfilling your mission.”

He also said he sold his 2011 Toyota FJ Cruiser, also known Uncle Phil, in August to make payroll and that stuff like that never gets covered unless he writes about it on Medium. And he complained in his post about inaccuracies in media reports.

In a separate post on the Localeur blog, Spearman reports Localeur is hiring and it’s soon going to have an all hand’s on meeting in San Francisco to plot its strategy. It’s aiming to have next year’s meeting in London.

Bright minds that look at things in innovative ways are going to be the future of the healthcare industry, according to Dr. Vonda Wright, Orthopaedic surgeon and keynote speaker at MedTechTX 2016. But it’s not just about inventing a cool gadget and thinking the healthcare system will automatically embrace it. Healthcare startups have unique challenges they face in getting their product to market. A recent conference, MedTechTX 2016, in downtown Austin, addressed a lot of the challenges entrepreneurs face in the marketplace today. Here’s a few of the takeaways from the two-day event.

1. It’s Not All About Making Money – Remember you are saving lives with your gadgets and platforms and it’s not about making money that is the message you need to translate your product into – the why to improve patient outcomes, said Dr. Vonda Wright, Orthopaedic surgeon, UPMC Center for Sports Medicine, Medical Director, UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex, founder, Women’s Health Conversations Conference, director of Performance & Research Initiative for Masters Athletes.
2. Startups Need a Warm Introduction to Get in the Door – The best way to get in is to get a warm introduction to healthcare providers from someone they know, said Dr. Frank Mazza, Chief Medical Officer of Quantros.

   Claudia Perez, BSN, MHI, business development with Seton Healthcare Family, only makes calls to introduce startups to doctors after she has vetted the startups for passion, solid product, good team, business plan and customers.

3. Startups Must Find a Champion within the Healthcare System to help pitch their product and startup – Once you find your champion, you got to make sure they have skin in the game as well, said Dr. Frank Mazza. Don’t give everything away for free. Make them commit to providing you with data or access to data. Also make them commit to a certain amount of time every week to meet with you and the right people.
4. Criticism equals opportunity – Controversies are opportunities for innovation, but beware of selective hearing, according to Jonathan Coe of Prescient Surgical.
5. Focus on the Patient Experience – You’ve got to come in with a ROI (Return on Investment) story, said Dr. William Rice with St. David’s Healthcare. But you also need the patient experience ROI. It’s not just a financial story. It’s multi-dimensional.
6. Make Sure You Can Make a Profit – It may cost $200 to make a widget and you’re going to get reimbursed $210 – sometimes it’s better to fail early than to waste a lot of time and a lot of money, Dr. Dan Peterson with Alafair Biosciences. It’s important to know how much customers are willing to pay for your product.
7. Do Your Homework – Don’t ask your potential client to do your homework for you, said Chris Thierfelder, director of research and development of Halyard Health. Please do your homework in advance.
8. Pitch Via Email – Dr. Norman Chenven, CEO of Austin Regional Clinic doesn’t want to get pitched via a slidedeck. He wants an email with bulletin points that shows why a startup’s product or service is good for their organization. No slides. No pictures. Then he’ll call together a white board group or team when they are looking at a device to see how it fits in the organization. I try to do a lot of pre-screening. We do get pitched by a lot of folks.
9. Start Small -Katrina Daniel, RN, Chief Health Care Officer of the Texas Teacher Retirement System, advised startups to start small and get experience and then expand. A program the size of ours is not going to take too many chances.
10. Play by the Rules – Play by the rules in whatever organization you’re trying to get into, said Kevin Cook, CEO of Hospital System of Mississippi. The quickest way to get shut down is to try to do an end run around those rules, he said. His organization is bureaucratic, complex and difficult and they have to play within those roles. His organization is a state entity and has regulatory requirements to comply with, he said.
11. Focus on Sustainable, Patient-Centric Valuation – To understand if your product is going to create value, you need to focus on credible data – cost and outcomes – ask patients if they got better, said Dr. Kevin J. Bozic, MBA, professor and chairman of the department of surgery and peri operative care at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin and a keynote luncheon speaker.

Disclosure: MedTechTX is put on by the Texas State Small Business Development Center, which is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News and sponsored a two-day live blog of the conference.

Amazon Lumberyard logo courtesy of Amazon.com

Amazon opened a corporate office in Austin in the Domain at 11501 Alterra Parkway about a year ago, according to a report from KXAN.

In a blog post, Amazon called Austin “one of the long-standing centers of gravity for great game development talent, and innovation in community-driven games.”

“We believe Austin is a perfect location for us to continue our quest to help game developers build the community-driven games that push both engine and cloud technology,” according to the blog post. “From the early days of Ultima Online, to some of today’s most beloved MMOs, Austin game teams have helped lead the industry in large-scale, multiplayer experiences.”

Richard Garriott de Cayeux created Ultima Online in 1997 as part of Origin Games, which was acquired by NCsoft. He currently runs an Austin-based gaming company called Portalarium.

Lumberyard and AWS seek to offer game developers a scalable infrastructure to build their operations without worrying about their backend technologies.

“Not only is Austin a great location for experts who have passion and deep experience building some of our favorite MMOs, multiplayer, and community-driven games, it’s also home to one of our new Twitch teams who just set up shop there in July,” according to Amazon. “The Twitch team in Austin is focused on helping developers use Twitch in creative ways to grow community and make money, and we’re excited to work closely together (and have made sure that our desks are well within Nerf distance).”

Amazon currently lists 205 jobs available at its Austin office.

VentureBeat reports the Amazon Lumberyard expansion comes a few weeks after San Francisco-based “MaxPlay, the maker of a competing game engine, confirmed that it had laid off almost all of its employees at its San Francisco and Austin locations.”

Disclosure: Silicon Hills News is an affiliate partner with Amazon.