GE Aviation is in Austin.

The business, a division of General Electric based in Cincinnati, Ohio, officially opened up its Austin digital collaboration center last week. It is the first in the U.S. In the past year, GE opened similar centers in Dubai, Shanghai and Paris.

The company also announced it is working with customer Qantas Airways on a data and analytics project aimed at providing solutions for aviation fleet intelligence and operational insights.

GE Aviation Chief Digital Officer, Jim Daily, officially opened the center with Qantas Head of Fuel and Environment Alan Milne. Local officials participating in the event included State Representative Paul Workman, State Representative Celia Israel and Ahmed Tewfix, chairperson of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

“GE’s collaboration center in Austin is home to software developers, data scientists and domain experts with specific backgrounds in analytics, flight-planning and engines, depending on what we’re working on,” Daily said in a news release. “Opening the center with Qantas, marks the commitment from a customer who really understands the value of using data across their operation.”

The center occupies 27,000 square feet at 400 W 15th Street with 100 data scientists, engineers and designers. GE Aviation plans to hire many more within the next year.

“We’ve seen that even small gains in fuel efficiency add up to big benefits and lower emissions when you multiply them across the hundreds of aircraft in the Qantas fleet,” Milne said in a news release. “The work we’re doing with GE is giving us more insight than we’ve ever had before into the way our aircraft operate, helping us find ways of flying smarter – and this is the next step in the partnership.”

Today, nearly 100 airlines covering more than 10,000 aircraft are GE Aviation Digital Solutions’ customers for such services as flight and fuel analytics, navigation services, airline operations management and planning and recovery.

Four years ago, GE Aviation acquired Austin Digital, a 40 employee startup that specialized in flight operations data analysis.

Finding a great work of art to display in an apartment is apparently a big problem for a lot of people.

And now a new Austin startup, Twyla, has got the solution.

The company officially launched on Thursday. It provides a new way to discover and buy art by providing access to limited-edition artworks by leading contemporary artists.

Instead of a consumer going to a gallery to haggle with an artist, Twyla takes the pain out the art acquisition process. It negotiates with artists to create exclusive prints at a fraction of the price of their original pieces. The company also displays its artwork at select “showrooms” including boutique hotels and venues across the country such as South Congress Hotel in Austin and Soho House West Hollywood.

The company works with artists worldwide. It currently is collaborating with more than 80 artists including Miya Ando, Travis Boyer, Guy Dill and Kristen Schiele to create more than 300 pieces, which range in price from $1,000 to $5,000. The artwork is also framed. Twyla’s artists have displayed their works in some of the world’s most influential museums and galleries including Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim, LACMA, MoMA, Gagosian Gallery, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Palais de Tokyo.

“We started Twyla after experiencing firsthand how frustrating it can be to buy art,” Matt Randall, co-founder and CEO of Twyla, said in a news release. “Artists are stifled by seller limitations, while consumers are expected to expertly navigate the complicated, opaque world of art buying. The artists are selected by the Twyla collective, which is composed of our experienced curators and creatives, that identifies what’s now, next and perfectly suited to Twyla’s clients’ tastes.”

Twyla also sends the artwork to a customers home in safe packaging and provides a kit with instructions on how to hang the art. In 12 U.S. cities, customers can opt to have their artwork installed by a professional art handler.

HomeAway co-founder and chairman Brian Sharples is one of the company’s co-founders. He recently stepped down as CEO of HomeAway and now serves as chairman of the board of Twyla. David Krane, CEO of GV (formerly Google Ventures) is board member; art community veteran and former president of Christie’s Doug Woodham and CEO of The Standard Hotels International Amar Lalvani. Twyla has raised over $19 million led by GV and joined by IVP and Redpoint Ventures.

“There’s a huge gap in the art buying market between posters and Picassos,” Krane, CEO of GV and Twyla board member said in a news release. “Twyla fills that void, finally speaking to a new generation of buyers who want to invest in art they love at a price they can afford.”

Firefly Space Systems, a private aerospace which was developing vehicles to launch small to medium sized satellites to orbit, laid off its staff of 159 employees and is exploring a possible sale of the company, according to a news report in Space News.
Last year, NASA selected Firefly, based in Cedar Park, for a $5.5 million contract to demonstrate a CubeSat launch by March of 2018, according to a news release.

Last week, the company let its workers go and posted a note on its Twitter feed about running into trouble closing on financing to keep the company operating.

Statement pic.twitter.com/aXX8wsJRX3

— Firefly Space (@Firefly_Space) September 29, 2016

This week, Firefly co-founder and chief executive Thomas Markusic told Space News that a major investor pulled out of its Series A funding round.

“The second large investor, which we had been working with for a year and had everything finalized, dropped out at really absolutely the last minute,” he said. “Suddenly we were left with half of our Series A funding unaccounted for.”

Markusic is working on raising funds but also told Space News that he is exploring a possible sale of the company.

The company filed papers last June with the Securities and Exchange Commission reporting it had raised $19 million of a $38.2 million offering.

Space News also reports that an arbitrator recently concluded that Markusic destroyed evidence at his former company Virgin Galactic that could have implicated him in a scheme to steal trade secrets for Firefly. Virgin Galactic has sued Markusic accusing him of taking technology he developed at Virgin Galactic with him to form Firefly. Firefly also sued Markusic to try to keep him from divulging trade secrets.

Factom, an Austin-based blockchain technology company that secures data, announced Wednesday it has closed on $4.2 million in funding.

Billionaire Investor Tim Draper of Draper Associates led the Series A round.

Blockchain is the underlying technology for Bitcoin, an alternative currency. A blockchain is a public ledger of all bitcoin transactions that have ever been executed.

Factom has taken that technology and applied it to data security for a wide range of industries and applications. The company has created Factom Apollo and Factom Iris, built on its open source core software, aimed at securing records and identity.

Factom previously raised a few million dollars in seed stage investment. The latest round of funding will let the company further develop its core technology and products.

This summer, the Department of Homeland Security issued a $199,000 grant to Factom aimed at developing digital identity security products for Internet of Things devices.

Earlier this year, the Austin Chamber of Commerce also named Factom to its A-List of Hottest Companies for 2016 in the emerging and early/seed stage category.

“We are delighted to have venture capitalists of such caliber help us build Factom,” Peter Kirby, CEO and Co-founder of Factom said in a news release. “This round of funding allows us to aggressively grow the company and the underlying technology. We started Factom to build a more honest and transparent world using a pretty simple approach: create software that makes it impossible to change the past and point that software at places where it solves valuable business problems. This funding accelerates our progress down that road.”

“Securing data is mission critical for governments, banks, car companies, credit card companies, retailers and any company concerned with hacking,” Draper said in a news release. “Centralized data is prone to critical failure by any individual mistake, whether by user error or malicious hacking. By decentralizing data through the blockchain, Factom avoids critical failures due to user error or hacker. Factom lets people sleep easy knowing that their bank account won’t be broken into, their car won’t errantly go off the road, and their identity won’t be stolen.”

“Consensus is extremely challenging,” Paul Snow, Chief Architect and Co-founder of Factom, said in a news release. “Blockchains first pushed the boundaries of computer science with the simple yet revolutionary ability to trade digital value openly. Now we are pushing the limits of computer science in a second revolution. The Factom protocol allows for the open coordination of processes against immutable ledgers of data. It will have the same kind of impact on data and systems as the first revolution had on value.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Condé Nast is going to “go big” in Austin, said Robert Sauerberg, the company’s CEO.

“This is the right environment for us to get new people and new talent,” Sauerberg said. “We’re going to be a dominate player in Austin and that’s our goal. We’re the first media company here and we want to make a big impact.”

Asked if there might be an Austin branded media platform coming out of the city, Sauerberg said “It’s too early to tell, but why not?”

The New York-based media giant just established its newest Digital Innovation Center on Austin’s Eastside across from Liberty Bar and Tattoo Parlor and next to Zilker Brewing Company.

Sauerberg said virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence are going to play a big role in the future of the way media is delivered to consumers.

“Today it’s all about mobile and video but it’s going to be about AI and VR and we’ll continue to evolve with whatever technology is coming at us next,” Sauerberg said.

Twenty years from now, there will “absolutely be magazines,” Sauerberg said.

“Our brands will be on all of these different platforms and magazines will be part of that, the brands will be much bigger, very broad and very widely distributed and global,” he said.

People are reading magazines more voraciously than ever, Sauerberg said. Millennials love them, he said. They appeal to wide range of consumers, he said.

“Everybody loves magazines,” he said.

Sauerberg was in town to officially open Condé Nast’s Austin office along with Condé Nast Chief Digital Officer Fred Santarparia. Michele Skelding, senior vice president of Global Tech & Innovation at the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Barbary Brunner, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, Gerardo Interiano, Google’s head of external affairs for the Southwest and other dignitaries attended the event.

Dale Watson and the Lonestars played tunes like “Quick, Quick, Slow, Slow,” “I Lie When I Drink” and “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down.”

Condé Nast’s offices are bright and open with lots of natural light. Its wide open workspace features a combination of sitting desks and standing desks with lots of conference rooms and lounge areas. Pictures from the covers of Condé Nast magazines decorate the walls. And magazines are on just about every table. The nearly 9,000 square feet of space in a new office building at 1645 E. Austin will have 30 employees by the end of the year. The employees include a range of engineers and product designers.

Condé Nast also has digital teams in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and London. Austin’s creative workforce is what attracted the company to the city.

“The brand of Condé Nast is not only a luxury brand, but it’s a brand that is going through digital transformation and for them to choose their digital innovation center for Austin is huge for us,” Skelding said.

Condé Nast reaches an audience of more than 100 million consumers across its print, digital and video brands. The company publishes some of the most iconic titles in media: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Brides, Self, GQ, GQ Style, The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, Architectural Digest, Bon Appetite, Epicurious, Wired and more.

The company’s newest division, Condé Nast Entertainment, was launched in 2011 to develop film, television and premium digital video programming.

On a wall of the new Condé Nast Austin office is the motto “Make Big Promises and Keep Them.” It seems like a harbinger of things to come.

CognitiveScale, an Austin-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning, announced Tuesday it has closed on $25 million in funding including a strategic investment from Microsoft Ventures.

The Austin-based startup, founded in 2013, reports the Microsoft investment will help the company develop applications based on Microsoft HoloLens and Microsoft Azure for consumers and businesses.

Other investors include Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital and IBM. The company previously reported in August it had received $21.8 million in Series B funding.

“We are entering a new era of immersive computing in which the world is our browser and we are the cursor,” Akshay Sabhikhi, CEO of CognitiveScale said in a news release. “Our goal is to embed cognitive systems of intelligence into a whole range of new personal computing applications and business processes, from customer engagement, to procurement and regulatory compliance, using hyper-personalized holographic projections and mixed reality (MR).”

The Microsoft investment will allow CognitiveScale to develop MR applications for shopping, workforce productivity and business processes.

“CognitiveScale products can be deployed on hybrid cloud environments to meet the requirements of our customers, including the ability to bring their own data lake and allow our Cognitive Cloud technology to securely access sensitive data. We are seeing more requirements to use Microsoft Azure due to its scalability, rich set of tools, cost effectiveness, and flexibility for customers to control access to their sensitive data sources,” Matt Sanchez, Founder and CTO of CognitiveScale said in a news release.

Schedule courtesy of SXSW – all times are Eastern.

9:45 AM: Hard Things are Hard: A Conversation with James Turrell and David Adjaye (Newseum)

11:30 AM: Musical performances in the White House, including Gallant and Black Alley

12:30 PM: DJ Bev Bond (Innovation Stage)

1:45 PM: The Dap-Kings (Innovation Stage)

2:45 PM: Feeding the Future Panel (Innovation Stage) Fixing Real Problems Panel (Discussion Stage)

4:00 PM: LA: A Case Study in Innovation Panel (Innovation Stage) How We Make Change (Discussion Stage)

5:15 PM: White House Student Film Festival (Innovation Stage and Film Screen)

6:15 PM: The Lumineers (Innovation Stage)

7:00 PM: President Obama in Conversation with Leonardo DiCaprio and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe (Innovation Stage)

7:45 PM: Domestic premiere of climate documentary film Before the Flood (Film Screen)

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Amos Schwartzfarb took over as Managing Director of Techstars Austin in 2015. Before that, he founded several companies and worked for numerous startups including Joust, BlackLocus, mySpoonful, Business.com, HotJobs.com and others. He enjoys working with entrepreneurs and in Austin’s vibrant technology startup scene.

Q. What brought you to Austin?

AS: My wife and I came here for a weekend in 2007 to visit a number of friends that had moved here and we fell in love with this city. Things were starting to bubble up here. Austin seemed to have the makings of a great tech scene plus great weather, outdoor activities, music and great people. It had everything we were looking for.

Q. What was your first startup?

AS: The first startup I was a part of was a company called Shoreline Mountain Products in 1997. It was a paper catalog company that sold rock climbing and outdoor gear. We put the company online in 1997. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, we were one of the first online retailers. We didn’t realize we were doing anything crazy. It turned out we were breaking new ground. That company sold to Mountain Gear in 1999/2000. That was in the Bay area.

Q. What attributes do you think make a good entrepreneur?

AS: Passion, tenacity, perseverance and a love for doing really hard things and enduring lots of pain to achieve success. People forget to mention that last one. Starting a company is really hard.

Q. Do you think that there’s romanticism about running a startup that isn’t reflected in reality?

AS: I absolutely do. It seems really romantic to be a founder and to start a company. It sounds so awesome. The truth is most companies are not successful and the ones that are have to work way harder and fight through more challenges than one can ever really prepare for. It is just so much more work than you can ever imagine. I think if anyone remembered how hard it was the first time that they wouldn’t do it again. But it’s also one of the most rewarding things you can do whether you’re successful or not. To create something new with your own hands and your own brain it’s a pretty powerful experience.

Q. Why did you decided to become Managing Director of Techstars Austin?

AS: The timing was right. After being an operator for over 20 years and dabbling in investing the opportunity was presented and it just made sense. This role allows me to take my experience and passion of growing businesses and combine it with choosing 10 amazing founders/companies each year who are solving real problems and growing real businesses. Getting to be a “hands on” investor is the best of all worlds for me and is incredibly rewarding.

Q. How did the first class of Austin startups under your direction do?

AS: I’m obviously biased, but I think it’s an exceptional class of phenomenal founders. Most of them are done with fundraising. They continue to build their business. In truth, only time will tell but I’m still very bullish on all of them.

Q. What surprised you about the Techstars startups?

AS: The way the teams all came together and were able to help each other. There is a lot of power in that. They were leveraging each other, as well as, the program. It was an amazing thing to witness and even more amazing to see it continue on several months after the program has ended.

Q. And what stage is Techstars Austin in right now?

AS: Applications for the next program close in three weeks on Oct. 15th. In December, we’ll make our decisions and on January 23rd the program starts.

Q. Anything in particular you are looking for in startup teams?

AS: I would say the biggest things I’m looking for are really passionate founders solving real problems.

Q. They can be from any industry?

AS: They can be from any industry and anywhere in the world. And really any stage too.

Q. Why is Austin a great place for tech startups?

AS: I think Austin is a great place for tech startups for several reasons. The energy in this town is phenomenal. The “give first” attitude makes it very friendly to early stage companies and open for collaboration. It’s not as expensive as being on one of the coasts. All of those things combined are really helpful. Then there is a sheer number of people trying to do new and exciting things that creates positive energy and innovation. It all builds on each other.

Q. What about the venture capital availability in Austin? Is it here? Do we need more?

AS: That’s a question everyone ponders. A lot of people say there is not enough capital. I think there is enough capital for great founders and companies to get funded. The market will continue to evolve as the breadth of the companies evolve. There are plenty of great companies getting funded all the time.

Q. One of the hot topics in technology is about diversity and the need for more diverse startups what is your position on that?

AS: This is a hot topic at Techstars too. I think it is an extremely important topic. The fact that we have to talk about it shines the light that we have to be involved. Personally, I try to be completely agnostic to everything and simply focus on finding awesome entrepreneurs. That said, there is more to be done.

Q. Where do you go from here?

AS: I love this job and getting to work with so many talented entrepreneurs and I love this city. This past spring I closed the next Techstars Austin fund which will fund the next four programs/years I look forward to many more years working for Techstars in Austin and with great founders from all over the globe.

Editor’s note: Amos Schwartzfarb was featured in Silicon Hills News’ 2016 Austin Technology calendar. SHN will run Q&As with all the people featured in the calendar. For information on how you can sponsor or be a part of the 2017 Austin Technology calendar, please contact Laura@SiliconHillsNews.com. Thank you.