Codero Hosting, a provider of web-based hosting services, announced Tuesday it has received $8 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank and Farnam Street Financial.
The company plans to use the money to set up data centers throughout the U.S. and Europe to serve more customers from multiple locations.
“We have outpaced our industry’s growth, expanding faster than other hosting and cloud providers due to our commitment to providing customers with unparalleled performance, expertise, support and value,” Emil Sayegh, president and CEO of Codero Hosting, said in a news release. “The support of SVB and Farnam Street Financial helps us accelerate our growth and capitalize on our market success.”
Codero is based in Kansas and opened an office in Austin in 2012.
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By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Joe Ross,president and cofounder CSID and Shawn Bose, vice president and general manager of UShip. Photo by Susan Lahey
Sixteen startup teams competed but SpareFoot triumphed, winning more games than any other startup team and receiving a check for $23,000 to go to Kure It, an organization that funds cancer research. Uship took second place and Capital Factory won the third place trophy.
The top three teams win the biggest part of the pot, which this year was close to $60,000, according to Gillian Wilson, co-founder and president of the games and senior manager of human resources for UShip.
Gillian Wilson, co-founder and president of the games and senior manager of human resources for UShip. Photo by Susan Lahey
Originally, the games started as a friendly challenge, said Shawn Bose, vice president and general manager of global business for UShip.
Several friends from different startups were “all out one night and it was like ‘We could beat you at beer pong….’” Bose said. Soon, the idea had ballooned to include eight startups and raising money for charity.
“You hear all these stories about cutthroat behavior in the valley and in New York,” he said, “here in Austin we have this great community, this culture of helping each other.”
Bose said he’d known of people who came to the event last year just to network and wound up working at one of the competing startups. He liked to imagine that there might be people hatching an idea for a new startup in the midst of the event, standing at the foosball table, or playing darts.
Last year, John Egan, now editor in chief at SpareFoot, was getting ready for his Monday job interview with the company when he attended the Startup Olympics.“I think it’s a great event because it brings a lot of startups together that might not otherwise come together and it raises a lot of money for great charities.”
The founders have a rule that only startups can participate, meaning that a large company—like RetailMeNot—isn’t eligible to participate. But Bose said that didn’t stop the company from being one of the event’s biggest sponsors. Capital Factory had its own team of startups whose numbers were too small to form their own teams. Many teams wore costumes ranging from team t-shirts to togas and laurel wreaths, giant inflated body suits and hair-band attire.
Every year, there’s a mystery competition that is unveiled at the end of the day. The first year it was a bouncy castle, last year it was a mechanical bull, and this year it was a labyrinth the “athletes” had to navigate blindfolded.The first year the event raised $3,000 for charity and has grown exponentially ever since. At some point, Bose and Wilson said, they’d like to see other cities adopt the event and possibly hold national or even global competition during SXSW.
By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
The XPRIZE Foundation organized a four-day adventure trip to visit tech companies in California last February.
XPRIZE Founder Dr. Peter Diamandis wanted to showcase space and ocean innovation to a select group of entrepreneurs.
Part of the event involved a Zero G flight in which the passengers float about weightless for several minutes. That’s where software entrepreneur Christian Cotichini literally crashed into Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, during the flight.
When the flight ended, Cotichini, Diamandis and Weston met and dreamed up the idea for HeroX, a smaller, community-oriented version of the XPRIZE, which seeks to solve the world’s big challenges by creating and managing large-scale incentivized prizes focused on learning, exploration, energy & environment, global development and life sciences.
On Thursday night at an invitation-only event on the fourth floor of the Rio Plaza on the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio, the first HeroX challenge officially launched. It’s called the San Antonio MX Challenge, a two-year $500,000 prize to foster entrepreneurship between San Antonio and Mexico.
The team behind the San Antonio MX Challenge: Tito Salas, Emily Fowler, Christian Cotichini, Lorenzo Gomez and Graham Weston
San Antonio has the opportunity to be the gateway to America for the entrepreneurs in Mexico and the San Antonio MX Challenge will serve as that catalyst to make it happen, Weston said.
San Antonio has so much of the infrastructure to offer entrepreneurs in the startup world, Weston said.
“Mexican entrepreneurs can come to America to launch their products and then go back to Mexico to build their companies,” Weston said.
San Antonio is the first city to launch a HeroX prize, but soon it will be everywhere, Weston said.
“HeroX is going to be in every city around the world from London to Lubbock,” he said.
HeroX democratizes innovation, Cotichini said, co-founder and CEO of HeroX. He sold his software company, Make Technologies, based in Vancouver, to Dell in 2011. He soon became immersed in studying the world’s problems. It almost made him become depressed until he read Diamandis’ book Abundance, which paints an optimistic view of the future. Cotichini then knew he wanted to be part of making that vision become a reality.
“This is the very first HeroX branded challenge,” Cotichini said. “The Internet is creating new models that allow us to be far more powerful as a species. These new models are going to change the world.”
Open innovation can change cities and companies. It’s a tool for anybody who needs innovation, he said.
HeroX is an online crowdsourcing platform that allows people to realize visions and live out dreams, said Emily Fowler, co-founder and vice president of possibilities for HeroX.
HeroX plans to launch hundreds of competitions worldwide.
Whereas the XPRIZE challenges offer prizes from $10 million to $30 million and last from five to eight years, the HeroX challenges offer prizes of $10,000 to millions and last from six months to a few years, Fowler said. Anyone can take on a challenge or offer one up, she said.
“We’re stimulating a new generation of entrepreneurs and it’s really interesting,” Cotichini said. “The millennial generation really gets the power of crowdsourcing and collaboration.”
One of those is Tito Salas, project manager of San Antonio MX Prize. He was born in Northern Mexico and graduated from the University of Texas with a double major in marketing and business management.
“The San Antonio MX Challenge wants to make it easy for Mexican entrepreneurs to move to San Antonio to launch their business,” Salas said. His role is to help provide Mexican entrepreneurs with Visas, mentors, business services, access to capital and more.
“We’re also looking to get together all of the entrepreneurs from Mexico in San Antonio and bring them to Geekdom to make something bigger,” Salas said.
Walter Teele, co-founder of ParLevel Systems .
Teele sees the San Antonio MX Challenge as a way to fill a need that exists in helping Mexican startups.
“I think it’s going to give entrepreneurs in Mexico awareness that there are people here that want to support them and help them realize their dreams,” Teele said. “We don’t have a startup culture in Mexico. You have it here.”
Mexican entrepreneurs can benefit from the infrastructure that already exists in San Antonio, Teele said.
So far three people have expressed interest in registering for the San Antonio MX Challenge, said Lorenzo Gomez, director of Geekdom. The organization provides the criteria a company needs to meet to win the prize, but they don’t provide any seed stage capital or pre-determined solutions, Gomez said. Early registration ends on Aug. 25 and final registration is Jan. 14, 2015.
“The beauty of the prize models is it’s always the person that didn’t know they could win it that wins it,” Gomez said. “It’s probably going to be someone you never thought or maybe it’s someone that was very obvious. That’s one of the exciting parts of the prize is to see who steps up to solve it. It might just be one person with a magic Rolodex that makes it happen.“
Christie St. Martin, community manager and digital media specialist for HeroX
By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Geekdom, the collaborative co-working space in downtown San Antonio, kicked off a new speakers event Thursday called The Master’s Series.
“Our goal is to pummel you with amazing information,” said Lorenzo Gomez, director of Geekdom.
The first speaker, Christie St. Martin talked about social media tips and advice for startup companies.
Martin, formerly social media manager for JPMorgan Chase and L’Oreal, currently serves as community development and digital strategy manager for HeroX and is from Toronto. She’s helping to kick off HeroX’s first local prize San Antonio Mx Challenge.
It’s really important companies manage their social media presence online, St. Martin said. The job is one of the most important for companies and it should not be regulated to the social media savvy intern, she said. Tools like Hootsuite, social media management software, can help.
In the past, customers with a complaint would call or write a company, but today’s consumers often go directly to complain on Twitter or Facebook, she said.
“Real time interaction is 100 percent where you need to focus your time,” St. Martin said.
In her PowerPoint presentation, peppered with pictures of LOL Cats and dogs, St. Martin advised companies to be honest, be you, don’t panic and listen to customers.
“The stuff that is super important is you being a real human,” she said.
She advised companies to brainstorm all of the frequently asked questions from customers and to put them into a document. She tells them to use that document as a guidepost in answering queries online. But don’t just regurgitate the stock answers, she said. Personalize each answer and tailor it to the particular customer, she said.
St. Martin also advised startups to cultivate their influencers, which she defined as “someone who is active online and followed by your target audience.” These people can drive traffic to your website and ignite interest around your brand. She listed five common types of influencers:
1. The Networker (Social butterfly)
2. The Opinion Leader (Thought leader)
3. The Discoverer (Trendsetter)
4. The Sharer (Reporter)
5. The User (Everyday customer)
St. Martin also advised companies to post regularly on all of their social media channels. But she advised quality over quantity of posts. The social media checklist St. Martin shared with the audience is listed below. She also gave away copies of Rohit Bhargava’s book: likeonomics: the unexpected truth behind earning trust, influencing behavior and inspiring action.
NowCastSA livestreamed the presentation, which is embedded below.
Watch live streaming video from nowcastsa at livestream.com
By KEITH CASEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Before I go any further, let me state that I loved working for Twilio. It’s cool technology but more importantly the passion, intelligence, and the ability of the senior leadership and just about everyone else is amazing. I walked in and felt like everything we did sharpened my skills and abilities every step of the way.
I write this post for a couple reasons.. First, I’ve been out of Twilio for a couple months, so I’ve finally organized my thoughts. Second, and more importantly, a number of people have asked me about becoming an evangelist and what the job is like.
First, what does a Developer Evangelist do?
This will vary from company to company and even as the company grows and matures, but here’s what I did:
Attended hackathons, gave demos, and helped people solve problems, Twilio-related or not.. an average of 1-2 hackathons/month for 2.5 years;
Update: It’s also worth noting that I co-organized 25-30% of those hackathons;
Spoke at an average of 15 conferences per year, usually a 1 hour presentation, sometimes a 3 hour workshop;
Wrote blog posts ranging from technical coverage of clever applications and good API usage to event writeups;
For my first year, I ran customer support every Tuesday, then one weekend day/month, then not at all once the Support team grew;
Acted as a sherpa to help customers navigate the organization to find the right person to talk to for whatever;
Kept an eye out for good employee candidates, made recommendations where appropriate;
Tested and reviewed projects, tools, and concepts coming out of the Product team;
Introduced and promoted partners when their products/services fit the needs of other partners & customers;
Introduced customers to Sales, helped Sales by visiting customers and helping them get started;
Made myself available at random coffee shops both in Austin and during travels;
Served as the point of contact for numerous community organizations and (inadvertently) a number of F500 customers;
Traveled 140 days during 2011;
Traveled 120 days during 2012;
Traveled 115 days during 2013 (but over 9 months, instead of 12).
Next, let me cover the high points of Developer Evangelism..
The job is like nothing else. In fact, in the right company, it will be exactly what you make it. At Twilio, we reported through Marketing but we interacted with Support, Sales, Product, Recruiting, and just about every other group in the organization. My personal passion was helping people get started, figure out where Twilio made sense for them, and getting their first project online. But on any given day, if I was tired of doing X, there was plenty of Y and Z to do also. Unfortunately, at other companies, the evangelists may report through Sales which likely means quotas. Or through Product which means installs or downloads are probable goals. Regardless, measurement is good, but it has to be the right measurements and things you can actually influence.
The opportunity is like nothing else. Finding smart people doing cool things was my job. I got to meet, hang out with, help, and work with some of the best and brightest across North America. There are people literally saving lives with Twilio and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. When you can go to sleep at night knowing the world is changing in a positive way due to your work.. amazing.
The community is like nothing else. I don’t just mean the individual tech communities as those are awesome too. I mean the growing network of evangelists. No one gets the job without being smart, passionate, friendly, and being well-connected. When you get to hang out with this crew, you learn about some of the best and brightest out there and get to play with the best technology, concepts, etc.
Now, let’s cover the dark side..
First, the job is prone to burnout. I was the first evangelist to make it past the 12 month mark and I’d wager I really only made it to 18 months before burnout started to set in and 24 months before it fully reared its ugly head. Now before you think Twilio is exceptional in that way, know that it’s a common situation across many companies. I know of one company where evangelists consistently leave at 18 months.
Next, the job wreaks havoc on your personal life. If you’re single with no kids, no pets, no mortgage, no blah, blah, blah, the flexibility is awesome. You can be in a different city every single weekend and never come to your “home” city. I know of at least two evangelists who gave up their apartments for just that reason. But if you do have any of those personal commitments, it’s another story.. being in a different city every weekend can be a curse. You always have to make arrangements, make apologies, and figure out how to juggle.
The killer for me was when TripIt started reminding me of upcoming “visits” to Austin between actual trips.. for the record, I live there.
Finally, you are never off the clock. This is the big one.. and I can think of one friend and colleague who was nearly destroyed by it. When you’re at an event, you’re representing the company. When you’re speaking, you’re representing the company. When you tweet, you’re representing the company. Everything you write, say, do, or whatever represents the company. You can use those “doesn’t represent the views” lines all you want but they don’t mean anything.
Think about that.. from the time you wake up until you go to sleep, you’re on the clock.
So there it is. That’s the full story on Developer Evangelism. If you can do it for the right company and team, it is one of the best jobs you can ever have. At the same time, it’s challenging, exhausting, and ripe for getting yourself in trouble.
If you have any specific questions, feel free to drop me a note: Keith Casey
Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Keith Casey’s personal blog. It is reprinted here with permission.
BY CHELSEA McCULLOUGH
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
Welcome to buzzword bingo. These are the terms and phrases that are prolific in headlines, tweets, panel discussions and conversations.
Topping Forbes’ list in 2014 is the word “disrupt.” The Wall Street Journal recently penned a piece “Disruption Is the New Normal,” where they describe the constant wave of innovations (another buzzword) that are replacing other technologies at a rapid pace. The article states, “Who would have thought that a mobile phone would challenge industries as varied as home phones, video cameras and flashlights? Digital alternatives undermined the business models for travel agents, restaurant guides and newspapers.”
Reporter L. Gordon Crovitz makes an elegant case with relevant examples of how mobile mapping apps have “disrupted” related satellite-based GPS device companies such as Tom Tom and Garmin. What was once a cutting-edge gadget becomes almost instantly obsolete. The most interesting aspect (for us at least) about this article is the well-stated point that while consumers are certainly benefiting… regulators are spinning. Technology is moving so quickly, it’s challenging for industry experts to keep up much less government officials who often struggle to keep stride with the pace of the private sector.
So what is a regulator to do?
Some economic champions would suggest that government should get out of the way and instead of creating roadblocks (or holding fast to outdated regulations), they should pave the way for entrepreneurs to create market-driven solutions. We couldn’t agree more, especially when it comes to expanding access to high-speed broadband. Consumers are downloading data, surfing the Internet, scanning social media and consuming video at ever-increasing rates, particularly via the mobile phones. This trend shows no sign of slowing. Smart regulators will open the floodgates and encourage companies to invest in communications infrastructure needed to provide platforms for entrepreneurs who are eager to satisfy the voracious appetite of broadband consumers.
True, regulation has its place and the private sector shouldn’t run unfettered. But this is a challenging new time when consumers are becoming accustomed to lightning-fast delivery of new products that provide ultimate convenience. Crovitz agrees and suggests, “The biggest impact of this big bang of innovation over the next few years could be on regulated industries and government itself.” And technology isn’t alone. Other sectors like pharmaceuticals, education, energy, and auto are seeing innovations run up against regulations designed before their new offerings existed.
When regulations, and the officials that administer those policies, stand in the way of “new-better-faster,” the people will speak and expect to be heard. Talk about disruption.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Chelsea McCullough’s work bridges the interrelated areas of entrepreneurship, social good, technology and communications. She serves as Executive Director of Texans for Economic Progress, a statewide coalition that advocates greater access to tech education, entrepreneurship and infrastructure. She is also founder of Intercambio, a consulting company that connects companies to opportunity where has participated in the launch of several entrepreneurial companies including FrameBuzz, NewsTaco, FlashValet and Vidamerica.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
It will be a SXSW pitch competition with a media twist. ATI/Silicon Hills Startup Pitch, sponsored by Silicon Hills News, Austin Technology Incubator and Central Texas Angel Network, will give 10 Austin companies a chance to pitch in front of investors and the media to determine two things:
1. How appealing is your company as an investment?
2. Can you tell a story the media finds irresistible?
Many companies know the criteria investors look for: A strong team, market validation, disruption, potential for big returns. Then they try to pitch their story to the media using the same criteria. But what makes a story sexy to reporters doesn’t always fall in these categories. A startup might become a media darling because it has a super colorful founder who gives great quotes. It might have an inspiring back story about a person whose life was changed by the product or technology. It might include a “dark night of the soul” aspect where the company nearly failed but pivoted and rose to success.
Everybody loves a good story.
“Communication is paramount,” said Kyle Cox, director of IT/Wireless & University Development portfolios at ATI. “Often entrepreneurs are too close to their own solution and find it difficult to succinctly tell their story. (Entrepreneur and venture capitalist) Mark Suster has famously said that VC’s invest in ‘lines not dots.’ Having a memorable story, a hook, for why your company is differentiated and defensible is a key component to begin building that ‘line.’”
Among the prizes is a series of articles published in Silicon Hills—which has 20,000 unique visitors monthly–about one of the companies. This would be a kind of Hero’s Journey series which might include an initial profile about the founding of the company, another about some pivot or series of iterations they’re wrestling with, another about their process learning to pitch. The topics will depend on the company.
Other prizes include three months membership in ATI’s Landing Pad Portfolio, three hours pitch coaching from Articulate Persuasion’s Monique Maley, who has coached some of the top startups in Austin, and free entry into CTAN’s next funding cycle. Each of the 10 teams competing will receive one SXSW Interactive badge.
The first round of the competition will be held online at AustinFastPitch.com. Online applications must be in by February 5th. From those applicants, judges will pick 10 startups, each of which will pitch on March 9 at the Austin Chamber Offices. The first round will take place at 9:30; the final round at 11 a.m.
Judges for the event include Venu Shamapant Live Oak Partners, John Stockton of Mayfield Fund, Pat Noonan of Austin Ventures, Monique Maley, Gary Forni of CTAN and Tom Chederar of Venture Beat.
The event is part of SXSW’s Austin section of Startup Village, one of the most popular and fastest growing sectors of Interactive.
“It’s great to have an event where Austin startups get a chance to represent on the worldwide stage that is SXSW,” Cox said.
By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
TrustRadius founder Vinay Bhagat taken at Tech Ranch Austin by Leslie Anne Jones
“Over the last decade consumers have benefited from greater transparency,” TrustRadius founder Vinay Bhagat said. Now, his website gathers reviews for business software, striving to do for business people what’s sites like Trip Advisor, Yelp and Cars.com have done for consumers.
The model isn’t exactly the same. Yelp relies on a vocal minority: only about 1 percent of users actually write reviews; and a committed foodie might share his opinion on 100 restaurants. Whereas most people using TrustRadius are familiar with about five software products, according to Bhagat, and top users might be familiar with up to 60. Thus, the site has to drive a higher participation rate to gather enough information.
To do so, the site is set up so users must register to receive continued access to reviews. Then the site asks people to profile themselves and encourages them to review products they’ve used. About 30 percent of TrustRadius’ registered users have reviewed a product.
The website relies on crowd-sourcing, but it also has a clear editorial standard to drive quality content. An in-house research team checks all reviews, and they wind up rejecting about 5 percent of submissions.
Reviews are structured in fixed sections (usability, implementation, customer support, etc.). This makes it easy for those researching products to find the precise feedback they’re looking for, and it also encourages more comprehensive review writing.
Reviewers receive emails on how many people have viewed their write up, and these updates might include an editorial question, prompting them to expand part of their opinion if they skipped over or wrote little in certain sections. Research Director Alan Cooke says in the beginning they had a 15 percent response rate to these prompts, but that has increased to 30 percent due to tweaks to the editorial process.
This careful focus on providing quality content has allowed the site to quickly ascend Google’s search results. TrustRadius isn’t doing any paid advertising, 70 percent of people find the site through Google searches, the other 30 percent through social referrals. The site is up to 50,000 visitors per month and has grown by 20 percent per month since last May, according to Bhagat. Mattermark, a company that provides research to venture capital firms, ranked Trust Radius as Austin’s second fastest-growing startup (behind Bitcoin processing company CoinTerra).
“It’s really the first website that I found I was really comfortable with all the information in the reviews,” said Debbie Personette, the HR system coordinator for Houston-based LINN Energy, who found the site while doing research. “The only think I didn’t like about it was there just weren’t enough reviews.” Though as she spoke, Personette looked at the site and noted there were now many more reviews for the product she was interested in.
TrustRadius isn’t the only website gathering peer reviews for business. Sites like Credii and IT Central Station have similar objectives (though both appear to be more targeted at IT professionals, where Trust Radius covers all business software). But Bhagat is no stranger to stiff competition: His first start-up Convio, a provider of relationship management and marketing software for non-profit organizations, was founded in 1999, had its Initial Public Offering in 2010 and was bought by software supplier Blackbaud for $325 million in 2012.
“When I started Convio there were twenty other people trying to bring Internet marketing to non-profits,” Bhagat says.
It was actually the pain of a miscalculated purchase at Convio that got him thinking about how to improve the buying process. The company bought a $100,000 human resource software package that didn’t perform as needed. “We’d been oversold by a sales person,” Bhagat recalled. “The company who bought us had made the same mistake.”
As Convio was being acquired, Bhagat had more time to think about what to do next and to research whether other businesses had similar software-buying problems (they did). Convio sold in May 2012, and TrustRadius incorporated in June. In November 2012 they launched a private beta site and on May 1, 2013 the public site went live. Then on June 28, they received $5 million from Mayfield Fund, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest venture capital firms.
TrustRadius bootstrapped through its first year, and Bhagat says they’re still keeping things lean. Presently, the team is nine people, eight in Austin and one in Iowa (a star employee from the Convio days, Bhagat says).The site plans to begin monetizing in the first half of this year once they’ve reached a critical mass of content. In the future they might offer paid premium content, but the site will initially generate revenue from the vendor side: Users who decide to buy the products they’ve been researching will be encouraged to connect to sellers through TrustRadius.
“Monetization is part of the plan for 2014,” Bhagat said. “But the first priority is scaling and providing deeper, richer coverage.”
Photo courtesy of SXSW Interactive
SXSW officials selected 48 finalists in six categories, including five Austin startups. And three other Austin startups were named as alternates.
In the enterprise and big data category, the Austin finalists are EvoSure and Shelfbucks.
In the entertainment and content technologies category, sonarDesign made the list.
In the innovative world technologies category, OP3Nvoice and Plum, formerly UBE, made the cut.
No local technology startups made the list for the health technologies, social technologies or wearables technology categories. But Filament Labs made the alternate list in the health category, Ferris Labs made the social technologies category as an alternate and Tsugi was an alternative in the innovative world technologies category.
The event takes place March 8-9th on the fourth floor of the downtown Hilton Hotel at SXSW Interactive’s Startup Village.
“Over the past five years of companies competing in SXSW Accelerator, 56 percent have gone on to receive funding in excess of $587 million and 9 percent of the companies have been acquired, so the judges are looking for truly innovative companies to raise the stakes,” SXSW Accelerator Event Producer, Chris Valentine said in a news statement. “All of the finalists have demonstrated the capability to change our perception of technology and we now have to recognize the utmost potential within a very distinguished group of entrepreneurs.”
The winners receive badges to the 2015 SXSW Interactive event, sponsor gifts and exposure to potential investors, customers, press and more.
This year’s SXSW Accelerator finalists include:
Enterprise and Big Data Technologies
AddSearch (Helsinki, Finland)
Addy (San Francisco, CA)
Databox (Boston, MA)
EvoSure (Austin, TX)
Fieldwire (San Francisco, CA)
Map-D (Cambridge, MA)
Shelfbucks (Austin, TX)
Trustev (Cork City, Ireland)
Entertainment and Content Technologies
Artiphon (Nashville, TN)
Eyeris (Mountain View, CA)
Fliptu (Los Angeles, CA)
MentorMob (Chicago, IL)
Namo Media (San Francisco, CA)
PlayCanvas (London, United Kingdom)
sonarDesign (Austin, TX)
Waygo (Providence, RI)
Health Technologies
ActiveProtective (Allentown, PA)
AdhereTech (New York, NY)
Kinsa (New York, NY)
Pixie Scientific (New York, NY)
Plantiga (North Vancouver, Canada)
Sensible Baby (Somerville, MA)
ThriveOn (San Francisco, CA)
Yingo Yango (Weatogue, CT)
Innovative World Technologies
CubeSensors (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
InsideMaps (Mountain View, CA)
Monsieur (Atlanta, GA)
OP3Nvoice (Austin, TX)
Plum (Austin, TX)
Synbiota (Montréal, Canada)
The Eye Tribe (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Viddyad (Dublin, Ireland)
Social Technologies
Ansa (Orinda, CA)
Connect (San Francisco, CA)
Felt (Telluride, CO)
MobiSocial (Menlo Park, CA)
PPLCONNECT (Montreal, Canada)
Samba.me (Tel Aviv, Israel)
Surfly (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Terranova (Chicago, IL)
Wearable Technologies
Bionym (Toronto, Canada)
Fashion Discovery Labs (San Francisco, CA)
Jon Lou (Staten Island, NY)
Kiwi Wearable Technologies (Toronto, Canada)
Mighty Cast (Montreal, Canada)
Pauline van Dongen (Arnhem, Netherlands)
People+ (San Francisco, CA)
Skully Helmets (San Francisco, CA)
Music and technology go hand in hand like bananas and cheerios, coffee and biscotti and alligators and a swamp.
And the music and tech industry in Austin work together in such perfect harmony like Paul McCartney’s Ebony and Ivory lyrics.
“Ebony, Ivory Living In Perfect Harmony
Ebony, Ivory, Ooh”
So it just makes sense, so much sense, that SpareFoot, the irreverent and fun startup known for pinup calendars and a sketchy workplace hiring Mockumentary would hold its first Battle of the Storage Bands contest in the self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World.”
That’s right and you don’t even have to work at a storage center to enter. But you do have to be a musical act from the Austin area that practices in local self storage units. (Who knew there was such a thing? Put down your hands SpareFoot people, I’m talking to other readers.)
Apparently you can be a one man or one woman band in a storage unit. (I might have to find my old squeeze box and spoons, rent a unit and begin practicing at Uncle Bob’s Self Storage.)
The talent search began on Jan. 13. Sparefoot requires contestants to submit a YouTube video of a performance of an original song. (Might I suggest: Ode to my locker, There’ll always be space for you in my storage unit, I love my stuff or Finding Treasures at Uncle Bob’s.) You can enter the contest here.
“SpareFoot’s Band Selection Committee then will consider the three musical acts that collect the most online votes by Feb. 21,” according to a news release. “Committee members will choose the one act that will play a 30-minute set to open The SpareFoot Party on March 7 at Austin’s Scoot Inn. Plus, the winner will receive VIP passes to the party, along with event transportation and one night’s lodging.”
SpareFoot, the nation’s largest online marketplace for self storage, has 102 employees in Austin. It was founded in 2008 and has raised $6.5 million in venture capital to date, according to its CrunchBase profile.