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UnaliWear Makes Smartwatches for Older Adults

August 7, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Jean Anne Booth, founder and CEO of UnaliWear, maker of the Kanega Watch for seniors, photo by John Davidson.

Joan Hall worked as a model most of her life.

Now she’s 81 and lives independently in San Antonio.

Her daughter, Jean Anne Booth, who lives in Austin, wanted to keep tabs on her mom and make sure she is ok but her mom refused to wear one of those elder alert buttons.

“They’re just plain ugly,” Hall told her daughter.

And those emergency response help buttons are socially stigmatizing and limits people to their homes, she said.

That’s when Jean Anne Booth, an engineer and serial entrepreneur, decided to come up with a better solution. She left retirement to start Austin-based UnaliWear, maker of the Kanega watch for seniors. Booth sold her last company to Texas Instruments and the one before that to Apple.

“I wanted to build something that my mother and I both would be willing to wear to remain safe as we age,” Booth said.

Prototypes of the Kanega watch. Photo courtesy of UnaliWear

For the past few years, Booth has been working with a small team of engineers to create prototypes of a senior alert watch. And she’s been conducting focus groups. She created a classically styled watch that doesn’t require a smartphone to operate. Now they’re ready to begin a beta trial with the product, called the Kanega watch. It has built-in cellular, Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities. It also has an accelerometer for fall detection, and continuous speech to provide an active medical alert that works anywhere, in combination with data-driven artificial intelligence that learns the wearer’s lifestyle.

“We build the cell phone into the watch because less than 10 percent of seniors 75 and older have smartphones,” Booth said.

The Austin-based startup, previously known as LifeAssist, changed its name to UnaliWear because “Unalii” is the Cherokee word for “friend,” Booth said. And “Kanega” means speak, so were the “friend who speaks to you,” she said.

Focus groups have also called the Kanega watch an “OnStar for Seniors.” The watch’s built in voice recognition software responds to the name that the owner gives it and operates on voice commands instead of buttons. Booth’s mom named her watch “Fred Astaire.” It has all the features of a regular watch including time and date features in large print. The watch can also let a senior live an active lifestyle because it goes wherever they go and it works around the clock, Booth said. If the person wearing the watch has an accident, the watch monitors activity so it can call operators for help.

UnaliWear recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign. The company raised $110,000, 10 percent above its goal, from 306 backers.

The response to UnaliWear’s Kickstarter campaign shows a demand exists for easy to use monitoring devices for older adults. In fact, a Nielsen Co. report on aging last year showed the number one concern among older adults is about losing self-reliance to care for basic needs.

For a long time, the wearables market seemed to ignore the aging population. They created exercise monitors and other devices to increase fitness and health. But it wasn’t until recently wearables aimed at seniors began to appear.

Today, the Kanega watch faces competition from companies like Lively, Evermind and BeClose. The companies generally charge $50 to $300 for the device and then monthly monitoring fees starting at around $30 a month.

The market for monitoring devices for seniors is $1.5 billion annually in the U.S. at least, said Laurie Orlov, an aging in place expert and a longtime technology veteran and analyst.

“Consider that 46 percent of women aged 75 and up live alone – they would like to feel safe at home and when they are out and about,” Orlov said.

And many seniors take multiple prescription medications that can lead to confusion and other side effects if taken incorrectly, Booth said. So the ability to monitor medications is a huge benefit to the Kanega watch, she said.

UnaliWear’s Kanega watch is still in beta testing and isn’t yet available on the mass market. Those supporters who pledged in the Kickstarter campaign will get the first devices.

“We’ve recently built our fifth prototype,” Booth said. “We’re doing a friends and family test. That’s where we are today.”

UnaliWear is testing one more prototype and expects to be in the market in 2016, she said. The watch costs $299 for the device with activation fee and $35 to $85 a month in monitoring fees.

So far, Booth has raised just $1.1 million in seed stage funding. All of her marketing has been through the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. And she was recently featured in a Time Magazine article on smartwatches for seniors.

“What we’re building works,” Booth said. “We’re allowing seniors to have independence with dignity.”

BioMed SA Celebrates 10th Anniversary

August 6, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Ann Stevens, president of BioMed SA, courtesy photo.

Ten years ago, a group of leaders in San Antonio, led by former Mayor Henry Cisneros and the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, created an advocacy organization for the city’s biomedical industry.

They founded BioMed SA with the core mission to raise the visibility of San Antonio’s sizable biomedical industry locally, statewide, nationally and internationally.

“We’ve gained considerable traction in the last few years,” said Ann Stevens, BioMed SA’s president.

During the last decade, the organization’s mission has evolved to include economic development, Stevens said.

In 2009, Medtronic selected San Antonio for its new Diabetes Therapy Management & Education Center with plans to create 1,400 jobs. San Antonio beat out more than 900 other cities for the project and BioMed SA played an important role in convincing the company to locate here, Stevens said.

“EDF (The San Antonio Economic Development Foundation) had been working on it for more than a year,” Stevens said. “In the final stages, they asked BioMed SA to come into the project and help them land it.”

Since then, BioMed SA has worked closely with the EDF to bring new businesses here and to retain the ones that are here as well as foster new startups.

“We believe we are bringing real value by not only our promotional activities, but we’re beginning to attract outside investments to the city,” Stevens said.

In addition, the local startup scene in the life sciences industry is growing, Stevens said. The entrepreneurial side of the life sciences industry fosters new companies, attracts venture capital, brings seasoned executives to the city and helps the overall ecosystem to grow, she said.

Just recently, Targeted Technology, a locally based venture capital fund, brought Cytocentrics Bioscience, a Rostock, Germany-based biotech company, to San Antonio. The company agreed to relocate its corporate headquarters to San Antonio and create 15 jobs by the end of the year. In June, the City of San Antonio granted Cytocentrics $1 million in economic development funds to attract the company, which has pledged to create 285 additional jobs in the next eight years and invest $15 million. The company will be based initially at 18618 Tuscany Stone. Cytocentrics makes a medical device called a CytoPatch Machine. The company’s patch clamping technology evaluates drug interactions with human cells and analyzes data.

In addition to biomedical startups relocating here, one of the trends locally is to focus on technology transfer by taking academic research out of local institutions like the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas at San Antonio and spinning that technology out into startups, Stevens said.

On the startup front, Invictus Medical, which makes a cranial support device for the heads of newborn babies, is a prime example of a spin off coming out of the University of Texas at San Antonio, Stevens said. Other startups spinning out of the Health Science Center include Astrocyte Pharmaceuticals, which is developing drugs for brain injuries, and Rapamycin Holdings, a drug development company focused on disease prevention and treatment in pets and humans.

Randy Goldsmith, who heads up Rapamycin, also runs The Texas Technology Development Center, known as T3DC, and hosts a quarterly luncheon to keep everyone informed on what’s going on in the biomedical industry in San Antonio. About 200 people attend the luncheon, which features company presentations.

“By working together and raising visibility we have attracted more economic activity including a lot of activity in entrepreneurial startups and retained our hometown business,” Stevens said.

To continue to move the life sciences industry forward, BioMed SA plans to pursue new revenue sources from foundations, corporate grants and donations from individuals, said BioMed SA Chairman Ken Trevett.

Nobel Laureate, W.E. (William Esco) Moerner, Ph. D., to receive BioMed SA’s 10th Annual Julio Palmaz Award. Photo courtesy of BioMed SA

A few of BioMed SA’s key accomplishments in its first 10 years include the creation of the annual Julio Palmaz Award for Innovation in Healthcare and Biosciences. The next award, now in its 10th year, will go to W.E. Moerner, PhD, a San Antonio native and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He will receive the award at BioMed SA’s annual award dinner in San Antonio on September 10th.

BioMed SA also recently completed a two-year Asset Initiative to identify “five key disease areas in which San Antonio has biomedical assets and expertise of national or world-class caliber.” That information is being used to promote San Antonio to researchers and companies in those areas and helped attract the World Stem Cell Summit to San Antonio last December.

San Antonio’s healthcare and bioscience industry employs nearly one of every six members of the city’s workforce and has an annual economic impact exceeding $30 billion, according to BioMed SA.

Google Fiber is Coming to San Antonio

August 5, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

Mayor Ivy R. Taylor announcing Google Fiber is coming to San Antonio, photos by Laura Lorek

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Google announced San Antonio as the next city to receive its “Gigabit” Internet network, which is about 100 times faster than what most broadband users currently experience in the city.

“Google Fiber will provide San Antonio with the competitive business and entrepreneurial edge needed in this era of continuously evolving high-speed technology,” Mayor Ivy R. Taylor said during a press conference Wednesday morning at Geekdom, the downtown San Antonio collaborative co-working center.

“I’m excited about the impact on our economy,” Taylor said. That includes Google hiring contractors to install 4,000 new miles of fiber infrastructure throughout the city and new startups springing up from having access to the service. Google reports that its fiber network is massive enough to stretch from here to Canada and back. San Antonio is also the largest city Google has launched its fiber service in to date. San Antonio is a sprawling community that is the nation’s seventh largest city and home to 1.4 million residents.

San Antonio is also just 75 miles down the road from the high tech hub of Austin, which also has a Google Fiber Gigabit network. In April of 2013, Google announced its plans to provide Google Fiber in Austin. It began service to its first Austin customers in December of 2014. Google Fiber is still rolling out the service to neighborhoods, which it calls “fiberhoods” throughout Austin. The San Antonio announcement does not affect those plans, a Google spokesman said. Both cities will be under construction simultaneously.

“This is a key milestone on the path to world class Internet but there’s still a lot of work to be done,” Taylor said.

Mark Strama, head of Google Fiber, Texas, San Antonio Mayor Ivy R. Taylor and Lorenzo Gomez, director of Geekdom

Google cannot yet report when the service will be available in San Antonio or provide any timelines, said Mark Strama, head of Google Fiber, Texas.

“This is a very exciting day, one that a lot of time and effort has been invested in,” Strama said. “San Antonio is a very interesting city and a really attractive place to see what is possible with Gigabit speeds.”

San Antonio has had a commitment to connect more people with affordable and accessible Internet access through its Connect Home initiative, Strama said. U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary and former Mayor of San Antonio Julian Castro announced the new program in July to provide high speed Internet access to low-income populations. San Antonio is one of 27 cities nationwide involved in the pilot program.

San Antonio is also part of President Obama’s Tech Hire initiative to train more people for high tech jobs by providing them with coding and other skills. In March, President Obama announced the program to provide scholarships to minorities and low income Americans who want to take coding classes at academies such as Codeup or Rackspace’s Open Cloud Academy.

In addition, San Antonio is a hub for cloud-based companies like Rackspace. It also has the Open Cloud Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Techstars Cloud, a thematic accelerator program focused on generating and nurturing the next batch of cloud companies. San Antonio also boasts the second largest concentration of data centers in the country. It is home to Microsoft’s mammoth data center as well as one for the National Security Agency and dozens of others. The city also has a thriving Cybersecurity industry, and one of the largest concentration of cryptologists, hackers, network security specialists, electronic warfare specialists and other Cybersecurity professionals in the country. And San Antonio is home to a large and growing biomedical industry and dozens of technology startups sprouting up around Geekdom.

The evolution of dial up Internet to broadband resulted in an acceleration in speed of about 10 megabits per second, Strama said. The evolution from today’s broadband speeds to Gigabit speeds is an acceleration of the Internet of over 900 megabits per second, he said.

Google Fiber San Antonio vans, which will begin appearing around the city as construction on the 4,000 miles of fiber network begin.

A lot of applications that require Gigabit speeds don’t yet exist because the capacity isn’t available yet, Strama said. But soon Geekdom startups will be able to create those “killer applications” that require Gigabit speeds, he said.

For the next few years, Google will be deploying its fiber network throughout San Antonio. And it’s a major construction project, Strama said. Google has been working on engineering and design for months and it plans to begin construction in the next few months, Strama said.

“As soon as we can, we will start delivering service to our customers in San Antonio,” Strama said. “I can’t provide a specific date or timeline for that. Construction is subject to a lot of variables, not all of which are within our control, but we are highly motivated to work as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

Google Fiber will roll out the network in a staggered deployment, Strama said. It will begin offering service in neighborhoods as it continues to build out other neighborhoods, he said.

Lorenzo Gomez, director of Geekdom and director of the 80/20 Foundation, Rackspace Founder Graham Weston's private foundation focused on spurring entrepreneurship and growth in San Antonio, welcoming Google Fiber to San Antonio

Lorenzo Gomez, director of Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation, welcoming Google Fiber to San Antonio

“We have rich Internet history in this city,” said Lorenzo Gomez, director of Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation, Rackspace Founder Graham Weston’s private foundation focused on spurring entrepreneurship and growth in San Antonio.

This is not the first time something game changing has happened in San Antonio, he said. Ten years ago, Rackspace at the Weston Centre housed the first servers for Youtube, he said.

Now Google Fiber in San Antonio unleashes all of the possibilities for the next generation of innovators to create game changing products and services on the Internet, Gomez said.

Gomez recounted a story about what has taken place in Kansas City, the first city to get the Google Fiber Gigabit network. A couple of entrepreneurs started the Kansas City Startup Village in a house to take advantage of the high-speed Google Fiber Gigabit network, Gomez said. The high speed network allowed them to iterate and innovate faster than ever, he said. Today, more than 25 companies are located at the Kansas City Startup Village and many of them moved from elsewhere to be near the network, he said. That’s exactly the kind of ecosystem San Antonio is creating to attract and spawn new technology startups, he said.

The city of San Antonio doesn’t expect to spend any money on the Google Fiber installation, Mayor Taylor said. It’s private investment from Google and the city hasn’t discussed any costs involved in the project, she said.

San Antonio first applied to be a Google Fiber city in 2010 along with 1,100 other cities. It didn’t make that cut, but San Antonio did make the short list of cities under consideration for Google Fiber in February of 2014. But when Google announced its new cities later that year, San Antonio didn’t make it. Getting Google Fiber here has been a long process, but San Antonio and Austin are the only Texas cities to have the service. Google Fiber is currently available in Austin, Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri and Provo, Utah. It is under construction in Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina and Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Google Fiber access in San Antonio has far-reaching implications for the Central Texas region as a whole, said Gomez, director of Geekdom.

“I feel like the San Antonio and Austin region is going to be the next mega-region,” Gomez said. “We are Portland to their Seattle. We both specialize in different things, now is the time to collaborate and hone in on what we’re really good at doing.”

Google fiber is part of what will tie the two communities together and make them a powerhouse region, Gomez said.

“I do think you’re going to see a wave of innovation,” Gomez said.

Technology companies in both communities have access to this super fast Internet network and that will accelerate activity that’s already going on around Internet Cloud companies, Cybersecurity, biomedical research and more, Gomez said.

“It really is a story of two cities, if played correctly – collaboratively, not competitively, will emerge in the top five regions in the country, if not the world,” Gomez said.

Ten Life Sciences Companies to Watch in Central Texas

August 5, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Photo licensed from iStockphoto

Texas is one of the leading biotech states in the country, according to a 2014 report from the Texas Governor’s Office. In fact, it ranks second for employment of life and physical scientists nationwide.

The state has more than 3,600 biotechnology manufacturing and research and development firms. More than 92,000 people work for biotech companies in Texas. It has also become a hotbed of activity for startups tackling big problems like finding drugs to combat different types of cancer or medical devices to screen for cancer. San Antonio and Austin have dozens of innovative startups addressing big problems in the medical industry. Here are just ten to keep an eye on in the coming year:

Aeglea Biotherapeutics: the Austin-based startup develops variants on human enzymes to deplete key amino acids to fight cancer and other diseases. The company filed in June with the Nasdaq Stock Exchange for an Initial Public Offering to raise $86.2 million.

Aerin Medical: the company is in the process of relocating its headquarters from California to Austin. Fred Dinger, a serial biomedical entrepreneur, is heading it up as CEO in Austin. It also just filed a Form D with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $14.36 million in funding. The company focuses on solving breathing problems. It has created a device that opens up the air passages of patients so they no longer need breathe right devices or surgery to breathe easier. The procedure is done in the doctor’s office.

Bluegrass Vascular Technologies – the San Antonio-based startup relocated from Lexington, Kentucky. It raised $4.5 million in Series A financing last year led by the Targeted Technology Fund of San Antonio. The company makes the Surfacer, a central venous access catheter system. Gabriele Niederauer joined the company in September of 2014 as its CEO and President.

Chiron Health – the Austin-based startup provides telemedicine healthcare consultation for doctors with patients remotely over the Internet. With the Chiron Health platform, doctors can review lab results, adjust medication and answer other patient questions online. Founded by Andrew O’Hara, the company is working with 20 health care providers.

ENTVantageDX Diagnostics: the Austin-based startup is creating a test to detect bacterial sinusitis, which requires antibiotics to cure. The test is similar to a strep throat test administered in the doctor’s office.

Mirna Therapeautics, the Austin-based startup develops cancer-fighting drugs. Its drugs are currently in clinical trial testing with patients. It recently received $41.8 million in venture capital financing. The company has raised $82.8 million in four rounds from 11 investors, according to its Crunchbase profile. Dr. Paul Lammers is the company’s CEO and president.

Neurolink Medical: the San Antonio-based startup has created a brain implant system to monitor brain activity and to directly deliver drugs to treat brain seizures or epilepsy. It received $3.2 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

Savara Pharmaceuticals: the Austin-based pharmaceutical startup has created pulmonary therapeutics for cancer and other diseases. It received $1.9 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. To date, the company has raised $47.7 million in eight rounds.

Seno Medical Instruments: the San Antonio-based medical device startup has created laser optic technology to screen for cancer. It received $2 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

StemBioSys: the San Antonio-based startup develops proprietary stem cell technologies for the regenerative medical market. Earlier this year, the company closed on $8 million in Series A funding led by the Targeted Technology Fund, a San Antonio-based venture capital firm. To date, it has raised $10 million. The company is in research partnerships with the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Langer/Anderson Laboratories at MIT.

Payment Data Systems to Begin Trading on the NASDAQ Stock Market

August 4, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 13 Comments

San Antonio-based Payment Data Systems, which processes online payments for other companies, announced Tuesday that it has received confirmation that its common stock will begin trading on the NASDAQ Capital Market starting Aug. 11th.

In addition, Michael Long, chairman and CEO of Payment Data Systems and Louis Hoch, the company’s president, will ring the opening bell at the NASDAQ MarketSite in Times Square in New York on Monday, Dec. 21st.

Payment Data System’s common stock, will be traded under the ticker symbol, PYDSD. Its stock will continue to trade on the OTCBB and the OTCQB until market close on Aug. 10th.

“After 20 days, or on August 20, the Company’s ticker symbol will revert to trading as PYDS from PYDSD on NASDAQ,” according to the company.

“Our listing on the NASDAQ Capital Market is a major corporate milestone for our company and a testament to the tremendous progress we have made over the past few years,” Long said in a news statement. Furthermore, we believe that the listing on NASDAQ will help broaden our shareholder base, increase appeal to institutional investors, provide us with better liquidity and ultimately contribute to increasing shareholder value.”

Payment Data Systems also has a wholly-owned subsidiary, FiCentive, which provides a turn-key prepaid card solution to businesses and others. The company reported record revenue in 2014 of $13.4 million, up 159 percent from a year earlier. The company also acquired Akimbo Financial, a San Antonio-based startup that sells and markets pre-paid credit cards, last December for $3 million.

Disclosure: Akimbo is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News

Plum Raises $5 Million and Plans to Ship its Lightpads Soon

August 4, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

Glen Burchers, co-founder of Plum, maker of WiFi-enabled smart light dimmers, courtesy photo.

Plum, maker of WiFi-enabled smart light dimmers, has raised $5 million in seed stage funding and is raising another $700,000 in funding before its round closes.

Plum reports the money will allow it to manufacture and ship its flagship product, the Plum Lightpad, which allows homeowners to control their lights with their smartphone from anywhere.

The Austin-based startup is using CircleUp, an equity-based crowdfunding platform to secure its investment. It has also raised funds from angel investors and convertible debt. To date, the company has raised $5 million from about 50 investors with investment sums ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 said Glen Burchers, the company’s co-founder and chief marketing officer.

In addition, Plum, formerly Ube, raised $307,600 from 1,308 backers in April of 2013 on Kickstarter, to create WiFi connected smart light dimmers. Plum reports it ranks in the top 5 percent of technology startups in the U.S. for raising capital on crowdfunding sites.

Plum’s Lightpad

It has taken longer than expected to get the product to backers because the company was overly ambitious and didn’t have all the funds it needed for engineering and manufacturing, Burchers said. But Plum plans to begin shipping its light dimmer switches to customers at the end of this month. Only about 50 backers have asked for refunds, Burchers said. Plum took its first orders on Kickstarter and then through Amazon. It has more than $1 million of orders received so far, Burchers said. That’s about 10,000 units which Plum plans to ship to customers shortly, he said.

“We expect our backlog to be fully shipped in the October time frame,” Burchers said.

The company has yet to spend any money on marketing or advertising, Burchers said. All of its sales have been online, but it plans to branch out into retail stores like Home Depot, Office Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond and Target next year, he said.

Plum WiFi enabled smart light dimmers have received Federal Communications Commission certification and they have also completed UL testing, Burchers said.

“That we just passed last Friday,” Burchers said. “Those were two things that were significant hurdles for us.”

Plum has a manufacturing partner with operations in Carrollton, Texas and Shanghai, China. The initial products will be made in Texas, Burchers said.

Plum, with offices on North Lamar, has 16 full time employees, of which 14 are engineers. Since its founding in 2012, Plum has participate in both the Techstars and Microsoft Ventures accelerator programs.

Lighting control today is a $4 billion annual market in the U.S. but it only serves the really wealthy since lighting control systems costs about $20,000, Burchers said. The Plum product is bringing lighting control to the masses or the 27 million people who have homes in the $300,000 range, he said.

Plum’s Lightpad comes equipped with smart meters that can tell consumers how much they are spending on lighting for each connect fixture. And all of the functionality that is in the mobile app, which controls the light switches, is also in the switch, Burchers said.

Two Austin Startups Featured at First White House Demo Day

August 4, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Photo courtesy of the White House

President Barack Obama is hosting the nation’s first Demo Day at the White House to showcase innovative technology startups from all over the country.

Among them, Jeanette Hill, CEO and founder of Spot On Sciences, will show off its portable and easy to use blood test kits. The company has created a product, HemaSpot, that lets people take a blood sample easily by pricking their finger and collecting a drop of blood in the special container and then sending it by mail to the lab. The product eliminates needles and trips to the lab. Spot on Sciences has received grants from DARPA and the National Institutes of Health. The company has also “announced a collaboration with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research to support a study for detecting infectious pathogens such as HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C, and mosquito-borne infections such as dengue, West Nile and chikungunya virus in deployed troops,” according to a news release from the White House.

Another startup from Austin, Student Loan Genius, founded by Tony Aguilar, is a program that allows companies to help their employees pay off their student loans faster through a company matching program. The company, previously known as Student Loan Benefits, pitched during Capital Factory Demo Day at South by Southwest. Aguilar, who graduated from college with more than $100,000 in student loan debt, created the program to give students the benefits he wishes he had, according to the White House press release.

More than 30 entrepreneurs are presenting at the first White House Demo day, which is focused on inclusive entrepreneurship.

Also, this afternoon, President Obama will announce new public and private-sector commitments to increase diversity in entrepreneurship, especially in the technology industry.

“America’s entrepreneurial economy is the envy of the world,” according to a White House statement. “But, we need to do more to make sure that we are tapping our full entrepreneurial potential – drawing on talented Americans from all backgrounds and locations.”

Women led just 3 percent of venture backed startups, and only about one percent are led by African Americans.

Only about four percent of U.S.-based venture capital investors are women. And that venture capital is only available in a few big cities.

“To maintain our lead as the best place on the planet to start and scale a great company, we must ensure that vibrant startup ecosystems emerge in every corner of America, and that all Americans, including those underrepresented in entrepreneurship like women and people of color, are both encouraged and able to fully contribute their entrepreneurial talents,” according to the White House.

On Tuesday, President Obama will announce 116 winners of two Small Business Administrative prizes. He also plans to announce the Growth Accelerator Fund for startup accelerators and a “Startup in a Day” initiative to cut red tape for local entrepreneurs. President Obama also plans to scale up the “National Science Foundation I-Corps program with eight new and expanded Federal agency partnerships, introducing hundreds of entrepreneurial scientist teams across the country to a rigorous process for moving their discoveries out of the lab and into the marketplace.”

In addition, President Obama is announcing more than “40 leading venture capital firms with over $100 billion under management, including Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, and Scale Venture Partners, committing to specific actions that advance opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

Institutional investors, engineering deans, and technology companies are also committing to focus on diversity in their investments, recruiting and hiring.

“Over a dozen major technology companies announcing new actions to ensure diverse recruitment and hiring, including Amazon, Box, Microsoft, Xerox, and others committing to adopt variations on the “Rooney Rule” to consider diverse candidates for senior executive positions,” according to the White House.

Spiceworks’ New Headquarters Opens, Expansion Planned Already

August 2, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Scott Abel, Spiceworks Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, photos by Susan Lahey

Spiceworks held an open house Friday for its new headquarters at 3700 North Capital of Texas Highway, in the same Hill Country-adjacent neighborhood as Bazaarvoice. The company, which provides a free network management IT community, reports 2,000 new members a day and has roughly 360 employees in its Austin headquarters.

Scott Abel, founder and executive board member, said Spiceworks modeled the new space after it’s previous space. “We cheated and replicated the old space because people really liked it. It’s very open. We experimented with a mix of open spaces and private offices. We played with high cubes and low cubes and no cubes and people really seemed to love the low cubes, so we stopped asking.”

Tour of Spiceworks’ new headquarters

About 300 people can fit on each of the 50,000-square foot floors and Spiceworks has two of the floors in the building with an option on a third.

“There’s a rumor we might accelerate that option,” Abel said. “We’re probably going to end up growing a little faster than we thought.”

In addition to the open spaces where various departments congregate in one section, there are private meeting rooms with names like Badger Den, Rawr, and Spice Spice. There are also several very small rooms that can let two people work together privately.

Spiceworks’ Kitchen

Abel was the one who recommended having a single communal kitchen for all departments on the first floor.

“If you don’t force people to interact they won’t,” he said. While each area has a little station with coffee and water, the food is all down in the kitchen. “There’s all this cross department pollination,” he said. Employees tell him often how much they like it because it introduces them to people in the company they would never have met otherwise.

“Culturally it matters immensely and employees tell me about it all the time. There’s this comfort level, feeling connected,” Abel said.

Spiceworks’ gong, because what startup doesn’t have its own gong?

Spiceworks, founded in 2006, has raised $111 million in five rounds from six investors, according to its Crunchbase profile.

eRelevance Creates DocWithMe App and Plans to Expand to Other Industries

July 30, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By HOJUN CHOI
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Robert Fabbio, co-founder of eRelevance, photo by John Davidson

Robert Fabbio and his band of seasoned entrepreneurs at eRelevance first envisioned a mobile application that would help doctors better interact with their patients after treatment, but, around this vision, developed a marketing strategy that could make ripples beyond just the healthcare industry.

“When we first started, we were all about a mobile application,“ said Michael Cohen, vice president of marketing. “What we realized is that that’s not always how the world works; an app might not be for everybody.”

Cohen said the team initially wanted to offer healthcare providers a better way to communicate with patients through a digital platform that would simulate some of the doctor-patient conversations that take place during an appointment.

After realizing the application’s potential as an interactive marketing tool, however, Cohen said the company rebranded itself from a patient engagement service into an marketing agency.

“What we found is that if you can engage people around the services of a practice when they’re choosing to have that particular conversation, the more likely it is that they go on to request care for that specific need,” Cohen said.

Because the mobile application, DocWithMe, only tries to engage users after they have selected to find out more about a specific health service, Cohen said the communication that the app fosters is a unique channel that other more traditional marketing solutions have not yet used to the best of its capability.

The company reached out to doctors and healthcare providers in the elective healthcare industry to find out what they were interested in finding out about their patients as well as how they have done in the past to engage former patients. Doing so, Cohen said, helped the agency design content that could best mirror a doctor-patient conversation.

The application, for example, may ask whether the user has recently been on vacation and move onto a conversation about sun damage to the skin. The user can then choose to learn more about offers that deal with treatments for sun damage, engage the subject at a later time or move on to a different topic.

Doctors using the marketing service can offer the mobile application to their patients, who can only use the application after a verification process. He said the interaction that takes place through the platform will not be shared with outside parties, recognizing the private and often sensitive nature of doctor-patient conversations.

“We don’t share what we’re learning about people to other marketing firms, but doctors can use our services to see what types of topics their patients are interested in,” Cohen said.

Though he recognized the importance of making impressions through social media and email notifications -services that the company now offers in addition to the mobile application, Cohen said that the company’s experience shows reaching out to patients through a conversation generated more leads than other channels.

“We’re doing all the creative work, we’re doing all the content as well as the technology to run that content,” Cohen said. “We’re doing all of that for them while they can sit back and focus on giving quality care to their patients.”

As a part of their service, the marketing startup also takes account of how patients are choosing to find out about services, whether they to do so through the agency’s texting service, email notification or social media posts. Doing so, Cohen said, allows their clients to have an easier time reaching out to these patients for future appointments.

Corina Ianculovici, who began using eRelevance’s service a year ago, said the company’s marketing strategy has been a “game changer” for her medispa clinic in New Jersey. Though she said she has yet to see the service generate new leads, Ianculovici said the multichannel approach is great at keeping her current leads active.

“Patient engagement through previous sources we used was ineffective because of the low email opening rate,” Ianculovici said. “Patients were aggravated when we used a text messaging application like CallFire.”

Ianculovici said she has seen higher patient engagement with eRelevance’s mobile application, and said that the company’s social media campaigns have been effective. She said the service has given her clinic a way to engage patients consistently.

Fabbio, the CEO of the company, realizes the service’s strength as a patient engagement platform. He said eRelevance, however, is a company that can take interactive marketing to new level.

“Ultimately what we have built is far more than a patient engagement service,” Fabbio said. “We have essentially built a next generation conversational marketing platform.”

Fabbio said that the agency, which launched in 2013, has closed more than 120 accounts in two quarters of selling. He also told Silicon Hills News that the company has raised about $2.7 million in seed funding, and has grown from its three original founders to 16 employees, mostly to expand its sales team.

The company currently targets elective health care practices in the healthcare industry across the country, a large number of them being medical spa clinics. Its interactive marketing service is offered through 6-month and 12-month contracts.

“We found that plastic surgeons, dermatologists and other health services that provide elective care are constantly looking to generate more leads for business,” Fabbio said.

Fabbio said the company plans on using this same conversational approach to reach different markets both in and outside the healthcare industry. He said with each new industry, the agency will use an application similar to DocWithMe to supplement its marketing campaigns.

“It’s a real basic white label app that is configured to look like as if these doctors or hospital systems have created their own app, so we’ll be able to configure a similar app for different industries,” Fabbio said.

Fabbio said it is still too early to estimate when the company’s expansion into different industries may happen. Tim Smith, one of the founders of the company and its director of products, said the company will be well prepared to adapt to a different market once it is ready to make the move.

“We have the science, we know what model to follow, we have the code and the back end that will run all this,” Smith said. “We just need to adapt the content and adapt the application a little bit and it will work.”

Fabbio, who has more than 25 years experience as an entrepreneur, has created over $1.5 billion in shareholder value at time of exit for the ventures that he has been a part of.

“I think there is great money to be made and great change to be had in the intersection of healthcare and information technology,” Fabbio said. “I have classically been an IT guy, and the ability to bring tech to healthcare is sort of my sweetspot.”

ePatientFinder is a Matchmaker for Patients and Clinical Trials

July 29, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Tom Dorsett, founder and CEO of ePatientFinder, courtesy photo

According to a study by Tufts University in 2014, 60-to-80 percent of the cost of any new drug or treatment goes to clinical trials, and most of that is money is channeled into luring in, then weeding out patients to test the drug. They have to have the exact combination of age, health status, family history and dozens of other factors to make the clinical trials valid. That’s what ePatientFinder, a startup in Austin, was created to deal with.

The ePatientFinder platform data mines physicians’ and hospitals’ medical records looking for keywords that would mark a patient as a good candidate for a phase III trial—the kind where people actually benefit from the treatment, rather than just being used to measure things like toxicity. If candidates are found, their primary physicians, who are signed up with ePatientFinder, contact the patients to tell them of the opportunity and further screen them to determine if they are, in fact, a good fit.

“I come from an academic institution where I had colleagues or friends doing research all the time, looking for patients to enroll in studies,” said Dr. Gary Goff, an internist in Dallas who is signed up with ePatientFinder. “There was no efficiency in it. It was like ‘Hey buddy, so and so, you have that disease. Would you be interested in talking to them? That was the mechanism of patient referrals– posters on a tripod all over campus. This is light years ahead of anything that’s been done before.”

The pharmaceutical companies pay ePatientFinder as well as the trial participants and doctors who screen and consult with patients. But it’s a lot more streamlined than trying to fish from the general population.

“If you look at areas like banking and communication it’s been a lot easier to automate because you’re dealing with less information,” said Tom Dorsett, ePatientFinder CEO and co-founder. Dorsett founded NuScribe, the market’s first health information exchange, in 1991 and sold it for $9 million. Dorsett used some of the proceeds of that sale to launch ePatientFinder.

ePatientFinder works with most of the technologies healthcare practices use to manage patient records. And, Dorsett said, it’s the only one that involves the primary care physician rather than appealing directly to the patients. While he said the company is focused on chronic illnesses right now, such as diabetes, which are the subject of a lot of research, Dr. Goff suggested that the platform’s data mining capabilities has other uses, such as monitoring preventive health measures for various patients with similar profiles.

Dorsett, who has had several jobs in medical IT consulting and management since the sale of his company, had been looking for another opportunity with friend and former business partner Tom Tauzin of Tauzin Consultants in Washington, D.C.. Tauzin’s father, and business partner, a former Congressman from Louisiana, also served as president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical association. They had discussed an idea Dorsett had years ago when his daughter was born with a large birthmark and was interested in what kinds of treatments were available. The idea for a clinical trial clearinghouse through primary physicians was initially created then.

“What we needed was a very large VHR (Virtual Health Record Clinical Portal) to access PHI (patient health information) efficiently,” Tauzin said. “We shelved it for some time…until the data showed that there was enough adoption that we could make a go of it from an investor standpoint…. Our model is solving big problems not that, necessarily, are unsolved but that could just be so onerous …that there’s a real cost barrier and hindrance to the industry.”

The cost of bringing treatments to market was one such problem. Tauzin and Dorsett had to consult with numerous attorneys and other consultants to ensure that the platform they were proposing was legal and met with regulatory restrictions such as patient privacy laws. Tauzin’s company is also launching an accelerator Impact Acceleration, a venture building incubator/accelerator focused on energy, healthcare, telecommunications and technology.

In addition to the exorbitant cost of finding patients, Dorsett said, “Most patients are completely unaware that these trials are going on. There’s a miniscule part of the population who will go out and look for clinical trials, and there are so many good treatments out there for diabetes, interesting things happening in Alzheimer’s, all the usual suspects drive the cost up in healthcare….” There are, he said some 17-odd-thousand trials running at any given point and they can be found at Clinicaltrials.gov. But ePatientFinder is able to sort out those that are showing the most promise in different therapeutic areas.

“Eighty six percent of clinical trials run behind because they’re looking for a diabetic, with another condition and 30 different data points,” he said. Researchers may ask a friend who is a physician if they can send patients over, but the physician, who is already busy, has no way of identifying the best patients other than combing through records. “What we do is automate all that so that community physicians can refer patients to clinical trials in their own community conducted by other physicians they know and trust in the community. Otherwise those treatments are completely inaccessible to those patients. We make it exist for them.”