Lung Therapeutics announced Wednesday it has joined the the Austin Technology Incubator, part of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
Lung Therapeutics joins ATI’s Bio/Health Sciences Portfolio.
“Lung Therapeutics Inc.’s lead drug candidate, LT1-01, will allow for effective fluid drainage of the lung cavity, a rare consequence of hospitalized pneumonia, without the need for surgery,” according to a news release. “The company has been awarded more than $12 million in NIH funding toward the development and IND-enabling studies of the lead candidate, as well as a seed investment from the UT Horizon Fund, a strategic venture fund of the University of Texas System.”
“Lung Therapeutics is unique as a pharmaceutical startup. The team has a wealth of experience in the respiratory disease field and the company has removed much of the technology risk by funding advanced translational research and manufacturing with substantial federal dollars. We are very pleased to admit them into the ATI portfolio,” Cindy WalkerPeach, PhD, Director, Bio/Health Sciences Portfolio at ATI, said in a news release.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Fairs, Armstrong, Gibbs, Johns, photo by Susan Lahey

The purpose of the conversation was to find out what births a place like the London borough of Hackney and the city of Austin, centers where artists, entrepreneurs and others who Richard Florida famously labeled “the creative class” convene.

Hackney, one of the poorest and most neglected and crime-ridden boroughs of London in past decades, had incredibly cheap rents that drew artists to an area called Shoreditch. They were followed by entrepreneurs who loved the low rents and collection of likeminded individuals. A number of these startups formed what they called the Silicon Roundabout and the English government renamed Tech City.

Moderator David Epstein of Gessler pointed out that there’s a certain romance, mystique and cool to the idea of startups that begin in a garage. But, he asked, what is it that makes something cool?

“I think it often comes down to luck,” said Marcus Fairs of Dezeen, architecture and design magazine in London. “There are clusters of vibrant human beings for reasons that can be put on a spreadsheet but nonetheless random things happen. The random genius can collect people around him.”

Armstrong, though, pointed out that a random collection of creative people need to be in fertile spaces that constantly change. “If you have a working environment where everything stays the same week after week month after month you can get stuck in your ways,” he said. “If your floor plans change, you change your walk routes. If there are new decorative items, new things to play with, people come in feeling that something’s going to be different this week that it was last week” and that creates innovation.

The reality, though, they pointed out, is that ‘cool’ keeps moving. And if a city or a startup or creative community doesn’t move with it, it will get left behind.

“I am reading these articles that Shoreditch is ‘over’” said Fairs. “You know…the battered sofa with the low tables and the guys working on their laptops. They move somewhere else. It’s the brutal cycle of fashion. The cost of things. Rising office rates…the price of accommodation is literally killing businesses.”

Historically, the group agreed, gentrification comes in and destroys what “cool” drew people to the area in the first place. But in the startup community, where being yourself and being authentic are paramount, that gentrification cycle could look very different. Startups, they acknowledged, often create spaces that “look like them” and that inspires innovation.

In the midst of this conversation, Johns rattled of a number of dollar figures about Austin’s economic success. He pointed out that any economic development Austin contemplates that’s a big investment is entered into UT’s revolutionary data visualization tool Stampede and specific ROI numbers are spit back out again, then rattled off several more numbers indicating that a rail system, for example, would have a very positive economic impact on the city. There’s some combination of data and serendipity that makes for cool.

Richard Gibbs who is in development for HereEast, an office and artistic development in Hackney, said the main thing people are looking for is where offices are “cool.” Because that’s where the talent wants to work. But in the process of creating such a center, the panel acknowledged, some of the sense of organic-ness and authenticity are lost.

But authenticity, Fairs said, isn’t something you can create.

“Hackney was a train wreck, now it’s the center of authenticity….Eindhoven (in the Netherlands) has an incredibly dynamic culture and it’s just a shithole. And Singapore is totally different and it has incredible creative things happening and it’s very expensive.”

Ultimately, the panel agreed, you can do extensive research, data collection, reconfiguring of space but a place’s “cool” partly just rests on its willingness to evolve and submit to the city’s natural lifestyle which may include parts of the city falling down, gentrification, displacement of populations and other uncomfortable realities.

As Fairs, said, it’s like the bumper sticker he saw recently: “Hackney was better when it was shit.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Korea brought its first group of startups to SXSW in 2014, the Geeks from Gangnam, sponsored by the Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs and the Korea Creative Content Agency.

Offering products as creative as a Korean travel news app and an origami app called “Let’s Fold,” that lets people do origami virtually and competitively, the group is part of an entrepreneurial training program called D.Camp, a startup community ecosystem that helps incubate entrepreneurial companies.

Seokwon Yang, senior manager of business operations for D.Camp , photo by Susan Lahey

Five thirty team, photo by Susan Lahey

Tech Ranch sponsored a Geeks from Gangnam party with K-Pop bands from Korea and some of the Austin startup community leaders Monday night at Brass House.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

So how out of 500 applicants for Accelerator, does Chris Valentine of SXSW choose the 48 companies (and their alternates) who will have the chance to pitch?

This year, for example, contestants came from Ireland and Slovenia, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, London, Tel Aviv and all over the United States.

“I spend a lot of time every day looking for interesting companies from around the world,” Valentine explains.

If he finds a cool technology, he passes the link onto an intern to check it out further. If some city, like Berlin, starts churning out cool startups, he might offer someone recommended to him in the scene a badge in return for scouting the area for cool startups. He also has the help of a qualifying committee including Ben Dyer, Tony Averbeck, Bart Bohn, Carla Cook, Kyle Cox, Michael Crider, Dean Cruse, Ken Demarest, Laura Kilcrease, Collin Osborn and Chris Treadaway.

“We all know about what’s happening in Chile, Brazil, all these countries. But what gets me really excited is that a lot of these companies are taking technologies that we may be developing here and developing them for their cultures. It’s like, you may be Uber for India. Facebook is trying to take Russia and they can’t because Russia has their own social site like Facebook that makes sense for that culture.”

Valentine says he knows a lot of the companies won’t be commercial successes in this iteration. One company, for example, makes designer gowns with solar panels on them for phone charging. Considering the small market for designer gowns, much less those with solar panels, the judges believed the application might have been more practical on outdoor gear….or even a tent.

“I hadn’t heard of anyone putting a solar panel on clothes,” Valentine said. “And here I am,” he indicated his smart phone connected into a nearby power strip. “I’m always looking for a place to charge my phone.” The company, Pauline Van Dongen, from the Netherlands may have to pivot. But then, Valentine said, This company may or may not be successful. The judges will say ‘I love this idea but what about this change.’ Maybe she’s so far in she can’t pivot. Maybe she’ll have to fail.”

Other Austin companies that made the cut included Op3nvoice, Plum (formerly Ube), EvoSure, Shelfbucks and sonarDesign.
Last year, Valentine said, he had five contestants from outside the U.S. This year he had 15 and he expects that to grow.

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

At the Austin Chamber Office Sunday morning, a standing room only crowd turned out at 9:30 a.m. to hear the ten finalists of the Austin Fast Pitch competition at South by Southwest Interactive.
That’s pretty amazing considering the parties at SXSW stretched into the wee hours of Sunday morning and daylight savings time change meant that everyone lost an hour of time as the clocks sprung forward.
The room at the Austin Chamber, which holds about 100 people, heated up quick with the two-minute pitches from Austin-based tech startups.
The Austin Technology Incubator, Central Texas Angel Network and Silicon Hills News hosted the panel.
Online, more than 40 companies competed for the ten semifinalist spots, said Kyle Cox, director with the ATI.
The five finalists were in retail and medical applications.
“Austin is becoming a hub for online commerce,” Cox said.
And with the new University of Texas Dell Medical School, the city is becoming a hotbed of activity for the healthcare industry, he said.
The finalists included Embrace, authentic customer relationship management, eyeQ, reinventing the in-store shopping experience, Mahana, iBeacons for customer relationship management at restaurants, Pristine, Google Glass for medical applications and Spot On Sciences, a convenient diagnostic blood test called HemaSpot.
Mahana won the Austin Fast Pitch competition, Spot on Sciences took second place and Pristine was third.
The winner will receive a series of stories about them in Silicon Hills News detailing “the entrepreneurial journey.” The winner also gets a chance to pitch the Central Texas Angels Network and a spot in the Austin Technology Incubator.
Venu Shamapant, general partner with LiveOak Venture Partners, John Stockton, venture advisor with Mayfield Fund and Tom Cheredar with Venturebeat served as the finalist judges. The runners up also get to choose from a selection of prizes.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

CEO Darla Hollander of Everywhere Energy

The company uses “a commercially available material” to collect kinetic energy through a shoe insert that can later be used to charge a cell phone.

CEO Darla Hollander said the technology was originally devised by Stanford Research Institute and used by the Defense Research Projects Agency. It was determined that it could not generate enough energy to make it worthwhile for DARPA to pursue, but with the small amount of power needed to charge today’s cell phones, it is worthwhile for consumers. The company hopes to build something discreet that can be used by people wearing various footwear options, including people in third world countries where sandals are the norm.

“The only thing keeping people tethered to their desks,” said COO Melinda Haghighatian, is the need for power. The company’s tagline is “Be Your Own Battery” @everywherenergy.

The UT Longhorn Startup Showcase featured some of the top startup ideas coming out of the University of Texas. The winner won a trophy and membership in ATI’s Development portfolio.

Other companies that competed include Prepify, which offers free, online, gamified SAT prep to students. The company cited research that students who do SAT prep fare significantly better than students who don’t, but only students from families with the financial resources tend to take SAT prep. Meanwhile colleges and universities are all looking for top students in lower socioeconomic brackets. Prepify will sell leads on these students for $500 each, which is less than a fourth what colleges and universities typically pay for marketing per student.

This week the College Board announced that it would change the SAT’s, removing the essay requirement, simplifying the language and dropping the scoring from the 2,400 point back to 1600, as well as offering free prep. Prepify co-founder Joseph Bartolotta said the company would have to pivot some in response to the announcement but he expects the College Board to be slow to implement its test prep and that the prep will not be available outside the U.S. So Prepify might target foreign students.

Retell is a mobile app that lets consumers give feedback to retail establishments via mobile devices. While some companies, like Whole Foods, already have in-store solutions to let consumers give feedback but they have to go to a kiosk, rather than using their own devices when and where they want.

Recommenu is an app that allows customers to pull up menus from restaurants nearby to decide where to eat or what to eat once they arrive. Necto Net Contact Management integrates technology with business contact management. QR codes and software for business people with multiple business identities who wear numerous hats.

Judges for the event included Bob Metcalfe, Kyle Cox, Michael Cider, Ben Dyer, Ken Demarest and Rob Warren. Rudy Garza emceed. Christina White of NAE Grand Challenges Scholars Program hosted.