TechCrunch, the nation’s largest technology news site, is coming to Austin on June 23rd to hold a meetup and pitch-off event.

The deadline for startups to apply to participate in the pitch-off is today. Each startup gets 60 seconds to pitch in front of a panel of judges including TechCrunch writers and local VCs. All of the startups must be in stealth or private beta. First place receives a table in Startup Alley at a TechCrunch Disrupt event, second place receives two tickets to the event and third place receives one ticket.

This is the third annual pitch-off event for TechCrunch in Austin.

The startups TechCrunch selects also get 15 minute one-on-one talks with TechCrunch staff.

The event will be held at Palm Door on Sixth with doors opening at 6 p.m. and the pitch off competition beginning at 7 p.m.

Tickets to the event cost $10.

TabbedOut, a mobile payments app for bars and restaurants, announced Thursday it has raised $21.5 million in a Series C round.

Wellington Management Company led the round with participation from previous investors NEA and Morgan Creek Capital Management. To date, the Austin-based startup has raised $39 million.

“TabbedOut was founded on the fundamental idea that we could save people time and help venues provide guests with a better customer experience when paying their bar and restaurant tabs,” Alex Broeker, CEO, TabbedOut, said in a news release.

The app saves customers time in checking out. It also gives merchants data and analytics about their customers.

TabbedOut plans to use the money raised for customer acquisition and to create loyalty and rewards programs, to integrate with other mobile consumer services and to expand into 20 new U.S. metro markets and internationally.

TabbedOut reports its app is installed in more than 10,000 venues nationwide and it has partnerships with Citibank and brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Dos Equis, Heineken and Deep Eddy Vodka.

LawnStarter announced Tuesday it has raised $6 million in a Series A investment led by San Francisco-based Binary Capital.

To date, LawnStarter has raised $7.25 million. The latest funds will help the lawn care platform expand and hire more employees.

Previously, LawnStarter raised $1 million in a seed round from Gary Vaynerchuk and other angel investors. The company also participated in TechStars Austin last year.

“This money will allow us to build the all star team it takes to win. We’ll be bringing on a VP of Engineering, several engineers and a couple of marketing professionals. City expansion is on the horizon as well, Cofounder and CEO Steven Corcoran said in a news release.

LawnStarter, founded in 2013, provides a platform for homeowners to schedule lawn mowing, fertilization, bush trimming and other lawn care services from local providers. LawnStarter has a mobile app that allows people to easily manage and schedule services. The company currently operates in the Washington, D.C. metro area, Austin and Orlando.

By JOHN DAVIDSON
Special Report for Silicon Hills News

NewCo rolled into Austin last week for the inaugural NewCoATX festival.

John Battelle and Brian Monahan founded NewCo in 2012 to “identify, celebrate and connect the engines of positive change in technology.” It seeks to do that through an event experience it describes as “a mash-up of an open-studio tour and a business conference, with the vibe of a music festival.”

NewCoATX kicked off Thursday night with a VIP Welcome Reception with about 200 people, hosted at the expansive new Atlassian headquarters downtown. Battelle, a journalist and entrepreneur whose list of accomplishments include co-founding Wired Magazine and The Web 2.0 Conferences, engaged in a ‘fireside chat’ with Josh Rubin, Executive Producer and Managing Director of The Daily Dot, before a VIP audience. Battelle described the kind of companies that NewCo wishes to partner with as “not companies that have a mission, but companies that are on a mission to inspire positive change.”

Typical NewCo festivals feature sixty host companies. At appointed times throughout the day, each company invites attendees to observe a presentation from a company executive, and provides a behind-the-scenes look, not just at what the company does, but how it does it.

In Austin, participating companies ranged across a broad spectrum of industries. Kari Hernandez, of boutique PR agency Ink PR, discussed how start-ups might recognize when they would benefit from hiring an in-house marketing manager, rather than hiring an agency. Thought leader Andrew Allison, Co-CEO of Main Street Hub, offered a riveting presentation on creating a positive work culture, touching upon how striving to do so has affected his company’s hiring process, and the value to be found in nurturing an environment in which “professional development is a defining characteristic of the company.”

Powerhouse juggernauts such as Google Fiber and Under Armour Connected Fitness hosted sessions. The sessions closed with beer and a frank assessment of the challenges of bootstrapping and the tectonic shifts that occur beneath new company foundations.

“If the timing is right to start a company, start. Because the idea will change anyway,” said Square Root CEO and Founder Chris Taylor.

To attend NewCoATX, it was possible to visit one company without charge, but the remainder of the festival works on a tier system – a Silver Pass ($30) earned you access to unlimited sessions; a Platinum Pass ($150) provided access to unlimited sessions, plus opening and closing VIP events.

So who pays to attend? And what do they hope to discover?

“From a statistical basis,” Battelle told Silicon Hills News, “our database of 15,000 people tells us that their average age is 30, and the average job-title is Director or V-P, upwards. If you look around at the crowd here tonight, you can see that’s consistent with what we’ve been seeing elsewhere. And I think most of them are here to connect with other people in their ecosystem or community. The second reason (they might be here), of course, is because they’re looking for a job.”

The event’s organizers didn’t have precise attendance figures immediately available, but many of the NewCoATX sessions either sold out, or approached capacity. On the day of the festival (Friday, May 29), the weather was remarkably benevolent, given the climate woes of the entire previous week – and road traffic was surprisingly manageable. For some, this may have proved crucial to the logistical success of the event. Those who booked a full schedule of six sessions soon discovered that the half-hour window between sessions left little likelihood of networking and arriving in time for the start of the next session. Doubtless those who exercised a more judicious strategic approach benefited from a less frantic day criss-crossing the city.

Sixteen NewCo affiliate cities exist worldwide, in locations as far-flung as Portland, Ore, and Istanbul, Turkey. The company aims to connect one hundred affiliate cities within the next five years. The next festival takes place in Amsterdam, on June 5.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour, has a whiteboard in his office on which many things are written in black about the growing company vision.

Under Armour recently opened a connected digital fitness headquarters in Austin and announced its new Grip wrist band. And since it purchased other companies including MapMyFitness it has built a global digital community of 130 million athletes who use the organization’s products and track their workouts and food intake. But in the middle of the whiteboard, written in red is this message: “Don’t forget to sell shirts and shoes.”

Plank, whose company has reached $3.8 billion in revenues this year, was interviewed by Heather Brunner, CEO of WP Engine, at the Austin Technology Council CEO Summit Thursday. Brunner tried to coax information from him about insights gleaned from the company’s digital community which include the fact that most runners complete 3.1 miles on average and that a certain Under Armour shoe performs best at just under 400 miles. But if there are other secret athlete insights the company is gleaning from the data he kept that to himself.

He did, however, share basic insights about building a company from a tiny operation and $15,000 in his grandmother’s basement to a global company. In keeping with his football player roots, Plank takes a very aggressive stand toward entrepreneurship. His headquarters is full of signs with slogans like “We play offense” and “Great ideas get funded.”

Though his personal belief is that the best source of funding is your product’s inventory. He believes in speed and decisiveness, even when that leads to errors. For example, the company’s first women’s line of athletic clothing was created by a dozen men sitting around a table postulating what their wives and girlfriends might want to wear. Their solution was to “pink and shrink” the men’s clothing line. But after they’d created the women’s line, and sold nearly $1 million worth to retailers—reflecting about 20 percent of the company’s profits—they realized they couldn’t ship them because they weren’t up to par. It would screw up the brand.

That inspired the company to start broadening its ideas about who considers themselves athletes and respond accordingly with new product lines and more hiring diversity.

Under Armour’s move into wearables is a logical one, Plank said, especially because with all the data we have available to us, many of us can’t remember what blood type we are or the name of a doctor we saw several years ago. Our body is our most important asset, he said. That’s what we should be tracking the data on.

But the culture is still all quarterback. Brunner recalled a campaign Under Armour did with the slogan “Protect This House.” It was 2010, the economy had tanked and she was working with BazaarVoice at the time. They adopted the slogan for their own.

“Yeah, there was a lot of testosterone in that one,” Plank said ruefully, but it also reflected American ideas that people needed, especially then.

The main secret to the company’s success is “we never believed it wouldn’t happen. You have to grab your business, lift it up, will it to happen…we’re just getting started.”