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UTSA Hosts the Open BigCloud Symposium

May 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Some of the biggest trends in technology today are the cloud, a fancy name for data centers, and big data, the massive bits and bytes of information flowing through those data centers.

At the University of Texas at San Antonio, more than 100 people met Wednesday to discuss hardware, software and networks around those topics at the first Open BigCloud Symposium.

“This is about the future of cloud computing and big data,” said UTSA President Ricardo Romo.

He compared the ideas and innovation around the Open Cloud environment to Detroit during its heyday of the automotive industry.

“A collision of ideas that’s what’s going to happen here,” he said.

Romo also cut the ribbon to officially open the UTSA Open Compute Project Certification and Solutions Laboratory. The only other lab of its kind is in Taiwan.

Frank Frankovsky, president and chairman of the Open Compute Project Foundation, praised the project.

“There are incredibly innovative people in the state of Texas driving the industry forward,” he said.

The two-day Open BigCloud Symposium features more than 20 speakers in the HEB University Center Ballroom at the UTSA main campus. Most of it is highly technical with sessions like “Using ZeroVM and Swift to Build a Compute Enabled Storage Platforms” and “Composable Rack Scale Archecture Storage.” But some of the sessions address universal issues facing the technology industry like the shortage of women in technology and fostering entrepreneurship.

In 2012, Rackspace hosted the Open Compute Summit and hosted more than 500 people involved in the Open Compute Project, which Frankovsky and his team launched at Facebook in 2011. The project’s goal focuses on creating the most efficient computer hardware and software for data center. Major players like Facebook, Rackspace, Hewlett Packard, Dell and Microsoft back the project.

The Open Compute Project is driven by collaboration, contributions and consumption or the adoption of the technology by industry, Frankovsky said.

UTSA is becoming a nationally recognized hub of innovation in the Cloud and big data technology, said Lorenzo Gomez, director of the 80/20 Foundation and Geekdom.

The 80/20 Foundation has donated more than $4 million in endowed partnerships in cloud computing technology to UTSA, Gomez said.

The research, the academia and industry coming together at UTSA is extremely important said John Engates, Rackspace’s Chief Technology Officer.

“We at Rackspace believe open is supercritical,” Engates said.

Open and collaborative environments help companies innovate faster, Engates said. It also means freedom. It also allows people to do their work remotely easily, he said. An open environment also allows companies to share the risks and rewards of research and development and innovation, he said.

“Getting people on a bobsled together and going in together I think that’s supercritical,” he said.

In 2010, Rackspace and NASA jointly created the OpenStack , an open source cloud software. Today, Rackspace runs the largest OpenStack cloud in the world today, Engates said.

Competition Heats Up for the San Antonio MX Challenge

May 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Already 30 teams have registered to compete in the San Antonio MX Challenge, said Jesus Salas, head of the project.
Salas gave an update on the San Antonio MX Challenge Tuesday night at the SA NewTech meetup. About 50 people attended the meetup, which was organized by Cole Wollak and Michael Girdley.
The San Antonio MX Challenge begins in September and is a competition to see who can best foster the tech entrepreneurial connection between Mexico and San Antonio by fostering startups here.
The competitors will be judged on sustainability of the business plan, sustainability of the project in San Antonio, revenue generated and the number of jobs created, Salas said.
The San Antonio MX Challenge will award $500,000 to the team, business or organization that best meets that challenge.
The 18 month competition will officially kick off at a special San Antonio MX Challenge Summit in San Antonio on September 15th and 16th. The event coincides with Mexican Independence Day and will incorporate local celebrations of that holiday, Salas said.
Salas has visited Mexico City and Guadalajara to spread the word about the San Antonio MX Challenge, which is an offshoot of the HeroX challenge, a smaller and more localized version of the X Prize.
At his meetings, Salas emphasized San Antonio’s growing entrepreneurial community and its large workforce in the biosciences, cybersecurity and information technology industries.
In addition to Salas, three teams, made up of former Code Up students, pitched their capstone projects from their class. The teams graduated from the program recently.
The projects included Spotspy, a parking reservation app, VIND IT, a lost and found app and EatSafe-Sa.com, which provide restaurant ratings based on city health inspection reports.

Google Buys Austin-based Adometry

May 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

In 2007, a startup called Click Forensics began operations in San Antonio.
The company, founded by Tom Cuthbert and Tom Charvet, tackled the problem of click fraud online. Austin Ventures provided its initial $500,000 seed stage funding.
Click Forensics ended up moving to Austin and pivoted to become a marketing analytics firm called Adometry.
On Tuesday, Google announced it bought Adometry for an undisclosed price. Since its inception, Adometry has raised $29.1 million in venture funding from Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures, according to the company.
Adometry and Google both announced the deal it in separate blog posts.
“Adometry is joining Google, where they will build on the momentum of our existing measurement and analytics offerings, which include Google Analytics Premium as well as other products,” according to a Google blog post.
“Attribution solutions, like Adometry’s, help businesses better understand the influence that different marketing tools — digital, offline, email, and more — have along their customers’ paths to purchase (http://goo.gl/tXTliw). This heightened understanding, in turn, enables businesses to measure marketing impact, allocate their resources more wisely, and provide people with ads and messages that they’re likely to care about.”
Adometry moved into new headquarters last year at the Lakewood Center Building II on Capital of Texas Highway and has about 135 employees, according to this profile Silicon Hills News did of the company in March.
“We couldn’t be more excited to join Google — a company that shares our core values. Not only do they focus on innovation and solving big problems, but also like Adometry, they seek to provide brands and their agency partners with the analytics and insights to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns,” Paul Pellman, Adometry’s CEO, wrote in a blog post on its site.

Google Names Capital Factory as its Latest Google Tech Hub

May 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Joshua Baer, co-founder of Capital Factory, the latest Google Tech Hub

Austin’s Capital Factory is Google’s latest Tech Hub.

Mayor Lee Leffingwell, donning a pair of Google glasses, made the announcement Tuesday at Capital Factory to more than 150 people from the startup community. He welcomed Google for Entrepreneurs and its partnership with Capital Factory, which is a technology incubator, accelerator and coworking space with more than 600 members and 200 companies.

“The impact goes way beyond Capital Factory,”‘ said Leffingwell.

Capital Factory joins seven other Google Tech Hubs in the U.S. and Canada, which Google announced late last year. The others are in Minneapolis, Chicago, Waterloo, Ontario, Nashville, Durham, Denver and Detroit.

Mayor Lee Leffingwell, donning a pair of Google glasses, announced Capital Factory as a Google Tech Hub

He said the startups at the various Tech Hubs will have opportunities to pitch investors in Silicon Valley at Google for Entrepreneurs Demo Day. Startups at the various tech hubs have already raised more than $150 million and created 1,200 jobs since becoming part of their Google Tech Hub.

The Google Tech Hub members can also work out of any of the eight locations in the network and sites in London and Tel Aviv.

Daniel Navarro with Google for Entrepreneurs showed a video members of the other Google Tech Hubs created to welcome Capital Factory to the network.

The Google Tech Hub partners also work closely with Google’s developer and business groups, said Gerardo A. Interiano, spokesman for Google in Austin. It has about 300 employees at its Austin offices.

Daniel Navarro with Google for Entrepreneurs

Tech hubs provide also “host a range of events, workshops, and provide co-working space for entrepreneurs. Google enables tech hubs by providing them with technical content, business tools, and infrastructure upgrades, so that they can support increasing demand from developers and startups,” according to Google.

Capital Factory has had such a strong partnership with Google for such a long time, said Josh Baer, co-founder and director of Capital Factory.

Capital Factory is also one of 100 sites the City of Austin selected to receive its 1-Gigabit Google Fiber high speed Internet service through its community partnership program. Google announced plans for its high-speed fiber network last year and is the process of installing it and expects to turn the service on in Austin later this year.

Josh Baer, co-founder and director of Capital Factory.

In an interview following the announcement, Baer said the announcement is recognition for Capital Factory and Austin as one of the major tech centers in the country. It also means more resources for entrepreneurs at Capital Factory. Its members get access to Google products and Google mentors and developers, he said. And lastly, the financial support Google provides allows Capital Factory to engage more with the community and provide more talks, meetings and events, Baer said. Google is the flagship sponsor of Capital Factory. Other sponsors include Dell, AT&T and Rackspace.

Pristin.io is a Capital Factory company working specifically to create Google glass applications for physicians to use Google Glass in surgery. But all of the startups use Google applications to run their businesses, Baer said.

“The way Google makes a big difference here is it covers a lot of the basics that all startups need,” said Tuscan Knox with Weeva, a story telling startup recently admitted into the Capital Factory incubator program. “There are a lot of services they provide that almost every startup needs.”

Another benefit is having access to Google’s people and expertise, Knox said.

“They have people who are incredibly smart,” he said. “Every startup here is super excited to have Google involved with Capital Factory.”

Gerardo A. Interiano, spokesman for Google in Austin.

Bitcoin Miner CloudHashing Operates Multi-million-dollar Facilities on Two Continents

May 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Emmanuel Abiodun, founder of Austin-based Cloudhashing

Emmanuel Abiodun’s first foray into bitcoin mining took place at home in London in January 2013. Today, his Austin-based company CloudHashing has mining facilities both outside Dallas and in Iceland, and he’s signing million-dollar contracts with investors looking to cash in on the cryptocurrency phenomenon.

Before CloudHashing, Abiodun worked at HSBC building risk-management and trading systems, so he had a good mix of finance and tech background. Around the time he began mining, he had friends who were also interested, but lacked the necessary tech savvy.

“So that’s where the business idea came from,” he said.

Abiodun decided to sell pre-order mining contracts to raise capital to invest in the hardware to build a major mining pool. He launched CloudHashing.com in April 2013. Abiodun’s initial investment was $15,000. Now he has mining hardware worth $15 million kept in guarded facilities with strict security procedures that include biometric scanning.

A bit of background on cryptocurrency mining: The mysterious/anonymous person (or maybe group of people) Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the Bitcoin program in 2009. Today, it is the frontrunner among dozens of digital currencies. Bitcoin uses a cryptographic algorithm to release coins. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist, and presently there’s around 12.6 million in circulation. About every 10 minutes, more bitcoins are released and the program is written so that the last coins will enter the market in 2140. By having computers “hash” the algorithm (i.e. solve really difficult math), miners compete to earn bitcoins as they’re released. In 2009, it was possible to do this with a desktop computer, but as more computers work on solving the algorithm its difficulty increases. Today, people buy multi-thousand dollar chips specifically manufactured to mine bitcoin.

The hardware involved sucks up a lot of electricity, generates heat, can be noisy and smells like ozone. CloudHashing offers a solution to people who want to mine bitcoins without the hassle of purchasing and maintaining their own equipment. For as little as $299, people can buy a one-year contract that is essentially a lease on CloudHashing’s mining power.

Shortly after the CloudHashing website debuted, Abiodun was contacted by Benny Gorlick, a small businessman from Anchorage, Alaska whose company sold heavy equipment to gold mining and oil companies. Like Abiodun, Gorlick was in his early thirties, had only recently started bitcoin mining, and he too had a wife who was befuddled by all the loud, hot computer equipment he was installing in their home. After a long Skype call, the two decided to work together. Gorlick’s experience negotiating with real-life mining equipment manufacturers helped them in the process of buying bitcoin mining equipment.

Their introductory conversation took place around May last year, Gorlick and Abiodun wouldn’t meet in person until October. In the intervening months, both kept their day jobs and ran the company together over Skype and email, but their customer base quickly mushroomed beyond what just the two could manage.

Today, the company has a small sales and customer service office in north Austin. The Iceland mining facility began operating at full capacity in October, and the one here in Texas at the end of January. Gorlick moved from Alaska and now oversees the U.S. side of operations, while Abiodun continues to live in the U.K., but travels to the States frequently to meet with customers. CloudHashing chose Texas partly for its low energy costs (which Iceland also offered) and proximity to manufacturers. CloudHashing’s office is across the hall from one of its hardware suppliers, Cointerra, which is also only about a year old and has already seen sales of $35 million.

Both companies received some criticism from consumers unhappy with order delays (Cointerra’s mining rigs shipped late, and CloudHashing initially had delays delivering capacity). As Gorlick put it when reflecting on his experience in the oil and gold mining equipment industry, “You’re always in line behind the guy who’s ahead of you.” Right now, it’s a scramble for manufacturers to develop faster hardware and for miners to snap it up. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin algorithm’s difficulty increases and returns diminish. Abiodun said his goal is to have CloudHashing doing 15 percent of total Bitcoin mining activity, but presently the company is at about 7.5 percent, as stiff competition slows growth across the board.

Presently, Abiodun says his typical customer is between 30 and 50 years old and has a salary of $115,000-200,000 a year. Many have invested hundreds of thousands in the company and the biggest contract to date was for $1 million.

Glenn Chaffin, a financial controller for a California marketing company, invested about $20,000 with CloudHashing in December. “I kind of wanted something with contractual obligation, to where I didn’t have to do any setup or support of software,” he said. Chaffin estimates he’ll break even in nine months, but it depends on the price of bitcoin, which has dropped over the last three months.

Abiodun said he doesn’t worry about the short-term fluctuations in bitcoin price, and that his stresses have more to do with the day-to-day operations of the business and keeping the hardware mining optimally. It’s been a whirlwind thus far, and as for the next six months? The plan is to increase CloudHashing’s mining capacity exponentially.

Join a Special 3 Day Startup Focused on Cyber Security in San Antonio

May 5, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Did you know San Antonio has the second largest concentration of cyber security professionals outside of the Washington, D.C. area?

The bulk of them are at the National Security Agency’s (also nicknamed as No Such Agency) Texas Cryptology Center. The NSA leased and renovated the old Sony chip manufacturing plant in 2005 and was expected to hire as many as 1,500 workers. The NSA’s facility has two buildings for a total of 475,000 square feet, including a data center.

Even before the NSA, San Antonio had deep roots in the cyber security field with the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Agency at Lackland, nicknamed Security Hill and the University of Texas at San Antonio recognized by the NSA as a center for academic excellence in information assurance education.

So it just made sense for the first Cyber Security 3 Day Startup to take place in San Antonio. 3DS selects 45 people to participate in the weekend long program in which the group breaks up into teams and form startups, create a prototype and then pitch their companies. The 80/20 Foundation is sponsoring the Cyber Security 3 Day Startup.

The Cyber Security 3 Day Startup is now recruiting “passionate individuals with an entrepreneurial drive, including Computer Science (PhD, MS, undergraduate) MBAs, law students, graphic designers, PR, business undergraduates, etc” to participate in its program to be held May 23rd through May 25th at the old Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre.

To apply for the program, please visit Cyber Security 3 Day Startup.

Biovideo and 9W Search Selected as Finalists in IBM’s Watson Mobile Developer Challenge

May 4, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Watson display at the Computer History Museum, photo by Laura Lorek

IBM wants to make us all smarter through our smart phones by tapping into its Watson super computer database.

To do that, IBM issued a challenge back in February to app developers worldwide encouraging them to submit apps for its IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge. The apps needed to use “Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities to analyze, discover insights and learn from Big Data.” IBM developed Watson as a cognitive technology that processes information more like a human and understands natural language.

Some might consider IBM’s mobile Watson, the sage grandfather of Siri, Apple’s personal assistant available on its iPhones.

Last week, the IBM Watson team announced it has picked 25 finalists in its competition including San Antonio-based Biovideo and Austin-based 9WSearch.

Several hundred companies submitted apps in the IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge. The apps that made the cut span several categories including finance, healthcare services, news, business, fashion, education, cities and nutrition.

In the finance category, 9W Search, founded by Susan Strausberg, one of the founders of Edgar Online, submitted its app, which mines financial information online combined with Watson’s cognitive capabilities to answer complex financial questions. Its first application is in the energy industry.

“The ability to incorporate vast amounts of structured and unstructured primary source materials into the 9W/Watson cloud lets users ask and answer billions of complex questions through a simple, familiar interface,” according to 9W Search’s submission.
Biovideo, founded by Carlos Villasenor, made the finalists in the Health Services category. The company submitted an app that provides “the best help for new and expectant mothers at their fingertips.”

Biovideo, which operates out of San Antonio’s Geekdom, works with hospitals in Texas and Mexico to create a movie capturing the birth of a child for free for parents.

“The Biovideo App incorporates the Baby 101 searchable database for the first time and becomes the ultimate parenting tool,” according to the company. “It also eliminates geographic limitation, as the app and the Baby 101 program are available to anyone, anywhere. Providing the power of Watson to the Baby 101 program provides unlimited information, insight and reach to new parents.”

The finalists must submit prototypes to IBM, which will select five teams to present their proposals. And then IBM will choose three winners. “The three winners are awarded 90 days of access to the Watson APIs and consulting from IBM Interactive design services.”

iCreate to Educate Finds Success Through Improving Education

May 3, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Melissa Pickering, founder of iCreatetoEducate.com

It’s a feel-good startup story. Melissa Pickering quit her Imagineering job at Disney to tackle math and science education. She took a university job, then left to start her company selling educational software. On April 9, British webcam company and long-time distribution partner Hue acquired iCreate to Educate – proof that great learning tools are also good business. The acquisition was made public last week.

Back in 2005, Disney hired Pickering into its show-ride design department right after she graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from Tufts University. While working there was “an amazing experience,” Pickering noted few other women worked in the department and most were serving in administrative positions. Back at Tufts, she’d participated in a work-study program in Boston public schools helping kids build LEGO robots. That experience gave her an enduring interest in education initiatives that could lead more students, especially female ones, into STEM fields.

After two years in Los Angeles, Pickering returned to her alma mater. She relinquished her coveted “Imagineer” title to work at the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach, an institute dedicated to bettering engineering education for students in kindergarten through high school.

Leaving Disney was difficult, but the move wasn’t unprecedented. Pickering saw other engineers leave the Magic Kingdom, one to go to law school, another to become a teacher.

“There’s a feeling in our generation where if we’re not challenged we’re going to jump and do something else,” the 30-year-old Pickering said.

At the Tufts Center, Pickering saw a lot of grant-funded work on educational software development, but the grants would end and the graduate students would graduate, and so many good ideas were left unimplemented. After two and a half years at the Center, Pickering left in 2010 and founded iCreate to Educate to bring one of the Center’s projects, the SAM Animation software, to market.

SAM Animation is a simple stop-motion animation program that allows students to make videos with a webcam. Its features are limited to image capturing and basic editing. It is easy for both teachers and students as young as 5 to use, and students can concentrate on the content of their videos, instead of learning the bells and whistles of a complicated program.

“It’s not just popping bubbles or playing Angry Birds, they’re using technology but it also takes creative thought,” Pickering said.

The software is supported by constructivist education theory. The idea is that students learn by doing: they’re better able to learn concepts when education incorporates interaction with the world around them. Creating something related to a topic helps cement knowledge. For example, the software is popular among science teachers who have students create videos that illustrate photosynthesis and the water cycle.

High School science teacher Kevin Murray of Fort Collins, Colorado uses SAM Animation with his ninth-grade biology students to explore botany topics. He observed that not only did making videos help students learn the subject, it also imbued them with a sense of pride about the cool videos they were making. “They want their work to be seen, which isn’t always true,” he said. “They wouldn’t want me to put their papers under a document camera.”

Deb Ramm, who teaches fourth grade in Johnston, Rhode Island, uses it for science and math lessons. “It’s really engaged the kids. They’re taking some of the things we do every day in the classroom and having more fun with them,” she said.

In 2011, Pickering was selected for the Kauffman Foundation incubator program, which helps education-minded entrepreneurs. iCreate also benefited from its association with Tufts, teachers in the northeast were familiar with the Center and its research-backed educational mandate.

In 2012, iCreate released the iPhone and iPad version of the software. Last year, Pickering moved to Austin and received an investment from education company Kaplan. Hue started distributing iCreate’s product in the UK back in 2011 and just recently bought out Kaplan. Pickering is pleased with the acquisition because Hue has a small product line that fits with her product. Also, she’s fielded a lot of interest from teachers and parents in Europe and the UK, so it’s good to have a partner based there.

Even today, Pickering says word of mouth among teachers is her best source of advertising. Some 60 percent of new users hear about the product from another teacher, she said. A school-wide software license runs $500-1,000 depending on the size of the school, a single computer license is $30 and the iPad/iPhone app is $4.99. About 100,000 users have downloaded the free (abbreviated) version, and 300 school licenses and 20,000 individual licenses have been issued.

Before acquisition, iCreate only ever had four team members. Presently, Pickering and an assistant are based out of the Center61 coworking space, but will likely move into a more permanent shared office sometime this summer. “It’s a huge relief,” Pickering said, “And it’s exciting that another entity sees enough value in what I’ve built in the last four years.”

Got Cargo? British Airways Wants to Fly it to London

May 2, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

IAG Cargo’s team: (LtoR) Camilo Garcia, head of Global Key Accounts, David Shepherd, president of commercial business and Joseph LeBeau, vice president of commercial, the Americas.

On any given day, IAG Cargo might be transporting computer components, chocolates, spare parts for machinery or fruits and vegetables through Austin to London.

And it might be flying in salmon, automotive and other parts into Austin Bergstrom International Airport from its hub at the Heathrow Airport.

“A market like this is great because it’s so diversified,” said David Shepherd, head of commercial business for IAG Cargo.

IAG Cargo wants to make sure Austin companies can deliver products worldwide as fast as possible, Shepherd said. They are particularly targeting the growing high-tech industry in the region.

Shepherd spoke at a press conference Friday morning at the Austin Chamber of Commerce offices in downtown Austin. Four British journalists flew to Austin to learn more about the company’s operations here. They were going to go on a tour of the city and visit Freescale Semiconductor and then have a special dinner at Salt Lick.

IAG Cargo formed in 2011, after the merger of British Airways with Iberia. The company has $1.5 billion in revenue annually and is the seventh largest cargo company in the world. It has more than 2,700 employees worldwide.

“We’re not the biggest but we believe we’re the best,” Shepherd said.

In March, IAG Cargo began offering services out of Austin when British Airlines launched its direct flights between Austin and London. The company has 380 aircraft and connects to 350 destinations worldwide through its hubs at Heathrow and Madrid.

It’s not just geeks flying from Tech City London to Austin’s bustling startup scene. It’s a lot of cargo too.

IAG Cargo transports general cargo, live animals; secure products, gold, airmail, dangerous goods, human remains and courier services.

IAG Cargo has 20 gateways in the U.S. and operates more than 45 flights per day. It already operates out of Dallas and Houston and Austin was the next logical expansion, said Joseph LeBeau, IAG Cargo’s vice president of commercial, the Americas.

“It’s been in the works for about two years,” he said.

“Texas has been very kind to IAG Cargo,” he said. “Between Dallas and Houston, for as long as I can remember, we have been 100 percent full every day.’’

The cargo flights on the Austin to London route were 88 percent full after just three weeks and now operate at 90 percent to 95 percent capacity, LeBeau said.

“It’s not all Austin. It’s being fed into by San Antonio and Laredo,” he said. “This route eases the capacity crunch at Houston and Dallas.’’

Austin is shipping high tech products from the “Silicon Hills” as well as aviation and oilfield spare parts and equipment and pharmaceuticals.

IAG Cargo has a fully functional warehouse at the Austin airport and is expected to get its constant climate accreditation shortly for its refrigerated cargo. Its transatlantic service began daily service as of May 1st and is serviced by a Boeing 787 Dreamliner that can transport up to 44,000 pounds of cargo per night.

Joseph LeBeau providing an overview of IAG Cargo’s Austin and North American operations.

Biosciences and Medical Industry is Booming in Central Texas

May 1, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Photo licensed from iStock Photos.

Austin’s biotechnology industry is booming, according to a report released Thursday from the Austin Technology Council.

The life sciences sector has 206 companies, 6,052 employees and generates more than $1 billion in economic activity to the region.

The five sectors that make up the industry include pharmaceutical manufacturing, research and development in physical, engineering and life sciences, research and development in biotechnology, surgical appliance and supplies manufacturing and biological product manufacturing.

The industry also pays high wages with the average salary in the life sciences sector of $75,209, compared to $49,557 for the regional economy as a whole.

The sector did suffer a job loss following the dot com bust and during the financial meltdown in mid-2000. But it’s been on the mend and with the groundbreaking of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, the industry is expected to expand even more.

Austin’s life sciences industry is still much smaller than San Antonio’s bioscience and healthcare industry. BioMedSA reported that more than one in every six jobs in San Antonio are in that industry which had an overall economic impact of more than $29 billion in 2011.

Research organizations, private sector companies and the U.S. military drive the bioscience industry growth, according to BioMedSA. The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is one of the main contributors to the industry along with the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, Southwest Research Institute, South texas Accelerated Research Therapeutics and the National Trauma Institute.