By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Got a small business in Austin and need cash?

Able recently struck an agreement that will enable the company to provide loans to 25 new companies in Austin. It’s aimed at bootstrapped businesses like hair salons, restaurants, breweries, bakeries and more. The company launched in July of 2014 and has been proving out a new collabortive lendng platform ever since.

Able announced a partnership with Garrison Point, which will underwrite Able, which is lending to Austin’s small and medium sized businesses. This is the first time the company is not lending out of its own account. The financial technology startup made the announcement during South by Southwest at an event with Floodgate Venture Capitalist Mike Maples Jr., one of the company’s investors and Josh Hare, owner of Hops + Grain Brewery, an Able customer.

“Mike is one of our biggest supporters,” said Will Davis, co-founder of Able. “He’s been a great investor and advisor to us.”

This month, Able began taking application for its third “cohort” of loans, the “Able 25.” Evan Baehr discussed the company’s strategy on Medium in a blog post.

Able’s loan range from $25,000 to $250,000 with the average loan amount of $125,000. Its customers, on average, have annual revenue of above $500,000.

The key to an Able loan is a company’s friends and family and fans provide 25 percent of the loan amount and Able covers the rest. Interest rates range from 8 percent to 16 percent. Able also offers a package of benefits and services to each of its loan customers which include everything from photography, online business profile, marketing, promotion and public relations.

“We approve an entrepreneur and they go out and sell their story,” Davis said. “Once all those pieces are together that loans is priced.”

And Able offers incentives to anyone who refers a business that becomes part of the Able 25. The company gets $500 off their loan and the referrer gets a $500 credit to buy goods or services from the company.

“Anyone that makes something we love,” Davis said. “We love makers. We also like providers.”

So far, Able’s customers include Chi’Lantro, Branch Basic, Esby, Raven + Lily, Good Seed Burger and more. The company has provided loans to more than 25 businesses.

“There’s a fundamental lack of credit that is happening right now in the marketplace,” Davis said. “These small businesses play an important role in the economy and yet ironically they are not getting access to capital.”

The majority of Small Business Administration loan applications are rejected or withdrawn, Davis said. And when they are approved, it takes an extremely long time to get an SBA loan, he said. Some times the business is rejected for a nonfinancial reason like a short length of time in business, Davis said.

“We are going after companies in that category that are close to being bankable but are still being told no by the big bank,” Davis said.

The draught in startup capital for small to medium sized businesses can be traced to the 2008 financial crisis, Davis said. Since then, many banks have become risk averse, he said.

“The risky or hardest category for banks to lend into are small businesses,” he said.

That lack of access to credit is where Able finds opportunity, Davis said. Able is reducing the cost of a small business loan and making it available to a whole new class of borrower, he said.

Right now, Able is only lending in Austin.

“In the next several months, we’ll be branching out of Austin and to the nation after that,” Davis said.

In addition, Able plans to raise a new venture round by the end of the summer.

“We have tested and proven this model,” Davis said. “We’re finding insanely low rates for entrepreneurs. Backers are earning 10.5 percent on their money. The macro-economic climate of Austin is so good for small business.”

As Able expands nationally, the company will partner with a bank moving forward, Davis said.

“Banks don’t like the fact that they can’t lend to small business,” he said. “There is a very strong and promising relationship with banks. And we fit very nicely.”

In 2012, eyeQ won the Texas Ventures Labs Investment Competition.

And it has come a long way since then.

The company, founded by Michael Garel, just announced Monday it has landed $1.2 million in funding. Corsa Ventures, DreamIt, Houston Angel Network, South Coast Angel Network and other angel investors invested in the company.

eyeQ plans to use the money to expand its business and reach more customers. Its customers include national restaurant chains Luby’s and Fuddruckers and retailers like Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores.

“Since getting our solutions into stores and restaurants, the response – and almost immediate ROI – has been amazing,” Garel said in a news statement. “Our customers are finding measurable value in the intelligence eyeQ delivers. This additional investment will help us get our systems in more locations faster.”

eyeQ has created a combination of hardware and analytical software which it installs in stores. The system provides retail information to consumers with the ultimate goal of driving more sales for the retailer.

“Brick and mortar stores aren’t going away, but they are finding it harder to compete, and keep customers over online options,” Brian Grisby, managing partner of Corsa Ventures, said in a news release. “eyeQ gives these physical stores and brands a leg up, and powers customers with intelligence, in real time, to make smart decisions – and purchases – right in the stores.”

eyeQ is working with IBM. It is using its BlueMix cloud platform and cognitive computing platform Watson. The company also won the Mentor/Investor Choice award at the 2014 Austin IBM Smartcamp. It was one of two companies to win the U.S. regional Smartcamp competition and it is now competing in the IBM Smartcamp Global Finals.

eyeQ is a member of the Austin Technology Incubator and a 2014 graduate of DreamIt Ventures.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

According to James Beshara, CEO of Tilt, they just “threw up something on Facebook” about a panel Y Combinator alums were hosting to talk about how to get into Y Combinator, and the next thing they knew they were way beyond capacity for the Palm on Sixth, which says something about the popularity of either Y Combinator or the allure of an open bar.

Tilt and Handsome co-sponsored the event.

The panel assembled Friday night, Justin Kan, a partner at Y Combinator, Beshhara, Steve Huffman of Reddit.com, Hipmunk.com, Scott Gress of Treeline.io and Lloyd Armbrust of OwnLocal talked about how they got into the incubator, what the learned there and what they’ve learned since.

Beshara told the story of working on his solution to the question “What will crowdfunding look like in a mobile world?” and then, one day, buying a desk from Armbrust on Craigslist. The two began talking and eventually the conversation turned to Y Combinator and Armbrust suggested Beshara apply.

In an interview before the event, Beshara said that he struggled to get funding in Austin and learned that, when it comes to social technology, Silicon Valley has the greatest concentration of talent and investors. Armbrust had assured him that going through Y Combinator would make recruiting and finding investment a lot easier.

“Even if it makes it 10 percent easier,” Armbrust said, “it’s worth it.”

The Reddit Story

Huffman met Paul Graham just before he founded Y Combinator. Huffman and his roommate and later co-founder Alexis Ohanian were at the University of Virginia and learned that Graham would be speaking at Harvard. They took the train up to see him and Graham was so impressed that they’d taken this long journey to hear him speak, he offered to hang out with them for a bit.

“I was standing at the gas tank and they had these pizza subs inside the convenience store and I just thought it was a travesty, a crime against humanity that the guy inside the convenience store didn’t already know I wanted a pizza sub, that would have saved us a few minutes,” Huffman said. So he explained ideas for quicker food access through apps that he and Ohanian had dreamed up and Graham’s response was:

“You’re going to eliminate lines! No one will ever wait in line again!”

“And I thought ‘No, I just want pizza subs,’” Huffman said.

When Graham invited them to apply for his new incubator, they figured they were a shoo in. Then they got rejected. They were headed home on the train, getting “shithoused” when they got a call that they, personally, were welcome to come to Y Combinator. They just needed a new idea.

Lessons from Y Combinator

Several of the panelists described being told that the 10 minute interview that determined acceptance into Y Combinator was the most harrowing 10 minutes of one’s life and that they saw other candidates emerging from the interview looking like they’d been hit by trains.

The panelists, though, had a different experience. Armbrust, who had a newspaper history, remembered being asked what he considered a bunch of softball questions about the newspaper industry and thinking it was a sign that they Y Combinator team didn’t take him seriously. In fact, he was later told, Graham was impressed that he “knew more about the newspaper industry than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Treeline’s Gress, whose company is finishing it’s last day at Y Combinator March 31, said one thing he learned was that maybe they should have started sooner. Treeline builds backend architecture for apps and was being to use its own modular code systems in its consulting business before finally deciding to let go of the consulting business—which was doing well—and build its product.

“If you think you have something worth doing, start working on it and if it doesn’t pan out, you’ll know soon enough….But if it feels like it has potential and you’re in a position to keep working on it, do it,” Gress said. To that, Armbrust added that startups should treat their employees well, buy them health insurance, give them a liveable wage and let them know the expectations you have for the ride.

Huffman agreed that relationships with people you work with are key. In those moments when there doesn’t appear to be anything else keeping you motivated, he said, those relationships will.

Beware Advice

All the panelists ironically agreed that startups need to be careful about taking advice. As Armbrust said, everyone offering advice is coming from a particular mindset and set of experiences that will skew the advice they give.

Beshara said there’s a natural human tendency to constantly seek advice of experts, rather than becoming the expert. Every time there’s a problem, the company wants to book office hours. But at some point there are 17 problems that need to be dealt with in a day and you come to the conclusion that you need to know this information for yourself. So instead of outsourcing your thinking, you should build the muscle of thinking for yourself.

“There’s all this research that shows new neurological pathways aren’t created by reading but are created by the emotion of doing something…,” he said.

Gress pointed out that, early in the company, that’s not always possible.

“You might be getting in situations that are so alien to you that any decisions you’re going to make seems completely arbitrary so you default to these people who have done this before, thinking ‘At least they know what they’re talking about,’” he said.

But ultimately, the founders agreed, one person’s success pathway might be completely irrelevant to what another company is doing.

“My friend taught me that there are many paths to success, it’s just important that you are on one of them,” Huffman said. “Granted, he gave me this advice when he was teaching me to play Settlers of Catan….butt at the minimum you have to have a plan and be able to plausibly explain to yourself where the path to success is. “

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

At 24 Diner in downtown Austin, Bob Metcalfe orders a large bowl of fruit with extra strawberries and coffee for breakfast.

Metcalfe, 68, is training to walk his first marathon. And it’s not an ordinary marathon either. He’s doing the Boston Marathon in April. His wife, Robyn, son, Max and daughter, Julia, are all running the race.

Metcalfe’s goal is to finish 26.2 miles in eight hours or under. He is part of the C/I team, which is raising money to help poor kids learn computer programming in Boston.

A few years ago, Metcalfe did his first triathlon – the Rookie Tri in Austin. And in February he finished the Austin Half Marathon. He doesn’t shy away from new challenges. He has summited Mt. Kilimanjaro and hiked through Patagonia.

And every ten years he starts a new career.

For the past four years, Metcalfe has served as the Professor of Innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught an undergraduate course on entrepreneurship with Joshua Baer, founder of Capital Factory and Ben Dyer, Entrepreneur in Residence at UT, called Longhorn Startup. It has spawned dozens of startups.

Metcalfe also runs the Innovation Center in the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT with Louise Epstein and Dyer. They’ve focused on nurturing UT faculty- run startups through the Longhorn StARTup Studio. Each month, Metcalfe and the Austin Chamber of Commerce host “The stARTup Studio,” an informal gathering to bring the faculty run companies in front of investors, entrepreneurs and other community members to talk about their newest products and inventions. The goal of the studio is to teach faculty the art of technology commercialization, Metcalfe said.

Austin is lucky to have Metcalfe, Baer said.

“The students learn a lot from him,” Baer said. He has got a lifetime of experiences, and Metcalfe shares his stories about double dating with Steve Jobs or being the first investor in PowerPoint with students, Baer said.

Metcalfe earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT and a master’s degree in applied mathematics and a PhD in computer science from Harvard. He then worked at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center early in his career. That led to his famous invention of Ethernet, a local area networking technology that lets computers communicate with each other. In 2013, Metcalfe was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for inventing Ethernet.

Metcalfe also co-founded 3Com and worked as a publisher and columnist at InfoWorld. He worked as a full time venture capitalist for a decade at Polaris Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm.

So how did Metcalfe end up in Austin and at UT?

“I met a saleswoman for NI,” Metcalfe said.

The saleswoman, he doesn’t remember her name now, attended a speech he gave in Boston and told him her boss, James Truchard, CEO and co-founder of National Instruments, wanted to meet Metcalfe. The two then met for breakfast and Truchard invited Metcalfe to Austin to speak at NI week.

Not long after that meeting, Metcalfe attended the National Venture Capital Association convention in Los Angeles. He sat at an empty table. And Rudy Garza, a venture capitalist and founder of G51 Capital, joined him. Once Garza sat down, Metcalfe told him he was going “Meta on innovation” and he thought he might spend the next 10 years of his life in Austin, Garza recalled.

“I said Bob, as president of the UT Alumni Association, I think I can help make that happen,” Garza told him.

Metcalfe told Garza he would be in Austin in June of 2010 to give a speech during NI week.

When Garza got back to Austin, he met with Greg Fenves, then dean of engineering at UT, to brainstorm how they could get Metcalfe to move to Austin. They arranged a dinner with local movers and shakers in Austin’s technology community to get together at Fenves’ house to meet Metcalfe.

“It was serendipity, timing and dumb luck,” Garza said. “I think Bob really felt a spirit of collaboration in Austin and a real hunger and a real passion about taking the city and the region to the next level. And that’s part of what attracted him.”

In fact, one of Metcalfe’s goals is to make Austin and the surrounding area of which he includes San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, into a better Silicon Valley. He doesn’t want to keep Austin weird, a movement he associates with a left wing and anti-corporate faction, he said. Instead, he has adopted the new slogan of “Keep Austin Wired.”

Last year, Metcalfe sold his Boston condo and bought a house in Austin. He’s put down roots here now. He drives a giant black Suburban SUV so his wife can easily transport her bike to various races, he said. His other car is a tiny red smart car.

“I feel like when Bob came to Austin you could just feel that rising tide effect,” Baer said. “The whole tide came up a few feet just from him being here. We’re still in the afterglow from that.”

Metcalfe has been a wonderful catalyst for growth in Austin’s technology community, Garza said. He recognizes opportunities for collaboration between angel investors, venture capitalists, universities, students, incubators and accelerators. He is able, along with some of his friends in the industry, to be the glue that makes everything stick together, Garza said.

“He arrived at the perfect time for the growth of the city as we are becoming more recognized as a technology hub,” Garza said.

Metcalfe shines a light on the innovative spirit of Austin and its powerful entrepreneurial ecosystem and helps to communicate all that is going on here to the world, said Michele Skelding, senior vice president of global technology and innovation at the Austin Chamber of Commerce.

The Austin Chamber of Commerce named Metcalfe its 2014 Volunteer of the Year for Technology & Innovation.

Metcalfe doesn’t just give advice. He gives his time, Skelding said. In 2014, Metcalfe led a fireside chat with Mike Maples Jr., managing partner of Floodgate, at the Austin Chamber’s 2014 A-List awards ceremony. He also served as an A-list judge, reviewing more than 100 emerging company applications in Austin. And he gave the opening keynote with Skelding at the Innotech Technology conference. He has also led panels and had multiple speaking roles representing Austin nationwide and worldwide, Skelding said.

And it’s not unusual to find Metcalfe at 24 Diner holding one of his “Night Owl” sessions with local entrepreneurs like Henry Yoshida and William Hurley, who just launched a fin-tech startup Honest Dollar.

He also shows up early in the morning and is a fan of Damon Clinkscales’ Austin Open Coffee, a bi-monthly get together of entrepreneurs at Houndstooth Coffee.

“With his variety of experiences, people listen when he talks,” Clinkscales said.

In addition to Open Coffee, it’s not unusual to see Metcalfe at the Capital Factory. He recently attended the “Intro to Startup Scene” session there. He also signed up to be a “baller” at Capital Factory’s SXSW Startup Crawl.

Metcalfe has also planted the seeds of entrepreneurial thinking in hundreds of students through the Longhorn Startup Lab, Dyer said.

“We’ve had a number of teams go on to become companies,” Dyer said.

Burpy, a grocery delivery service, Lynx Labs, 3D camera imaging startup, Clay.io, an online gaming platform and MicroMulsion, which is developing microgels for cell cultures and landed an investment from Billionaire Mark Cuban, are just a few of the companies to launch out of Longhorn Startup Lab.

Since Metcalfe joined UT, there’s been a groundswell of interest in entrepreneurial activities across the campus with organizations like Founders Group and Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency, Dyer said.

“The real impact of our program is something we can measure in ten or fifteen years when one of our students starts a multi-billion company and puts his or her name on a building,” Dyer said.

Metcalfe and Dyer are contemporaries in the microcomputer revolution that occurred in the late ‘70s. While Metcalfe built 3Com, Dyer hunkered down in Atlanta creating Peachtree Software. Amazingly, the two never met until they both ended up at UT.

“Bob is always teaching,” Dyer said. “Every time I’m around him I learn something.”

And he’s a prolific social media poster on Twitter and Facebook, Dyer said.

“Bob can out Tweet me,” Dyer said.

Metcalfe has more than 17,500 followers on Twitter and has posted more than 17,500 Tweets since joining in 2009.

Metcalfe is also always learning, Dyer said. In 2013, he completed a Massive Open Online Course, known as MOOC, from MIT: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in 2013 with his son. He has also done two “Ask Me Anything” sessions on Reddit.

And Metcalfe has a great sense of humor.

“Every time I go to a football game with him he reminds me has four years left of eligibility for a tight end position,” Dyer said.

Metcalfe is a huge fan of Longhorn sports and often attends football and basketball games. He also tweets about the women’s volleyball team and other sports to show his support.

“He does have a great gift of nonstop curiosity about things,” Dyer said. “He’s got great energy. He also has a willingness to show up and be counted. And he’s actually engaged in everything he attends. He gets mentality focused on it and participates.”

Metcalfe is so accessible and he’s happy to talk to lots of different people, Baer said.

“The biggest impact he has made is just inspiring people,” Baer said. “He listens to students, believes in them and encourages them. That makes a big difference in affecting thousands of students at the University of Texas.

He lives life to the fullest, Baer said.

“I love that he is still going full speed,” he said. “He hasn’t slowed down at all by having a few gray hairs.”

In the summer, Metcalfe hosts several male friends on an Island property he owns off the coast of Maine for “Big Boys Camp.” Metcalfe said he has been criticized for only inviting men, but the U.S. Constitution gives him the right to do that. His wife also has her own “Big Girls Camp.”

Baer has attended the Big Boys camp. Garza and Larry Walker from Austin have also been there for week of camping.

“He’s an organizer and he brings people together,” Baer said. “Personally one of the things I really appreciate about him, he is the person I turn to when I don’t know what to do. He’s not afraid to call bullshit on me. That’s a really valuable thing to have in life. Constructive feedback.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Vast, which makes search and analytics tools for homes and autos, started out in Silicon Valley in 2005.

Naval Ravikant, now CEO of AngelList, founded the company to create a better search site to help people find and discover items online. He wanted people to use technology instead of advertising to find a better match between buyers and sellers, said John Price, now Vast’s CEO.

Today, Vast, under Price’s direction, has evolved into a highly sophisticated technology platform that uses artificial intelligence, patented algorithms, big data, analytics and more to match buyers with sellers in the automotive and real estate markets.

Price, a co-founder of Trilogy in Austin, joined Vast in 2007 to help build the automotive and real estate search engine and analytics tools.

In 2011, Price moved the company to Austin. He started recruiting out of the Trilogy alumni network and rapidly created a big presence for the company in Austin’s tech scene. Vast is based at Sixth and Congress in the three-story Buttrey Building, built in 1885. They have 40 local employees, half of which are ex-Trilogy workers, Price said. They have another 100 employees in Belgrade, Serbia.

Vast markets its search tools under two brands, CarStory for automotive and HomeStory for real estate. CarStory helps consumers discover and decide what car is right for them with artificial intelligence, data and analytics. HomeStory does the same for people looking for a home. Vast distributes its products through partnerships. It serves 1,000 companies, including America Online and Southwest Airlines and powers more than 300 automotive marketplaces.

The HomeStory and CarStory apps are available in the Apple Store and are aimed at real estate agents and their customers and car dealers and their customers. An Android version is also in the works, Price said.

Vast’s 100 employees in Serbia work on the data behind the apps. They have been doing the work since 2005 and they have perfected the sourcing, classifying and cleansing of big data in automotive and real estate, Price said. Today, Vast’s technology powers more than 350 marketplaces.

“Think of how Google does ad words and they know everything and can tell you all the analytics around an ad,” Price said. “We’re doing that for cars and homes. We have all that demand data for cars and inventory for automotive. Take the demand and supply data and that allow us to build unique analytics. “

That way Vast’s technology can tell a consumer looking for a car that people like them have also looked at these other cars. Price says its technology is like Pandora, the Internet music service, it likes to suggest alternatives that the consumer might not have considered, he said.

“We think search is broken in real estate and automotive,” Price said. “We think discovery is the new search tool.”

A lot of dealerships now provide consumers with Vast’s CarStory market report which contains all kinds of data on the car they are looking it. Vast’s CarStory reports will be in more than 5,000 dealerships by June. Volkswagen of America selected CarStory for a national rollout across 48 states.

The CarStory market reports are free to all dealerships and then Vast has some add-on products that it sells to dealers that generate revenue for Vast.

Vast plans to tackle the travel market next, Price said. And the company is growing. Vast plans to double its employees in Austin this year from 40 to 80, Price said.

“We want to bring excited motivated buyers into brokerages and dealerships armed with valuable data,” Price said. “We fundamentally think the right car and the right home exist for you and they can be found at the right price.”

Data is the new gold for companies, big and small, to mine in the online world.

Sifting through data for important insights can provide a competitive edge in any industry.

In fact, at SXSW Interactive 2015, Bill Gurley, venture capitalist with Benchmark, said he looks for startups that have a data scientist, for potential investments.

Making sense of data online is the focus of the upcoming Collab/Space Austin workshop. It seeks to help media projects get beyond measurements like clicks and page views to come up with meaningful metrics to measure impact.

The event will be held on April 16th. It is co-produced by PBS MediaShift, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and the Media Impact Project at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center. The day-long workshop will take place at the Belo Center for New Media at the University of Texas. It precedes the 16th International Symposium on Online Journalism which kicks off on April 17th.

Collab/Space program organizers plan to select eight startups, nonprofits and academic projects to present in the metrics and impact space. Laura Evans, vice president of audience development and data science at Scripps Networks Interactive, is the featured speaker. The event also features improv comedy techniques to get participants to think creatively.

Tickets to the event are $129 each. It is expected to sell out. To register, please visit Collab/Space Austin’s eventbrite page.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

“Play is our original language; then when we get to school, they remove the play,” said Johan Brand, CEO and co-founder of Kahoot!, a platform that lets students play a high-energy, high interaction quiz game in the classroom using their mobile devices.

Kahoot!, from Oslo, is the first company to join Capital Factory’s International program.

Kahoot! lets teachers either design their own quizzes, based on the curriculum they’re covering or choose from hundreds of games created and shared by platform users all over the world. Questions appear on a screen at the front of the class and students answer using their mobile devices. There’s a leaderboard on the screen that shows the top five respondents for each question. In the next iteration, soon to be released, students will be able to play against “ghost” versions of themselves on games they’ve played previously as well as play against teams all over the world.

Kahoot has 35 million unique players, 80 percent of which are in the U.S. and the largest group of those in Texas, Brand said.

The Science of Kahoot!

What sets Kahoot! apart from other classroom games is that students can’t get sucked into their own devices because all the questions and answers are on the screen. So they look at the screen, the teacher and each other, only looking at their mobile devices to tap the color corresponding with the answer, which creates a much higher level of energy and engagement, said Stephanie Castle, a science teacher at United Nations International School. Castle, who did her master’s research on the use of mobile devices in teaching, said she’s an early adopter and had tried a number of different tools to create engagement; but “Kahoot! Pretty much wiped them all away.”

“This is the only one that has come close to eliciting this level of enthusiasm,” Castle said. “Others created some energy but they didn’t feel social in any sense…. This makes the kids look up and look out…. the smart phone just becomes the tool it doesn’t become the object of attention.”

Kahoot! Was created by Brand and his co-founder, Jamie Brooker, based on research done by Morten Versvik and his professor Alf Inge Wang for Versvik’s master’s at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. While Wang created the quiz, Brand, Brooker and Versvik created the platform, Brand said. It was part of the work they did creating their behavior design company—We Are Human—in London.

Brand and Brooker researched and incorporated a lot of elements of human behavior science in developing Kahoot!: Social behavior, emotional engagement, neurochemical reward systems and reinforcing learning. But, Brand said, “it was all for good. If I was going to lose my house it was going to be for the sake of something good.”

The team has raised $2 million for Kahoot! from investment from the founders, research grants from the Norwegian Research Council, cash prizes from startup events and grants from impact funds such as the Norwegian Discovery fund.

“We measure Kahoot! on impact,” Brand said. “Our focus is Return on Education (Learning) and if we do well with impact the consequences will be a good ROI. We are student centered and truly believe we will build a sustainable business as a direct result of our impact on learning.”

They intend to keep the current classroom product free for learners and teachers forever, but “we will offer added value services & products as we mature. This will also be impact driven. We will continue to also work with organizations and government grant funding to unlock our social impact.”

The company is also doing a beta model of a “corporate pilot account” which does provide a revenue stream.

Kahooting in the Classroom

Kahoot! can be adapted to almost any subject but Cathy Yenca, a math teacher at Eanes ISD’s Hill Country Middle School, said it works best on subjects where speed is crucial.

“The kids would Kahoot! every day if I let them,” said Yenca. She uses Kahoot for classes in which recall is a crucial component and not as much for multi-step processes like certain kinds of algebra problems.
One of the best parts of the tool, Yenca said, was a bar graph that shows, after the game, how many students got the answers right.

“This is where you can interrupt the process and say ‘Hey kiddo, you don’t know this yet. And you stop and do a mini re-teach. You’re not waiting until a test or quiz to see who doesn’t get this.”

Castle said that, as a science teacher she can’t testify to the effectiveness of Kahoot! on performance without doing experiments.

“But anecdotally we’re seeing kids recognizing where they have misconceptions, points of regular confusion…you put it in a quiz and they go ‘Ohhhhhh.’ While student achievement is obviously important I don’t think you can belittle or forget the importance of reengaging kids….” Anyone, she said, can become distracted and tired in 40 minutes of lecture. With Kahoot!, she said, “they’ve been concentrating without even realizing it.”

Fred Schmidt, director of international affairs for Capital Factory, said Kahoot! Is the first of several international companies that will establish offices at the incubator.

“When Johan and Asmund (Furuseth, vice president of business development) arrived in Austin for a CF tour the day before SXSWedu even started, they put down their bags at the end of the visit and said ‘We’re staying!’,” said Schmidt. “They immediately fell in love with the space, the vibe, the people and the obvious natural networking that goes on every day. We gave them a couple of temporary desks on our recently remodeled and expanded 5th Floor where they worked for the entire week they were here.”

Brand said Austin has a good kind of “cowboy” atmosphere: Enterprising, honest, straightforward, that fits well with Norwegian culture. At 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, he said, Norwegians all disappear into nature. Sounds about right for Austin.

The Techstars program in Austin has announced its new class of startups featuring 10 technology companies from around the country.

This is Techstars third class in Austin. It officially kicked off the program Monday and it runs for three months with Demo Day on June 17th at the Austin Music Hall.

Jason Seats, cofounder of Slicehost and former executive with Rackspace, runs the program in Austin. He previously ran the Techstars Cloud program in San Antonio. And more than 100 mentors volunteer to help the companies in Austin program.

Several former Techstar Austin graduate companies have made Austin their home including Burpy, Fashion Metric, Pivot Freight, Lawnstarter, Ube and Atlas.

The Techstars program in Austin provides each startup $18,000 in funding for a 6 percent stake in the company and access to $100,000 convertible note, a loan that converts into an equity stake eventually, which brings the total equity stake in the company to between 7 percent and 10 percent.

The latest cohort include the following ten companies:

FantasyHub – This Louisville, Kentucky-based startup is founded by Andrew Busa, Steven Plappert and Chris Pierce. Its a fantasy sports site that uses games as contests for organizations such as charities, fraternities and others.

HuntingLocator.com – This Austin-based startups serves as marketplace for hunters and landowners to find and post hunts.

MetricStory – an analytics dashboard for companies.

One Model – Human Resources analytics to help companies manage their data.

Pushmote – a platform to manage iBeacons.

Red Fox Clan – Indie games promotion platform for mobile games.

SelfLender – A personal financial services and technology based in Denver, Colorado.

Spotlight.io – an API testing and debugging tool, based in Venice, Calif.

StyleSage – this analytics startup provides information on prices and monitors what people are saying about products online to fashion retailers and brands.

Wonders – a discovery platform for apparel from brand-generated content.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The medical technology industry in Austin is booming.

For evidence, look no further than the 18 startups that exhibited in the Austin Health Pavilion Monday and Tuesday at the inaugural South by Southwest Interactive MedTech Expo.

“The goal of the Austin Health Pavilion at the MedTech Expo is to give all of the early stage technology companies in Austin a voice during this premiere event at South by Southwest,” said Kyle Cox, a venture capitalist in Austin.

“The best and brightest of early stage health-tech companies in Austin are represented here,” Cox said.

Most of the Austin medical technology startups just launched in the last few years. They run the gamut from hardware and software startups to data and analytics companies.

SXSW introduced health tech programming four years ago, said Dana Abramovitz, community liaison for the SX Health and MedTech Expo.

“This really stemmed out of the growing interest in MedTech in the community,” she said.

Part of the focus of the two-day expo at the new J.W. Marriott Hotel was to bring creative and innovative people together to have a discussion about what they can create together, she said.

Jean Anne Booth, a serial entrepreneur, had a wearable tech device for seniors on display at the expo.

A few years ago, Booth launched UnaliWear, a Kenega watch with speech recognition for seniors that acts as a medical alert system, medication reminder and guards against wandering. She saw the need for a fashionable safety system for seniors because of some incidents involving her 80-year-old mother and her twin sister. Both women live independently.

Booth successfully raised $800,000 from angel investors and she has exceeded her $100,000 goal on a Kickstarter campaign with six days left to go. So far, she has raised $104,000. She plans to deliver the Kickstarter devices early next year and have her watch on the consumer market by next summer. The watches cost $299 for an activation fee and $35 to $80 a month for monitoring services.

“It’s discreet,” Booth said. “You don’t have that big help button that screams to people that I’m old and out of control in my life.”

New activity in the MedTech industry is also attracting new companies to Austin.

Because of that increased activity, Robert Palmer moved his company, PotentiaMED to Austin. He has 20 employees and hopes to add another 15 in the next year.

PotentiaMED is a data analytics firm that does outcome analysis on cardiac treatments. The company builds tools to predict what treatment will work best for each individual patient based on years of data analysis.

Palmer has personal experience with the dilemma on choosing what kind of treatment is the right one for the patient. His dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer and he passed away within a year. If Palmer had better analytics on outcomes of patients with prostate cancer, he would have made a better treatment decision for him, he said.

The goal of the company’s work is to improve the quality of life of the patient, Palmer said.

To further its expansion, PotentiaMED has raised $4 million to date and is looking to close a $10 million Series B investment round.

Palmer looked at Silicon Valley and Boston as possible relocation sites but decided on Austin because of the strong healthcare ecosystem here with the new Dell Medical School and the Livestrong Foundation, Palmer said.

The local MedTech activity is also attracting more funders.

Because of increased activity here, Martin Ventures, a Nashville-based venture capital firm focused on medical startups, opened an Austin in Austin last September, said Suzanne Towry, spokeswoman.

“We really see it as a new hub for innovation and technology especially in the healthcare space,” she said.

Martin Ventures has already invested in eRelevance, a patient and doctor communications platform founded by Bob Fabbio, a serial entrepreneur in Austin. The firm makes early and seed stage investments generally in the range of $2 million to $5 million, Towry said.

“We’ve invested as little as $25,000 and as much as $18 million during the lifetime of the company,” she said.

Andrew O’Hara, founded Chiron Health about a year and a half ago to provide 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 easily without a visit to the doctor’s office.

Chiron Health is working with 20 healthcare providers. It has raised $1.2 million in seed stage capital and has 14 employees in Austin.

“We see telemedicine over the next three to five years making a big impact in the healthcare space.” O’Hara said.

Chiron Health plans to release native iOS and Android apps for its telemedicine platform with the next financing round, he said.

Capsenta, which spun out of the University of Texas at Austin, also put its technology on display at the expo.

Daniel Miranker, professor of computer science at UT and Juan Sequeda, graduate student, founded the company. It is based on the trademarked “ultrawrap” software that Sequeda invented. The software automatically compiles disparate data using keywords and phrases.

“Capsenta works with relational databases and applies semantics on top of it,” said David Arnold, CEO of Capsenta.

In healthcare, Capsenta works with medical device companies that make pacemakers. The technology is highly proprietary, but Capsenta is able to take the databases of the various companies and match them to patients so that a doctor can know in a minute or less what kind of device a patient has. It used to take several hours to figure out what kind of pacemaker a patient had. In an emergency room, Capsenta’s technology can potentially save a person’s life.

Capsenta is raising a $1 million seed stage round through June. So far, the company has been funded through National Science Foundation grants. It has six employees with three of them working full time.

“We’re growing and we have partners that are helping us grow,” Arnold said.