Seismos, a data analytics company for the oil and gas production, has received $4 million in funding.

The Austin-based company plans to use the funds on marketing and engineering.

Javelin Venture Partners led the funding round with participation from Osage University Partners and other oil and gas technology-focused investors. As a result of the deal, Noah Doyle, Javelin Venture Partners general partner, has joined the Seismos board of directors.

Seismos creates technology that is able to help oil and gas companies track and recovery Carbon Dioxide during oil well production.

“The intersection of innovative approaches and large business problems, led by inspiring, committed teams is exactly what we love to get behind,” Noah Doyle, general partner of Javelin Venture Partners, said in a news release.

Seismos uses a system of sensors and data collection devices and uploads that information to cloud-based databases that then crunches the data and produces maps of CO2 movement over time. With this information, oil field operators can save more time and money.

“We are entering a new era for the oil and gas industry where technology driven solutions, particularly via real-time, field deployed data acquisition and analytics systems, will dramatically reduce the cost of production for our entire industry,” Panos Adamopoulos, Seismos founder and CEO, said in a news statement.

Seismos, founded in 2012, also has an office in Houston.

Ortho Kinematics, a spine imaging diagnostics company, announced Tuesday it has closed on $9.6 million in Series C funding.

The Austin-based company plans to use the money to expand sales and marketing of its flagship product, Vertebral Motion Analysis. It also plans to use the funds for limited research and development activities.

The investors in Ortho Kinematic’s latest round of financing included Medtronic, TEXO Ventures, MB Venture Partners and other new and previous investors.

As a result of the deal, Gary Stevenson, co-founder and managing partner of MB Venture Partners, has joined the OKI board of directors.

“This current round of financing is a strong vote of confidence and will give OKI the resources to support ambitious growth,” Paul Gunnoe, CEO of OKI said in a news release. “The VMA is disrupting 60+ year old methods of diagnosing spine issues, and we believe this type of innovation is long overdue. We are leading in this area and are humbled by the support we have received.”

Austin ends up on a lot of top 10 lists and now it’s ranked No. 9 on its ability to attract and grow tech talent, according to a new CBRE Research report “Scoring Tech Talent.”

The ability to retain and grow tech talent and that clustering effect leads to big demand for office space in the U.S., according to CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate firm.

Silicon Valley ranked first on the list, followed by San Francisco, San Francisco Peninsula, New York, Seattle, Boston and Baltimore.

“Austin’s talent growth rate from 2010 to 2013 was 26.5 percent, making it one of the ten strongest large markets for tech talent growth,” according to the report.

Tech talent makes up less than four percent of the total U.S. workforce, but it accounted for nearly 14 percent of all office leasing activity in the U.S. in 2013 and 19 percent in 2014, according to the CBRE Report.

“For the past two years, the high-tech industry has not only spurred the economy as a whole, but it has been the top driver of commercial office activity, influencing rents and vacancy in major markets across the U.S., including Austin,” Erin Morales, senior vice president who leads CBRE’s Tech and Media Practice group in Austin, said in a news release. “Downtown Austin has experienced an incredible transformation of culture in the last decade, which is in large part the result of tech companies’ preference to grow their workforces in an amenity-rich environment with access to livable space. One can’t survive well without the other, but the trilogy of housing, amenity and tech growth have fueled the economy in Austin, and the continued development of apartments, hotels and office buildings suggests this growth is sustainable.”

The top 10 large markets on the Tech Talent Score Card (identified as markets with a talent pool above 50,000 tech professionals) are:

1. Silicon Valley, CA

2. Washington, D.C.

3. San Francisco, CA

4. San Francisco Peninsula, CA

5. New York, NY

6. Seattle, WA

7. Boston, MA

8. Baltimore, MD

9. Austin, TX

10. Atlanta, GA

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Three Polish programmers wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots stole the show at the third Techstars Cloud Demo Day.

Damian Nowak, the CEO of Virtkick, clearly embraced the Texan life during his last three months in San Antonio participating in the Techstars Cloud program. He relocated here along with Damian Kaczmarek and Mirek Wozniak from Poland. They are also experts in cloud computing.

“The cloud computing market is still in a gold rush today,” Nowak said during his pitch.

The web hosting market is worth $20 billion annually and the big guys only have half of the market. The rest is divided up among 50,000 small and medium providers who lose money because of outdated and expensive software, Nowak said.

Virtkick does “for the hosting industry what Shopify did for e-commerce,” Nowak said. The company created a software as a service product aimed at small to medium-sized web hosting companies that makes it easy for them to manage their customers.

Already 10 customers are using Virtkick’s product.

Virtkick was one of ten startups that pitched at Techstars Cloud Demo Day Thursday afternoon at the Aztec Theater in downtown San Antonio.

Blake Yeager, managing director of the Techstars Cloud, introduced the teams on stage along with other staff and mentors. One team, Nebulab came from San Antonio. Another, bitfusion.io came from Austin. The rest were from all over the country and world.

This is the third Techstars Cloud class in San Antonio. The first program took place in 2012 with 11 companies and the next year another 11 startups participated in the 2013 program.

The Techstars Cloud program provides each startup with $18,000 in funding for a 6 percent stake in the company and access to $100,000 convertible note, a loan that converts to equity and can make the equity stake higher.

Of the 11 startups that went through the 2012 Techstars Cloud program, four startups have shut down. Vidmaker announced its team’s plan to join YouTube and shut down its site in January. Emergent One, CloudSnap and Appsembler are out of business. Callisto.Fm is now Epic Playground. Conductrics, Keen.IO, Distil Networks, TempoDB, now TempoIQ, Flomio and Cloudability are all still in business.
Of the 11 2013 Techstars Cloud companies, all of them are still in business. And Rackspace acquired Techstars Cloud startup ZeroVM.

The 2015 Techstars cloud class spent the last three months in offices on the 10th floor of the Weston Centre, the former site of the old Geekdom co-working space.

It was a space familiar to the team behind Nebulab. The company spun out of a 3-Day Startup Program in San Antonio and last year the Geekdom Fund invested $25,000 in them. Nebulab is based at Geekdom. The company is currently in private beta testing. It has created a platform for research scientists to store and manage scientific data and papers.

“Researchers today have better software on their phone to manage their photos and their music than they do to manage the data necessary to cure disease and to improve the human condition,” Guillermo Vela, CEO and Co-founder, said during his pitch for Nebulab.

Today, research data is not just inaccessible but it gets lost, Vela said. Nebulab is the solution scientists need to keep their data secure and accessible, he said.

Shai Wolkomir, CEO of Elasticode, a team from Tel Aviv, Israel, pitched the startup, which collects data about a person’s mobile phone usage to create mobile experiences tailored for them.

“The world doesn’t need another A/B testing platform. This is audience adaptive software and we are Elasticode,” Wolkomir said.

Josh Kerr, a serial entrepreneur from Austin and a long-time Techstars mentor, introduced Fantasmo Studios, a company that does augmented reality games.

“I have never been this excited about a company as I am about the technology you are about to see,” Kerr said. “This stuff is super cool. They are literally taking stuff in the fantasy world and shaping it into reality.”

Jameson Detweiler, CEO and Co-Founder of Fantasmo Studios, announced the company has created an augmented virtual reality game called Blanimals that is similar to Pokémon. It lets kids capture creatures in real life on their phones, iPads or tablets.

Craig Murphy, training manager with the InterContinental Hotels Group, flew in from Atlanta to introduce Callinize. He’s a customer and he’s happy with them.

“Everyday Callinize helps my team better manage our hotels,” Murphy said.

Blake Robertson, CEO and Co-Founder of San Francisco-based Callinize, sales software, said the company is already booking $13,000 a month in recurring revenue. Last month, the company booked $30,000 in revenue and was “accidently profitable,” Robertson said. Callinize makes it easy for companies to connect their existing phone system to their existing Customer Relations Management software. It has more than 100 customers already using its software.

“Callinize makes sales people smart,” Robertson said. “We unlock the opportunity that is trapped inside your CRM.”

Appbase.io has created database management software to handle search queries from mobile apps.

“Every tenth of a second in added delay costs the ecommerce industry $30 billion annually,” said Siddarth Kothari, CEO and Co-Founder of Appbase.

Card Isle lets people pick and print a unique greeting card from a kiosk in less than 90 seconds, said Adam Donato, the company’s Co-founder.

The company gets its card designs from local and national artists. They upload their designs to the company, which makes them available to all the kiosks.

The company has built ten kiosks and printed more than 5,000 greeting cards to date, Donato said.

Stabilitas provides tracking software on employees and lets employers know what risks they face when they travel to foreign countries.

Military veterans who spent decades in the security space run the company.

“Let’s make the world a safer place together,” said Gregg Adams, Co-founder of Stabilitas.

Knowtify is an engagement marketing platform that helps software marketers. It has a custom engagement algorithm that lets marketers know who is engaging with their brand and who is not.

Knowtify gives marketers the ability to send marketing emails from one place.

Bitfusion.io has created specialized software that brings supercomputing performance to a variety of hardware devices to allow them to run any kind of application, said Subu Rama, Co-Founder of the company.

The Austin-based company announced a partnership on Thursday with Rackspace. The terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

What is it about the 16th floor?

Atlassian cut the ribbon on a 75,000 square foot space on the 16th floor of the new Colorado Towers Thursday night. With panoramic views and a balcony that looks out on Lake Austin, it will host the 120 new employees Atlassian hopes to hire in 2015 to add to the 150 it hired since its arrival.

That will bring it close to the 300 that was reportedly expected when the company opened its Austin office a year ago.

The Austin office is a global engineering hub for HipChat which is one of the company’s fastest-growing products, and most of the hires will be in software engineering and technical support The new space was also designed to be a community hub for local tech events and meet-ups.

Company president Jay Simons said when Atlassian was looking for cities where it could find software talent for its suite of collaboration tools, Austin won them over partly because “We’re a quirky, unusual company and Austin felt like home to us. We care a lot about culture and we care a lot about hiring people who are additive to the chemistry…we saw people who are like us here.”

Atlassian, founded 13 years ago in Australia, is a bootstrapped company with a DIY business model that’s unusual in enterprise software. Companies can download it themselves from the Internet and have unlimited users. Currently the company has two floors in the Colorado Towers but Simons said, with Atlassian’s rate of growth it expects to be opening a new space within the year. The company announced a 44 percent revenue increase to $215 million in September and was named Australia’s Best Place to Work by Great Place to Work.com. It has nearly 50,000 organizational clients including Citigroup, eBay, Coca-Cola, Tesla, Twilio and NASA.

The company gives one percent of its profits to charity, offers vacation time to employees for volunteer work and stands by its five values which include:

• Open company, no bullshit
• Play as a team
• Build with Heart and Balance
• Don’t Fuck the Customer
• Be the Change You Seek

The company also has a day called Ship It every quarter that begins on a Thursday afternoon in which employees can work on any project they like. It doesn’t have to be connected to work, but it can be. Employees have to create a “Shipping Order” to describe what they plan to do and have it done by Friday afternoon.

Simons told of one project that involved fixing all the office chairs. Because of a weak coating on the office chair arms, every time someone slid his chair under his desk it would get scratched and in no time the brand new chairs were battered and crappy looking. The manufacturer’s only solution was to lock the chairs at a certain height so they didn’t scrape against the desks. This, as one might imagine, was not a popular solution. After three years, for one Ship It day, a couple employees took apart a chair, figured out how to unlock them and unlocked all the chairs in the office.

The response, Simons said, was “Thank you! That was the best project ever.”

The culture fit makes Austin an ideal hub for HipChat since, the private chat service is a culture driver, Simons said. “Hipchat is a culture spreader. If you look at how teams use it there are memes and inside jokes and all these warm and fuzzy references to people,” he said. “One of the reasons people love using the product is they say ‘Our team got stronger when started communicating this way.’”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The Internet of Everything is already here, said Leah Lewis, managing director of Cisco Consulting Services.

“It’s happening today,” Lewis told a packed ballroom during the Thursday morning keynote address at InnoTech San Antonio.

Today, every company is a tech company, Lewis said. And change isn’t constant, it’s instant, she said.

The applications of smart devices connected to the Internet seem endless. They include everything from a smart bra that senses temperature and blood flow to detect breast cancer to the University of British Columbia’s “smart concrete” that contains sensors and can send out alarms if a bridge has too much weight on it.

Both Google and Apple are creating smart contact lenses, Lewis said.

Google’s contact lenses are targeted at diabetics. The lenses can measure the blood glucose level in tears and send alerts when it’s time to take insulin. Apple is creating smart contact lenses that allow you to control your iPhone.

Just last week, Delphi Corp. announced its self-driving Audi Q5 travelled 3,500 miles from San Francisco to New York with the car doing almost all of the driving on its own.

To do that, the car has got to have radar and multiple sensors, Lewis said.

Lewis also recounted how her son, a college athlete who competes in Ironman Triathlons, uses technology through his Garmin watch to track his training.

“This watch blows away our little fitness apps,” she said.

The watch monitors her son’s swimming pace and stroke length. It also monitors his stride length, distance and running pace and even the torque in his pedals when he is biking. The data is all uploaded to his trainer. The trainer reviews that data and designs programs to help him improve.

Fitness isn’t the only area where the Internet of Everything is having a huge impact. Cities are adopting the technology to save money, create jobs and make cities more efficient and responsive to citizens.

For the last four years, Cisco has partnered with the City of Barcelona in Spain to create a smart city. City officials now track water, lighting, parking, transportation, waste and they’ve created 47,000 jobs in the process, Lewis said.

“Parking creates a lot of congestion in cities,” Lewis said.

In Barcelona, city officials have installed smart sensors in the concrete in parking spots that alert citizens via a mobile phone application that a parking spot is available, she said.

Smart devices and sensors create wide ranging applications for cities, manufacturers and industries such as the oil and gas industry, Lewis said. Leak detection on oil pipelines through sensors is just one application, she said.

Retailers are also starting to use sensors to detect customers inside stores and send discount coupons to their smart phones. Smart carts will some day allow people to pay for their groceries and other items with their mobile phone and make checking out super speedy. Sensors also help retailers track products, inventory and product placement, Lewis said.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Lightphile won the 2015 InnoTech Beta Summit Thursday morning at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

David Barrick, CEO and Co-founder presented the company, which makes an app and hardware box to control stage lighting systems.

Lightphile, based at Geekdom, is currently in private beta but has a handful of paying customers including the Geekdom Events Center, the Woodlands First Community Baptist Church and Waco Hall.

Lightphile has raised some capital from angel investors and the Geekdom Fund.

The audience attending the beta summit chose Lightphile as the winner using the VoxVote.com mobile app. Lightphile captured 62 percent of the vote, followed by InfoCyte, a cybersecurity startup and Leto Solutions, a startup that makes a cooling device for people with prosthetic legs.

The other presenters included PhishBarrel, an email spam blocker and phishing scam detection and prevention software and SecPod, a cybersecurtiy software company. Silicon Hills News helped to organize the event and served as moderator.

Last year, Codeup won the Innotech Beta Summit and in 2013 Soloshot won the event. The Beta Summit has become a place to showcase the latest technology startups in San Antonio.

InnoTech, the largest annual technology conference in San Antonio, returns to the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center on Thursday.

The day-long conference begins with an 8 a.m. keynote address by Leah Lewis, managing director of Cisco Consulting Services, Americas Public Sector and former Chief Information Officer for Colorado. She will talk about the “Internet of Everything.”

The InnoTech Beta Summit, hosted by Silicon Hills News, will take place at 10:30 a.m. in room 202A. The event features five San Antonio-based startups including LightPhile, Leto Solutions, InfoCyte, PhishBarrel and SecPod. Last year, Codeup won the Beta Summit and the 2013 winner was Soloshot. This year, the audience will get to pick the winner using the VoxVote app.

This year’s conference also features a Women in Tech Summit and a Cybersecurity track.

In addition to InnoTech, the Techstars Cloud hosts its Demo Day at the Aztec Theater in San Antonio on Thursday afternoon.