The City of Austin is fighting to win up to $40 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation and $10 million from Vulcan Philanthropy, Paul Allen’s investment company, in the Smart City Challenge.

To gather information on how other smart cities are operating, recently Mayor Steve Adler traveled to Amsterdam, a city in which 50 percent of people travel daily by bicycle. Amsterdam converted itself to a more bicycle friendly city after several tragic bicycle accidents involving children in the 1970s, according to Mayor Adler’s post.

“First off, a Smart City is a city in which data is captured from all aspects of urban life and then that data is employed to improve its residents’ quality of life,” Mayor Adler wrote in his post. “This could take a thousand different forms, such as traffic lights that monitor traffic levels and patterns, time of day, weather, events in the area, and then which adjust syncing and timing to minimize traffic delay. In other words, the kind of thing we’re working on with the Smart City Challenge.”

Austin is one of seven finalists for the Smart City Challenge. The other finalists are Columbus, OH, Denver, CO., Kansas City, MO, Pittsburgh, PA, Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA. The DOT announced in March that it will award up to $40 million to one city that submits the best proposal for what it means to be a “Smart City” and that pledges to become the country’s first city to fully integrate innovative technologies such as self-driving cars, connected vehicles and smart sensors into its transportation network.

The Department of Transportation received proposals from 78 cities. The seven finalists received $100,000 each to refine their proposals for the final competition.

Initially, Austin submitted a 30 page proposal outlining its problems with traffic and congestion and solutions to fix the problem. Among them, the city proposed “automated and connected vehicles, electric fleets, sensor systems, travel access hubs and packaged mobility service.” Those ideas include innovations like parcel delivery by unmanned drones to alleviate traffic congestion on the roads. It also includes a plan to partner with General Motors and Lyft to deploy large numbers of GM electric Transportation Network Companies, known as TNCs, and taxi vehicles.

During the second phase selection process, the “winning city will be selected based on their ability to think big, and provide a detailed roadmap on how they will integrate innovative technologies to prototype the future of transportation in their city,” according to the DOT. The DOT plans to announce the winner of the competition in June.

Austin always has a ton of activities for entrepreneurs going on, but this is a particularly busy week for tech events. Silicon Hills News has highlighted a few below that are worth checking out including two focusing on the city’s emerging medical technology industry.

HealthTech Breakfast

On Tuesday, Silicon Hills News will be moderating a panel for the Health Tech Breakfast event at Capital Factory at 701 Brazos St, Suite 1600, kicking off at
7:45 a.m. The panelists include Jesus Garza, president and CEO of Seton Healthcare Family, Dr. William (Bill) H. Rice, senior vice president of clinical innovation, St. David’s HealthCare and Richard Burghardt, Chief Executive Officer, CancerGene Connect. The event is free but registration is required.

HealthCare Texas 2016

Also on Tuesday and Wednesday, the HealthCare Texas 2016 Conference will take place at Brazos Hall in downtown Austin. Dell Medical School, Texas Growth Capital Forum, the Austin Healthcare Council and the Moon Group at Merrill Lynch are sponsoring the event.

The conference will bring 300 innovators in healthcare information technology, digital health, life science and therapeutics together for two days. The event schedule includes three distinct program tracks. The first day will feature keynotes and innovation panels, and both days will have a program for venture capital matching. Click here to register and use promo code “SHNews” for a 30 percent discount.

The First Annual Small Business Festival

The event kicks off on Tuesday and runs through Friday. It features more than 70 speakers including Bazaarvoice Co-founder Brett Hurt, Spark Factory Founder Gary Hoover and more. The City of Austin Economic Development Department and Capital One Spark Business sponsor the events, which take place in a dozen locations around Austin.

Tickets for premiere events at the Google Fiber Space start at $397.

In addition, dozens of free community events will be held at Orange Coworking, Tech Ranch, WeWork, Capital Factory, Galvanize, The Entrepreneur Center of Austin, Austin Community College Highland Business and more.

Longhorn Startup Demo Day

Longhorn Startup at the University of Texas at Austin holds its Demo Day on Thursday evening at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium at 2313 Red River Street from 5:00 p.m. to 10 p.m. The free event features an exclusive interview between Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Mike Maples Jr. and Bob Metcalfe, Phd, professor of Innovation and inventor of Ethernet.
In addition, each startup will present for four minutes on stage followed by a reception where each startup will have a table set up for demos. The event is free but registration is required.

The Texas Venture Labs Spring Venture Expo

The University of Texas at Austin Venture Expo is a semi-annual showcase of “Investor Ready” startups from UT at Austin and the local area. The companies include UT graduate student-led companies and all current Texas Venture Labs (TVL) Accelerator members. The event takes place at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, Room 204 (Amphitheater). Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs, UT Austin’s startup accelerator is hosting the event which runs all day from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. The event is free but registration is required.

AlertMedia, a platform for interactive mass notification, announced Tuesday it has raised $4 million more in a Series A-1 funding round.

Silverton Partners led the round which included ATX Seed Ventures and other current investors.

The Austin-based startup announced last June that it had raised $4.16 million in Series A funding. The latest round is to support AlertMedia’s expansion in the emergency communications market. Its mass communications platform now serves tens of thousands of users in more than 80 countries, according to a news release.

“Silverton is very excited to continue our investment in the AlertMedia team,” Morgan Flager, partner at Silverton Partners and AlertMedia board member, said in a news release. “The company has developed a world-class product, which is in high demand across the dozens of industries AlertMedia already serves.”

AlertMedia serves customers in manufacturing, telecom, healthcare, business services, transportation, energy, government, financial services, real estate and education. They use the company’s platform to “protect their workers, automate operations and mitigate loss.” Its customers include AT&T, Volkswagen, DHL, Pitney Bowes, Kellogg’s, Deluxe Corp., Tokyo Electron and the state of Texas.

AlertMedia recently launched SafeSignal, a patented worker safety solution.

“Our goal is to continue developing amazing products, and deliver those products to enterprise customers who want to keep their people safe, informed and connected,” Brian Cruver, founder and CEO of AlertMedia, said in a news release.

SparkCognition, an artificial intelligence, analytics and data security startup, Tuesday announced it has received $6 million in venture capital.

The Austin-based company closed its Series B round with new investors CME Ventures and Verizon Ventures with participation from existing investors The Entrepreneurs’ Fund and Alameda Ventures.

SparkCognition, founded in 2013, plans to use the funding to expand its business in the Internet of Things and Cybersecurity industries.

“We are already well on our way to an AI-powered Industrial IoT Revolution – where cognitive systems will truly augment human capabilities, but at machine speed and big data scale,” Amir Husain, Founder and CEO of SparkCognition, said in a news release. “Our collaboration with CME Ventures and Verizon Ventures further validate the work we are doing at SparkCognition and speak to the industry needs we are addressing within the Industrial IoT and cyber security markets.”

SparkCognition has developed artificial intelligence software, sensors and data that can secure and protect industrial assets. The company’s clients include Fortune 500 and Fortune 1,000 organizations.

“We are excited to have CME Ventures and Verizon Ventures joining as strategic investors,” Manoj Saxena, Chairman of the Board of SparkCognition and Former General Manager of IBM Watson said in a news release. “The executive team at SparkCognition has done a remarkable job of acquiring an impressive list of clients, bringing on the best and the brightest, producing cutting edge IP, growing revenue, and building strong industry partnerships.”

SparkCognition’s technology processes data and learns from it and becomes more accurate over time at identifying risks and detecting threats before they become problematic. Its cybersecurity products can identify potential attacks in the Internet of Things environment.

In Austin, startups do eventually become big businesses but that that doesn’t mean they still don’t like to have fun.

And that’s the reason behind the second annual Startup Games: Level Up event, which takes place Saturday at Fair Market and features ten bigger companies competing against each other in games like ping pong, foosball, beer pong, flip cup, dodge ball and more.

Silicon Hills News covered the first Startup Olympics held at uShip in 2012. uShip won the games, followed by BuildASign and Sparefoot.

Last year, BuildASign.com won the gold at the Startup Games: Level Up. It will return this year to defend its championship. Newcomers to this year’s games include Accruent, Spiceworks, Spredfast and The Honest Company.

Saturday’s event expects to raise $42,000 in charitable donations, double the amount from last year, according to a press release. Each team plays for the charity of their choice. The event is open to the public with a suggested $10 donation at the door.

“Level Up brings together companies that “grew up” in Austin and are still actively involved in giving back to the community. Many of this year’s competitors even once played in the Startup Games, and though they’ve graduated past the startup stage, Level Up gives them an opportunity to keep having fun with the culture of charitable giving they instilled in employees early on,” Douglas Ray, Startup Games Director of Events, said in a news release.

Here is the full list of competitors and the charities they’ve chosen to support:

Accruent – Charity: Habitat for Humanity

Bigcommerce – Charity: Stupid Cancer

BuildASign – Charity: Lung Cancer Alliance

Drillinginfo – Charity: The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society

HomeAway – Charity: Mobile Loaves & Fishes: Community First

Main Street Hub – Charity: Austin Pets Alive

RetailMeNot – Charity: Boys & Girls Club of Austin

Spiceworks – Charity: Championship Hearts Foundation

Spredfast – Charity: Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Texas

The Honest Company – Charity: Ronald McDonald House CTX

“Startup Games has been very successful combining philanthropy with networking and friendly competition,” Sara Levy, Startup Games Executive Director, said in a news release. “Startup Games raised more than $57,000 this January, and we hope to reach a total of $100,000 raised this year after Level Up.”

Levy is also executive director of the Notley Fund, the philanthropic investment firm behind the Startup Games.

Correction: The Startup Games seeks to raise $42,000 this year for charities, double the amount raised last year. We regret the error.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

At the April meeting of the StARTup Studio on Tuesday night, Ultimate EOR, People Pattern and AwiaTech Corp. presented their ventures.

All of them have University of Texas at Austin professors at the helm.

The monthly StARTup Studio invitation-only meetings take place at WeWork on Congress and serve as a high-level show and tell gathering for technology commercialization projects spinning out of university research. It’s also a way to expose the companies to potential funders and others in the community who can provide feedback and assistance.

The Innovation Center at UT Austin led by Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation, Louise Epstein, managing director and Ben Dyer, Entrepreneur in Residence, put on the meetings with sponsorship from the Austin Chamber of Commerce, WeWork Austin and the UT Austin Office of Technology Commercialization.

The Innovation Center gives grants to early stage startups led by a professor from UT, ranging from $10,000 to $100,000, Metcalfe said. It also accepts donations from individuals, companies and organizations that wish to assist the ventures.

The first presenter, Mojdeh Delshad, president and CEO of Ultimate EOR, is tackling a trillion dollar industry. It licenses special chemical technology developed at UT and creates formulas for oil companies to extract even more oil from existing wells. Delshad is also a research professor in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at UT at Austin.

The company, founded in 2013, has 10 full time employees and four contractors. Its focus is on chemical enhancement recovery. Its chemicals are environmentally safe and energy efficient, Delshad said.

Ultimate EOR has raised $6 million from investors and strategic partners including D&M, Clariant Oil Services, Harcros & Univar.

“First of all, we have very special chemicals developed at the University of Texas,” Delshad said. “We have exclusive rights to use them.”

The company creates customized formulas such as alkaline/surfactant/polymers or alkaline/co-solvent/polymers to put into an oil well and scrub it of oil, followed by a water flush. This can lead to 20 percent more oil production. The company specializes in enhanced oil recovery modeling and reservoir engineering. It also licenses its chemicals to other companies for a royalty fee.

It is also working with polymer manufacturers and surfactant manufacturers to test their materials in its laboratories, Delshad said.

And even though the price of a barrel of oil has dropped to $40 and a lot of companies are slowing down field tests this year, Ultimate EOR expects to be profitable, Delshad said. It has diversified its business into training, testing and other fields that bring in a revenue stream when oil production dips, she said.

Next up, People Pattern presented its software that mines information in social media to provide brands insights about their customers. Its secret sauce is the use of data science and linguistics to analyze the words people use and to provide companies with precise demographic information on their customers.
Jason Balridge, chief scientist with People Pattern and associate professor in the department of linguistics at UT at Austin joined Ken Cho, CEO of People Pattern, in 2013 to launch the company. They later hired Doug Wolfe, formerly with Facebook, as Chief Operating Officer.

Information extraction on social media channels is complex, said Balridge. For example, when someone says Apple are they referring to the fruit or the company, he said.

“There’s a lot of levels of depth you can go to when analyzing language,” he said. People Pattern deals with millions upon millions of social media profiles at scale and can turn that data into actionable insights for companies.

People Pattern now has 17 full time employees and operates out of a former medical supply warehouse on Austin’s east side.

“People pattern helps you understand the people behind your brand and conversations, rather than using disparate post level insights based on passive keyword based listening,” Balridge said.

“How old am I and where do I live and what are my main interests,” Balridge said. “These are all things that brands we work with want to know about their customers.”

For example, People Pattern might work with its customers like McDonald’s and Campbell’s to understand the Hispanic audience in Detroit and to find a better way to cater to them, Balrdige said.

People Pattern has more than 200 million people in its database.

“What that allows companies to do is to search through that database and find influencers for a brand,” Balridge said. They can then use natural language processing technology to reach them with tailored ads, he said.

To date, People Pattern has raised $4.75 million. It expects to do $3.2 million in revenue this year, Cho said. It is not looking to raise money. It is cutting its burn rate and trying to get to cash flow break even, he said. It’s also an attractive acquisition target in the marketing technology industry, Cho said.

The last presenter, AwiaTech Corp. started out as a research project at UT at Austin eight years ago. The researchers behind the company, Advanced Wireless Industrial Analytics Technology, helped to create a communications standard for the industrial Internet of Things called the WirelessHART. The company incorporated to commercialize its technology in 2008.

AwiaTech has an exclusive license agreement with UT at Austin to commercialize its wireless technology. The company is led by Al Mok, chairman and president and professor at UT in Computer Science along with Jeff Song, CEO and Thomas Lin, CTO.

“Our vision is to be the premier provider of wireless real time data collection and analytics for mission-critical Internet of Things,” according to Song.
Its technology and sensors can be used in industrial process automation, medical monitoring, robotics and other applications.

AwiaTech has created a software and hardware infrastructure that is designed to perform wireless real-time data collection and analytics. It passed registration by the industry standard organization FieldComm Group. Its customers include UConn, Western University in Canada, NST and UTP.

The installed base of active wireless devices in industrial automation was $18 million in 2016 and the market is expected to grow to $43 million by 2020, according to AwiaTech based on information from Industrial Automation, Wireless IoT and Berg Insight.

In 2006, Bill Morrow founded CSIdentity in San Antonio.

A few years later, he moved the company to Austin, which had a much more developed technology industry.

This week, Experian, the global information services company, announced plans to buy CSIdentity for $360 million. The deal is pending regulatory approval.

“The acquisition of CSID accelerates executive of our Consumer Services strategy and enables us to address a broader spectrum of the consumer market,” Brian Cassin, CEO of Experian, said in a news release. “By combining Experian and CSID capabilities, we will provide best-in-class products to give consumers greater control over their identity and credit information in one proposition. We look forward to welcoming the CSID team to Experian and building stronger and ever more compelling services which help consumers to protect, manage and make the most of their data. Following completion, we expect CSID to be immediately enhancing to Group earnings.”

The market to protect consumers against identity theft is estimated to be around $1.6 billion annually with opportunities for growth, according to a news release from Experian. CSID provides identity protection services in the U.S. The company currently has more than 10 million consumers on its platform.

“CSID uses its patent-protected technology to access a variety of data and scours the internet in real-time to monitor websites, blogs, bulletin boards and chat rooms to identify the illegal trading and selling of personal information,” according to a news release. “It provides a range of services, including credit data, to notify consumers of potential abuse of their identities and that their digital identity information is being actively sold or traded on the internet. This helps consumers to take action to protect themselves.” Its customers include information services companies, retailers, financial institutions, insurance companies and other large institutions.

Experian and CSID have existing commercial relationships and Experian is one of a number of CSID’s data providers.

CSID has raised $36.48 million in three rounds from three investors, according to its Crunchbase profile.

Tripchamp, a corporate booking platform for travel, announced Tuesday that it has raised $2 million in funding from The Bird Group, owners of Amadeus India, a global platform for the Indian travel industry.

The Austin-based startup plans to use the funding to boost its customer service channel and for corporate growth, according to a news release.

Tripchamp caters to corporate travelers. The platform helps corporate travelers book flights, hotels and cars at a discount.

“This financing not only validates our capabilities in the travel industry, but it also ensures that Tripchamp can scale its growth and provide the best service and experience possible for our users,” Alex Greystoke, Tripchamp CEO, said in a news release. “It’s an honor to be seen as one of the leaders bringing change to the travel industry. We think that Tripchamp is truly showing that there is greater value out there for business travelers, in particular.”

Tripchamp is a marketplace for private, public and negotiated fares. “It uses evolutionary artificial intelligence to understand travelers’ true needs, provides access to inventory that other companies can’t offer and saves travelers thousands on international travel,” according to a news release.

Last October, Tripchamp won a free trip to Oslo to pitch at the Oslo Innovation Week’s 100 Pitches competition.

EverlyWell announced Tuesday that is has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and launched a beta test of its at-home healthcare diagnostics tests.

The Austin-based company is led by CEO Julia Cheek, who recently moved to Austin from Dallas. The startup has six employees and its headquarters is at West 6th Street and Guadalupe.

“We are pleased to launch our business in a vibrant market like Austin, which is known for its creativity and cutting-edge innovation,” Cheek said in a news release. “We want to be centered among the brightest, most entrepreneurial minds who can help us revolutionize the health testing industry. Our promise to consumers is to deliver a world-class product that simplifies the testing process and provides actionable, easy-to-read results that will help them take ownership of their own health.”

The company is creating diagnostics tests for food sensitivity, fertility, hormone health and more aimed at consumers. The kits are mailed to consumers’ homes with instructions on completing the test and mailing it back. Kit samples are collected via pinprick dried blood spot, saliva or urine. Once the lab receives the test and processes it within a few days, the results and data are transmitted to the consumer electronically in an easy to read format. All of the testing is done without a lab or doctor’s visit in the privacy of the person’s home.

To analyze its tests, EverlyWell is partnering with CLIA-certified laboratories and a national physician network to review customer results.

“Diagnostic testing is a subpar experience for the individual,” Dr. Murdoc Khaleghi, EverlyWell’s Chief Medical Officer, said in a news release. “EverlyWell has developed an innovative platform that places the consumer at the center, empowering the individual to order, understand, and improve their own biomarkers. Health information is a powerful tool in preventing long-term and chronic disease, and ultimately should be accessible and understandable to all.”