Austin Startup Week kicks off Monday and runs through Friday and it’s the biggest one yet.
Along with all the festivities celebrating startups, the Captivate Conference kicked off Sunday and South by Southwest Eco begins on Monday. Both have sessions and talks geared to technology startups.
Jacqueline Hughes and Josh Baer created the first Austin Startup Week in 2011 and it has grown steadily every year with new events like the Battle of the Bands and old favorites like the Austin Startup Crawl and Austin Startup Bazaar.
On Monday night, Ricardo Sanchez will host the largest Co-founders Meetup ever. He has more than 130 signed up to watch 12 pitches from The TechMap, Radvocacy, TeleCog, Freedom Family Ranches, Musiqmatrix, Zaplink, Taplet, Kindery, TaskTrak, Culture Booster, Aland Decision and Scribe Sense.
The Austin Technology Council hosts the first ever Battle of the Bands Monday night at Mohawk starting at 7 p.m. featuring bands from local startups.
For a full list of events, check out the Austin Startup Week website.
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The Captivate Conference kicked off today at the Palmer Events Center in Austin. The new conference focused on game development, film, music, content creation and creative media is the brainchild of Jennifer Bullard, who heads up the Austin Chapter of the International Game Developers Association.
The event features sessions on micro-transactions, crowdfunding, augmented reality and 3D printing. It also focuses on product launches, community building, monetization techniques and more.
The conference runs through Tuesday, Oct. 8th with more than 100 sessions and speakers.
Warren Spector, game executive with Disney Interactive, Junction Point and Ion Storm, gave the opening keynote speech this morning.
Other speakers include Gary Hoover, who recently launched Bigwig Games and formerly founded Bookstop and Hoover’s and William Hurley, known simply as Whurley, with Chaotic Moon.
“We decided to launch Captivate because we realized that there was a void we needed to fill,” Executive Director Bullard said.
“Convergence is our mantra,” Conference Director Suzanne Freyjadis said in a news statement. “We’re bringing film mobile, music, and game industries together with a very clear purpose. If you want to make a difference in your career, this is the conference for you. If you’re a filmmaker, for example, you’ll be encouraged to blur the lines between film, music, and games by participating in a game design session, learning how to create the perfect soundscape, or trying your hand at non-linear storytelling. Why limit yourself to a single industry when they’re all connected – and quickly becoming one and the same.”
By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Dirk Elmendorf and Pat Condon, co-founders of Rackspace, speaking at an Entrepreneurial Bootcamp at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
They might have to make a business plan, find funding, do market research, sell products or services, stay on top of legal issues and intellectual property rights and sometimes figure out manufacturing.
This weekend, 150 University of Texas at San Antonio students got an edge on their competition. They covered these topics in less than eight hours in UTSA’s CITE Technology Entrepreneur Boot Camp. The camp featured ten speakers, including Rackspace Hosting co-founders Pat Condon and Dirk Elmendorf.
“Follow your own path. Don’t follow conventional wisdom necessarily,” Condon said. “Some of the conventional wisdom that we did follow that we shouldn’t of was: don’t serve your customers because you can’t make money doing it. Our history is littered with doing things because a lot of other people were doing it. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should be doing it that way too.”
Condon and Elmendorf discussed the triumphs and pitfalls of their experiences, speaking at length about a time when Rackspace’s customer support was more abysmal than fanatical. They encouraged the students to push forward with their ideas even if they didn’t feel qualified or smart enough to see them through.
“When you read hacker news, Techcrunch, all that stuff — it always feels like the founders are these anointed geniuses that are passed down from – well, there is founder worship,” Elmendorf said. “Because we give this presentation inside Rackspace, I never want someone who is joining to think it was founded by geniuses and they couldn’t contribute. We were idiots! We got lucky and we worked hard. If you can stick it out and do all those things you can make it.”
Other presenters included YUMIX founder Alex Garner, Jackson Walker Attorney William R. Borchers, and It’s 2Cool Ltd. CEO Deb Prost.
“I hope that I can inspire some of these folks to really take that nugget of an idea that they have and do all the blood, sweat, and tears that you have to do to get to where you really can market a product,” Prost said.
Held biannually, the CITE boot camp is open to students and faculty members and is designed to both inform and encourage students towards a life of entrepreneurship. The students came from a wide variety of situations. Some were getting ready to enter the $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition with a team and a product. Others were part of the student CEO organization, part of the Certificate of Technology Entrepreneurial Management program, or simply entrepreneurship-minded students hoping to develop their skills.
“We’re taught in our program that whenever you have the opportunity to sit down and talk to people in the tech space that are from a different perspective, it’s always a good idea,” Business Senior Somer Baburek said.
Baburek is currently in the Business College’s entrepreneurship program and is preparing to enter the $100,000 competition with a medical device that wirelessly monitors fetal heart rates in labor and delivery. She attended the event to gain business knowledge and look for additional engineers for her team.
Engineering Senior Davis Richardson is also preparing for the competition, and attended to get better acquainted with the business side of startups. Richardson will be entering the competition with a device that trains students to design hydraulic systems.
“This is a really interesting opportunity because in the engineering college we spend all of our time looking at how to develop products internally,” Richardson said. “It’s not until here, or in electives, that we really get much insight into how this works outside the design process.”
Ramon Coronado and Tony Yuan at the UTSA Entrepreneurial Bootcamp
“We have a lot of science in academia but no one around the department can teach us about business,” Coronado said. “Before this course we didn’t have the chance to see how to translate the technology [to market].”
The event also attracted younger students as well. Sophomore David Barrick is not involved in a competition or an entrepreneurship class, but he does have a few ideas for a tech company and attended to learn more about obtaining patents and talking to investors for seed funding.
“I saw this conference on a Tweet in Twitter for UTSA. I have been thinking of starting a tech company, so I saw this and said, ‘yea, this is for me’” said Barrick.
As of this weekend, 1,300 students have now gone through the CITE Technology Entrepreneurship Boot Camp at UTSA. CITE, short for Center of Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship, is an interdisciplinary center for the colleges of engineering and business directed by Cory Hallam and Anita Leffel. While the boot camp is an achievement for the university, Hallam also sees the event as an essential part of an effort to grow the startup community, and the local economy, of San Antonio.
“We have to feed the pipeline of entrepreneurship in San Antonio, and these are students who will found companies now, found companies later, participate in three day startups, go be part of Geekdom,” Hallam said. “It’s great to be a contributor for San Antonio in that pipeline.”
Time Warner Cable now offers 900 hotspots around Austin.
The cable company began rolling out its expanded wireless Internet service in April and plans to install 1,350 WiFi hotspots throughout Austin by the end of the year. Time Warner plans to add additional hotspots in 2014.
The WiFi Internet service is available for free to Time Warner Cable customers with Internet service and on a pay-as-you-go-basis to others.
“We’re going to continue to invest to bring WiFi to areas in Austin where the community can take advantage of being connected to the Time Warner Cable network,” Kathy Brabson, area vice president of operations for Time Warner Cable, said in a news release.
The company recently installed WiFi hotspots in the following locations:
- Barton Springs road (Zilker Park to S. Congress)
- South Lamar (Riverside to Ben White Boulevard/Highway 71)
- The South Congress area (Riverside to Ben White Boulevard/Highway 71)
- 38th Street at the North Lamar corridor
Time Warner Cable is also offering a free two week trial of WiFi along with its partnership with the Austin City Limits Festival, starting Oct. 3rd and running through Oct. 13th. Time Warner Cable is offering free WiFi to everyone attending the music festival which runs this weekend and Oct. 11-13th.
Tabbedout, a mobile payment app that allows people to pay bar and restaurant tabs with their mobile phone, received $7.75 million in venture capital.
The Austin-based company announced the Series B financing deal Thursday on its website. The investors included NEA, Heartland Payment Systems and Morgan Creek Capital.
With the latest financing, Tabbedout has raised $13.5 million, according to its CrunchBase profile.
Tabbedout, founded in 2009, plans to use the funds on marketing and to expand sales.
“Tabbeout has created a truly innovative solution for the hospitality industry, giving merchants key insights into customer behavior and feedback, which greatly improves the consumer experience,” Rick Yang, principal at New Enterprise Associates, said in a news release.
Tabbedout is available at more than 1,000 locations nationwide. The free smartphone app is available for download from the Apple App Store or Google Play.
By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Ross William Ulbricht, alleged mastermind behind Silk Road, an illegal online marketplace for drugs, hacking software, forgeries and hit men. Photo from Ulbricht’s LinkedIn Profile.
Ulbricht, 29, allegedly operated the Silk Road, a sprawling $1.2 billion black-market bazaar for drugs, computer hacking software, forgeries and hit man services. He founded the site, programmed its features and oversaw its operations on a daily basis, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
The FBI arrested Ulbricht earlier this week on charges of narcotics trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering, according to a sealed criminal complaint by Christopher Tarbell, FBI special agent.
A Native of Austin
Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin and graduated from Westlake High School in 2002, is now in jail in San Francisco facing charges that carry several hundred years of jail time.
The FBI arrested Ulbricht for owning and operating the underground website known as “Silk Road,” which provided a platform to sell heroin, cocaine, LSD and Methamphetamines. Ulbricht, under an alias “altoid” allegedly called the site “an anonymous Amazon.com.”
The complaint also alleges that the Silk Road provided a platform to trade “malicious software designed for computer hacking, such as password stealers, keyloggers, and remote access tools.” It also traded in other illicit goods and services through a payment system based on Bitcoins, an unregulated digital currency.
The FBI alleges that Ulbricht added a Bitcoin “tumbler” to the Silk Road payment system to “ensure that illegal transactions conducted on the site could not be traced to individual users.”
The two-year investigation of Silk Road, headed up by FBI Special Agent Tarbell, also involved agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and Homeland Security Investigations.
So who is Ulbricht?
Ulbricht’s Facebook page reveals that he liked beer pong and crazy hat parties. He enjoyed movies like The Matrix, Office Space, Time Bandits and Lord of the Rings. His favorite books included Be Here Now, Hyperion, The Power of Now and Shogun.
His interests spanned money, partying, yoga, dancing, drumming and strength training.
He also focused on entrepreneurship and participated in a 3 Day Startup program in 2010. His LinkedIn profile listed his occupation as an “investment adviser and entrepreneur” based in Austin.
But the FBI alleges that starting in January of 2011 through September of this year, Ulbricht ran a global platform for drug dealers to sell controlled substances online.
And the plot deepened even further this year when Ulbricht allegedly “solicited a Silk Road user to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site,” according to the complaint.
The Silk Road operated on the “the onion router” or “tor” network, which provides anonymity to users.
“Based on my training and experience, Silk Road has emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today,” according to Tarbell. “Silk Road has been used by several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to well over a hundred thousand buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions.”
All transactions took place using Bitcoins
The site generated more than 9.5 million Bitcoins and collected 600,000 in Bitcoin commissions, equivalent to about $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions, according to Tarbell.
As of Sept. 23, the Silk Road had 13,000 items listed for sale under categories such as “cannabis,” “dissociatives,” “Ecstasy,” “Psychedelics,” and “Stimulants.” The items were sold in individual dosages and bulk orders.
During its investigation, law enforcement agents purchased more than 100 items of controlled substances such as cocaine, heroin, LSD and more from sellers on the Silk Road.
The Silk Road charged a commission, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent, for every transaction on its site.
Hiring Hitmen
Tarbell also reported that Ulbricht took “it upon himself to police threats to the site from scammers and extortionists, and has demonstrated a willingness to use violence in doing so.”
In a second criminal complaint from the state of Maryland listed on the Baltimore Sun’s website, Ulbricht is alleged to have hired a hitman to kill an employee who he thought was stealing from Silk Road. He allegedly paid $80,000 to an undercover cop to execute the employee in January of 2013.
And in another case of hitman for hire a few months later, Tarbell outlines how Ulbricht allegedly sent messages to have a Silk Road user in Canada with a wife and three kids, named “FriendlyChemist,” killed for $150,000 or 1,670 bitcoins. The guy was trying to extort Ulbricht for $500,000 or else he would release the names and addresses of Silk Road users.
Ross Ulbricht, photo from Twitter
How did Ulbricht end up in jail?
He graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 2006, according to his LinkedIn profile. Then he attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania School of Materials Science and Engineering.
On his LinkedIn profile, Ulbricht states that his goals shifted since graduate school and that he was focused on “creating an economic simulation” designed to “give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force” by “institutions and governments.”
Tarbell believed that system to be Silk Road. He also reported that Ulbricht, under the alias “altoid” posted on different online forums to market Silk Road.
The Social Media Trail
The FBI heavily relied upon social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google + to put together a profile of Ulbricht and link him back to Silk Road. For example, Ulbricht’s Google + profile listed his favorite YouTube videos, which included a number originating from Mises.org, the website of the Mises Institute, the world center of the Austrian School of Economics.
Ulbricht, under the alias DPR, had cited the “Austrian Economic theory” and the work of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard – economists closely associated with the “Misus Institute” as providing the philosophical underpinnings for Silk Road.
Ulbricht’s best friend is Rene Pinnell, founder of Hurricane Party and Forecast in Austin, which shut down in July of 2012. Pinnell moved to San Francisco shortly after that. Ulbricht was living at his parents house in Austin and moved shortly after that to join Pinnell in San Francisco.
In its complaint, the FBI reported that Ulbricht lived for a while with a friend who moved to San Francisco in September of 2012. That friend is believed to be Pinnell. They also made a YouTube video together interviewing each other for Story Corps, according to a posting on Pinnell’s personal website. The video shows Pinnell and Ulbricht in split screen talking about moving out to San Francisco, school friends, work, women and other interests. The two have known each other since sixth grade at West Ridge Middle School.
Josh, Frosty and other Aliases
In July of 2013, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted a package from Canada that contained nine counterfeit identity documents. Agents then visited Ulbricht at his house on 15th Street in San Francisco where he sublet a room for $1,000 monthly, which he paid in cash. He provided them with a copy of his real Texas driver’s license and said that his two other housemates currently only knew him by the fake name “Josh.”
He told the agents that “hypothetically anyone could go onto a website named “Silk Road” on “Tor” and purchase any drugs or fake identity documents the person wanted.”
“The agents also spoke with one of Ulbricht’s housemates at the address, who state that Ulbricht, whom he knew as “Josh,” was always home in his room on the computer.”
Tarbell concluded in his investigation that Ulbricht was stocking up on fake identities so he could rent multiple servers from hosting companies under false identities.
Ulbricht also used the alias “Frosty” posting in computer coding forums for help on programming his illegal underground website.
So how did a kid, who liked cliff jumping and snowboarding and grew up in Austin, got advanced degrees and studied to be an entrepreneur, go down such a bad path? That’s something that only Ulbricht knows. But one thing is for sure, this Silk Road didn’t lead to riches and the good life, but to the inside of a dingy jail cell. And if convicted, Ulbricht, a bright kid with so much promise, faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
At a hearing on Friday, Ulbricht’s lawyer denied all charges including that Ulbricht ran the Silk Road website, according to the Los Angeles Times.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
If startups could see where the trends are headed and get ahead of them, their chances of building successful businesses would jump immeasurably. That was one of the points of the MiniTrends 2013 conference at the Holiday Inn Town Lake Wednesday and Thursday. The subject of the conference was The Integration of Profit and Social Responsibility.
Among the keynote speakers was John Vanston, chairman of Technology Futures Inc. which sponsored the conference and author of the book “MiniTrends: How Innovators and Entrepreneurs Discover and Profit from Business and Technology Trends.”
Where to Spot MiniTrends
Vanston’s presentation “The Importance of MiniTrends and Seven Ways You Can Find Them” gave ideas for entrepreneurs about where to search for minitrends:
- Follow the Money. Government agencies like the Small Business Innovation Research Program and Small Business Technology Transfer Program give grants to federal agencies study areas of innovation that look promising. Those grants are public record, meaning businesses could look at places where the federal government sees an emerging trend worthy of investment.
- • Follow the Leaders. Pay attention to the people who are changing industries. Examine their thoughts and intentions.
- Examine Limits. Identify whether limits your idea faces are physical—meaning they can’t be changed; perceptual—meaning the limit is only a limit within current perceptions of the way the world works; or practical—whether the effort to exceed the limit isn’t worth the time or investment for the eventual gain.
- Consider Human Nature. People are still driven by the same needs they’ve always had, need for love, connection, success, pride…but the way they’re manifesting those needs changes.
- Take Note of Demographics.
- Analyze Frustrations. Identify situations that frustrate people, such as long waits at restaurants, for possible solutions to alleviate the frustrations.
- Look for Convergences. Breakthroughs often happen when technologies converge.
The conference attendees assembled into groups for the afternoon session where they diagrammed possible emerging trends in areas of social need by beginning with an issue, such as aging, and branching out into all the repercussions of aging, then the repercussions of those repercussions and so forth, looking for possible trends that could be turned into business opportunities. This exercise, according to Carrie Vanston, marketing director with Technology Futures, allows for building on diverse perspectives and revealing possible convergences.
Who in Austin Can Help
The final panel was called Help is Here: Digital Strategist Vicki Flaugher moderated the panel, which included Bijoy Goswami, co-founder of ATX Equation, Eve Richter, vice president of community and partnerships with Door64 and Joy Miller, marketing and outreach coordinator City of Austin Small Business Development Program.
The questions centered on what resources and people are available for entrepreneurs once they’ve got their business ideas.
Flaugher asked Miller what was the first thing entrepreneurs asked for when they came to see her at the city. Most of them, Miller said, are looking for capital—not loans as much as angel or VC money.
But both Richter and Goswami pointed out the fallacy that many new entrepreneurs have that if they just had investment money, their businesses would take off.
“You do need money,” said, Goswami, Austin’s chief evangelist for bootstrapping a business as part of a personal journey. “You need customers.” People do need support on the entrepreneurial journey, he said, but a lot of that can be found in the entrepreneurial community. He created one of several maps of the Austin entrepreneurial world, explaining how to find resources.
Richter pointed out that Austin Startup Week is next week and anyone an entrepreneur could hope to meet will be at the many events and parties. In addition, she said, the Central Texas Angel Network has office hours to help entrepreneurs get help shaping their ideas. The important thing, they both said, is to enter the startup world looking for relationship, not just handing out business cards and trying to close deals.
Once you’ve made personal connections, Richter said, many people, especially connectors who know everyone, will be happy to make introductions, direct you to events to meet the people you’re hoping to meet or connect you with resources.
“Social capital is a really intrinsic part of how Austin works,” Goswami said. “In other cities, your business identity is your identity. Here the question isn’t so much ‘What do you do?’ but ‘How are you?’ and the answer might be ‘Oh, I had a really hard yoga class today…..’ This is a small and loyal community and word travels fast.”
Full disclosure: Silicon Hills News was a media sponsor of the Minitrends conference.
By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
How do you repair a shattered leg, a ruined ligament, or severely burned skin? The answer is both simple, and a bit morbid: You need more human parts. Various bones, tendons, and other “parts” are obtained from organ donors by procurement companies, such as San Antonio’s Bone Bank Allografts, and provided to hospitals for surgery.
This year, however, Bone Bank Allografts has begun processing new human tissues for use in skin grafts and surgeries — and you aren’t going to believe where they get it.
The tissue is called amnion, and it is the innermost membrane in a human placenta – the same tissue that has direct contact with a child in the womb. The membrane is obtained, with consent of the patient, after a C-sections is preformed. The placenta is frozen, boxed up, and sent to Bone Bank Allografts where the amnion membrane is separated from the placenta’s chorion membrane and prepared for use in their new SteriShield product.
“We actually get the tissue from caesarean sections. This is donated tissue, by the mother, and that mother has done all the screening and workup that we would do for any tissue,” Chief Technology Officer James W. Poser said.
Bone Bank Allografts is not the first company to create an amnion product, but it is one of the few leading the way. While the medical benefits of amnion have been known for the last 30 years, the tissue has only started seeing use in the last four years – particularly in ophthalmic (eye-related) use.
So what are these benefits? Amnion membranes have unique biological factors that help heal wounds without producing scars. It contains particular elements, called cytokines and growth factors, which will regulate the body’s response to trauma, infection, and inflammation – resulting in better overall healing of a wound. The tissue is dried and sterilized into a thin, flexible sheet of material that surgeons can use in a variety of applications both topical and surgical.
Amnion can be used as a wound-cover in burns, skin ulcers, and general skin grafting procedures where it helps the graft better take to the patient’s body. In corneal abrasions or burns, the membrane can be placed over an eye wound to prevent the eye from scaring and permanently blurring a patient’s vision or causing them lasting pain.
Amnion is equally useful in surgery. Dr. Richard Guyer, an orthopedic surgeon at the Texas Back Institute, has been working with amnion for over two years.
“It prevents there from being any scar tissue over the sack that holds the nerves, called the Dura,” Guyer said. “So we use a lot of these amnion membranes almost routinely to prevent scars.”
Scar tissue around nerve clusters can cause pinched nerves and result in back pain after surgery. Typical surgeries, which can benefit from amnion, include disk herniation, neck fusions, and spinal decompressions.
Amnion is also very useful in tendon and ligament repairs. By wrapping tendons, ligaments, and any other moving components during surgery, a surgeon can prevent scar tissue buildup around those components and preserve a patient’s range of motion. Restricted movement is a common issue when repairing an Achilles tendon.
“One of the problems that is going to happen is this thing is going to freeze up on you,” Poser said. “All that scar tissue is going to grab that thing and hold to it. You want to prevent that from happening. One way to do that is to wrap it in Amnion.”
While Amnion products like SteriShield will be more expensive for surgeries in the short run, the tissue will unquestionably improve quality of life for the patients, Poser said. Previously, surgeons used “fat flaps” – which were literally thin slices of body fat – to protect tendons and nerve areas.
“We have used a number of other things that have not really been satisfactory. It seems to be the best thing that we have today,” Guyer said.
Because it has only been used for a short time, there is no definitive study that proves Amnion will create any cost savings for hospitals. It does, however, seem to reduce the need for secondary surgeries as well as reduce patent pain. According to Guyer, Amnion does make follow-up surgeries easier because of the reduction of scar tissue.
“In surgery we make different sizes of openings, so if we have to go back for another reason.. ..then the dissection is much easier because the properties of the membrane prevent scaring from adhering to whatever it’s covering,” Guyer said.
Turnstone, in partnership with Wharton management professor and human resource expert Peter Cappelli, has selected 15 Best Young Companies to Work for nationwide.
The list includes two companies in Austin: Sparefoot, an online marketplace for self-storage, and Sputnik Creative, a digital and branding studio.
Turnstone received more than 100 nominations in its inaugural contest.
Turnstone selected the companies based on positive culture, great leadership, business innovation, talent retention, community outreach and “an intentionally designed workspace,” according to a news release.
The companies had to be less than 10 years old with no more than 100 employees.
“These 15 companies have created environments which embrace the company’s personality by vividly representing their culture, fostering a tight community and exuding fun,” Kevin Kuske, general manager and chief anthropologist for turnstone said in a news release.
The other companies included: Chalkfly of Detroit, Cloudability of Portland, OR, Fanology of Los Angeles, Greatist of New York, Groove Commerce of Baltimore, MD, Hoopla.io of Kansas City, KS, Nexus IT group of Overland Park, KS, Parking Panda of Baltimore, MD, Privy of Boston, MA, SocialRada of Washington, D.C., Sparkhouse of Costa Mesa, CA, Sprout Social of Chicago, IL and Thanx Media of Glen Ellyn, IL.
AT&T Tuesday announced it has started to roll out its high speed broadband network in Austin, which can deliver speeds up to one Gigabit per second.
The service includes AT&T U-verse with GigaPowerSM, Internet services and more TV services and features in December.
“Austin embodies innovation and social consciousness, and is the heart of a vibrant, ever-evolving tech culture and entrepreneurial spirit,” Dave Nichols, President of AT&T Texas said in a news release. “With our all-fiber U-verse services, we are building the foundation for a new wave of innovation for Austin’s consumers, businesses, and civic and educational institutions. It’s about engaging the full community and empowering the city and its people with all that technology can offer us. This investment will help attract new business and new jobs to Austin.”
AT&T is encouraging consumers and business owners to vote to help AT&T identify which neighborhoods get the high speed network in the future. The company plans to further expand its network next year.
“This is an exciting time to live and work in Austin. We currently sit at the cutting edge of technology and this deployment will allow our businesses and residents to work, educate, create, invest, and build at faster speeds,” Mike Rollins, President of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce said in a news release. “Jump-starting the actual construction of GigaPower will add another reason for people to want to do business and innovate in Austin and call Austin home.”
