By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Pingboard Tuesday released a company organizational chart feature in its employee management software.

Customers demanded it, said Bill Boebel, co-founder and CEO of Pingboard.

“Going into this business I had no idea how important an organizational chart would be for companies,” he said. “It’s the number one feature they’ve asked for.”

For two years, Pingboard, based at Capital Factory in Austin, has created human resources management software featuring an employee directory and a vacation planner. The startup has more than 120 small to medium sized businesses as paying customers with close to 30,000 employees using the software on a daily basis, Boebel said. About 20 of its customers are international including HelloFresh in Berlin and Freelancer.com in Australia.

Pingboard, which raised $2.5 million in venture capital and has 11 employees, redesigned the employee directory and vacation calendar for the benefit of employees.

The organizational chart was the next logical feature, Boebel said. Right now, a lot of companies use a spreadsheet or manually draw an organization chart outlining who reports to whom, he said. Pingboard’s software creates a dynamic online organizational chart that makes it easy and accessible to everyone inside a company, he said.

“Companies are growing and that stuff gets outdated really fast,” Boebel said. “This provides informational transparency.”

Pingboard’s software works on iOS and Android mobile platforms. It’s designed for employees and it takes information that used to reside in folders in a company’s human resources department into easily accessible and actionable information that empowers employees, Boebel said.

Pingboard doesn’t charge companies with less than 15 employees to use its software. Its largest customer has 1,200 employees. The majority of its customers have a few hundred employees.

When startups get bigger than 100 people, the employees don’t know each other as well and they need a human resource management tool like Pingboard, Boebel said.

“It provides a layer of transparency to HR,” he said.

Freelancer.com uses Pingboard’s software to tag freelancers in its database by skill sets. That makes the database easily searchable. Adecco, a staffing agency, also tags people with skills, functional areas and regions.

Providing information in a fast growing startup environment allows companies to make decisions faster, Boebel said.

Boebel originally came up with the program because as managing director of Capital Factory he wanted something to keep track of the employees and members as the organization grew. Today, Capital Factory still uses Pingboard and has more than 1,000 members and employees listed in the directory.

Food+City has selected 24 finalists for its second annual Food Challenge Prize with cash awards totalling $50,000.

The Austin-based organization reported 115 entrepreneurs applied for the contest, which is aimed at improving or solving a wide range of food system issues. Of the 24 finalists, six are from Texas including four from Austin and two from Texas A&M at College Station.

The local finalists include:

BENTO + PICNIC, a healthy local lunch from Austin’s chef-owned bento chop offering healthy, ready to eat lunches made from local, seasonal ingredients.

Crickers, crackers made from cricket flour. This Austin-based startup wants to normalize the consumption of insects in the U.S. as a sustainable protein alternative.

Eat at Home, a startup led by a team of students at the University of Texas at Austin, is a marketplace, website and mobile app, which connects people looking for homemade foods with people passionate for cooking.

Tastegraphy, an Austin-based startup created an app, Tasty, that aggregates data on a person’s food likes, dislikes and dietary restrictions to recommend restaurant dishes at eateries they would most enjoy.

Go Fresh!, a startup founded by Texas A&M student McCalley Cunningham. It is focused on helping businesses and households decrease food waste.

Regrub, a Texas A&M student led team that is tackling the $161.6 billion problem of food waste in the U.S. The company has developed a waste management kit that uses solider flies to turn food waste into fertilizer.

Other finalists include:

Garbage to Garden of Portland, Maine aims to combat chronic soil erosion by collecting organic compost, via a garbage and recycling collection service, from households, businesses and schools.

47farms which seeks to connect large food sellers and distributors with local growers and suppliers in order reduce the distance that food travels between farms and consumers.

The Food+City Challenge Prize is focused on identifying and encouraging startup businesses, products and processes to provide new solutions addressing food problems globally.

“This is a great lineup, and we’re excited to see this year’s participation expand well beyond the United States to include the United Kingdom, Israel, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Colombia,” Robyn Metcalfe, director of Food+City, said in a news release. “A wide range of startups include urban vertical farming, commercial kitchen sharing, and curbside composting. We also saw an increase in food delivery services and waste reduction business models.”

The next step is the finalists work with industry mentors on their business plans and prototypes for the next three months. Then the winning teams will be announced on Feb. 6th at a public showcase and pitch contest at the University of Texas at Austin.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

At the StARTup Studio’s monthly meeting Thursday night at WeWork, three University of Texas at Austin professor-led startups pitched their ventures.

They included a topical cream to detect skin cancer, a therapeutic temperature management system to lower and raise the body’s temperature and a protein sequencing technology to easily diagnose cancer and other diseases.

The goal of the StARTup Studio is to identify professor-based startups and help them find funding and bring their products to market, said Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation and director of the Innovation Center at UT Austin. The monthly events generally feature three startups with about 50 invited guests. The UT Austin Office of Technology Commercialization, the Austin Chamber of Commerce and WeWork Austin sponsor the events.

“We have identified a gap between research and startups so we are looking for ways to fund people across that gap we’re calling them innovation grants,” Metcalfe said.

Louise Epstein, managing director of the Innovation Center and Metcalfe, match professor-led startups at UT Austin with people who would like to support their work with donations. They will be making some Innovation grants in a month or so, Metcalfe said.

First to pitch, Professor Ken Diller, who has spent 43 years in the UT Biomedical engineering department, founded Mercury Biomed in March of 2015. The company has two thermoregulatory products: SmartCool and WarmSmart.

“We are sitting right on a huge medical market and we think we have really, really unique innovative IP technology that can be disruptive,” Diller said. “We think it’s way more effective than anything that exists right now. We think it is very different from what exists.”

WarmSmart is used to keep the body warm when a patient is under anesthesia during surgery, Diller said. And SmartCool is used to keep the body cool.

During surgery, people tend to get quite cool with very negative consequences if they are not warmed up, Diller said. In the U.S., there are 50 million surgeries a year and the consequences of not being warm are serious, he said. They can lead to infections, bleeding and shivering, he said. The market right now for warming devices is a $1.6 billion market, Diller said.

On the other side, cooling patients is needed in situations where there is low blood flow to the brain such as in strokes and traumatic brain injuries, Diller said. There are 5 million events per year creating a $665 million market.

“The way we do this both for cooling and warming is we recruit the way the body works naturally,” Diller said.

The body has built in high efficiency heat exchangers to stay alive, Diller said. The primary way that happens is the circulation of blood from our core out to the extremities. The heat exchangers are in the palms of our hands and soles of our feet among other areas, he said. The company heats the neck to increase high performance blood flow. Diller came up with the idea after taking a hot shower in the wintertime. He noticed that the hot water on his neck made his palms bright red and warm.

Mercury Biomed’s patent-pending system contains mittens and booties and a device to regulate heat or cooling for the body.

“We have combined a very sophisticated physiology with super simple and safe devices and that’s our hallmark,” Diller said.

Mercury Biomed has created the device prototypes and they are in clinical trials right now. The company has raised $300,000 in seed stage funding is looking to raise a Series A fund in the $3 million to $4 million range, Diller said.

The next presenter, Anna H. Chen, co-founded Proteanseq.

“What genomics does for DNA, we do for proteins,” Chen said. “Everything in your body is done by proteins, diseases, drugs, everything. While DNA is the blueprint for your body, proteins are the actual physical entities that are doing all the work think of them like the brick and mortar, the paint and the plumbing in your house.”

To build a new diagnostic, it’s necessary to know what the proteins are doing, Chen said. Current technology detects only about 25 percent of the body’s proteins. But with Proteanseq’s technology, the company can detect all of the proteins with one blood drop, she said.

Proteanseq sequences each protein – it breaks them down into peptides and further breaks them down into amino acids. It labels each amino acid. It then uses a proprietary database to match the proteins to find patterns to detect diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s.

The diagnostics market is projected to be worth $71.6 billion in 2019 with $5 billion in the protein diagnostics industry.

Proteanseq is pursuing Small Business Innovation Research grants to take the product from the research lab to the marketplace, Chen said.

During the question and answer session, someone asked Chen about the comparison of Proteanseq to Theranos, a venture-backed diagnostics company in Silicon Valley. Chen said Theranos’ technology is based on DNA whereas Proteanseq’s technology is based on proteins. The highly-stealth Theranos has been in the hot seat lately with many news stories published about it because it uses proprietary technology with little oversight from the scientific community to do diagnostic tests with just a few drops of blood. Some question whether its technology is effective.

But Chen said Proteanseq’s proprietary technology is effective and vetted by the scientific community.

The last presenter, Dorothy Silbaugh, a graduate student at UT, gave an overview of her early-stage company, Spot on Nano. The company uses silicon nanoparticles that are 500,000 times smaller than a grain of sand to detect cancer. The company’s nanoparticles can be attached with specific tags to them that will bond with cell receptors and aggregate on cells that have a specific characteristic.

Silbaugh gave a specific application of the technology to create a cream that can detect malignant skin cancer cells versus benign cells. The cream can help dermatologists detect skin cancer without doing a biopsy. An estimated 80 percent of all biopsies turn out to be benign, Silbaugh said.

Spot on Nano’s technology eliminates unnecessary biopsies and reduces repeat doctor visits, Silbaugh said. The company plans to pursue some research grants to prove out its technology, she said.

The University of Texas at Austin received a $6 million recruitment grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas which has allowed it to hire Thomas Yankeelov, a distinguished cancer researcher.

Yankeelov will join UT Austin on Jan. 1, 2016 and he will assume a dual appointment in the Cockrell School of Engineering and the Dell Medical School. Yankeelov’s clinical research is aimed at improving patient care by employing advanced imaging methods for the early identification, assessment and prediction of tumors and their response to therapy. He previously worked at Vanderbilt University where he served as the Ingram Professor of Cancer Research; professor of radiology and radiological sciences, physics, biomedical engineering and cancer biology; and director of cancer imaging research and co-leader of the Host-Tumor Interactions Research Program for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center..

“There are tremendous opportunities at the intersection of medicine and engineering to develop new tools that will help save lives. Dr. Yankeelov will help UT Austin lead those efforts,” President Gregory L. Fenves said in a news release. “We continually strive to bring the best minds to Texas to collaborate on world changing research. This grant from CPRIT allows us to do just that.”

Together, Austin and San Antonio can develop into a powerhouse business and technology region, similar to Dallas-Fort Worth, according to a new report.

Austin and San Antonio have the chance to build something incredibly special in Central Texas. And the folks at Lawnstarter report in 2030, this region will have a 34 percent increase in population to 5.7 million people.

So what’s Lawnstarter’s interest in the regional growth? It provides lawn care service to customers in both Austin and San Antonio. So I guess it will have even more customers with the boom in population.

RealMassive, creator of an open data marketplace for the commercial real estate industry, announced Thursday it has appointed two new board members.

Lynn Atchison, chief financial officer of HomeAway and David Mather, managing partners of Ensys Capital, join Craig Hancock and Hank Seale, founder and chairman of Q2 Holdings.

“Lynn and David have so much experience,”Hancock said. “I can’t be more thrilled to have these professionals on our board.

Both have a proven track record of building and leading successful data and technology companies, he said. They will help RealMassive immensely on its quest to become the leading commercial real estate marketplace, he said.

RealMassive, founded in 2013, has 22 employees, and recently moved into an entire floor at 1145 W 5th St. Civitas Learning formerly occupied the space.

RealMassive, which is a disruptor in the commercial real estate industry, has grown quickly and its data is now available in 33 markets. The company has raised $10 million in funding and is using that on product engineering and to build out its sales and marketing organization, said Hancock. It will most likely seek additional funding next summer, he said.

The addition of Atchison and Mather will help the company grow even faster, Hancock said. Atchison has extensive experience working with high-growth startups as the CFO of HomeAway and as the vice chair of the Austin Technology Council’s board of directors. She also previously served as CFO of Hoover’s.

Mather, with 25 years of technology leadership experience, currently serves on the board of MTPV and managing part of Ensys Capital. He also previously served as president of Hoovers.

RealMassive is tackling a big market. The commercial real estate industry has been opaque with information, Hancock said. RealMassive has created an open, listing database of commercial properties. Its platform reduces costs, increases efficiencies and accelerates deal flow, Hancock said.

Zebra Imaging, which specializes in 3d holographic visualization technology, Wednesday announced it has acquired Austin-based Rattan Software, a research and development firm.

Austin-based Zebra Imaging reports the acquisition will accelerate its ability to leverage advanced 3D light-field technology in upcoming holographic display products. Zebra Imaging develops 3D digital holographic images, hologram imagers and interactive 3D displays for government and commercial use. Rattan will continue to operate as its own brand as a wholly owned subsidiary of Zebra Imaging.

“With Rattan’s expertise, Zebra will be able to bring more depth, quality and focal clarity to our 3D Dynamic Light-Field display product lines,” Chuck Scullion, Zebra President and CEO, said in a news release. “The display industry is naturally moving towards glass-free technologies, this acquisition helps position Zebra right in the middle of all that action. We are very happy they are coming on board.”

Graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory founded Zebra Imaging in 1996. The company has raised $24.5 million in venture capital in five rounds, according to its CrunchBase profile.

Rattan, founded in 2012, works with clients involved in virtual reality, semiconductor, and military applications. Its customers include Virtuix Omni, Samsung, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“We want to push the realms of possibility for 3D holographic light-field displays,” Amy Lessner, President of Rattan Software, said in a news release.“By joining the Zebra team, we can accelerate those objectives with a company that not only developed the world-leading Zebra Motion Display (ZMD) system, but has 50 patents issued or pending on holography and dynamic LFD’s. The applications are endless. Zebra is the only company in the world to have achieved true 3D 360-degree dynamic displays, with four installed prototypes in research labs today. We are very excited about the detailed Gen2 design, which has already received government funding, and we look forward to accelerating this system to market.”

Selfbucks, which makes dynamic marketing platforms for retail stores and brands, announced this week it has closed its Series A funding and raised $6.5 million.

To date, the Austin-based company, founded in 2013, has raised $11.5 million, according to its CrunchBase profile.

With the latest funds, Shelfbucks plans to rollout its platform nationwide to even more stores. In particular, it is targeting grocery, drug, mass, specialty retailers and consumer packaged goods brand companies. The company is also hiring engineering and sales employees.

Shelfbucks’ SmartShelf and SmartDisplay platform lets stores offer coupons and other specials to customer in-store via a smartphone.

“Shelfbucks has been on a steady growth track based on market demand for our platform to deliver a better shopping experience for consumers while enabling retailers and CPG companies to measure and improve the performance of their in-store marketing campaigns,” Erik McMillan, CEO of Shelfbucks, said in a news release. “This latest round of funding will help accelerate our growth, as well as enhance the scale and speed of our production, installation and support processes for leading retailers and brands.”