By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Eight companies pitched to a crowd of more than 100 potential partners, investors and others at the Co-founders Meetup at Capital Factory Monday night.
Jason Brown, a game designer with many Microsoft games to his credit, is working on games to help autistic children interact. From moving a spaceship up and down by smiling or frowning to mirroring games with “smiley” faces that have various facial expressions. He’s gotten positive feedback from both teachers and parents on the games.
Daniel Senyard from Vivogig explained the new sponsorship platform his company is creating for its app and website that allow people to share photos of bands on social networks. The sponsorship platform would connect companies looking to sponsor specific bands or performances with discounts on the company’s goods and services. Points and discounts can be earned by followers of the band who share the band’s photos.
Adam Gravois has 18 years experience creating visual effects for film and commercials and is creating a company to let customers virtually try on items—such as eyeglasses—just by taking a picture of themselves on a tablet then clicking on images in a catalog. He works with developers to communicate how to transform visual effects into digital products and has created 3,000 pairs of glasses so far. Gravois is looking for someone with a business development background to help create relationships with corporate customers.
Tom Maiaroto was looking for technical help and investors for his company Virality Score, which creates an index measuring the virality of web content. He has created a score based on shares and web addresses, known as Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs, mentioning the content which can help creators optimize their content to increase sharing. He is measuring more than 15,000 URLs every hour, updating every 15 minutes. At present, he said, he has no customers but he anticipates the NFL will soon be a client. At present, it is possible to go on his website and check the virality of one URL vs. another.
Nickolay Shestapalov, founder of Ecoscape Solutions, introduced his early stage idea of a clean technology that could be used by commercial buildings to greatly reduce the amount of water they use for landscaping. At present, he said, the idea has no hardware. But Shestapalov, a computational scientist, said that existing smart irrigation systems schedule watering to reduce the amount of water used, but never measure the existing moisture in the ground.
“This would be like trying to treat a patient without taking his temperature,” he said. His system would not only measure the existing moisture in the ground but would connect with weather systems and postpone watering when there was a particularly high chance of precipitation.
Raymond Westwater, founder of Futureware, has devised a new video compression algorithm that delivers video 4-to-5 times faster than existing systems. He calls his compression technology Zpeg. Westwater was not looking for help with the technology, he said.
“I can’t take investment yet, I’m really far from that. And you’d have to be one hell of a damn good compression guy to out produce me. What I need,” he joked, “is my alter ego, the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, the lying, treacherous CEO.”
Adam Singh is a digital marketing consultant with Phunware and is working on an Internet marketing report system that scrapes information from Google Analytics and translates it into easily read dashboards that explain SEO metrics for customers who are not SEO literate. He’s looking for a technical cofounder who can help him iterate based on close contact with customers and their experience with the team.
Ron Lasorsa, founder of Local Magnet is trying to raise money and work on getting a larger sample to validate his service which is lead generation for businesses that rely on customers calling during emergencies—like plumbing services or roadside assistance. His click-to-call platform sells a certain number of calls to a given business and allows them to see specific metrics on return on investment. For example, the company bought a certain number of calls, it could track how many customers and what kind of income it made directly from that call.
The next meeting of Co-Founders Austin is October 7 at the Capital Factory.

Two Austin digital design and marketing firms have merged.
SpaceCraft and Element Creative have joined forces and will operate under the management of SpaceCraft CEO Adam Moore and Element CEO Dan Isaacs.
The merger allows the company to expand, improve their products and provide great customer support.
SpaceCraft makes software to creative websites for small businesses. The software optimizes its performance on mobile devices. Its software, introduced in 2012, has built more than 1,000 websites. SpaceCraft received $1.35 million in Series A funding in August of 2011, according to the Austin Business Journal.
“We’ve been keeping track of SpaceCraft’s significant growth over the last couple years.” Isaacs, CEO of Element said in a news release. “I’m excited about combining these two experienced teams and at the potential of what we can accomplish in this rapidly growing market.”
“This merger brings together two great teams with proven track records.” Moore, SpaceCraft’s Co-founder and CEO, said in a news release. “Dan and I have worked together for over a decade. We helped Dell build their online business in the 90’s. As partners at T3, we helped make it one of Austin’s leading digital marketing firms, and most recently, we co-founded, grew and successfully sold digital marketing agency Springbox.”
Element Creative, founded in October of 2011, is a top digital design firm whose clients include Adobe, Evernote and Bloomfire. The combined company will have 18 employees and is profitable. The company plans to hire more employees and look for a bigger office and it may raise additional capital to expand.

Facebook today announced it has partnered with Mass Relevance and select media companies to allow them to integrate Facebook conversations into their coverage of real-time events.
The partnership will allow Mass Relevance, an Austin-based startup, to access Facebook information to gauge the impact of an event, an article or a broadcast.
Facebook is making available its Keyword Insights API, an aggregation of the total number of posts that mention a specific term, and the Public Feed API, which displays a real-time feed of public posts for a specific word.
The tools can provide demographic insight around specific topics.
“For instance, now every week during the “What’s Trending” segment of The Today Show, NBC can easily include how many people on Facebook talked about a popular subject, where it’s getting the most buzz, whether it’s most popular among males or females, and with which age groups,” according to Facebook.
Mass Relevance will also use Facebook’s tools to track trends and conversations for their media clients.
In addition to Mass Relevance and NBC’s Today Show, Facebook is partnering with Buzzfeed, CNN, bSkyB and Slate.
Mass Relevance is the first and only social experience platform to gain full access to both Facebook’s Public Feed API and Keyword Insights API for display in broadcast and on digital properties.
“We’re able to aggregate, filter it and visual it in real time,” said Sam Decker, CEO and founder of Mass Relevance.
For example, Mass Relevance can give its clients a data visualization of people talking about a football game in real time and they can put that on their website quickly and easily.
In addition, Mass Relevance can mine Facebook’s real time data and pull the best comments from the public stream and put it on a television screen during an event or a sports competition.
Mass Relevance’s clients want that information because it drives audience engagement, Decker said. It spurs audience involvement in that event or topic, he said.
“That drives more participation and that drives more people to tune in,” Decker said.
For publications, they can use the data to tap into the conversations related around the topic of an article, Decker said.
“It creates more time on the site and more ad impressions,” Decker said.
Mass Relevance has already been working with Facebook. This partnership just provides more sources to data and access, Decker said.
Today, consumers don’t just watch TV, they post on websites such as Twitter and Facebook using their phones and laptops. That makes it difficult for media companies to attract viewers and deploy effective ad campaigns. Facebook’s data will make it easier for them to reach their target audience with relevant content.
Mass Relevance already has a partnership with Twitter. Its clients include ESPN, ABC, CBS and most major networks as well as some publishers, sports teams and sports leagues as well. Mass Relevance, which call itself a “social experience company” has 110 employees and plans to add another 30 by the end of the year.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Finding tutoring for a kid doesn’t sound hard. But, parents say: Just try it. First you have to find someone you trust to be with your child, who is competent in the subject matter, who has an opening when your kid is available, who doesn’t cost too much, and then you have to drive your child back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Enter myCampusTutors. This Austin startup lets parents sift through more than 100 tutors from U.S. colleges who tutor kids online for 15-minute to one-hour sessions in math, science, Spanish, ESL and traditional English.
“At the end of the day you can grab your kid, get her into the tutoring session and go have a glass of wine while watching American Idol. You don’t have to skimp on the quality of education and you have the freedom to have a life. That’s very sexy for a mom,” said Erin Ostboe, vice president of operations and niece of myCampusTutor founder Katy Hackerman. Ostboe helped launch the company after serving as associate vice president of enrolment services for Higher Education Online in the U.K.
There are other online tutoring services, Hackerman said, but many of them rely on tutors in other countries who don’t necessarily have English as their first language. Hackerman wanted to create a service using U.S. students. The company tests the students in the subject matter, performs background checks, evaluates their tutoring skills and provides ongoing training. The company also employs a rating system for the most popular tutors.
Hackerman is a serial entrepreneur whose previous businesses include a chain of travel agencies, which she sold to the World Wrestling Federation. She also worked for the College of Natural Sciences at UT as Director of Corporate Relations and Commercialization. Her grandfather, Norman Hackerman, served as president of UT in the late 1960s.
Hackerman’s son required tutoring and finding a good one was a huge challenge. So she decided to build myCampusTutors.
“The scaleability of the platform was very important to me, and the security of the classroom,” she said. “Every time a student connects in the classroom it’s posted on the student’s profile for 180 days. A parent can go in and review it…a parent can watch an entire session. And frankly, that’s safer than having someone in your house. You can download and upload documents. File sharing was one of the things that was really important. You can save on gas, it’s convenient, and it’s a safe, innovative way to help kids when they’re struggling. ”
One session costs $60 per hour but the company offers packages. If a parent buys 10 sessions they may pay only $40 an hour. The first half-hour session is free, Ostboe said.
“I think this is very creative and a great opportunity to conserve time and energy and resources,” said Dinny Peterson, parent of a student who got tutoring through the company’s pilot program. Her daughter, she said, is reluctant to embrace new things and so wasn’t as keen on the service as she was. But, she said, “As a parent it makes perfect sense. I liked it because of the convenience. And, of course, you could go and choose your tutor and read all about them.” Initially, she said, there were audio bugs, but she was assured those had been worked out.
So far, in pilot sessions mainly through local school districts, the company has logged about 600 sessions. It is a member of the Capital Factory incubator and has its soft launch on September 17.
“I’m a partner and mentor at Capital Factory and they were one of the companies admitted into incubator,” said Johannes Larcher, senior vice president international of Hulu. “I got to know Katy and her team and decided to become an investor and advisor. I think they are looking at an opportunity that’s quite significant overall,” he said. “The tutoring market is a $10 billion dollar market and it’s ripe for disruption.”
Hackerman said the company was initially focused on central Texas and was trying to build consumer sales as well as partner with institutions. But they also plan to help post secondary, for-profit institutions with retention problems. She’d like to build a multi-million dollar company that benefits Austin’s economy. But she also suspects traditional tutoring companies may make a bid for her platform. Right now, she’s just busy building it.
“Katy is a very passionate, driven person,” said Larcher. “She has relevant relationships in the space and she’s an accomplished business woman in own right…it’s a very interesting early stage company doing really interesting things.”

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Is it better to make a product that a huge market might need or that a small market must have? Entrepreneur and Yale junior Ian Panchèvre has had experience with both. His first company, Social Commerce, required a huge infusion of capital, office space, and an outside developer. It appealed to a large market – offering to leverage social media for increased revenues — but wasn’t a must-have for that market and was ultimately unsuccessful.
Last week, Panchèvre officially went public with his new startup, Prepd, which is a polar opposite in many ways.
Prepd is a Google Chrome app designed for high school debate competitions and specifically for extemporaneous speaking – a competition where speakers must be prepared to give a speech on any current national issue, from memory, after only 30 minutes of preparation. Competitors prepare the speech from their team’s collection of news articles on every national issue. To prepare for the competition, teams collect hundreds of articles per month on everything from healthcare to the economy to social issues. Efficient article gathering, sorting, and recovery are crucial for the success of any team, and that is exactly what Prepd does.
Previously there was no specific high-tech solution for extemporaneous events. Most competing teams used Google Drive, Evernote, or Dropbox to organize news articles by manually creating folders. They saved news articles either by converting them to PDF form or by saving article text in Word documents. Compatibility and formatting issues were rampant, as students often used different operating systems or organized files in different ways.
As a Chrome app, Prepd offers a solution compatible with all operating systems. It uses a Chrome widget that will save any article in a standard form with the click of a mouse. The software also has an easily customizable filing system that will organize all of a team’s articles in the same place. Team coaches can have special permissions for those folders, which will keep students from accidentally deleting important articles. Prepd even has a “Cleantext” option that will remove the ads, photos, links, and formatting from a saved article, leaving only a single image and the article text – making browsing articles an easier task in the 30 minutes allowed for speech preparation.
“They can do more efficient researching with less time. They can save more articles and save those articles in a way that is easier to access and study from,” said Panchèvre. “It is much friendlier to use in a competitive setting.”
In contrast to previous startup Social Commerce, which had a long and expensive development cycle, Prepd has 12 high schools paying for its alpha version product after only five months in development. Most of the high schools are located in San Antonio, Texas – Panchèvre’s hometown. A highly targeted product, Panchèvre believes Prepd is a must-have for high school debate programs.
“This is something that I am trying to convince them to use, not something that I am trying to sell them on,” said Panchèvre. “It sells itself. All they need to do is watch the video and they are ready to commit to it.”
As his team developed the product, Panchèvre was in constant contact with his participating alpha users. San Antonio NEISD Coordinator for Speech and Debate Joseph Johnson has been working with the software since his debate camp earlier in July. He keeps the Prepd team updated on any problems or suggestions his students have.
“Ian and his development team have been doing a really, really good job of listening to practical criticism with what works and doesn’t work,” said Johnson. “There is always going to be something in the development process that they don’t catch until someone actually uses it.”
According to Johnson, the software allows coaches to improve their overall programs by saving them time on file management and storage.
“The potential of it is amazing,” said Johnson. “It allows the coaches to focus more on the students’ speaking than on the file collecting.. ..The kids can focus more on just giving speeches as well, which is what the event is supposed to be about.”
The products organizational efficiency translates to competitions as well. As a former competitive extemporaneous debater at both the high school and college levels, Panchèvre is by no means modest about the competitive edge Prepd is meant to give students in extemporaneous speaking competitions.
“If you have two kids of equal ability and one is using my software and the other is using technology that isn’t efficient for this particular use, where they have to spend time doing redundant tasks.. ..I would say that the student using Prepd has a big advantage,” said Panchèvre.
Prepd will be primarily marketed to high school programs that participate in extemporaneous competitions. The price will range from $20 to $40 dollars depending on the number of users and stored articles needed. Individuals can purchase the software for $5 or can try a free striped down trial version.
In further contrast to his earlier startup, where the development was outsourced to another company, Panchèvre developed Prepd with a small, close-knit team of three Romanian developers he had met in San Antonio. Mihai Bura, Madalin Barbulescu, and Emanuel Butacu met Panchèvre when they came to San Antonio for a work study program in computer science. Fellow extemporaneous debater and high school friend Jeremiah Anderson handles the startup’s business operations.
Prepd is funded by a local Angel Investor in San Antonio. Panchèvre won’t disclose the details but said it was “a small amount of initial capital” — a far cry from the huge initial investment he raised for Social Commerce.
While Panchèvre is the first to admit that Prepd might not evolve into a billion dollar company, he sees many advantages in creating a niche product and looks forward to providing more solutions for the extemporaneous community.
“There are a lot of advantages to going after niche market opportunities,” said Panchèvre. “For one, you have a really focused user base. So, it’s a lot easier to design and build the product for them. Secondly, because your user base is so concentrated it’s much easier to market towards them and you can spend your marketing dollars very efficiently.”
“For me,” said Panchèvre, “It’s all about getting to a point where we make more money than we spend. And at that point we can reassess additional ways of providing value to this community.”

Full disclosure: Ian Panchèvre has been a contributor to Silicon Hills News.

RunTitle, an online title search marketplace geared to the oil and gas industry, has landed $4 million in Series A venture capital led by Austin Ventures.
The Houston-based startup also relocated to Austin as a condition of the financing.
The company plans to use the money to expand its inventory, on product development, distribution and marketing.
“Austin Ventures expects RunTitle to have a big impact on the current title market, which has remained largely the same for the last century. The Company has a timely opportunity to build an extraordinary information services business,” Mike Dodd, Partner, Austin Ventures, said in a news release. “The founding team brings a wealth of knowledge to an industry whose inefficiencies have yet to be disrupted by the Internet.” Dodd will also be joining the RunTitle board of directors.
The cloud-based title portal is aimed at the oil and gas industry, which looks to secure mineral rights for properties.
“Resource companies spend billions of dollars a year just to find out who owns mineral rights. This information – held in regional county courthouses and in private record databases across the country – has been very difficult to access. RunTitle will offer the industry an unprecedented database of information that will save customers substantial amounts of time and money. We will radically improve a labor-intensive process that hasn’t evolved with technology,” Reid Calhoon, RunTitle’s CEO, said in a news release.
RunTitle, which launched in August of 2012, is currently available in 13 states. It also graduated from the Houston energy startup program, the SURGE Accelerator.

At the Blanton Museum Thursday night, nine teams of University of Texas at Austin student entrepreneurs took to the stage to pitch their startups.
All of the companies spent the summer with the Austin Technology Incubator shaping their ideas, honing business plans, working with mentors and business partners and testing their marketplaces.
The teams were part of the annual ATI Student Entrepreneur Acceleration and Launch, known as SEAL program. At the event, the companies make a “Go/No Go” decision on their projects. They all decided to go ahead and pursue their ideas.
“It speaks to the quality of startups that are coming out of the University,” said Kyle Cox, ATI’s director of information technology/wireless and university development portfolios.
Kaoru Fujita founded Guava with Justin Crites and Jo Jo Marion and they’ve put school on hold to pursue their idea. The three joined up last April during a 3 Day Startup program at RetailMeNot in Austin. The idea to create financial products to help low income people sprang out of 3 Day Startup. Then they got accepted into ATI’s SEAL program and their company began to take shape.
“The program allowed us to really focus in on what we needed to do,” Fujita said. “Bart Bohn (co-founder of AuManil) was our mentor. He kicked our ass on a daily basis.”
Fujita was going to be a second year student in the MBA program at UT. He’s taken a leave of absence to concentrate on the business full time. Guava also recently received a $25,000 investment from the Geekdom Fund. The company has relocated to Geekdom, a co-working space focused on technology startups in San Antonio.
AdBm Technologies, which makes noise abatement technologies for marine environments, received $3.3 million in research grants to develop its products. Its patented technology was developed at UT and is licensed from the university. The company created SoundShields, which can be placed in the water at the site of construction work, to protect marine life and it has already received $12 million in quotes, said Daniel J. Appel, one of AdBm’s co-founders.
The ATI SEAL program helped AdBm with sales, search engine optimization, marketing and business development, Appel said. It also helped the company land a meeting in Germany in a few weeks, Appel said.
“It was a fantastic experience,” Appel said.
Clay.io, led by Austin Hallock, already has 10,000 users for its HTML5 gaming portal. Hallock founded the company in late 2011 and he went through the Longhorn Startup program, formerly known as One Semester Startup, geared to undergraduates at UT.
The other companies in the program included Beyonic, a mobile payment network, Favor, a delivery service in Austin, Intelligent Menu, data for restaurants, LifeM, pressure sensors for catheters, nCarbon, graphene for super-capacitors and Onsite Control, security systems for the oil and gas industry.