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Ziptask Makes Managing Outsourced Projects Easier

April 17, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Ziptask seeks to make managing outsourced projects simpler.
The Anaheim, Calif.-based company launched its fully managed outsourcing platform on Wednesday.
The company provides a layer on top of services like Freelancer.com, Elance, 99Designs and others that makes managing outsourced projects easier.
Ziptask is a member of the TechStars Cloud Class of 2013. Its team will be presenting their company Thursday at the TechStars Cloud Demo Day at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in downtown San Antonio. The company has spent the past three and a half months participating in the TechStars Cloud accelerator.
Ziptask’s product is aimed at small to medium sized businesses.
Ziptask’s project managers act as liaisons to freelancers. Those project managers do all the hiring, communications and everything else involved in managing a project.
To cut down on fraud or low quality work, Ziptask’s project managers pre-screen, interview and hire the freelancers and then oversee all of the work until the project is delivered to the customer.
“This saves significant time and resources on any project, and ensures that every job is completed on time, to the customer’s expectations, and within a pre-approved budget,” according to Ziptask.
Common projects include WordPress, IT, Application and Software Development, eCommerce, and Graphic Design
“Ziptask created a platform for fully-managed outsourcing for the same reasons managed hosting was introduced to the server hosting business. High touch, customer-focused, satisfaction-oriented project work will be the next revolution in the outsourcing business,” said Jason Seats, Managing Director of TechStars Cloud.

About a week ago, Laura Lorek, founder of Silicon Hills News, interviewed Shawn Livermore, Stan Miroshnik and Matt Lee about Ziptask.

TechStars Cloud’s Good.co Matches Workers’ Personalities to the Right Job

April 17, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

The TechStars Cloud company, Good.co, wants people to be happy in their jobs.
The San Francisco-based company has spent the past three months at Geekdom in the TechStars Cloud accelerator program. Its founders will officially pitch their company during TechStars Cloud Demo Day on Thursday at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in downtown San Antonio.
Good.co is one of 12 TechStar Cloud companies in the 2013 class.
The team behind Good.co have created a “professional network and self-discovery platform for people who want more meaningful careers.”
The company offers free psychometric personality tests on its website based on its own algorithm that is reports has a 95 percent accuracy rate. It seeks to match people’s personalities with the right workplace. It also gives them tools and resources to succeed in the workplace. Good.co is also integrated with LinkedIn and can make recommendations on current job opportunities most suitable to applicants.
By finding the right candidate for the job, Good.co’s personality assessment can save companies time and money.
“Everyone wants to be happy in their career, and find that perfect position where they thrive as a professional, and feel at home and part of a team,” Jason Seats, Managing Director of TechStars Cloud, said in a statement. “Good.co has created a highly accurate test for deciphering the personality types of professionals, teams and companies. The platform is a great tool for finding that perfect job, and also gives managers, HR departments and recruiters a great resource for identifying those candidates most likely to be a fit for them, too.”

About a week ago, Laura Lorek, founder of Silicon Hills News, interviewed Good.co’s team of Samar Birwadker, Subbu Balakrishnan, Nisar Mirza and Gabriel Debeaupuis in the Silver Fox Studios at Geekdom. The video from that interview is posted below.

Soloshot Wins the Innotech San Antonio 2013 Beta Summit

April 17, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Nick Longo, director of Geekdom with Scott Taylor of Soloshot and winner of the 2013 Innotech San Antonio Beta Summit

Soloshot took home first place at the Innotech San Antonio Beta Summit on Wednesday afternoon.
“The first motion picture camera was invented over 125 years ago,” said Scott Taylor, co-founder of Soloshot. “And since then there have been tremendous improvements in camera technology from color film to video cameras, to digital cameras, to cameras that are built into your cell phone.”
But one thing hasn’t changed in all those years, to film a moving subject, you’ve always needed a human to operate the camera and keep it pointed toward the subject, Taylor said at the seventh annual Innotech Beta Summit.
“And that’s a problem,” he said. “Especially when it comes to filming sports, no one ever wants to be the guy on the sidelines holding the camera. That was the problem we set out to solve, and what resulted is Soloshot, a tripod system that automatically keeps your camera pointed at you.”
Soloshot won a one-year membership in the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and a plaque. The San Antonio-based startup also won a trophy from Geekdom. Both the chamber and Geekdom sponsored the Beta Summit and the audience chose the winner through a heads down, hands up vote at the conclusion of the six pitches.
Nick Longo, director of Geekdom and the event’s moderator, told the crowd to consider what problem the startups were solving and who their customers were and how they are going to market and sell their product to customers.
Soloshot began manufacturing and shipping its $479 tripod system that works using a radio frequency communication system with an armband last June. Since then, Soloshot has quadrupled its manufacturing facilities in San Antonio and ramped up its production ten times, Taylor said. Its customers are amateur and pro athletes, videographers and parents.
So far, Soloshot has shipped to customers in 30 countries and its device is sold in stores in 18 countries. It’s continually growing its distribution and retail network, Taylor said.
The company has done a lot of marketing through social media to spread the word about its product, Taylor said. Its Facebook page has received 60,000 likes. People have viewed its Youtube video channel more than 1 million times.
To date, Soloshot has more than 30 patents and trademarks.
“You only get one shot,” Taylor said. “Capture them with Soloshot.”
The other San Antonio startups pitching at the event included SocialRest, Sportybird, Kirpeep, Greenhouse and the Amazing Jellybean.
Jennifer Navarrete with the Media Fuse captured the event on Livestream video. The embedded version is posted below.

Video streaming by Ustream

Rackspace’s Weston Says Hybrid is the Cloud of the Future

April 17, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace

Instead of a one-size fits all Cloud, the Internet will have millions of specialized clouds.
That’s the assertion of Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, the world’s largest hybrid cloud provider. He gave the keynote speech Wednesday morning at Innotech San Antonio at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.
“This is a cloud that fits itself to your application instead of your application fitting to the cloud,” Weston said.
Cloud computing, in which hardware and software are delivered as a service over the Internet, is becoming ubiquitous and will become as commonplace for companies as electric utilities in 20 years, Weston said.
“We believe the cloud is one of the most incredible innovations in our age,” Weston said. “We also need to understand its limitations.”
The myths are that every application works best on the public cloud, that the public cloud is cheaper and that no support is needed in the public cloud, Weston said. Cloud computing solutions have to be tailored to the specific needs of a company, he said.
San Antonio-based Rackspace is an open cloud company with more than 205,000 customers worldwide. It provides public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and dedicated hosting.
And Rackspace, along with NASA, developed OpenStack; the open source cloud-computing platform that creates a standard system that meets the needs of public and private clouds of any size. Some refer to it as the “Linux of Cloud Computing.” Rackspace and NASA launched OpenStack in 2010.
“We now built a new standard,” Weston said. “This standard will be part of our everyday lives.”
Today, more than 150 companies have joined the project including Dell, HP, AMD, Intel, Linux, Red Hat, IBM, VMware and Yahoo!
This week, an OpenStack Summit is going on in Portland, Oregon. It kicked off on Monday and runs through Thursday with 3,500 people attending. That’s just six months after the OpenStack Summit held in San Diego last October. But the first Open Compute Summit was held at Rackspace’s headquarters in 2011.
“This little idea that started in San Antonio, Texas has taken on a life of its own,” Weston said.
Rackspace took software that its engineers spent years to develop and gave it to the cloud for everyone to develop, Weston said. That spirit of sharing fosters innovation and it’s why Linux operating systems power 85 percent of all servers, he said.
In the past, many companies had to choose between a public cloud, private cloud or dedicated hosting. Now, Rackspace is offering hybrid clouds powered by OpenStack that allow companies to tap into all three kinds of hosting.
For example, HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company, now uses Rackspace’s hybrid cloud solutions to supports its marketing toolset including blogs, analytics, social media, email and more.
With the hybrid cloud, HubSpot, with 8,600 customers, can now rapidly grow and change workloads as it expands its product offerings and its demands. HubSpot has reduced its costs and increased its efficiency as a result of a move to Rackspace’s hybrid cloud, according to HubSpot.
“Really this hybrid cloud is the next generation of the cloud,” Weston said.

Full disclosure: Graham Weston is co-founder of Geekdom and Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

Six Startups to Compete at the 2013 Innotech San Antonio Beta Summit

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

At the Innotech San Antonio Beta Summit Wednesday at 3 p.m. six startup companies will pitch their companies. The audience will select one startup as the winner of the 2013 Beta Summit and that company will receive the trophy pictured here.
This is the sixth annual beta summit at the Innotech San Antonio conference. It’s a great place to showcase San Antonio’s newest and most innovative technology companies.
This year, Nick Longo, managing director of Geekdom, will serve as the event’s moderator. Geekdom and the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce are sponsoring the event. Silicon Hills News is hosting the event.

Here’s the list of companies presenting at the Innotech San Antonio Beta Summit at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center on Wednesday at 3 p.m.

1. SocialRest is social media for developers made simple. The company, which spun out of 3 Day Startup in San Antonio, takes care of maintaining API changes on social networks so developers no longer have to redeploy their applications. They can simply code and forget about it. With SocialRest, they do not have to go back and fix old applications. Clay Selby is the company’s founder.

2. SOLOSHOT is a first of its kind product that enables anyone – from extreme sport athletes to little league parents – to easily film the action with NO camera operator. The SOLOSHOT tripod automatically keeps a camera pointed towards the subject. SOLOSHOT is manufactured in-house in San Antonio. Scott Taylor and Chris Boyle are the founders of SOLOSHOT.

3. Amazing JellyBean is a smart power switch that reboots your devices in the correct order to solve connection problems. About 80 percent of all Internet connectivity problems can be fixed by simply rebooting the devices, according to Jim Pyle, founder and inventor of the Amazing Jellybean. The company raised more than $10,000 on Kickstarter in a recently successful campaign.

4. Kirpeep, which stands for Keeping It Real People, is an exchange engine working to empower those who provide value to their communities, by making it easy to exchange for goods and services, with or without money. Steven Quintanilla, a 2010 graduate of M.I.T., is the founder. The company received a $25,000 investment from the Geekdom Fund.

5. Sportybird is a cloud-based social platform built for in-game analytics of youth soccer. All collegiate and pro teams around the world use in-game analytics to improve team performance. Joshua Swank and John Trenholm, founders of Sportybird.io, are bringing the same technology to youth teams. The company received a $25,000 investment from the Geekdom Fund.

6. Greenhouse connects the crowd of Funders with passionate Founders. Greenhouse recognizes that great companies begin with a great community. The Greenhouse crowdfunding platform helps Funders discover companies that are important to them, lets Funders invest for equity in the companies, and provides Funders and Founders with the tools to build value together. Roberto Rondero de Mosier and Nathan Roach are the founders.

Disclosure: Innotech and Geekdom are sponsors of Silicon Hills News

Women Find Their Inner Geek at San Antonio Innotech

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

Rackspace Battles Patent Trolls

April 15, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Rackspace wants to wipe out so called “patent trolls.”
And as Alan Schoenbaum, chief counsel at San Antonio-based Rackspace, detailed in a blog post titled “Kill The Patent, Kill The Troll” last Friday, that’s a difficult task.
“Despite our efforts, these patent troll lawsuits keep popping up like weeds. It’s like a never-ending game of whack-a-troll,” Schoenbaum wrote.
Patent trolls often work as shell companies that buy patents and then “extort settlements from well-meaning businesses,” according to Schoenbaum.
“Most of these patent troll cases are brought by shell companies whose only asset is the patent itself,” Schoenbaum said.
He said the latest patent infringement lawsuit against Rackspace is another frivolous one. It was filed last week by a “known Patent Assertion Entity called Rotatable Technologies, which claims to own the patent to a type of screen rotation technology – you know, when you turn your iPhone and the screen shifts orientation from portrait mode to landscape mode? It is the functionality we use in our Cloud Notes mobile app, which is the same functionality used by virtually every app in the app store.”
In addition to Rackspace, Rotatable has also sued Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target and Whole Foods Market.
In response, Rackspace is fighting back. It has challenged the validity of the patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and is seeking to have it declared invalid.
Rackspace chose to fight the patent instead of paying a fine to the company, even though the fight would be more expensive, because it wants to put an end to patent trolls extorting payments from companies for flimsy patents that hinder innovation, Schoenbaum said.
Patent trolls clearly hamper innovation, especially in the open source community, Schoenbaum said. The Internet was built on Open Source software and Rackspace created OpenStack, open source cloud computing software, which depends on open source innovations.
“Virtually every website is reliant on open source software,” Schoenbaum said.
In addition to the litigation costs, small businesses and technology companies also have to spend time dealing with patent troll demands and that hampers innovation, Schoenbaum said. Rackspace has been vigilant in its fight against patent trolls.
Last week, Rackspace filed a complaint against IP Nav and Parallel Iron in federal court in San Antonio.
Rackspace has seen a 500 percent spike in legal spending to combat patent trolls since 2010.
Overall, patent trolls cost the U.S. economy about $29 billion in 2011, up from $7 billion in 2005, according to a 2012 Boston University study.
So far, Rackspace has fought a patent troll in court and won and also sued one.
Patent trolls not only affect Rackspace, but they affect the company’s customers as well, Schoenbaum said.
“We think it’s an unfortunate use of the patent system and the law needs to be changed so that developers, small business and tech companies don’t have to defend themselves against these kinds of lawsuits,” he said. “We’re not saying there shouldn’t be patent litigation.”
Schoenbaum said the patent trolls play a game simply intended to extract small settlements from numerous companies. And that’s an abuse of the patent system.
“I think it’s gotten worse because more entrepreneurs have gotten into the game and seen how easy it is to make money,” Schoenbaum said.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issues half a million new patents every year and patent trolls often buy up old patents and then seek to enforce them.
Lawsuits against patent trolls cost $5 million to $6 million to defend, Schoenbaum said. That’s why so many small businesses are forced to settle, he said.
To combat patent trolls, Rackspace supports the Shield Act, which stands for “Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes.” The bill, HR 6245, introduced by Congressman Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon, seeks to protect technology companies from frivolous patent lawsuits that costs jobs and resources.
“The SHEILD Act will put the financial burden on so-called “patent trolls” that buy patents soley to sue the American tech startups that created the products,” according to a statement from Congressman DeFazio.
Rackspace is also supporting efforts to stomp out patent trolls through its memberships in the Coalition for Patent Fairness, Internet Association, Internet Infrastructure Coalition, App Developers Alliance and the Electronic Frontier Association.

Startup Grind San Antonio Launches Featuring Interview with Jason Seats

April 13, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Startup Grind, based in Mountain View, Calif. seeks to foster entrepreneurship through storytelling.
Derek Anderson founded Startup Grind, which now has chapters in 40 cities and 20 countries around the world.
One of the latest chapters is Startup Grind San Antonio.
The values of Startup Grind are important ones to foster an entrepreneurial environment.
“We believe in making friends, not contacts. We believe in giving, not taking. We believe in helping others before helping yourself. We are truly passionate about helping founders, entrepreneurs and startups succeed. We intend to make their startup journey less lonely, more connected and more memorable.”
The first Startup Grind San Antonio event takes place on April 23 at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio and features a one on one interview with Jason Seats, cofounder of SliceHost and managing director of the TechStars Cloud. The TechStars Demo Day for its second class of 12 companies is Thursday in San Antonio. Seats has helped to launch 23 TechStars Cloud companies. He is also an active angel investor.
Startup Grind also has a chapter in Austin, headed up by Andi Gillentine, co-founder of Whit.li. She launched that chapter last year and has held several successful events at Capital Factory. The next one is April 29th at Capital Factory featuring an interview with Mellie Price, founder of Source Spring and Front Gate Tickets. Startup Grind also has a Dallas chapter.
Geekdom is sponsoring Startup Grind San Antonio and Vid Luther with ZippyKid, a WordPress hosting site, is also sponsoring the event.
Startup Grind San Antonio will kick off at 6 p.m. with pizza and beer. The interview with Seats will take place from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. and will feature an interactive question and answer session with the audience. So please sign up now and get your tickets, which are limited.
Startup Grind San Antonio’s May speaker is David Spencer, founder of Onboard Systems and Startup Grind San Antonio’s speaker for June is Pat Condon, cofounder of Rackspace.

In February, I was lucky to attend Startup Grind’s annual conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The speakers were fabulous. Here’s a video that shows some highlights from that event.

Austin-based StoryPress Launches Kickstarter Campaign

April 13, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Mike Davis, founder of StoryPress, has gotten a lot of traction for his free storytelling application since launching late last year.
He got the idea for the company when he wanted to record some stories from his grandma, Bea, for future generations. Davis created an iPhone and iPad app that does just that.
So far, StoryPress has been featured in PC Magazine and Mashable. Davis kicked off a Kickstarter campaign April 1st to raise $15,000 for the next version of the software and to enhance its features. So far, he’s raised $4,577 from 92 backers. He’s almost a third of the way to reaching his goal with 17 days to go.
Silicon Hills News also did a Q&A with Davis and Slice of Silicon Hills News featured him in this recent video interview.

Disclosure: Storypress is advertising on Silicon Hills News this month.

Greenhouse Founders Featured on A Slice of Silicon Hills News

April 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

Finding Funding for your startup is hard, but Greenhouse is trying to make it easier.
The company is one of several firms taking advantage of the JOBS act of 2012, which relaxes regulations for equity investing and allows individuals to own stock in new startups without being SEC accredited. This means that you, or a friend of yours, can own equity in fledgling startups – as long as you go through a web portal that handles the legal issues.
This is exactly the service that Greenhouse provides. Founders R.C. Rondero de Mosier and Nathan Roach are based in Austin and San Antonio respectively, and hope to create a crowdfunding community in the south Texas area that benefits startups and investors as well as the local economies. With equity crowdfunding, the Greenhouse users will actually own part of the local startups they invest in, creating an incentive to stick with and promote such startups in the future.
“This creates a larger community because you turn your purchasers into advocates, and people are going to be ideally more long term engaged with you,” says Rondero de Mosier.
The JOBS act rules will go into effect as soon as the SEC releases regulations for those rules. Under old rules, only SEC accredited investors could purchase equity in private startup companies – or companies that had not already made an initial public stock offering. Such investors had to be either worth around a million dollars or prove that they made more than $200K annually for several years – a rule which Rondero de Mosier says excluded around 94 percent of Americans from investing in small businesses without public stocks. Once the new rules pass, companies like Greenhouse will open the door for those people by providing a web portal for such investment.
According to Forbes.com, the new rules will allow individuals making less than $100K – most of us – to invest five percent of their annual income in equity crowdfunding. Individuals making more than $100K may invest 10 percent.
Greenhouse is currently in beta, and plans to launch once the SEC rules are fully implemented. Users can sign up for the beta at FundGreenhouse.com.