By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Austin is one of the country’s leading centers for research and development of autonomous cars.

Google is already operating self-driving cars on the city’s roadways. It’s just the second location for testing the vehicles outside of Google’s Mountain View headquarters. And the head of the project, Chris Urmson, estimates autonomous vehicles will be available for the general public to ride in them within four years.

But Kara Kockelman, transportation professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been doing Department of Transportation research on autonomous vehicles and estimates it will take at least 20 years before they are widely adopted.

“Adoption is going to take a while,” Kockelman said. “Without strong incentives, we don’t see a lot of people shifting to a Level 4 (fully autonomous) vehicle for decades. Prices have to fall dramatically.”

“I am not convinced it’s going to be 20 years,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler. “I’d be surprised if it’s 10 years.”

Kockelman and Adler spoke on a panel at South by Southwest Eco last week moderated by Greg Rucks, principal of the mobility team with the Rocky Mountain Institute. The city is working with the institute to find solutions to its traffic problems. Last week, the city also released a mobility report to examine the city’s traffic problems and brainstorm solutions.

The benefits of autonomous cars to improve land use, alleviate traffic congestion, reduce traffic fatalities and accidents and to provide transportation to kids, older people without driver’s licenses, blind and disabled people are enormous, according to the panelists.

Autonomous cars are making a huge impact on today’s car industry, Rucks said. Today, a rare alignment has taken place between the incumbent automakers and the technology disruptors to create autonomous vehicles, he said.

Autonomous vehicles will trigger the biggest shake up in the auto industry’s history, according to CB Insights. While Google gets a lot of the attention, the research firm has identified 25 other major corporations in the driverless car space including Apple, Audi, Daimler, Delphi, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Mercedes-Benz and more.

Mayor Adler has ridden in one of Google’s autonomous cars being tested in Austin and found the experience quite exciting. Kockelman has also ridden in Google’s autonomous cars and called the experience “dull.”

What attracted Google to Austin is its innovative spirit but also because no rules yet exist for autonomous cars, Adler said. Any city, county or state official could have objected to the cars being tested here and put roadblocks in Google’s way but instead they all agreed to go ahead with the pilot project, Adler said.

“This is a magical place, Austin,” Adler said. “In part because of what this city is, it is the fastest growing metropolitan area in the country for the last four years, growing 30 percent faster than number two.”

But at one time, city officials decided they wanted to save the city from growth and they quit investing in infrastructure, Adler said. Today, the city has grave affordability issues that are intertwined with transportation issues, he said.

“If we are going to preserve who we are as a city, the spirit and soul that is Austin, frankly our affordability issues come down to transportation,” Adler said. “This technology, to me, represents a way out.”

Last year, Austin citizens voted 70 percent against light rail because the costs were too great, Adler said.

“We can’t build our way out of congestion,” Adler said. “We’re going to have to innovate our way out of congestion. The autonomous vehicles that are being tested in our city provide a solution.”

The use of autonomous vehicles will result in reductions of lives lost, Kockelman said. And the city will see some reduction in traffic congestion from fewer crashes, she said. Auto crashes cost every driver $1,000 a year, on average, she said.

The use of autonomous vehicles would result in crash reductions of 80 percent, Kockelman said.

“We will also be saving a lot of time,” she said.

But the autonomous vehicles could result in a lot of congestion from added miles travelled unless people start sharing the vehicles, Kockelman said. People could send the cars home empty after dropping them off at work and that would add to traffic on the roads, she said. Kockelman is advocating for shared autonomous vehicles that allow people to pair up with strangers going to the same location.

Another big benefit of the autonomous vehicles is greater connectivity, Kockelman said. A short-range communications band is now required of all vehicles, she said. It is considered Level 1 autonomy. That technology reports your location, speed and acceleration to vehicles within 300 feet. That will help self-driving vehicles see farther than their radar or cameras, Kockelman said.

“They will be able to anticipate issues farther ahead and they can react,” Kockelman said. “We’re going to see an evolution with some of these features and then a big leap frogging.”

While Google’s research focuses on individual cars, Adler is also excited about the opportunities for mass transit using autonomous technology. China has already rolled out the world’s first driverless bus, Adler said.

Mass transit combined with the last mile of transport with an autonomous car will do a great deal to alleviate traffic congestion in Austin, Adler said.

Autonomous cars also could reconfigure the look of Austin by getting rid of structured parking and surface parking lots, creating more opportunities in a city where property values are increasing, Adler said.

In a parody movie trailer “Forget Steve Jobs, get ready for Michael Dell’ the Conan O’Brien show had a little fun taking a poke at Michael Dell last week.

But Dell showed he had a sense humor.

In a tweet on Friday, Dell posted a picture of himself with a sleek new Dell laptop and wrote “I said make it thicker! And where’s the fan?!”

https://t.co/C5BVGd0jtQ: I said make it thicker! And where’s the fan?! @teamcoco @ConanOBrien pic.twitter.com/kmt3s4WSMr

— Michael Dell (@MichaelDell) October 9, 2015

That was in response to the actor who portrayed Dell in the skit. In one scene, he instructs his employees during a meeting to “Don’t think different, think same.” He also tells them “And guys we need to make these laptops really thick, with the fans in the back so they can see them cooling down.”

The skit is in response to yet another Steve Jobs movie which hit movie theaters this weekend nationwide. The O’Brien trailer contrasts the late Jobs’ mythical technology industry status with that of Dell, who is a bit more low key.

Also, the latest Jobs’ movie is based on a book written by Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs. He also wrote a book on the computer industry called The Innovators. And he kind of left out Dell’s contributions.

Despite the jabs, Dell has done pretty well with his strategy. The 50-year-old self-made billionaire took the company he founded private a few years ago in a deal worth $25 billion. And Forbes lists him as the 47th richest man in the world.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

There was the story about a really fun, crazy marketing plan with no return on investment, the entrepreneur who thought she could let her bills and health slide while she built her business, the visionary pivoter who didn’t bother to do any market validation before buying $100,000 worth of inventory, and the startup techie who didn’t get things in writing because her co-founder seemed like someone she could trust. It was Austin FuckUp Night, Startup Week Edition.

FuckUp Night is a global phenomenon that began in Mexico in 2012 where entrepreneurs can share their failure stories and lessons learned. Austin’s first FuckUp Night was in August. Thursday night Elijah May, Managing Partner at The Experience Firm, Frances Smith, formerly of Diesel Foods, Laura Beck, founder of Striped Shirt, and Nicole Forbes of Violet Crown Consulting bore their entrepreneurial wounds before a group of about 100 people at Mutual Mobile.

Marketing for Fun, Not Profit

May, chagrined to be sharing that brand strategist screwed up someone’s brand, told a sad tale that had the audience laughing the entire time. The idea started—like many startup brands do—with a crazy idea that had no real tie to the business plan. His favorite part of what he does is to create amazing experiences. And he was hired by a sign company that gave him carte blanche to create such an experience for customers.

“After a lot of conversations, I found this cool idea: Signs and Bacon…,” May said. People loved it, but it didn’t make people buy signs. “We didn’t do any homework,” he said. “We didn’t figure out what this thing was or understand the company’s culture. We had a cool logo and some fun stickers and we ended up getting a pig and naming him Kevin Bacon.”

At Christmas time, they tried to tie the campaign to selling yard signs by decorating the old-fashioned pig logo with a Santa cap and writing “Pork Your Neighbor,” on the signs. This didn’t go over as well as Kevin Bacon.

“No one wanted to pork their neighbor at Christmas,” May said.

At one point they had Kevin Bacon, the pig, make a star appearance, pulling up in Whurley’s (founder of Chaotic Moon Studios and Honest Dollar) car to a red carpet. The pig relieved himself in the car. That, May said, was kind of the moment he knew.

His biggest takeaway, May said, was: Don’t forgo the branding process. “Is the culture clear? Is the brand clear? We jumped right to the fun reputation stuff but you have to be sure why you’re doing it and provide people with a solution they want in their lives.”

When Your Business is Everything

Frances Smith, founder of Diesel Foods[/caption]Frances Smith spoke next. Hers was the freshest failure, since she closed her business, Diesel Foods, only six months prior. Smith said she’d had one talk prepared but switched it the night before to an admonition that entrepreneurs have to take care of themselves. Entrepreneurs, she said, sometimes pride themselves on the insane hours they work and how long they go without sleep. They shouldn’t. But they also shouldn’t neglect the other parts of being a person, like working out, getting a haircut, and possibly getting a counselor.

“All I ever talked about was my business so my friends never wanted to talk to me again,” she said.

Plus, friends who weren’t entrepreneurs didn’t understand that $50,000 in revenue didn’t mean she was getting paid. And that was one of the biggest issues: Not paying her bills. Tanking her personal credit score made it nearly impossible to get money for her business.

When an audience member asked her if she would have heeded her own advice had she heard it at the start of her business, she acknowledged “Probably not. But I’ll do it next time.”

Well I Love the Idea….

Laura Beck zipped the audience through a tragically hilarious dip into fashion entrepreneurship that she described as “One and done.”

Beck had been in PR for years and her agency was “killing it” with $3 million in revenue. But she was working constantly and didn’t have the time she wanted for her two young daughters. So, without the benefit of any market research beyond consulting her own opinions, she dumped it all and spent $100,000 on boxes and boxes of striped shirts that would let people show their support for a school or a team or a city, without having to wear some ugly logo. She imagined whole families going to games dressed in the shirts, which were priced at around $20.00—again, according to her opinion of what they should be priced.

She built a $10,000 website that was way more than she needed. “I did it thinking ‘I can scale this baby! I can have striped bathing suits and water bottles….’ I over architected the smack out of this thing. It was like I was building The Gap.” But she never took time to implement a lot of the other marketing tools she actually knew—on some level—that she needed.

She’d thought, being a PR expert, she could push her business without sales. But PR, she realized, is “air cover” for sales. The only time sales rose was in September. She thought it was tied to people going back to school and sports teams getting revved up, but in fact people were buying them for Halloween costumes, Where’s Waldo in particular.

In May she threw what became a viral “Kickstopper” or and “Indienogo.” “I wanted to bookend this fucker,” she said. She did a tongue-in-cheek Facebook video that got 138,000 views and sold 1,000 t-shirts. Then she took her family to China. (She still has a lot of shirts for sale).

Trust But Verify

Forbes told the tale many entrepreneurs struggle with about going into business with someone she trusted without pinning her co-founder to nitty gritty details like vesting schedules and control.

Ultimately, she said, the business, SMRT Mouth, a biometric mouth guard that collected data from players on the field and sent it to coaches with tablets on the sidelines, succeeded, but she was out. Forbes’ co-founder started by wanting 51 percent of ownership, promising her full control as to how to run a business.

Once they got their patents on a smart mouth guard, she was off like a bullet from a gun. “I was really eager, versus excited,” Forbes said. “It’s okay to be excited, but when you’re over eager, you start to overlook red flags.” For example, there was no proof of concept. “You couldn’t even put the thing in your mouth,” she said. She had no equity, there was no vesting schedule, she wound up working for a year for free, and every time she was on the verge of getting investment that might cut into the co-founder’s 51 percent, he put the kibosh on it. What finally convinced her to leave, she said, was learning that the co-founder had given someone else equity in the company.

The co-founder wanted to split the company into a hardware company, a mobile app company and a data company, giving her the hardware piece. “Everybody knows the money’s in the data,” she said.

Her biggest mistake, she said, was avoiding offending her co-founder. That and “Never go into business with someone who knows shit about business.”

FuckUp Night happens monthly in Austin.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

During Austin Startup Week, Austin Mayor Steve Adler declared Oct. 7th as “UK Day in Austin.”

Officials with the United Kingdom, which is comprised of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, showcased some of the opportunities U.S. companies, and in particular Austin-based companies, have in expanding their operations into the fifth largest single market.

For UK day, the British Consulate held a series of events on Wednesday including an open for business British breakfast, a lunch on animation and gaming and a gin tasting at Old School Bar & Grill on Sixth Street downtown.

Last year, the U.S. British Consul Office in Houston opened an office in Austin. Haileigh Meyers, vice consul ICT & Creative Media, heads up the local office. She organized the events for Austin Startup Week.

To kick off the animation and gaming luncheon presentation, Hannah Perrin-Haynes, vice president of Scottish Development International, gave a presentation on the benefits of locating operations in Scotland. It is the biggest hub for game development in Britain.

Scotland has a robust video game development industry with more than 100 companies, Perrin-Haynes said.

“It’s a growing sector,” Perrin-Haynes said.

The country’s skilled, talented and creative workforce attracts multi-national companies to locate operations there, she said. Also, costs are low and it’s a stunningly attractive location and they’ve got scotch, she said.

CGI last year opened an open source software development center in Glasgow that is expected to create around 250 jobs, Perrin-Haynes said.

And many people might be surprised to learn that the hit video game franchise Grand Theft Auto was created in Scotland. DMA Design created the game in Dundee, a former shipbuilding city. The company is now part of Rockstar Games.

And 4J Studios, another Dundee-based gaming company, created Minecraft for Xbox 360. Swedish programmer Markus Persson created the original version of Minecraft.

London is also a draw for international gaming and animation companies, said

London is home to gaming studios from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. And King.com created the wildly popular Candy Crush Saga. London also has 26 meetups geared to the gaming and animation industry and several conferences, said James Cummings, vice president of business development with London & Partners.

London has the seed funds, technology accelerators, support of the government, Tech City and coworking spaces for a vibrant technology and gaming cluster, Cummings said.

“Everything the cluster needs to develop extremely well is in London,” Cummings said. “We’ve attracted more international gaming companies than any other international city.”

London has a cluster of 83 international gaming publishers in London, more than Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo, Seoul or Vancouver, Cummings said.

“London attracts creative talent that is looking to innovate,” he said.

The UK is the easiest place in Europe to open an international office, said Mark Barron, partner with TaylorWessing, a London-based law firm. The U.K. also offers tax credits and low tax rates to international firms doing business there.

“The U.K. is a great springboard to the rest of the world,” Barron said.

It takes a day to set up a business in the U.K., Barron said.

Kixer, a mobile advertising platform with its technical team based in Austin, just got acquired by LAKANA.

Kixer is based in Los Angeles, but Jake Moilanen, its co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, lives in Austin and so does the company’s technology team.

LAKANA, based in St. Paul, Minn., did not release the terms of the deal. Its local media platform network reaches nearly 220 million unique monthly users across 300 sites. Kixer helps marketers promote their products through its mobile app “over 400 premium web publications that in aggregate reach over 110 million unique visitors and generate 1.5 billion page views per month.”

“As the mobile ecosystem continues to evolve, mobile app marketing has become a multibillion-dollar advertiser category poised to double in size over the next 12 months,” Phillip Hyun, LAKANA’s president said in a news release. “Kixer has quickly become a leading platform for app marketers to reach the most valuable users across premium content mobile websites.”

Kixer was backed by Lowercase Capital and TenOneTen Ventures as well as a collection of well-known angel investors. Kixer was co-founded by Keith Bonnici, Omar Nicola and Moilanen in 2014.

Mozido, a digital payments company, and TabbedOut, an app that lets people pay tabs at restaurants and bars, are partnering to improve the experience of consumers through a mobile application.

Through the partnership, the companies will create a new mobile app that will allow their customers to discover new restaurant locations, join wait-lists, make reservations, order, split and pay bills and leave feedback on their mobile phones.

“Mozido and TabbedOut are improving the way consumers find places to eat and drink, redeem valuable and relevant offers, place their orders, and pay,” Michael Liberty, founder of Mozido, said in a news release. “We are proud to be mobilizing the hospitality industry together with our partner TabbedOut.”

“Mozido is a leader in providing secure, full-featured mobile solutions to Quick Service Restaurants, retail merchants, banks, and mobile network operators enabling them to better serve their customers,” Ben Carolan, executive vice president of strategic partnerships at TabbedOut, said in a news release. “Partnering with Mozido enables TabbedOut to not only be the quickest and most secure way to pay, but also to provide the best way to mobilize the entire restaurant and bar customer experience for our merchants.”

Several media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, CNBC and the New York Times are quoting inside sources saying Dell is in talks to buy EMC, a data storage and software development company.

In 2013, Dell went private in a $25 billion buyout deal which left its founder Michael Dell with a 75 percent ownership stake. Silver Lake Partners controls the rest.

The acquisition price of EMC would be more than $40 billion, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.

“A combined Dell-EMC would encompass computing, networking and storage—both hardware and software—giving it the breadth to compete more effectively with larger companies such as International Business Machines Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Cisco Systems Inc. and Oracle Corp,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

If Dell and EMC merge it would create one of the largest technology companies in the world. The acquisition makes sense with Dell’s moves in the past few years to become more of a software and services company in addition to its businesses in PCs and servers. It has seen a lot of growth in its data center, cloud and cybersecurity businesses, according to a presentation Michael Dell made at Dell World last year.

HomeAway, a vacation rental business, Wednesday announced its acquisition of Dwellable, an online vacation rental search engine and app based in Seattle.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Dwellable, founded in 2012, had raised $2 million in one round from three investors, according to its CrunchBase profile.

A time of six employees including founders Nathan Kriege and Adam Doppelt will be moving to Austin, according to a story in GeekWire.

“The Dwellable team has built an incredible product with an impressive and growing base of travelers who use the app to book vacation rentals,” HomeAway Co-founder and CEO Brian Sharples said in a news release. “With 48 percent of travelers coming to HomeAway from mobile devices, it’s important for us to continue improving our mobile experience, with an even stronger emphasis on functionality and design for the traveler. Dwellable will help us take that next step.”

HomeAway’s mobile app has had more than two million downloads this year. It has undergone significant improvements in recent years with HomeAway’s investment in social travel platform Gogobot this year and its acquisition of mobile app developer Glad to Have You last year.

“Travelers using HomeAway to book a vacation rental can improve their whole vacation experience through the app by accessing information about the home and surrounding areas and activities through Gogobot, hailing an Uber car ride, ordering Instacart grocery delivery and hiring a babysitter from Care.com,” according to a news release.

Dwellable will shut down its app within 30 days and customers will be referred to HomeAway.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

TripChamp, a company that saves organizations thousands on airfares through access to unpublished fares as well published ones, won a free trip to pitch at Oslo Innovation Week’s 100 Pitches competition October 16.

TripChamp was one of six Austin companies to pitch before the panel of judges that included Morton Paulsen, Consul General for Norway, Casey Smith, Austin Economic Development’s International Program Manager; Gary Hoover and Donovan Miller, international project manager for IC2 at Austin Technology Incubator. Hoover and Paulsen said that while competition was close among the six companies, all judges were unanimous on TripChamp.

“They have a real product that saves money and is capturing the attention of the industry… and did a very clear presentation of what they’re up to,” Hoover said. “They appear to have a wonderful team and advisors from the industry. The travel industry is complex, there are a lot of players and to have that level of people say ‘Hey this is a great idea,’ really says something.”

Daniel Senyard, COO of TripChamp—whose parent company is LF Tech in London–pitched in front of the small group at Capital Factory Wednesday morning. The company created a database that helps find the best rates for flights.

For TripChamp most of these options apply only to business and first class flights and are only available to business customers who use a lot of flying miles. They also employ artificial intelligence so TripChamp offers rates and options designed specifically for the user. Ultimately the company may use the technologies on other verticals Senyard said.

Growth Institute, a company that provides executive education programs from internationally known thought leaders in easily digestible formats was chosen as the alternate if TripChamp founders couldn’t make the conference. Growth Institute makes courses available for individuals as well as whole companies in both English and Spanish.

Other companies that pitched included Own Local, which converts newspaper print ads into digital ad campaigns; Curb, which sells a device that attaches to a breaker box and tracks energy usage; You Roam, a company that allows consumers to travel internationally and use their own phone numbers to send and receive calls without paying international rates; and Pen Pal Schools, a peer-to-peer global education program covering language, culture, politics and other topics.

All companies were required to have traction in Europe. Two members of TripChamp’s team will travel to Oslo next week, all expenses paid, to pitch against top ranking companies from London and Scandinavia.

Senyard said the company has just been launching with very early beta customers in recent months but has received a large investment from “a large strategic investor in the travel industry.” Senyard said he was “surprised” to have won, but then on second thought added “Well it’s a good audience of international people and what I do with TripChamp caters exactly to what this whole contest is about…which is moving people around. So I knew I had a good target audience.”