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Mahana Helps Restaurants Roll Out the Red Carpet

April 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Bryan Menell and Richard Bagonas, co-founders of Mahana

Bryan Menell and Richard Bagdonas, co-founders of Mahana

At a restaurant like Swift’s Attic, when someone is an especially good customer—perhaps because they come in a lot, host big parties or drink expensive Bourbon– you don’t reward them with a punch card good for a free muffin. You might send out a complimentary appetizer, said co-owner CK Chin, and you want to make sure it doesn’t show up on the bill. You might slash their wait time. You might give them the table they prefer. But with 60 percent turnover in the restaurant industry, there’s a good chance that if the owner’s not around, the hostess won’t have a clue whether the guy who walked in is a big spending regular or transient who eats nothing but salad and bread sticks. That’s part of the idea behind Mahana.

If a restaurant uses Mahana, and its customers download the app, the restaurant picks up a beacon that signals the customer is near and has a chance to invite him in for a special pairing of his favorite food and drink. If the customer walks in, Mahana lets the host know and gives information the restaurant has gleaned about the customer, meaning the host can welcome the diner by name, offer a favorite table or suggest a special based on previous purchases. Mahana also clues the customer about wait times for a table before the customer ever walks in. Mahana members can share what items they liked on the menu and especially loyal customers can expect perks, like a bump up the waiting list or an appetizer on the house.

In Praise of Market Validation

Mahana Co-founder Richard Bagdonas previously founded SpeedMenu, an ordering and payment app for the restaurant industry…and it taught him something.

SpeedMenu and other companies, he said, “saw a problem they were experiencing and went to solve it,” Bagdonas said. “But they didn’t ask restaurants whether their problem was shared by the restaurant. They thought ‘I’m having this issue, other people must be having this issue, if I solve it, people are going to love it.’

With the founding of Mahana with serial entrepreneur Bryan Menell, Bagdonas began with market validation, asking restaurants about their pain points.

“Not once did they say paying by credit cards was a problem,” he said. “They don’t need you to order a beer or food on your phone, they have someone there to take your order. Just because that person might be busy doesn’t mean they want to replace that person with something else…. Their biggest problem is there’s a chair over there and nobody is sitting in it and nobody is buying food. If they don’t sell the food, it has to get thrown out. They have the food. They have the staff and they have the chair that’s worth maybe $40,000 a year.”

Restaurants needed butts in seats. They needed people coming in, and people coming back, because the cost of acquiring a new customer is just as daunting for restaurants as for other businesses. They needed to be able to identify their best customers and to communicate with them in a way that doesn’t burn them out.

Stuart Thomajan, co-founder of Swift’s Attic and a partner in other popular restaurants such as Uchi and Delish, said that Mahana helps restaurants give valued customers that red carpet treatment, even if it’s the hostesses first day.

“People will go through histrionics to show the hostess they’ve been there before. They’ll say ‘Is Stuart here?’ or ‘Do you have that table in the corner?’” Thomajan said. “They’re trying to let the hostess know ‘Hey, I’ve been here before….’ When you’re serving 2,000 people a week you don’t always have the opportunity to know everybody. We want complete consistency in service. We want to make them feel special. I hoped somebody would develop this tool. Manaha gives us the opportunity to show customers the respect they deserve.”

As a former bartender, Chin said, he cultivated the ability to remember customers’ drinks. He uses that same skill to identify restaurant customers and reward them. Mahana adds “a superhero level of memory to my management.” Nor do customers seem to feel it’s “creepy” that the restaurant is keeping tabs on them. If the restaurant was doing it without getting their opt in. he said, it might be different. But customers treat this as a rewards program.

One of Mahana’s more valuable features, Thomajan said, is that it lets him send emails selectively to customers who would be interested in special events or new menu items at the restaurant without barraging customers with mail constantly. He doesn’t want to send customers emails about specials they wouldn’t be interested in–like sending an email about a steak dinner to a vegetarian or news of a Bourbon special to an alcoholic. “The next time they get an email from Swift’s Attic they won’t open it,” he said. Being able to build relationships with customers, he said “is huge to me.”

Thomajan though is less excited about the feature that lets customers know how long the wait is before they even come to the restaurant. At Swift’s Attic, it can be two hours.

“I’m not loving the idea that a two hour wait will be published to the world,” Thomajan said.

From Southern California to Austin

Before starting Mahana, Bagdonas and Menell founded Subtle Data, a platform for point of sale API developers. But as Subtle Data, they said, they’re “plumbers” setting up the infrastructure. They liked the idea of creating something customer-facing. As business partners, they complement each other. Bagdonas, Menell said, “won’t let me code” because Menell’s IT skills are more dated. But as Bagdonas talked, Menell pulled some documents off a fax machine, pushed them in front of Bagdonas and Bagdonas signed them without dropping a word or skipping a beat. He trusts Menell to be the business guy and “create a structure for the technology” so Bagdonas can keep his focus on software.

“I call him my work wife,” Menell joked.

Both came from Southern California. But they didn’t meet until they got to Austin. Menell was a senior tech consultant for Andersen Consulting working with clients like Apple and with Anderson Windows. After two years, he started his own consulting company Exact Consulting Systems Inc., (Exact stood for Ex-Anderson Consulting). It was the mid-1990s. Computers were still new and companies were beginning to adopt customer relationship management systems. Exact began to implement CRM systems for some of the largest call centers in the world, such as Gateway 2000. The company grew fast to $22 million in revenues. And then he sold it, in 1996 to BSG in Austin and that’s what brought him to town.

Bagdonas grew up in Southern California and had been writing software since he was a kid. In high school, his teacher offered to teach a semester of Pascal. The students loved it so much, they wound up studying it for four years and writing programs that, Bagdonas has no doubt the teacher was selling to industry. At the age of 14, Bagdonas and some friends got interested in voice recognition. They worked tirelessly on creating a voice recognition program but eventually the project failed. For one thing, they had no money. For another, the technology just wasn’t there. Later he realized voice recognition is still one of the hardest things for a computer. Too many words sound the same, even when spoken in a neutral accent. Add a regional accent and the opportunity for mistakes grows exponentially.

But Bagdonas had caught the entrepreneurial “bug.”

“I realized, oh my God, you don’t have to aspire to go work at IBM. You can aspire to be IBM. That’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “I’m very much the scientist but through business I get the opportunity to be creative.”

At 16, he launched a mobile mechanic business, going to people’s cars and fixing them wherever they had broken down. He wore fake glasses in an effort to look older. The business lasted five years and he employed three mechanics. His next venture was to learn to be a commercial pilot. His father, who died when he was 12, had been a pilot and Bagdonas was working his way through his licenses when he got in a horrible motorcycle accident. He needed 11 grafts, some with artificial skin. The damage was such that he was unable to pass the FAA’s health screen for pilots.

He became assistant vice president and director of emerging technologies for Prosoft, a company that trained aerospace engineers to program. While there, he authored four books on data communications, telecommunications, the convergence of voice, video and data and data for sales people. Prosoft moved Bagdonas to Austin. Around 2000, Menell incubated one of Bagdonas’ companies and Bagdonas built some support software for one of Menell’s customers. Menell was an advisor with SpeedMenu and later left the Dachis Group to be CEO of Subtle Data.

Right now, they said, Mahana is going to work to “crush” the Austin market, though there are restaurants in Washington D.C. and New York waiting to get on the list. Thomajan said the founders are very responsive to every suggestion he makes as a customer. He and Chin will also be including Mahana in their new restaurant, Wu Chow.

Now, Mahana’s wrapping up its seed round of financing and getting ready to expand. SXSW, they said, “was very good to us.” The company won, among other things, the Silicon Hills News/Austin Technology Incubator and Central Texas Angel Network pitch competition, which entitles them to a series of stories about their entrepreneurial journey. So, SHN will be revisiting Mahana as they work on financing and expand their services.

Boxer Aims to Simplify Email Management

April 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By JAIME NETZER
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Boxer’s motto is, “Email isn’t broken, it’s just unfair.”

It’s about an overload problem, says Boxer CEO and co-founder, Andrew Eye. “People are all frustrated by overload, and they tend to pick a scapegoat,” he says. “Email is a convenient scapegoat, people say it’s old, it’s broken, it needs to be replaced.” But, he says, it’s not actually broken. By and large, the emails that we get are those we want—or wanted at some point—to receive. Spam isn’t nearly the problem today that it was years ago. (“Google helped us solve that problem,” Eye adds.) But mobile email still comes in one continuous, linear stream. And that, Boxer says, is unfair.

The answer is a kind of email triage: With Boxer, a mobile email management app, users can utilize gestures to swipe their inbox clean. “The thing people want to do the most with email is delete it. It’s important to people to be able to as quickly as they can make a decision, take an action. In a lot of cases that decision is just, ‘is this important to me or not?’”

With Boxer, users can delete email, but they can also acknowledge receipt of email. As its website says: “That’s right, we added a Like button to email.”

Boxer, founded in 2012, previously known as TaskBox, has created an email application that lets people manage their email accounts. Its application supports Exchange, Google’s Gmail and Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, Apple’s iCloud, AOL mail and Microsoft’s Outlook and Hotmail. Its app is available for free download through Apple’s iTunes app store.

The company, based in Austin, raised $3 million in venture funding last year. Boxer also acquired Enhanced Email to boost its Android development in February of this year and it now has 15 full time employees, according to TechCrunch.

Randolph Bias, professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on tech usability, agrees that mobile email is the challenge to meet at this point in time: “Mobile email management is difficult for the same reason that so many tasks are hard to translate to the small device—we users have experience with the functionality on our laptops or tablets, and thus “mental models” of how the process should work and expectations about what functions will be provided, and it is hard to squeeze all that onto the small screen,” Bias explains. “Or, more to the point, [it’s] hard to decide which functionality to keep up close to the surface and which to bury, several keystrokes or gestures away.”

For his part, Bias was mostly impressed with Boxer’s functionality, but would offer up one change, to the Like function. “They should’ve used some other term, like “received,” that better expresses the user’s intent,” Bias says. “Plus, if I get an email that says “Aunt Edna died,” I don’t want to “like” it.”

But other customers have been thrilled with Boxer, which also offers integrated to dos and combined inboxes. “Boxer makes dealing with mobile email fast and easy, and it has completely replaced the default mail app on my iPhone,” says Michael Trafton, a Boxer user and Austin-based start-up entrepreneur. “I love being able to delete or archive my emails with a simple swipe of my finger.”

“Like most business owners, I’m drowning in email—I receive hundreds of messages a day,” Trafton adds. “Boxer makes it easy for me keep on top of my email. I can process my inbox with one hand—a simple swipe will delete or archive a message, or I can dash off a quick reply using message templates—no typing necessary. If an email needs further action, I add it to my ToDo list and it’s waiting for me when I get back to the office.”

That kind of control is exactly what Eye has in mind. “The mobile inbox is such a huge opportunity to make people’s lives better, to make them feel more in control, to make them feel like they’re accountable, like they responsive,” Eye says. “The inbox has never been associated with these types of words, but it’s really this wonderful source, if I want to know all the things I’m supposed to be looking at and thinking about.”

Wonderful, that is, as long as you have an app to help with you the decoding. To learn more about Boxer, visit www.getboxer.com.

ihiji’s Invision Cuts Down on IT House Calls

April 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Stuart Rench, founder of ihiji, photo by Leslie Anne Jones

Stuart, founder of ihiji

Remote diagnostic tools have been available to big companies with complex computer networks for many years, but the options for your average residential IT support provider were limited. It’s a waste of time and expense for the IT guy when he has to go to a house just to reboot the printer. Stuart Rench knows this from experience, and his ihiji invision – a little black box that plugs into a wall socket and lets specialists monitor what’s going on with the network remotely – is now saving many IT guys many trips.

Rench started his first company in Florida in 2005. There, he installed home automation systems for high net worth individuals – homes with $500,000 in-home theater systems and dimmable lighting controllable by touchscreen interface. On occasion, a client would come in on his private jet late on a Friday night after months away, something wouldn’t be working and Rench or one of his partners would have to go figure it out.

For several years, they tinkered with a prototype that could monitor networks remotely and eliminate needless in-person visits. In March 2010, Rench and his team packed up their computers and servers and relocated to Austin to work on ihiji full-time, but it took awhile for business to pick up.

“We were ahead of what the market needed,” Rench said. In the four years since moving to Austin, the team grew to eight members, but shrank down again for a period during slow sales. Today, it’s back up to nine full-time members, including three sales people. In those four years, the Internet of Things grew, home networks became more complex, and so too did the need for monitoring and support. “Now we’re the go-to company.”

The ihiji invision – which allows IT service providers to remotely see all the devices on a network and diagnose and maintain those connected devices – is now in 46 states and 25 countries and sales are strong. Some of ihiji’s clients are big national brands, but many are small businesses, one- or two-man shops for whom the ihiji invision helps conserve time and resources. Rench says their customers come from both ends of the geographic spectrum: He has a lot of clients who are city dwellers and remote monitoring saves them from having to waste time in traffic to visit clients in person; and he also has rural customers who need to cover a lot of ground – one client in Montana services homes within a 500-mile radius. Another customer based in New Zealand works exclusively on IT systems for mega yachts, ihiji’s service and monitoring solution is especially useful to him since his clients’ boats go all over the world. Earlier on, ihiji’s customers were mainly IT providers servicing residences, but Rench says now they have more clients who service commercial networks too.

Ihiji’s team works out of an office at Austin Technology Incubator, where they’ve been since arriving in Texas. Today, Rench says their focus is on making sure their upcoming products are ones people really want, not just what they think they might want, and to that end they’re paying close attention to feedback. So far Rench says, “We haven’t built anything where weren’t pushed in that direction.” Now the company is looking to grow its product line and expand the platform’s capabilities.

It used to be that IT service and system integration were seen as two separate jobs. Drawing on his industry experience, Rench equates them to a ven diagram with an ever-increasing area of shared space. “If I project forward, there will be very little difference between the two,” he says.

The home automation industry is in a growth phase, and the pace is expected to pick up with the proliferation of devices like Nest, the Wi-Fi-enabled smart thermostat, whose parent company Google bought in January for $3.2 billion.

“Only three percent of American homes currently have home automation systems, but we are only starting to approach the point at which such systems can really save people money and make their lives easier,” said Howdy Pierce, co-founder of engineering consultancy Cardinal Peak. “In the next five years we expect penetration of the Internet of Things to grow exponentially.”

With more devices on their networks, homeowners will likely need more help maintaining it all, and in turn the IT industry’s need for remote monitoring systems will grow, which will be good for ihiji. Things are already looking up, Rench says, “We’re on track to double revenues over the next year.”

Codeup Bootcamp Aims to Turn Non-techies into Web Programmers

April 4, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 7 Comments

By ZACH REED
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Photos courtesy of Codeup and Geekdom

Nathaniel Medrano wrapped up a recent internship feeling that, while the experience gave him great exposure, the job’s DIY learning model-via telecommute no less-still had him looking for ingrained traction in the technology. His work setting up search engines for local directories at a telecommunications company had given him a taste for the role and its tasks, but now he wanted a bootcamp experience that would help him understand the “why.”

He chose Codeup, an immersive 12-week cohort program launched out of the Geekdom tech startup incubator in downtown San Antonio. “Iron sharpens iron…and Codeup gave me exactly what I was looking for,” Medrano said. He graduates in a few weeks. The program “strengthened what I did know, and filled in all the gaps.”

Citing a Bureau of Labor Statistics study that job growth for developers is expected to grow 30 percent between 2010 and 2020, Codeup bills itself as an “in-person bootcamp that takes you from non-techie to web programmer.” It targets would-be web developers who are early career or second career with an intensive program that combines instructor-led training and self-study. Graduates are guaranteed that if they don’t land a job within six months, half their tuition will be refunded.

Fresh off the glow of his team winning the 2014 InnoTech Beta Summit, CEO Michael Girdley talked about what differentiates Codeup from courses available in community colleges and other bootcamps. “All a computer science degree gives you is theory, and then someone has to pay you to learn what to do with it,” he said. The value that Codeup tries to provide graduates and employers is “we cut out those first three years” that newly-minted web developers normally spend cutting their teeth on applied learning, Girdley said. A list of 55 employers formally recruit from Codeup, ranging from other Geekdom startups to established firms such as Globalscape and Labatt Food Service.

The typical student experience starts with a considerable amount of prep work even before the first class. “You’re coding within the first 45 minutes of Day One,” Girdley said. Subsequently, most days include six hours of classroom training, bookended by several hours of study hall where instructors are still available for assistance. Codeup punctuates the learning with lunchtime speakers, and recently held a hackathon competition. Throughout the 12-week course, students are continually assigned textbook reading. The emphasis is a hands-on learning of Lavarel, as PHP used in the creation of hundreds of millions of websites.

It’s an immersive, structured curriculum that Medrano was able to root in: “It filled that space between the ‘Pythagoras Theorem’ and ‘Here’s what to do,” Medrano said. He likens it to learning a new language, with the immediate focus on code that is immediately functional, “worrying about syntax later”. He particularly likes that the learning is iterative: material covered in the first week is used as a core that is continually revisited and built up from.

The next cohort of 30 students starts May 6th and is already half full, with 15 applications accepted out of 70 submitted, Girdley said. The review process involves a round of interviews with Codeup instructors. “What we ask ourselves during the interview process is ‘Can we help?’ and ‘What is their learn rate?” Girdley said. “I also want people I’m willing to be locked up with in a room all day,” he added with a good-natured laugh.

Prospective students can watch the current class via livestream or in-person, as well as read the team’s bios. The Codeup team includes four Instructors and three Lab Associates. “You’ve got a very experienced team here,” said Girdley, who has written four textbooks.

Coworking Options for Yogis, Dog-Lovers and Everybody Else

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

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Photo licensed from iStock

Picking a co-working space is like a cross between choosing a place to work and finding your favorite hangout. What’s important to you? Ergonomic chairs? Community? The vibe? The snacks? Or, as one Yelper explained, the fact that they “play the same tunes I have on my iPod?”
And considering that the people around you might become your friends, clients, business partners and tribe what do you want them to be like? Older professionals? Hackers? Hipsters? Artists? Do you want to bring your dog? Do you want to share a coffee machine with investors? Do you want a yoga class in the same space?
Austin has a great array of coworking places that offer all of the above and more. We’ve compiled a directory of some of the area’s hottest co-working spaces for you to find your spot.

Capital Factory

In many ways, Capital Factory is the hub of all things startup. On the 16th floor of the Omni building, this is where you can rub elbows with many of the area’s most promising new companies, and the investors and successful entrepreneurs who mentor them. You get access to giant pillows and snacks like candy, chips, fruit, and the occasional pizza. Co-workers don’t get all the designer ergonomic office systems. They share long tables in a common room. But they are at hand for many cool events and meetups that happen in Capital Factory space.
Membership Fee: $150 for 15 hours a month; $350 for unlimited access
Address: 701 Brazos St., 16th Floor, Austin
Website: capitalfactory.com/work/coworking

Conjunctured

Conjunctured is a funky work space in an old house on the East Side. Started by a couple of geeks, Conjectured prides itself on the community its co-workers have created. Members not only work at the space during the day but also have happy hours, volleyball games, board games at one another’s homes and go tubing and group skydiving. Conjunctured plays music from its members’ iPods but also has a quiet room for people who need minimal distractions. And it’s dog friendly—if you call first.
Membership fee: $25 to $275 a month
Address: 1309 E. Seventh St., Austin
Website: conjunctured.com

Center61

Center61 in East Austin, is where you might want to be if the focus of your work is social good. Like, if what gets you up in morning is the environment or global justice or racial harmony and you’re looking for likeminded people to collaborate with, this would be the place to work.
Modern, airy and quiet, Center 61 is scientists, artists, business owners, technologists and more.
Membership fee: $10 to $200 a month
Address: 2921 E. 17th St. #4, Austin
Website: center61.com

GoLab Austin

In an old building on groovy East Sixth, the GoLab is a combination art gallery and coworking space. Founder Steve Golab offers lunch and learns and encourages the software and social platform developers to birth new ideas through collaboration and community.
Membership fee: $250 to $350 a month
Address: 621 E. Sixth St., Austin
Website: golabaustin.com

Link Coworking

Link Coworking is one of the best known and longest-lasting co-working spots in Austin. With a funky, modern space with ergonomic Turnstone furniture, Link has private, dedicated spaces as well as open working spaces. If offers a place for experts to come and give free consulting to members and the community and it holds and myriad events for networking and for fun.
Membership fee: $200 to $500 a month
Address: 2700 W. Anderson Lane, #205, Austin
Website: linkcoworking.com

Opportunity Space

Started by startup veteran Erica Douglass, Opportunity Space is specially designed for startups, rather than freelancers or solopreneurs. Operating out of a charming old house on Caesar Chavez, on the East Side Opportunity Space offers each startup a dedicated desk and, if they want, a dedicated room. And it has one thing few co-working spaces offer…a shower!
Membership fee: $500 a month for a dedicated desk
Address: 2125 E. Cesar Chavez St., Austin
Website: opportunityspace.com

Perch Coworking

Perch coworking in East Austin offers ergonomic chairs, mail delivery and a community of what it calls “self-contained business people.” Perch has clean, modern space and focuses hard on the business aspect of getting work done and meeting with likeminded people who might also be good business contacts.
Membership fee: $175 a month; drop-ins are $25 a day
Address: 2235 E. Sixth St., Austin
Website: perchcoworking.com

Posh Coworking

Posh is the first Austin co-working space specifically for women. Elegant, if a little girlie, Posh not only provides co-working spaces but quiet meeting areas—named Elizabeth, Audrey and Marilyn–for members to meet with clients. Members rave about the warm feel, the writing lab, and the help of the owner, Blossom.
Membership fee: $125 to $400 a month
Address: 3027 N. Lamar Blvd., Suite 202, Austin
Website: poshcoworking.com

Soma Vida

So what if your requirements go way beyond ergonomic chairs and snacks? Soma Vida is a wellness community described by several Yelpers as “Nirvana.” It’s a yoga collective, a wellness center, a veritable Vallhalla of work life balance in an old house in East Austin. And best of all, it’s way less expensive than most co-working spaces. And memberships come with free yoga classes and entrance to networking events. Namaste.
Membership fee: $25 to $65 a month
Address: 1210 Rosewood Ave., Austin
Website: somavida.net

Tech Ranch Austin

Tech Ranch is another major startup hub in Austin, north of downtown. It’s an incubator that helps businesses from seed to scale. In a quiet office park off 183, Tech Ranch offers a range from general co-working in a modern setting to a dedicated desk, chair and locking cabinet space. Another great place to rub elbows with entrepreneurs and investors who are making new things happen.
Membership fee: $150 to $300 a month
Address: 9111 Old Jollyville Road, Suite 100, Austin
Website: techranchaustin.com

Vuka

The owners of Vuka envisioned the space as a co-working place, event venue and all around community gathering space. A giant, open warehouse with incredible tree light fixtures and funky furniture, Vuka is the perfect place for people who want to combine art with work. The venue has almost no parking, however, and some members report that all that combining of art, work and community can be a little distracting.
Membership fee: $150 to $300 a month; drop-ins are $15 a day ($5 on Fridays)
Address: 411 W. Monroe St., Austin
Website: vukaaustin.com

San Antonio Coworking Space

Geekdom

Geekdom is the place for San Antonio coworking. The local startup hub, Geekdom is steps away from the Riverwalk and offers month to month membership as well as dedicated desks and office spaces. Because it’s the hub of entrepreneurship, it’s also the place to encounter the up and coming companies and the investors and mentors who are helping them. The coworking space is moving into the historic Rand building downtown in late March and will have a specially designed space featuring showers, bike racks, kitchen, postboxes, phone booths and a special events center.
Membership fee: $50 to $200
112 East Pecan, 10th & 11th Floors
San Antonio, Texas 78205
Website: http://geekdom.com/san-antonio

Codeup Wins the 2014 San Antonio InnoTech Beta Summit

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

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Michael Girdley with Codeup, Bill Mock, senior vice president of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, Brandon Ashton with SocialRest and Marcus Robertson with TrueAbility.

Michael Girdley with Codeup, Bill Mock, senior vice president of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, Brandon Ashton with SocialRest and Marcus Robertson with TrueAbility.

Codeup, a 12-week boot camp to teach technical skills to people, won the 2014 InnoTech Beta Summit on Wednesday afternoon.

Michael Girdley launched Codeup last year and the first class of 28 men and women is about to graduate.

Michael Girdley, founder of Codeup

The startup, based at Geekdom, charges $9,850 per student, which ensures that the students are committed and motivated to completing the coursework, Girdley said. The company also guarantees its graduates will find a job or it will refund 50 percent of their tuition.

The runners up were TrueAbility and SocialRest.

The other companies pitching included InnerAlly, Picture It Settled, Remote Garage and Biovideo. Each company gave a five-minute pitch followed by a few minutes of questions from the judges.

The judges were Pat Matthews, co-founder of Webmail.us, Rackspace executive and investor, Sharon O’Malley Burg, a technology consultant and Erach Songodwala, an angel investor.

Marcus Robertson, co-founder and chief technology officer of TrueAbility, presented the startup, which lets technical job candidates demonstrate their skills to potential employers through its AbilityScreen. TrueAbility also has a jobs board and charges companies to post a job and screen candidates through its platform.

SocialRest has created software that measures how effective a company’s content is by measuring how it is shared on social media and how many sales result.

The San Antonio Chamber of Commerce sponsored the InnoTech Beta Summit and gave the winner a plaque and a one-year membership in its organization. The winners and runners up also received trophies.

Full disclosure: Silicon Hills News also helped to organize and host the InnoTech Beta Summit and InnoTech is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

Austin-based Social Media Powerhouses Mass Relevance and Spredfast Merge

April 2, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

Spredfast has merged with Mass Relevance to create one of the largest independent social marketing companies, and will operate going forward as Spredfast.

Mass Relevance has created social media management platforms for more than 350 major brands including Pepsi, Campbell’s, GE, Target, Walgreens and Microsoft.

Spredfast also provides its customers with a social media platform to manage all of social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and other popular blogging services. Its clients include AT&T, Warner Brothers, Whole Foods Market, AARP, AGAIN Interactive, HomeAway, and Ogilvy.

Together, the companies have more than 600 customers and they work with all five major broadcast networks and operate in 84 countries. The companies process more than 650 million pieces of social content every day.

“Keeping up with the speed of social is a lofty challenge for marketers and media today. Consumers continue to raise the bar for how they want to engage with brands. Amidst a sea of social chatter, brands must find the right moments to interact with their audience, and move faster than ever to deliver their stories,” Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast said in a news release “The combination of Spredfast and Mass Relevance give brands an unparalleled ability to stay on top of market trends, and be smarter about how to engage customers in social experiences that build lasting relationships.”

Social media has become a crucial component of how companies interact with customers and conduct business.

“We built Mass Relevance to connect relevant conversations from social networks and fuse them into a customer’s brand story. Three years later, we are honored to align with our neighbors, another Austin-based company, to complete the circle of bringing audience participation into every aspect of marketing,” Sam Decker, CEO and Co-Founder of Mass Relevance, said in a news release. “The combination of Spredfast and Mass Relevance opens up new possibilities for our customers to do more with social content in real-time.”

Mass Relevance, founded in 2009, has raised $5.5 million and Spredfast, founded in 2008, has raised $64.1 million to date, according to CrunchBase.

“Spredfast and Mass Relevance together provide an unmatched, comprehensive product solution necessary for any marketer to succeed in today’s always on and ever-changing social environment,” said Mike Dodd, Partner at Austin Ventures and founding investor in both companies.” These two companies and their highly effective leadership teams have been a critical part of the Austin technology landscape and their continued growth as one entity will be a defining factor in this community.”

The combined company will continue to be led by current Spredfast’s CEO Favaron. Decker will join the Board of Directors and serve as Executive Advisor to the new company. Spredfast has 350 employees and offices in Austin, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London and Sydney.

Soloshot, BiblioTech, Cloud Academy and SMSGate at SA New Tech

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

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

On the first Tuesday of every month, a group of people interested in the latest technology developments in San Antonio gathers at Geekdom for the San Antonio New Tech meetup.
The hour-long program showcases some of the latest startups in the city along with other interesting projects.
Cole Wollak, Jeremy Karney and Michael Girdley head up SA New Tech, which has grown to become one of the city’s most popular meetups with 672 registered members. SA New Tech has held 19 events since its founding more than two years ago.
On Tuesday, Geekdom and Codeup sponsored the event providing free beer and pizza to the more than 70 people in attendance.
Soloshot, a robotic cameraman, SMS Gate, a marketing messaging service, Open Cloud Academy, a Linux administrator and technical training center, and BiblioTech, the nation’s first all digital library, pitched to the crowd for five minutes and then answered questions from the crowd.
Chris Boyle, co-founder and CEO of Soloshot, a tripod device that allows a camera to track and film a subject automatically, gave an update on his company.
Soloshot is on the second generation of its product, the Soloshot2, the robot cameraman. The latest model includes new features such as vertical tracking, camera control for automatic zooming and start/pause recording, a smaller lighter transmitter and compatibility with third-party professional tripods.
The San Antonio-based company now has 15 employees. It also has 19 patents issued or pending and its product is available in more than 200 retail stores.
Soloshot has been featured in Popular Mechanics, the Discovery Channel, Fast Company magazine, TechCrunch and other publications. It has won several prestigious industry awards. Soloshot also won the 2013 InnoTech Beta Summit.
Soloshot, founded in 2012, originally sold its products to sports enthusiasts and professional athletes in the surfing, kiteboarding sports. But others quickly adopted its device to film snowboarders, soccer players, rugby teams, equestrians, skiers, wakeboarders, skateboarders, motocross racers, racecar drivers and parents seeking to capture their kid’s events.
Catarina Velasquez, BiblioTech Community relations liason, gave a brief overview of BiblioTech, which has more than 20,000 digital books available for download to Bexar County residents. It’s the nation’s first digital public library.
The $2.5 million library has 48 iMacs and it loans e-readers, which can hold up to five books to county residents with a BiblioTech library card. The library is open seven days a week and is located on the city’s South Side at 3505 Pleasanton Road.
Felipe Castillo pitched his startup, SMSGate, which provides a direct marketing service to companies through text messages. The company is from Mexico. The company is looking for Beta testers to try out its product for free. For more information, visit its website at SMSGate.co.
A representative from the Open Cloud Academy, on the sixth floor of the Weston Centre, gave a brief overview of the year-old technical training center. Rackspace’s Chairman and CEO Graham Weston started the academy to provide Linux administrator training to the general public. The program is based on the Rackspace Academy, which trains its employees in technical fields. The 10-week Linux Administrator training program costs $3,500 and the program provides some scholarships and other financing. Recently, the Open Cloud Academy launched Linux for Ladies, its first program targeted exclusively at training women to become Linux system administrators. That class, which begins in June, is already full. The demand is high for the classes. Jobs for Linux system administrators are plentiful and the jobs pay more than $50,000 a year, on average. More than 200 people attended an information session to learn more about the Linux for Ladies program.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

ENTvantage Diagnostics of Austin Wins the Emerging Medical Technology Symposium’s Pitch Competition

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

BY LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
ENTvantage Diagnostics won the Emerging Medical Technology Symposium’s pitch competition on Tuesday afternoon.

“ENTvantage Diagnostics provides primary care and ENT physicians with critical information on the causes of ear, nose and throat illnesses,” said Joseph Skraba, its CEO.

The Austin-based company’s first product is a test its developing that can detect bacterial sinusitis. The test is similar to a strep throat test administered in the doctor’s office, Skraba said. The test will be able to help a doctor confirm a case of bacterial sinusitis that requires antibiotics to cure.

Right now, no such test exists.

Doctors must diagnose a patient with bacterial sinusitis based on symptoms, which are similar to cases of viral sinusitis. As a result, doctors often over prescribe antibiotics to their patients. About 30 million patients annually are diagnosed with sinusitis and 90 percent of all cases are viral and not bacterial, Skraba said.

ENTVantage Diagnostics’s $15 test would dramatically cut down on prescriptions for antibiotics and give patients a more accurate diagnosis of their condition. Skraba estimates it will take three years to get the test to the market.

The company is looking to raise a $1 million seed stage round to complete its initial product, a class two medical device, Skraba said. It received a $1,000 check from the Targeted Technology Fund as the winner of the pitch competition.

The runner up, Claresta Solutions, won six months worth of office space at the San Antonio Technology Center. But since Claresta Solutions already had an office, it gave up the prize to Leto Solutions, which is based at the center, so it gets six months of free rent.

Altogether, eight startups delivered five-minute pitches to a panel of judges. The other startups included Wisewear, StemBioSys, TVA Medical, Chiron Health and ClotFree.

Jerry Wilmink, CEO of Austin-based Wisewear, pitched a wearable health device to monitor fitness including heart rate and motion detection. Its sensor is a sticky patch that affixes to the chest and it sends its data to a cell phone.

Somer Baburek, CEO and founder of Claresta Solutions, came up with a better labor fetal monitor after a difficult labor with her daughter. She spent 26 hours in labor and had an emergency C-Section. But the monitor kept setting off alarms and required constant adjustment by the nurses throughout her labor. She left the hospital thinking there must be a better solution. She came up with it. Her device is based on an electrical system and is 90 percent accurate, she said. Most labor monitors are currently Doppler devices that are only 75 percent accurate, she said. The company is currently seeking $250,000 in seed stage funding to create a working prototype of its device.

The sixth annual Emerging Medical Technology Symposium took place the day before the InnoTech San Antonio conference, which kicks off Wednesday morning at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio.

The event was a big success, said Gabriele G. Niederauer, vice president of research and development for ArthoCare Corp. and chair of the symposium’s organizing committee.

One of the big themes that kept coming up again and again throughout the day was the importance of having a good team behind the startup, she said.

Austin’s New Chief Innovation Officer

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

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Kerry O’Connor, Austin’s new Chief Innovation Officer, defines innovation as “any project that is new to you and has an uncertain outcome.” Her job as innovation officer, she said, is “bringing smart people together to feel around in the dark.”

O’Connor spoke at a party to welcome her thrown by Google and Capital Factory Monday night. She has held several positions in Washington D.C. as well as several global consulates. She worked in Ghana and Morocco in various capacities for the U.S. Department of State, and was hired as “innovation catalyst” for the department in 2012. She also served as logistics coordinator for the Pittsburgh G20 Summit in 2009.

Her road to innovation was marked by global history, she said, such as the falling of the Berlin wall and 9/11 when the rules that had marked the parameters of U.S. relations with other countries all changed and innovation was inevitable. O’Connor has a bachelor’s in international affairs with a concentration on European studies and minors in economics, French and music. She has a master’s in international affairs from George Washington University. Her starting salary will be $130,000 annually.

A rock climber and improv player, O’Conner said she wanted to begin “a very grounded conversation. Buzzwords make me break into hives,” she said. “I want to figure out how to collaborate on the nitty gritty.”

A fan of alliteration, O’Connor said, she wants to focus on “What is, what if, what wows and what works.” In the next 90 days, she said, she plans to come out with a business model that will be Austin’s model.

Austin, she said, has claimed a creative freedom for itself and everybody wants a part of it. No one who learned she was coming to Austin was nonchalant about it. “Keep Austin weird, “ O’Connor said, “is money.” At the same time, she said, “Constraints are kind of cool. Constraints give you something to play with…they give us texture.”

She would like to see entrepreneurs talking to intrapreneurs about risk, about creating business models and figuring out how to inject that into ongoing operations. She wants to keep the ethnography of the city while drawing people closer together. She wants to support the strong community vibe behind the Keep it Local movement that seems stronger in Austin than in D.C. where so much of the population is transient.

She wasn’t, she said, prepared to speculate much on ideas yet, until she’s gotten a better sense of the city’s soul.

Several of the city’s top innovators, including Bob Metcalfe and Hugh Forrest attended the event, as did several startups.