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Avai Mobile Solutions Launches its App Platform for Large Organizations

June 19, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

He called it WordPress for apps…on steroids. Avai Mobile Solutions LLC, recently introduced its app platform for large organizations, which lets them create the look and feel and manage content on their apps without having to build one from the ground up.
“It does a lot more than a WordPress site could because it allows you to utilize smart phone functions. It’s not just serving out HTML pages,” said Avai CEO Rand Arnold.
Arnold moved to Austin from Silicon Valley in 1999 and was working in UI/UX design and touchscreen interfaces. When his funding dried up at the start of the recession, his company pivoted into mobile.
“We said, here’s what we’ll do, we’re good at tying apps into back end servers. We don’t do games. We don’t do consumer apps, no iBeer…. The content would be updated with backend services.”
The company began working on individual custom mobile apps and many of its customers were state parks or theme parks.
“Where’s the first place people really start understanding the value of an app?” Arnold said. “You’re out in the state park and you don’t have your laptop or computer and you think ‘I sure would like to know what’s going on. Where am I? How do I find out where I want to go?”
But creating individual apps, with their long development cycles, endless iterations and long wait times after they’re submitted to the app store was proving too frustrating.
“We would build the app and customers wanted to see it on their phones before it went out but there was no easy way to get it to them until it was in the app store. They would approve it and then we’d wait around for weeks for Apple to release it. Then they’d see it and say ‘We know we approved it but we want the background a little darker green and we need it tomorrow…..’ Then we’d change it and have to resubmit the app to the store. The time and cost involved with building apps was ridiculous and it was going to get more ridiculous. You’re never done with software. As soon as you’re done you have to start the next draft.”
That’s when Avai decided it preferred to provide the architecture for enterprises to manage their own apps and app updates. T.J. Christensen, vice president of business development with Accesso, a company that provides ticketing and ecommerce solutions to theme parks, said the company has worked with Avai since 2010 as a white label app re-seller.
“Our ability to leverage their enterprise platform and mobile expertise has allowed us to become a leading provider of mobile solutions within our market segment,” Christensen said. “Over the past three years they have continued to re-invest in the platform bringing new and exciting features into the standard offering year after year – which has allowed us and our clients to stay well ahead of our collective competitors.”

Cubit’s Lean Startup Journey to Profitability

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

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Kristen Carney and Anthony Morales, photo by Susan Lahey

The founders of Cubit had a list of failures for each of their five years, but decided not to enumerate those for the crowd of 150 at Austin Lean Startup Circle at Capital Factory Tuesday night. It was too depressing. But Kristen Carney, co-founder of Cubit, said that as the five years progressed, the number of failures and successes evened out and eventually, the balance weighed in favor of success.
That was the story of Carney’s and Anthony Morales presentation: Cubit Case Study: Five Years of (Mostly) Failures and (a Few Successes) which they demonstrated with Paul Graham’s startup model.
Cubit packages demographic data for customers including small businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. In 2008, Carney was working for an environmental engineering firm studying the socioeconomic impacts of new roads. She would pull data, create drawings, discover that plan wouldn’t work, pull more data. She knew what a pain point data collection could be. So she and Morales, who worked in web design and programming, built a technology to pull together demographic reports with data that’s freely available on the census, but not easy to mine if you’re not a data expert. They founded Cubit at Capital Factory with $20,000 seed investment.
“We started off with the 37signals model of ‘I’m a customer, I know what the customer wants,” Carney said. As a result, they didn’t listen carefully enough to mentors. She and Morales created a very simple site with formulaic reports and instantly had customers. Since it was a “crappy” site, yet people were buying, they knew they were solving a problem. But the vision they had included maps, which was more involved. And that was one of their first mistakes, she said, clinging to a vision rather than selling what customers were buying.

By 2010, she said, they were in Graham’s downward slope of wearing off the novelty running out of money and heading for the trough of sorrow. They made 1,000 cold calls and sold nothing. They decided their first priority was “feed the family.” This slowed things down a bit because they alternated working on paying jobs and working on Cubit.
In 2011, they launched into another common mistake of startups. They started a different business.
“There’s this idea of my first business is failing. I should start a new business and do it right this time.”
They created a process to automate handwritten thank you notes. This was an eight-hour startup that slowed them down even more.
“We were a tiny company, we had no business trying to do both,” Carney said.
But 2011 was also when Carney started digging into the idea of lean startups. By 2012, they closed the thank you notes business and focused on Cubit. But this time, they put a ton of effort into finding out what it was customers really wanted.
They put a “buy now” button on the landing page with no specific offer, surrounded by space and no content, just to see if people would click on it. And they did. They started tracking the data to see who was clicking and what they were asking for. They hooked the button up to a Paypal account and Morales’ phone would go off at all hours of the day and night when customers bought a specific data set. He’d have to get up, pull a PDF and email it to them.
Then Carney and Morales really started digging into the existing pain points. They used Google Ad Words to drill down the terms people were searching for and they started reading Amazon reviews on books about census data or business marketing research to find what customers were complaining about. They created Wufoo forms that would collect data from users, used usertesting.com and purchased at least $100 worth of Google adwords, which noticeably improved their SEO traction.
They also tapped nonprofits who dealt with small businesses, offering to pull free data for any clients who would participate in an interview. Four non-profits turned them down in disgust. The last has become a valuable channel partner.
They then conducted interviews using the Spin Selling methodology written about by Neil Rackham and Bob Kalomeer. Carney, who considers herself a woefully bad saleswoman, had great success by asking potential customers if they would take 10 minutes to explain their project to her. Almost no one refused. When they told her of their data need, she’d also point out that all the data they provided was available for free. To that, customers would explain why getting the data themselves was too hard or time consuming, providing valuable information. Finally, she would ask how the data they sought would help their project.
All of it was rich with information. In addition, she added traditional “lean” interview questions like “What keeps you up at night?”
Another big issue was pricing. “Pricing is just hard. It just sucks. There’s no fun way to do it,” Carney said. “If we were in the interview we’d say hey, would you pay $200 for this report and they would lie to our faces and tell us, ‘Yes, we would pay $200 for this report.’” Ultimately they came up with pricing from $20 for standard reports to $12,000 for some custom reports, based on raising prices until some customers dropped out.
Their overhead is small, since they work from home and use data that’s free. And after five years, Carney said, they’re Whole Foods profitable, meaning they can afford to shop at Whole Foods. They’ve hit the better end of Graham’s curve.

The Funemployment Movie Seeks to Showcase Austin’s Tech Startup Scene

June 18, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Photo courtesy of Christine Chen and Moth to Flame Filmmakers

The entrepreneur’s reality began to warp as the pitch competition took on a Shark Tank feel. The entrepreneur made an introductory joke…nobody got it. Then the investors began asking more and more personal questions. Nobody would really ask those kinds of questions would they? Soon it was clear, this was a pitch nightmare come true.
That is a scene out of Funemployment, a movie being made in Austin about the Austin startup culture. The film will begin the casting process June 27 and July 2. Some roles will be paid, others are strictly volunteer.
Director/producer and co-writer Christine Chen went to business school at UT and “got sucked up into the startup world in Austin….. I wanted to write something very Austin about the culture itself, from working at coffee shops to networking events to trying to get funding and pitch parties. It’s a world I don’t think a lot of people know unless you’re a startup.”
Chen, who has created commercial short videos for companies, has never done a full-length script before. She’s estimating the film will run about 100 minutes and is similar to two of Chen’s favorite movies: Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. She’s planning to start shooting in July, though she’s still seeking funding. The movie is looking for startups interested in being featured in the movie in exchange for sponsorships.
“It’s funny and quirky but fairly dark,” Chen said, because of the questions entrepreneurs face—like whether they’re going to be able to make their rent. Chen is hoping for some guest appearances from Austin startup icons. Anyone interested in getting involved should contact Chen at funemployment@mothtoflamefilms.com

San Antonio Gets Its Own Health 2.0 Chapter

June 18, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

San Antonio has landed its own chapter of Health 2.0 and an organizational meeting will be held Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at Geekdom.
The organization’s mission is to support health technology startups. Health 2.0, based in San Francisco, started as an annual convention and now has 64 chapters around the world.
Cynthia Phelps, founder of HEALTHeDesigns in San Antonio, is the founder of the local chapter.
“Our vision for Health 2.0 San Antonio is to provide an organizational structure to cultivate the health technology startup culture in San Antonio with the goal of healthcare innovation,” Phelps wrote in a mission statement.
My over arching goal is to connect essentially the high tech startup culture here at Geekdom with the healthcare innovators in San Antonio,” Phelps said. “I would like to see San Antonio become a leader in health-tech innovation.”
San Antonio is poised to do this because of the developing community at Geekdom paired with the excellence of the city’s military healthcare system and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Phelps said. One of the main goals is to bring the geeks together with the those in the healthcare space who have ideas to improve healthcare, she said.

RetailMeNot Files its IPO Worth An Estimated $230 million

June 17, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

RetailMeNot has filed a registration statement with federal regulators for an initial public offering worth an estimated $230 million.
The Austin-based online coupon site, formerly Whale Shark Media, has applied to have its stock listed on the Nasdaq market under the ticket symbol “SALE.”
The company also reports that it is “an “emerging growth company” as that term is used in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or JOBS Act, and, as such, will be subject to reduced public company reporting requirements.”
“The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined,” the company reported in a news release.
Morgan Stanley & Co., Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Credit Suisse Securities will manage the proposed offering.
RetailMeNot operates the world’s largest digital coupon marketplace and had coupons from more than 60,000 retailers on its site in 2012 and reported 450 million visits to its websites. It also has contracts with more than 10,000 paid retailers.
“In 2013, our marketplace featured more than 500,000 digital coupons in each month,” according to its filing.
Founded in 2009 as Smallponds by CEO Cotter Cunningham, the company has seen its revenue increase from $16.9 million in 2010 to $144.7 million in 2012, representing a 192.9 percent compound annual growth rate. It’s net income also increased from $2.3 million in 2010 to $26 million in 2012. Its growth comes from acquisitions and organic growth. The majority of its revenues come from the U.S. with the rest coming from the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
The company has 331 full time employees in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and the Netherlands.
RetailMeNot has received $300 million from several venture capital firms including Austin Ventures, Google Ventures, and Institutional Venture Partners.

The Internship’s Message is to Enjoy the Real World

June 16, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The big takeaway from watching this summer’s buddy comedy, The Internship, about two middle aged laid off salesmen who become interns at Google, is don’t get so enamored of the latest technology and gadgets that you neglect real life.
And Google, for all its glory, is just a tool that humans use to get what they need to live better lives.
When technology rules our lives, we become unbalanced.
The older interns, played by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, teach the young technology whizzes how to live in the real world and to appreciate every moment. The young technology whizzes also teach Wilson and Vaughn how to use technology to create better products. The intern groups must compete against each other in a series of tasks and the best team wins jobs at Google.
“We’re looking at some sort of mental Hunger Games against a bunch of Genius kids for just a handful of jobs,” Wilson says in the movie.
While a lot of the movie is just pure fiction, Google really does make its new Googlers, called Nooglers, wear multi-colored beanies with propellers on them. But another thing Google does is it pays its interns really well with a software intern making $6,463 a month.
Glassdoor did a report earlier this year and reported that Google ranks number one as the best place to intern.
The movie is hilarious. But as a big Hollywood motion picture, the Internship is loaded with stereotypes that some may find offensive. Google, though, comes through looking like a star.

Rackspace Open Cloud Academy Graduates its First Class

June 16, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

After eight weeks of hard work and not much sleep, 17 students graduated from the Rackspace Open Cloud Academy on Friday in San Antonio.
The graduates are now certified in A+, Network+, Linux+, Apache, MySQL, Rackspace system administration, Red Hat system administration, cloud basics, and critical thinking. Each graduate put in around 250 training hours while going through the program.
Speaking at the ceremony, Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston called the next 100 years the “era of the cloud” and told the graduates that the ability to speak the language of the cloud is will be essential.
“What has happened is we’ve moved from the world of just using computers to what your are learning, which is how the cloud is going to interact with the whole world,” said Weston. “Software – fixing it, maintaining it, and writing it – are all the building blocks of the next hundred years. In the same way that concrete, steel, shovels, and sweat were the building blocks of the last hundred years.”
The skills each graduate learned will make them valuable candidates for Rackspace’s employment needs as well as open up other doors in their professional lives. Rackspace VP of Talent Management Larry Guillory says there is a huge cost savings to Rackspace associated with the Open Cloud Academy.
“A year and a half ago, I was paying upwards of $10,000 to an agency to hire a Linux tech for me,” said Guillory. “In this model, we have people essentially paying to learn and that gives us an extended opportunity to interview them.”
The graduates are also already trained to handle typical Rackspace IT issues, making them easy to hire into the company. Guillory says that Rackspace is looking to hire at least 10 of the 17 graduates.
In addition to Rackspace, local technology companies also sent talent scouts to check out the Academy graduates. Guillory even invited HostGator to interview the students after graduation. While the academy classes were held at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio, the graduation ceremony took place at Rackspace’s headquarters, known as the Castle.
Additionally, companies post about 40,000 job openings monthly on job sites looking for people with Linux skill sets and the average salary increase for such jobs is about 5 percent. The average salary for a Linux Systems Administrator in San Antonio is $74,000, according to Indeed.com, the world’s largest job postings site. Rackspace Director of Learning and Development Duane La Bom says the graduates will have plenty of opportunities in both San Antonio and Austin.
“Any organization that uses Linux as their primary operating system — our graduates would be fine candidates — great candidates! – for any of those organizations even if they are not IT,” said La Bom.
According to La Bom, the program offered by the academy did not require prior computer knowledge for candidates to be successful, but it did require a great amount of passion, aptitude, and interest in IT. Graduate Kristy Elizondo was previously a stay-at-home mom. Getting through the program meant only two to three hours of sleep a night and little time with her husband, but she still walked across the graduation stage.
“I’ve been a mom this whole time. I’ve raised three kids. And I came into the program with only a year and a half of knowledge about computers,” Elizondo said. “[Now] I can do Apache, I have a few problems with MySQL, but as far as any kind of Linux, command lines, or scripting — I can do it because this program showed me how to do that.”
Even if the graduates aren’t employed by Rackspace, the different certifications provided by the Open Cloud Academy are a huge resume boost. Morgan Davis, who got laid off from his private defense contractor job in February, says the certifications and Rackspace name brand will really help him stand out as he looks for a job – a problem he had before the academy.
“The problem was I had such a diverse skill set I could not prove to potential employers that I had been doing excessively well at any given discipline,” said Davis. “By having these actual certifications under my belt recruiters can find me under a much smaller pool of candidates now.”
Some graduates even left previous stable job positions for the new field of Cloud computing. Graduate Carlos Fuentes spent 14 years in economic development and is leaving his post as a Bexar County Strategic Initiatives Coordinator on Monday.
“I thought it was worth the risk entirely,” said Fuentes. “I’ve gone from community development where you write grants for communities that have no economic base, to marketing a community of 1.7 million people that has a diverse economic base.. ..a natural progression is to want to be part of providing direct value to a business that has customers at stake, that’s is globally competitive, and that’s ambitious in trying to make a dent in things.”
Fuentes is excited about having the chance to move up in a company that is globally competitive and hopes to one day have his own business and create new things.
The next session of the Rackspace Open Cloud Academy will start in the second week of July and following sessions will be back to back for most of this year. Rackspace’s Weston is already looking forward to ramping up the Academy up to a much bigger scale.
“I can’t wait for the day that we have a thousand graduates in the Open Cloud Academy,” Weston said.

San Antonio Mayor Castro and Local Business Leaders Support Immigration Reform

June 14, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Mayor Julián Castro at Zachry talking about immigration reform. Photo by Andrew Moore

Fresh off a trip to Washington, D.C. to tout immigration reform, San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro met with local business leader to drum up support for current legislation pending before Congress.
On Tuesday, Mayor Castro joined President Obama and other government and business leaders at the White House to show support for the so-called “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill currently being debated in the U.S. Senate.
On Friday morning, Mayor Castro joined Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston, and Zachry Holdings Executive Director of Public Policy A.J. Rodriguez at a press conference to urge Congress to pass the immigration legislation currently being considered.
The legislation has been led by a bipartisan group of senators called the “gang of eight” including Senators Marco Rubio, R-Fla., John McCain, R-Ariz., Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., Michael Bennet, D-Colo. and Bob Menedez, D-N.J.
The conference followed a discussion with San Antonio business leaders led by Mayor Castro at Zachry Holdings.
Rodriguez said the group came to a consensus and is “largely supportive of immigration reform.”
“We are honored to join the Mayor who has been a constant leader on immigration reform, in showing our company’s support for this issue,” Rodriguez said. “We believe that the U.S. economy will greatly benefit from an effective guest worker program, a clear expedited path to citizenship, and enhanced Visa opportunities for graduates.”
Mayor Castro urged Congress to support the legislation, which he saw as a historic opportunity to make much needed changes to the U.S. Immigration system.
“The legislation that is before the United States Senate, is the best chance that this country has had in a long time to fix its broken immigration system,” said Mayor Castro. “I’m confident that the business community throughout the United States, the business community in Texas, and our San Antonio business community sees the benefit of passing this legislation.”
The event’s three speakers supported several measures in the bill including increasing increase annual H1-B visas from 65,000 to 110,000, the increase of exempted advanced degree H1B visas from 20,000 to 25,000, and an increase in the ceiling of low tech visas for unskilled labor.
The group also supports increased border security and an earned pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, though Mayor Castro thinks that the 13 year requirement is too long.
Speaking for the tech industry, Rackspace’s Weston said immigration reform is crucial to a growing tech economy in the U.S.
“Without immigration reform America is less competitive, and our businesses are less competitive,” Weston said. “This to me is not a Republican or Democrat issue. This comes down to whether America wants to have policies that support its business community.”
A national shortage of high tech employees exists in America’s high-tech industries, and immigration reform is needed so the high tech industry can fill these positions instead of outsourcing them, Weston said. Today, American companies outsource not because of cost reasons, but because of skill reasons, he said.
“Would we rather have a talented Indian move to America, work in our offices, and be part of this American team that exports to the world; or would we rather hire that person in India? It is much better for America for that talented person to move here,” Weston said.
But today, hiring any immigrant is a struggle for Rackspace Hosting. Every immigrant employee must go through a complex legal process and “lawyer up” with Rackspace to stay with the company. If Rackspace wants to buy a foreign company – and they are looking at several right now – they may be forced to leave that company overseas instead of bringing the new employees to the U.S. This result is less productive for both Rackspace and the American economy.
“To me, you cannot be pro business without being pro immigration reform,” Weston said.

Tweet, Big Data, Geekery Added to the Oxford English Dictionary

June 14, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Photo courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Remember when Google became a verb?
It was 2006.
And now tweet has become a verb too!
The world is getting much more high tech and a lot quicker at that.
In a “Quiet Announcement” on the Oxford English Dictionary site that has been picked up globally by just about every news outfit, John Simpson, chief editor, announced “the noun and verb tweet (in the social networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion.”
The dictionary just added a whole slew of new words including plenty of techy ones like big data, crowdsourcing, e-reader,mouseover, flash mob, follow and geekery.

National Instruments Helps Train Teachers in the STEM Fields

June 13, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

An earthquake simulator that runs on National Instruments’ LabView software.

Simulating an earthquake on a wooden building model equipped with sensors or studying energy flow on a miniature power plant and power grid.
Those are a few of the hands-on activities for high school kids to learn about physics thanks to a program created by National Instruments.
The Austin-based company has created a curriculum for Texas physics teachers to give their students hands-on experience with different subjects and concepts and to teach them how to apply mathematical models to real-world data.
The programs, powered by National Instrument’s LabVIEW software, provide real-life experiments that bring textbooks to life.
And on Wednesday and Thursday, 29 high school science teachers learned about new ways to teach physics at National Instruments’ corporate headquarters.
They are part of the Texas Regional Collaboratives for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching’s first program at National Instruments to expose the teachers to real-world applications of physics and engineering and show them how to teach that in a compelling way to students in a classroom. More than 60 teachers applied for the program, said Carol Fletcher, associate director of TRC. She chose teachers from many disadvantaged school districts and those who would have the best ability to train others, she said.
All of the technology and entertainment kids get exposed to today tends to dilute their curiosity, said Antonio Gomez Pedroso, physics teacher at Longview High School in East, Texas, who was attending the training.
“You have to do big stuff to get their attention,” Pedroso said.

Ray Hsu, Senior Program Manager, K-12 Education
at National Instruments

Ray Hsu, senior program manager with National Instruments, understands that challenge. He has been designing K-12 education programs for students for the last three years. National Instruments needs engineers and they know about the shortage of workers in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, known as STEM, fields in the United States.
“We can be viewed as a customer of the education system,” Hsu said. “We’re trying to reach out and be an industry involved in bringing real world experiences to the classroom.”
National Instruments, which has been involved in the First Robotics program since 2006, is committed to making a substantial impact on the STEM education of kids, Hsu said.
The idea comes from the principle of shared value “which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges,” according to the Harvard Business Review. “Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress. Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success. It is not on the margin of what companies do but at the center.”
National Instruments has taken that philosophy to heart, Hsu said.
In 1998, NI engineers created a version of its LabVIEW software for Lego Mindstorms designed for use with the Lego Education robotics platform. And all of the robotic controllers and robots used for the First Robotics competition run on the LabVIEW software platform.
LabVIEW is a system design software used by engineers and scientists to design and control applications. Elon Musk’s SpaceX uses LabVIEW “systems to control launchpad equipment and to command and monitor the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles and its Dragon spacecraft,” according to National Instruments. Those are the kinds of cool applications that spark student’s interest, Hsu said.
“Engineering is not as well understood in the K-12 space,” Hsu said. “We want to change that. We want to take it to another level. We want to change the classroom.”
National Instruments created a data acquisition tool called myDAQ, which sells for $175, and connects via a USB port to a computer. It partnered with Pitsco Education to create an earthquake table. With the myDAQ device and the earthquake table students can study the effects of earthquakes. National Instruments also created a curriculum as a guide for teachers and students “Understanding Structures & Earthquakes.” The booklet is the first of 12 specialized physics curriculum National Instruments is creating. The other two that are currently available include “Discover Heat Transfer” and “Explore Power and Energy.”
“Teaching is an art,” Hsu said. “If they can get students to start asking questions then they’ve got them.”
National Instruments is also working with Carnegie Mellon University to create a pathway for students to get certified in LabVIEW with a badging system to mark each of their milestones. It’s all about making real life engineering work relevant and engaging to students, Hsu said.
During this week’s two-day training session at National Instruments, teachers learned how to teach lessons on the properties of waves and sound including frequency, wavelengths, the Doppler effect, resonance and more.

Manos Chaniotakis, with Ergopedia and one of the authors of a new physics textbook.

Tom Hsu and Manos Chaniotakis, with Ergopedia and authors of a new physics textbook, led the instruction.
“Our focus is to make sure we get reality into the curriculum,” Chaniotakis said.
Texas is going through adoption of a new physics textbook for the first time in 11 years. The latest book emphasis hands-on learning, said Chaniotakis. It has an e-book component, which can be accessed by computer, tablet or smartphone. It features videos, illustrations and more features that extend the paper textbook and provide the student with more opportunities for learning.
“Hands on is the key,” Chaniotakis said. “You learn better by doing something.”
Unfortunately, Texas lawmakers just passed H.B. 5, which makes physics and optional class for high school students, Hsu said.

Joni Milanovich, a physics teacher with Roosevelt High School in San Antonio, liked the training at National Instruments and the new textbook and the interactive approach to teaching.
“It’s vey hands on,” she said.
If she gives her students a paper assignment, they won’t do it often, she said. But if it’s on the computer, they are more engaged, she said.
“They are used to using electronics and equipment to do their homework and labs,” she said.

National Instruments’ technology focused on the K-12 market will be on display next week at the U.S. News STEM Solutions Conference, June 17-19 at the Austin Convention Center.