By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Dell spent $4 billion on goods and services from small, minority and women owned businesses last year.

And the computer giant wants to increase that number and further diversify its supplier network, said Mark Pringle, vice president of procurement for Dell.

“Diversity is tremendously important to Dell,” Pringle said.

Dell spent $350 million on women owned businesses in 2014 and it’s looking to grow that business, he said.

And Pringle is heading up that mission. The youngest of six children raised by a single mom in Topeka, Kansas, Pringle has seen the struggles women face in the workforce. He has four sisters including one who is a small business owner farming 3,000 acres in Kansas. His mother in law, who is from Colombia, is a small business owner in Austin. And his wife is also a strong business leader.

Pringle spoke Thursday afternoon at the Women’s Business Enterprise National Conference, known as WBENC, at the Austin Convention Center. Pringle is what WBENC refers to as a “He for She” or a man who advocates for women. He also spoke with Silicon Hills News following his talk about Dell’s focus on doing business with small, minority and women owned businesses.

In 1950, women working in the same job as a man earned 59 cents for every dollar a man earned, Pringle said. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Labor reports it’s on average 78 cents to a dollar, he said. There is still a gap and that needs to close, Pringle said.

Entrepreneurship is one way to help close that gap. And Pringle says education is key for women businesses to advance in the workplace. And it’s not just education through a university, but taking a lifelong approach to learning new skills and information, he said.

But already, the data shows women passed men in the number of bachelor, masters and PhD degrees from universities in 2007, Pringle said. And those statistics are going to continue to rank upwards, he said.

Dell has a supplier diversity group with five people to reach out to women owned businesses to help them do business with the company, Pringle said. It also has supplier diversity ambassadors throughout the world.

“If someone is trying to engage with Dell, our supplier diversity group is set up so they can reach out to us,” Pringle said. “Our goal is to understand what services and products they are offering.”

Pringle’s organization reaches out to the different business units in Dell to find out their needs to determine if the products and service offerings they have if they match up to its needs.

“Our job is to help them,” Pringle said.

In particular, Dell sees opportunities for women-owned business in the area of sustainability, which is important to Dell and the computer industry as a whole, Pringle said. Whether it’s in packaging or asset recovery, there are a lot of opportunities for small businesses; minority and women owned businesses in that area, Pringle said.

And sustainability not just about recycling products, but also about reducing energy consumption and water usage, Pringle said.

WBENC, one of the largest conferences to connect women-owned businesses with large corporations, is a great opportunity to engage with women-owned businesses, Pringle said. He has met several women-owned businesses at the conference that he plans to follow up with as potential business partners, he said.

The three-day conference and exhibition fair ended on Thursday. It included keynote speeches and presentations, panel discussions, matchmaking sessions, networking receptions and a business fair with more than 300 exhibitors.

For more information on Dell’s diversity efforts please visit its supplier diversity webpage.

Milestone Technologies, a Fremont, Calif.-based IT services company, is opening a new office in Austin on July 1st.

The office will serve Milestone’s growing customer base locally.

“Austin is a great choice for us and our customers,” Prem Chand, CEO and Founder, said in a news release.

The Austin office is Milestone Technologies’s fifth office. It is hiring for engineering positions.

“The opening of Milestone’s new Austin office is an important step towards realizing our goals of introducing our Platform Engineering Services to companies,” Jay Preston, vice president of sales and engineering, said in a news release. “With the new office, Milestone can expand its reach to meet the growing demand by companies to optimize the performance of their IT networks.”

Milestone Technologies, founded in 1997, has 1,700 employees worldwide.

Burro, a startup that connects truck owners to people or stores that need goods moved, won the TechCrunch Pitch Off event in Austin on Tuesday night.

A packed house of people showed up at the Palm Door on Sixth to listen to ten startups give one-minute pitches to a panel of judges. The judges then asked them questions. The local judges included Josh Baer, founder of Capital Factory, Whitney Wolfe, founder and CEO of Bumble, an Austin-based dating app and Todd Hansen, head of content for SXSW Interactive. Jordan R. Crook, a senior writer with TechCrunch, served as the emcee for the event.

Style Sage, a research and data service for the fashion industry, took second place and ReQwip, a platform that lets athletes sell used gear, won the audience favorite award.

Seventeen-year-old Ethan Hurtado, a junior in high school, pitched Burro with his dad and co-founder Jason Ervin. The company, with the tagline “your personal pack mule” won two tickets to attend TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September.

Burro, which launched last October, is part of the shareable economy. Its app connects people with trucks to people who need stuff moved. They are the “uber” of the moving business. They also face competition in Austin from Buddytruk, which rolled out its service in Austin last April.

A spokeswoman for TechCrunch said more than 1,000 people RSVPed for the event and more than 100 startups applied to pitch at it. It’s the fourth time TechCrunch has held a pitch event in Austin.

Alert Media, a platform for interactive mass notification, announced Tuesday that it has raised $4.16 million in a Series A funding round.

The Austin-based startup plans to use the money for product development and to hire more sales and business development employees.

Silverton Partners led the founding round which included participation from ATX Ventures and Capital Factory. Alert Media’s customers include several large companies in the telecom, manufacturing, shipping, energy and healthcare industries.

“Every large or complex organization that sees our platform in action gets very excited about the possibilities,” Brian Cruver, founder and CEO of Alert Media, said in a news release.

Alert Media offers its customers a cloud-based platform that lets them access and send notices from anywhere using any kind of device. A lot of customers use the platform for emergency communications, but it’s also being used for more common business notices, according to the company.

Qualcomm Inc. has donated $1 million to the University of Texas’ Cockrell School of Engineering for its new Engineering Education and Research Center.

The Qualcomm gift will provide funding for the new home of UT Austin’s Wireless Networking and Communications Group in the new engineering center, which opens in 2017.

The new space will be called the Qualcomm Wireless Networking and Communications Research Neighborhood. It will have 20 faculty members and 130 graduate and undergraduate students and numerous researchers and industry partners.

“Qualcomm’s gift will bring the innovative work of WNCG’s students and faculty to the heart of campus,” Sanjay Shakkottai, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of WNCG, said in a news release. “With more space and sophisticated equipment, we will be able to expand partnerships and explore new methods that lead to more breakthrough discoveries.”

Social Solutions Global from Baltimore announced Monday it has acquired Austin-based Community Techknowledge.

Both companies are privately held and the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. CTK, founded in 1999, has more than 60 employees. The company will become part of Social Solutions Global, which was founded in 2000 and has more than 215 employees. Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm, acquired Social Solutions Global last July. CTK will continue to operate in Austin.

Both companies provide software to nonprofit organizations.

“We offer a comprehensive case management software system with our Efforts to Outcomes solution,” Scott Johnson, CEO of Social Solutions Global, said in a news release. “CTK’s Apricot software will further expand SSG’s ability to help nonprofit organizations achieve their missions by enhancing our product offerings across more segments and markets.”

“CTK’s mission is to change lives in a world of unlimited need, scarce resources and growing expectations,” Kathryn Engelhardt-Cronk, CEO of Community Techknowledge, said in a news release. “SSG’s strength in public and private social services sectors will advance this mission and provide the market with a powerful software platform to help customers transform the lives of more and more people every day.”

Dropoff announced Monday that it has closed on $7 million in Series A funding.

The Austin-based startup, founded in November of 2014, provides on-demand, same-day delivery of all kinds of products for businesses in Austin and Houston.

Greycroft Partners led the investment with participation from new and existing investors including Correlation Ventures, Texas Atlantic Capital and Wild Basin Investments.

Dropoff plans to use the funds to expand its service into additional cities.

“This funding demonstrates how customers value and recognize what we are building – a transformative smae-day logistics solution for businesses. We are focused on providing our customers with convenience, reliability and consistent service across multiple locations,” Sean Spector, CEO and co-founder of Dropoff, said in a news release.

The era of the smart water bottle connected to the Internet that tracks water consumption has arrived.

It’s the Internet of Things in action.

And Austin-based Trago is making a smart water bottle that will measure hydration and help the average athletes improve performance.

Trago, founded by brothers Jac and Davis Saltzgiver, launched a Kickstarter campaign on June 2 and they hit their $50,000 goal in ten days. They’ve so far raised nearly $61,000 from 695 backers.

“We want to help people understand how much they should be drinking,” Jac Saltzgiver said.

Hydration is critical for athletes. Drinking too little water can result in heatstroke and sometimes death. Drinking too much water is also a problem and can result in hyponatremia, a condition in which the blood lacks sodium and it can also be fatal.

Trago’s patent pending water bottle measures how much a person drinks. It sells for $49 on Kickstarter and connects to a smartphone and other wearable devices and allows a person to set, and measure hydration goals. The Trago Cap fits on any wide-mouth water bottle.

For athletes, hydration is key to performance. The amount of water a person should drink varies on activity level, weight, height, age, temperature, location and more, Saltzgiver said.

Jac and Davis Saltzgiver have been working on the project for a year. They plan to use the money from their Kickstarter to further their product development and pay its engineers to finalize the product development.

But they are not the only smart water bottle raising funds on Kickstarter right now. HidrateMe has raised $356,000 from 4,666 backers far surpassing its $35,000 goal with 23 days to go.

Informed Data Systems, which makes the One Drop diabetes tracker app, announced Wednesday it has received $8 million in funding.

RRE Ventures led the Series A round.

The Austin-based startup plans to use the money to expand the development of its One Drop diabetes management software, hardware and services platform and on marketing and sales.

As part of the funding deal, Stuart Ellman, managing partner at RRE Ventures, will join Informed Data System’s board of directors. Other investors included BoxGroup, Launch Fund, Capital Factory and Neu Ventures.

Jeff Dachis, co-founder of RazorFish and formerly with Sprinklr and Dachis Group, founded the company. He has diabetes and he saw a need in the marketplace for a platform for diabetics to track data affecting their disease and health, according to the company’s website. Diabetes affects nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population or 30 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

“Diabetes is a data-driven disease. Despite incredible advances in mobile computing, big data, and the quantified-self movement, healthcare is one of the last areas to see any benefit from the advances digital technology has provided,” Dachis, CEO and Founder of One Drop, said in a news release. “It’s time to change this.”

The One Drop app is available for free download for iOS and Apple Watch.

Verb announced Tuesday that it has raised $2.3 million in seed stage funding.

The Austin-based social enterprise connects large corporations and foundations to thousands of social entrepreneurs worldwide through competitions and its platform. It plans to use the funds to fund global expansion and for platform development and to hire key employees.

Investors included Tom Meredith, John Thornton, Bobby Epstein, Matthew Dowd, David Hunt, Herbert Simon, the Tingari-Silverton Foundation and Graham Family Foundation and other angel investors and philanthropists.

Suzi Sosa and Tom Meredith founded Verb in 2013. Previously, Sosa and Meredith ran a competition at the University of Texas called the Dell Social Innovation Challenge for seven years. They have worked with clients such as IBM and Livestrong. Verb also recently struck a partnership with the Everglades Foundation to run its $10 million science prize.

“Verb has huge market potential” Meredith said in a news release. “Verb helps organizations to source creative ideas as well as top talent to address the problems and opportunities that interest them most. Verb’s platform and ecosystem provide entrepreneurs and organizations with the means to replicate and scale their innovations well beyond their local communities or existing markets. Verb helps entrepreneurs around the globe to identify strategic partners, sources of capital and mentors.”