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Rackspace Hosting Holds 7th Annual Thanksgiving Day Food Drive

November 24, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

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All photos by Samantha Davis.

Despite the 40 degree weather and high wind, two turkeys and the Roosevelt Rough Rider mascot continued to dance to the music in front of Rackspace Hosting’s San Antonio headquarters. The normally hot and stuffy mascot suits now failed to keep them warm.
“The thing that kept me warm today is dancing a lot,” Rackspace Sr. Manager for Lead Generation and cooked-turkey mascot Stan Slimp said.
But Slimp wasn’t the only frozen turkey on the move. Several feet away more than 70 volunteers loaded turkey after turkey into local residents’ vehicles along with everything else needed for a complete Thanksgiving meal.

In total, Rackspace Hosting purchased 1,500 turkeys for the event. Additionally, 1,500 “Rackers” spent their own money to put together 1,546 boxes of food which included mashed potatoes, rice, beans, green beans, carrots, cranberry sauce and more. The boxes also contained non-Thanksgiving items such as peanut butter, jelly, cereal, and spaghetti for kids to eat over the winter break. The San Antonio Food Bank supplied additional soda, chips, fresh produce, and bread for 1,500 families as well as boxes for the Rackers to use. In total, each family received around 100 pounds of food.
“It’s part of our culture to give back, to be a neighbor,” Rackspace Community Affairs

Specialist Allie Howard said. “One of the reasons that we moved into this side of town and into this neighborhood is because we had an opportunity to make a difference and to elevate this community.”
Around 20 Food Bank volunteers and 16 Theodore Roosevelt High School students helped the Rackers load all the produce into each car. More volunteers arrived from the community as well. Some of the Racker’s children even drew Thanksgiving pictures to give away to the families.
“It may be hard work, but at least we are able to help the community,” Theodore Roosevelt Senior Robert Robledo said. “It’s fun to be here, to be helping out someone you don’t know.”
To distribute vouchers for the food, Rackspace worked with family specialists at seven northeast San Antonio schools in the Walzem area and the San Antonio Food Bank. The vouchers were specifically targeted to families under the poverty line. According to San Antonio Food Bank COO Erika Borrego, one in four children and one in five adults in the Walzem area are classified as “food insecure” — meaning they are often not sure where their next meal will come from. In the local schools which received vouchers, more than 90 percent of students live at or below the poverty line. Without the Rackspace food drive, many residents would not be able to have a Thanksgiving.
“It really helps us out. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had anything,” resident Karen Kendrick said. “It’s going to make a big difference for us because we don’t really have any relatives to get together with.”
“The way things are right now, as hard as things are, anything that people give you makes you feel good,” resident Manuela Munoz said. “This is a lot of love. You gotta love people for them to be out here in this cold weather. It’s a blessing.”
While giving out food was the main goal of the event, Rackspace also worked hard to create a fun and welcoming atmosphere. For the last two years, Rackspace K-Rack DJ and Private Cloud Evangelist Dale Bracey pumped out dance music to keep residents, and volunteers, upbeat.
“Everybody’s dancing. We had people rolling up just dancing in their cars with a smile on their face,” Bracey said as his system played Baauer’s Harlem Shake. “You kind of get them involved; make them feel part of it.”
“It’s nice to be able to make people laugh and have a good time and make them feel welcome.” Rackspace’s Lawrence “Sugar Bear” Reyes said as he greeted residents in his turkey suit. “It is great to see Rackspace leading the charge here for the community, and people volunteering their time left and right to be part of something special.”

Some residents, such as Marvin Trimble, even got out of their car to join the festivities.
“Bro, I was dancin’!,” resident Trimble said. “They made this fun. They made a sad situation – a man needin’ some help – fun!”
At the end of the day, the food drive gave out 1,011 complete meals – roughly 50.5 tons of food. The San Antonio Food bank plans to distribute the remaining 239 turkeys and roughly 500 food boxes across San Antonio and the surrounding counties.

San Antonio-based Xenex Lands $11.3 Million in Funding

November 21, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

San Antonio-based Xenex Disinfection Services announced Thursday that is has received $11.3 million in funding.
The funding comes from Battery Ventures, Targeted Technology Fund II and continued investment from existing investors including RK Ventures.
The company will use the funding for product development, international expansion and increasing its U.S. sales force.
An estimated two million people get infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria every year and 23,000 die as a result of their infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To help prevent infection, Xenex makes a portable robot that can disinfect a room using ultraviolet light to destroy viruses, bacteria, mold, fungus and bacteria spores.
“Healthcare associated infections are a global health crisis. In the United States alone, 278 people lose their lives every day from an infection they unnecessarily acquired during their hospital visit. The Xenex technology is proven and is rapidly gaining acceptance. Xenex is the only company whose customers have published peer reviewed outcome studies showing a reduction in infection rates after implementing Xenex’s disinfection technology,” Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex, said in a news release. “We want to get our devices into hospitals as quickly as possible to help solve this enormous problem.”
Nearly 200 hospitals and medical centers currently use Xenex’s room disinfection system.

Austin Startup ScanSee Creates an All-in-One City App

November 21, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Imagine that you needed to report a pothole to the city, pay your electricity bill, find a good sushi place nearby, and promote your business on mobile devices. What mobile app would you use? Well you would have to use several, because no one app does all that – at least not quite yet.
Austin startup ScanSee is creating that app, called HubCiti, which can link a city’s businesses, departments, services, and consumers together in one place. ScanSee is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur and CEO Roy Truitt — founder of 17 different companies including Truco Enterprises which manufactures the On the Border brand of chips and salsas. Truitt founded ScanSee along with fellow entrepreneur and friend Nathan Ungarean three years ago. The startup has an ambitious scope, but Truitt has been working on the app for three years and already has $4 million invested – most of which is personal money from past ventures.
“It’s not a minor undertaking,” Truitt said. “What we’ve done is really put all the commerce in the city together with one app. You can find all the city information, you can report a lost dog, you can two-way communicate with city employees.”
ScanSee, founded in Dallas in January of 2011, launched in Austin last March and moved its corporate headquarters to the city at that time.
When fully implemented with a client city, HubCiti will enable users to access government services, find and interact with nearby businesses, and market their own business directly to customers. A beta version of the business component, called myScanSee, has been out on the Apple App Store since the beginning of the summer. Fifty Austin companies participated in the free beta trial including service companies, restaurants, bakeries, bars, retailers, and specialty businesses.
According to ScanSee, about 70 percent of the beta companies have converted to the paid version, which offers each business a page on the app with full Website functionality. The service costs $50 a month and can be cancelled at any time.
“It is driving more phone traffic my direction,” Central Texas Gun Works owner Michael Cargill said. “Once we got it all set up, they showed me the different statistics of people going to the site.”
Cargill is already paying for the app and plans to keep it as long as it drives more traffic to his store. Michelle’s Patisserie owner Michelle Doyon also plans to pay for the app because it lets her business push out specials.
“I feel like it was another way to get us the everyday type of customers who are looking for a little deal here and there,” said Doyon. “We really don’t do any advertising to that market.”
ScanSee also offers a free version for businesses that includes a link to the business’s website as well as basic location and contact information.
The full version of ScanSee’s product, HubCiti, will generate revenue by charging each client city a negotiated yearly subscription. Local businesses utilizing the paid version of the app will pay $50 a month and local manufactures will have a similar functionality for $500 a year.
ScanSee has been seriously negotiating with several Texas cities for the last five months and has already closed their first deal in the last week. The startup has chosen not to release the city name, as they are waiting to do a joint press release event.
To implement its app, ScanSee works with each client city to create a database of all businesses by using city records, reaching out to local chambers of commerce, and buying additional city information from affiliate networks such as Impact Radius. It then approaches local businesses about using the apps paid features. To get residents to adopt the app, they will use traditional options like billboards and ads.
While ScanSee is for-profit, it was also founded with a philanthropic goal.
“What the company was created and founded to do was to provide funding for higher education in a self sustaining way versus asking for donations all the time,” Truitt said. “In order to do that, we generate funding and give half of it to higher education.”
ScanSee generates this funding in two ways. When local businesses and manufacturers sign up for the paid version of the city app’s business product, a percentage of that revenue is given back to the city to be used for a higher education fund. Additionally, ScanSee will give back half of the final profit it generates from each city towards the fund.
While ScanSee is the only company selling such an app to Texas cities, it is not without competitors for the consumer market. Yelp.com already has locations, reviews, and contact information for many restaurants and businesses and Google remains an effective tool for exploring a city as well.
ScanSee CMO Penny Merian says HubCiti will still have an edge because it provides a deeper level of information on businesses and also gives the consumer the ability to access deals and promotions a business might offer.
“Google does do a lot, but I couldn’t – as a retailer – know that you are three miles away from me and I’m running a happy hour so I’m going to push out a special to you to come in.” Merian said. “A big piece of these app sites is the marketing piece.”
According to Penny, HubCiti also aggregates reviews directly from businesses which should enable users to get reviews all in one place – which could give the app an edge over Yelp.com and other review sites.
ScanSee expects to hold the launch event with its first client city in the next 30 days.

Dell Expands its Entrepreneurial Initiatives

November 21, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Dell is giving one lucky startup an opportunity to pitch their company to Michael Dell at Dell World next month.
Dell has already selected six startups including ihiji in Austin to present at Tech Innovation day: Pitch Slam at Dell World.
The online contest kicks off today to find the final technology startup to participate. The deadline for submission is midnight on Nov. 29th.
The Pitch Slam is part of the initiatives Dell is taking as the world’s largest startup. The company went private earlier this year.
During Global Entrepreneurship Week, on Thursday, Dell announced a global expansion of its Center for Entrepreneurs Initiative with a U.K. Centre in the United Kingdom. It plans to open another center in Ireland later this year and other centers next year.
“For Dell, supporting entrepreneurs isn’t just a business strategy, but a corporate philosophy. Since launching in the United States a year ago, the Dell Center for Entrepreneurs has been a true testament to the collaborative win-win of startups and corporations partnering for growth,” Ingrid Vanderveldt, entrepreneur-in-residence at Dell, said in a news statement. “Today, we’re excited to be taking big steps forward in expanding this footprint globally.”
Dell also has a $115 million Dell Innovators Credit Fund to provide financial and technology resources to startups. And its Founders Club, is a hand-picked group of 150 funded startups that Dell has invested in to help scale quickly.
The companies participating in the pitch slam include Neverware, a New York-based startup that improves schools’ access to working computers through software. The other startups include Nebula in San Francisco, Simple Relevance in Chicago, ihiji in Austin and Bottlenose in Los Angeles.
Dell also announced an entrepreneur in residence global advisory board made up of experts including Ashish J. Thakkar, founder of Mara Group and winner of the 2013 Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the World Entrepreneurship Forum. Other members include “Ido Leffler, co-founder of Yes To Inc., the No. 2 natural beauty brand in the U.S; Marcelo Sales, founding partner of 21212, a digital business accelerator headquartered in Rio de Janeiro and New York City; Catherine Graham, president and co-owner of RIGHTSLEEVE, and co-founder and CEO of commonsku, and Elizabeth Gore, resident entrepreneur at the United Nations Foundation.”

HomeAway’s Partnership Expands its European Reach

November 20, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

HomeAway announced Wednesday that it has expanded its partnership with Interhome AG, a leading managed vacation rental company in Europe, to add more listings to its network.
Austin-based HomeAway expects the partnership to add tens of thousands of online bookable vacation rentals to HomeAway on its European sites, FeWo-direkt and HomeAway.co.uk and later on Arbitel.fr in France.
“To date, this is the largest distribution partnership enabled by HomeAway’s pay-per-booking product for property managers, which launched earlier this month,” according to HomeAway.
“We’re excited to have a close integration with one of the largest and oldest companies in the business that enables our customers to receive quotes and book vacation rentals online,” HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples said in a news release. “We expect this is the beginning of many relationships with leading property managers, like Interhome, that will ultimately provide family and group vacationers with a high level of service.”
Interhome’s operations focus on France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.
“Working with HomeAway is a great fit because both companies passionately believe that vacations are not just about where you go, but where you stay,” Interhome CEO Simon Lehman said in a news release. “We look forward to helping even more families and groups create lasting memories with a level of service and comfort they’ll never forget.”

ABC’s of Entrepreneurship Book Launches

November 19, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Serial entrepreneur Bryan Menell and speaker Thom Singer knew each other in seventh grade back in Los Angeles. But they’ve made a pact never to tell anyone anything about those days, so there’s no point in asking. Monday night, they celebrated the launch of their book at Umami Mia on Barton Springs Road: The ABC’s of Entrepreneurs. It’s the tenth edition of Singer’s ABC series which includes The ABC’s of Networking and The ABC’s of Speaking.
Singer had wanted to write the book for a while, but got stuck.
“I’m a solo entrepreneur,” he said. “I’ve never taken money, never had employees, never had a co-founder, so a lot of the topics I couldn’t really write about first hand. So I killed the project. And Bryan came to me about a year later and said ‘What happened?’ and I said ‘I didn’t have the street cred.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but I do. Why don’t I help you write the book?”
ABC’s of Entrepreneurs covers topics like E is for Equity: “The most common pitfalls in equity distribution are undocumented and poorly defined promises of it. Imagine that you’re just about to close on a round of investment capital for your business when the investors figure out that you promised Cousin Clyde three percent of the company in exchange for office space. The first problem is that it’s not backed up by any signed documentation and the second problem is that you haven’t defined the equity. Is three percent of the company in options, common stock, preferred stock or warrants?”
For someone who has been studying the entrepreneurial world for a while, the points might be rudimentary, as the title suggests. But it might bring up some new thoughts, too. Singer plans to offer the book, along with his others, at his speaking engagements.

Formula One Fuels Tech Connections Between Austin and the U.K.

November 18, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
There was something almost surreally Texan about the Best of Great Britain Showcase Friday night at the Moody Theater at ACL Live. At one point, a conclave of what appeared to be seven-foot men in 10-gallon hats created a kind of Texan Stonehenge, towering over the crowd near the photo booth where Rick Perry was getting his picture taken with British Consul General Andrew Millar.
Standing among them, hatless, was Formula Austin president Andy Fish. Fish has been following Formula One for 30 years. His father raced the #2 Shelby Mustang to a national championship in the late 1960s.
“When we wanted the Formula One race to be here in Austin my international friends asked ‘Why Austin?’” Fish said. So he asked them, when they went to races in other parts of the world, what did they do besides go to the race. The answer came back, not much, because there wasn’t much else to do.
“I said, ‘That’s why the race is in Austin. Because Austin is different from every other track in the world. We’ve got so much going on here, when the world comes, they love it!”
To prove it, the Formula Austin team helped create a number of events, like this one with iconic music like Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel, Robert Earl Keen, Carolyn Wonderland, Rick Trevino and Marcia Ball, all of whom performed for crowds of two-steppers and swing dancers.
Another connection to Austin is technology, Fish pointed out. Three years ago, he said, he was with the Williams team at the Silverstone track in Great Britain and got access behind the pit wall. There, he said, engineers had 1,500 sensors on each car, feeding information into 24 computer screens, and a bank of servers, all with the name Dell on them.
Dell, along with Intel’s, Technology helps the Caterham F1 Team perform at its peak capabilities.
“Huge supercomputers perform billions of calculations to see which of a hundred front wingplates will work best,” according to Dell. “Servers provide a mobile office for over 60 people, 20 times per year. Gigabytes of data travel through virtually bulletproof laptops before being beamed back to a team’s base, sometimes on the other side of the world.”
Danny Lopez, Head of UK Trade and Investment spoke briefly about the UK’s campaign to promote the greatness of Great Britain, building on the momentum they gained during the London Olympics and “showcasing stories of creativity, technology and innovation: That’s the story of formula One,” he said. The Britain is great campaign “reminds audiences around the world that Britain is a great nation in which to invest, do business, study and visit.”
But he also got the biggest laugh of the night in this Keep Austin Weird crowd, by citing a BBC report that showed people from the UK are moving to Texas in great numbers because Texans are friendly, the business world is thriving, and Texans are “normal.”
Among the places he visited during his time in Austin was Capital Factory.
Gov. Rick Perry also spoke, pointing out that, when Texas was a republic, Great Britain was one of the nation’s that recognized its statehood. He also noted “No one will ever forget that it was a Brit who won the first U.S. Grand Prix.”

SparkFun’s National Tour Teaches Kids the Basics of Programming

November 16, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

On Geekdom’s projector screen, a buffalo and crab were prepared to move around a purple race track. SparkFun’s Jeff Branson gave the students the final programming directions for moving their animated characters.
“We have to be able to rotate to drive the buffalo, or in your case the flying pancake or whatever you’ve created,” Branson said. “I have to use my slider to drive my buffalo.”
This wasn’t Branson’s first digital rodeo. The SparkFun National Tour has already visited 70 cities on the way to San Antonio while teaching kids about programming, soldering, and building circuits. The SparkFun tour is an educational outreach mission of the larger SparkFun Electronics Company — based in Boulder, Colo. — which makes components for a wide range of prototype electronic devices as well as components for students, teachers, and inventors.
The San Antonio stop, which taught programming, was organized and funded by San Antonio nonprofit SASTEMIC – an educational organization working to organize and grow the local Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, known as STEM, community. SASTEMIC signed up for the event a year ago when they contributed $1,500 to the SparkFun Kickstarter campaign. Geekdom hosted the event.
Thirty-five students, ages 8-14, attended the event. While using Scratch, a drag-and-drop programming software, the students learned to program if-then statements and manipulate variables so that their animated character, called a sprite, could maneuver around a race track while avoiding another sprite. By the end of the day the students would have a simple game, which even included programming sprite collisions and creating a scoring system.
“When the crab runs into the buffalo, what do we want to happen?,” SparkFun Curriculum Curator Derek Runberg asked. “How about we lose one coin? What do we do when we want to subtract coins?”
To control their game, the students used a PicoBoard– a SparkFun-created multifunctional circuit board that has buttons, sliders, and sensors and can be programmed to work with Scratch. The kids had to program their software to work with their hardware. In this case, they used the slider to steer their sprite and a button as an accelerator. Once their character moved, they collected coins around their racetrack.
While the kids might not have noticed, the exercise required substantial problem solving as well as some intermediate math.
“It’s a very concrete way of teaching variables to kids at this age. In their standard math class, they just see a variable as a letter. In this they get to see that value change over time depending on what they are doing on the board,” Runberg said. “It makes a really good mental connection between something abstract and reality.”
Programming a racing buffalo or pancake might be more fun than work, but it’s the first part of a much bigger picture for SparkFun. The ultimate goal, according to Education Outreach Coordinator Jeff Branson, is to speed up the educational process for the next generation of programming talent.
“We feel like it’s the key to the future of innovation in this country,” Branson said. “It takes about 15 years to produce a significantly advanced engineer or computer programmer who is able to work at the levels of technology that are common in our society. If we start kids really young in these drag-and drop programming environments, by the time they get to the [Coding] languages, the vocabulary and the techniques are something they’ve already got. So it makes it that much easier, they learn that much faster, and we can push them into advanced territory that much sooner. ”
Parents such as Jay Tkachuk agree. While Tkachuk is Vice President of Online Services for Security Service Federal Credit Union, he has never been code-savvy and wants his kids to have that ability.
“To put it mildly, people who know how to code have special powers. I want our kids to not only be savvy how to use technology but to understand it on a fundamental level,” Tkachuk said. “We are trying to move away from the paradigm of just being users. I want them to be able to create or, if necessary, fix things.”
Both of Tkachuk’s 8-year-old kids, Kai and Michael, participated in the event.
“We were doing Scratch the cat, and we were making racetracks so they could race each other and see who would win,” Kai said. “I put the cat on the buffalo and I drew a Mario horse.”
The SparkFun National Tour will continue on to Houston Sunday and then will end in Victoria on Monday.
SASTEMIC plans to continue creating STEM programs, starting with a high school outreach program in January led by STEM Director Mark Burnett. The nonprofit organization purchased Geekdom’s Geekbus last summer, and will begin a high school pilot program next year using the resources of the SA Maker Space.
SASTEMIC founder and Chairman Scott Gray, who is also the President of Elevate Systems, says the programs are important to the San Antonio economy.
“The goal is to get the K through 12 kids excited about all of the STEM pathways so that they can progress and go to college and get degrees so we can hire them here in San Antonio,” Gray said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Written Raises $1 Million in Seed Stage Funding

November 15, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Written.com receives $1 million in seed stage funding from LiveOak Venture Partners, Floodgate and several angel investors.
Written.com plans to use the funding to expand its business development efforts and its blogger network.
The Austin-based startup connects bloggers with brands interested in licensing their content.
“Written.com takes the guesswork out of content marketing,” Josh Kerr, CEO of Written.com said in a news release. “Traditionally, content marketers create content, publish it, invest in promotion, and then try to engage readers and generate social lift. But engaged users and great content already exist. We flip the old content marketing model by starting with content that already attracts an engaged audience, and then activating it within a brand’s owned media channels.”
“Written.com stands out with a refreshingly different take in a crowded market, solving marketers’ most pressing problem by helping deliver a proven, engaged audience to their brand,” Krishna Srinivasan, General Partner with LiveOak Ventures Partners said in a news release. “We’re already seeing their strategy prove itself effective for both brands and bloggers, and we’re excited to be working with this experienced team and being a part of their growth.”

Diligent Consulting Lands $5.2 Million Contract with the Military

November 15, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

San Antonio-based Diligent Consulting announced on Friday that it has received a $5.2 million contract with the military.
The company got a contract for Cryptologic Mission System Software Services to support its Air Force Lifecycle Management Center Cryptologic and Cyber Systems Division in San Antonio.
The contract supports modernizing and integrating the cryptographic units in various United States Air Force applications.
“Diligent understands the criticality of ensuring these crypto systems function correctly, keeping information secure in support of multiple worldwide missions,” Rich Riney, the company’s Chief Operating Officer, said in a news statement.
Founded in 2001, Diligent a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business.