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It Takes a Startup Village and Chris Valentine Created One for SXSW

March 11, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Chris Valentine seems to be everywhere at once in SXSW Startup Village, watching, analyzing, conferencing, counting. One minute he’s in the Hilton’s Grand Ballroom gauging the crowd and seemingly an instant later he’s transported to the Austin Chamber offices (which actually can only be reached by an escalator, an outside door and an elevator).
This is his baby. The Startup Village, which last year was the darling of SXSW Interactive, was an idea he brought to Interactive director Hugh Forrest three years ago. Last year, he introduced Startup Austin—a series of events within the event– to showcase all the reasons Austin is a great city to build to transplant a startup. Ultimately, he’d love for Startup Village to consume an entire block of buildings…like an actual village.
There is a palpable energy in Startup Village. Everyone is hopped up on the possibilities of the new technologies, new companies, new investments. And Valentine shares in all of it.
“I’m so excited by all of it,” he said. “There are so many incredible things happening with technology and I get to work with some of the most amazing, smartest people alive. I was fortunate to find something I am passionate about. I love what I do, I am good at what I do and I’m respected for what I do. ‘Before, I did events but I didn’t specialize. I didn’t have a passion. Now I love to focus on technology.”
He says this despite the fact that managing the Accelerator and Startup Village is fraught with potential failure.
“Because it’s such a large event you don’t get to do what you do at other events, like rehearsals,” Valentine said. “And it’s fluid, things are constantly changing. At other events it’s considered rude if you walk out but because at SXSW it’s actually okay…. The deal with startups—there were 56 at the accelerator this year– is there’s a lot of volatility. We’ve had startups that got acquired, like, two weeks out. Some people run out of money. Some are in acquisition mode and their buyers say ‘We don’t want you to market.’”
Add to that the staffing reality that Valentine works with two professionals, Michelle Murdough—Accelerator assistant– and Maria Alonso—Startup Village assistant—but everyone else on his staff of 50-60 people are volunteers.
And yet, Mudough said, “Perfection is his starting point.” Murdough has worked with Valentine six years on various events including SXSW. She noted his focus on detail, down to making sure each pen on the judge’s table works.
“The smallest thing is something he would obsess over, more than….” she gestures a big picture. “And I’ve been like: Are you kidding me? You really want me to sit and check on every pen? Sure enough, one of them doesn’t work.”
They’ve had their blow ups in all the tension, but over the years they’ve learned to work together when something cranks up the pressure, like today when a pitching team that was supposed to pitch at 3:30 never appeared. Someone had to talk to the judges, the other teams, the emcee and make changes that would all be upended if the team suddenly showed up. Valentine and Murdough spell each other in those moments, taking turns dealing with the circumstance. “He has a huge heart and a tremendous focus on his work,” she said.
Valentine sees SXSW Accelerator and Startup Village as part of the startup ecosystem of the city that has been steadily growing over the past 10 years.
“I love this community,” he said, “the eclecticness, the quality of lifestyle…we have our own identity as far as a tech community. A new wave coming up and we’re different from the other tech communities. SXSW is not your traditional conference and I think people see and appreciate that. It’s so intertwined with the city. More and more the city realizes the value of startups, that they create vibrancies, possibilities.”
Valentine wound up as SXSW Accelerator and Startup Village Producer by a circuitous route. He got his degree in communication and behavioral science. But what he really loved was the arts. When he was a kid he lived part of the time in New York and New Jersey and his parents often took him to the museum. He began volunteering at various arts events just to be around the arts and wound up being asked to run the events. Two years in a row he created a Dancefest with 39 dance companies and 450 dancers over five days.
He was working as a recruiter with Intelquest when he decided to ask the marketing department if he could switch jobs and become their event manager. When he showed the head of marketing his portfolio, they were thrilled.
“People love it when you are passionate and have a lot of energy,” he said. Two years later, he was asked to run events for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and they elevated him to Executive Director. Then he started his own events video and audio company for the Chamber of Commerce and tourism industry, but when the tourism industry slowed down he segued to other jobs. He took on events management for the Busby Foundation for Central Texas for families of patients with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) which he still does.
When he feels overwhelmed by the pressure at SXSW, he remembers the families he deals with who are dealing with really painful issues and it restores his perspective. “People are dealing with really hard life issues,” he said.
But none of that means he lets anything slide.
“This event is very, very important to Chris,” Murdough said. “This one has his name and reputation on it. This one has to go right.”

SubtleData’s Developers Garage at SXSW

March 11, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

At the SubtleData Developer Garage event

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could order and pay for a beer – or any other food or beverage – at your favorite bar just by using a smartphone? Sure it would. Can you? Well, probably not. While there are most likely a million cool ways to build an app that lets you order from your table or have a cold beer waiting for you at your favorite bar, there probably isn’t any.
Why? Your Smartphone app doesn’t speak the same language as the cash register at the bar. In fact, having a cloud based app communicate with the server infrastructure of an establishment’s point of sale system is really difficult. The POS infrastructure – as in your favorite bar’s registers, touch screen software, servers the software talks to, etc – doesn’t speak in a smartphone-friendly language.
Building software that translates into each of the many different POS systems used in bars and restaurants is time consuming prohibitively expensive for app developers–costing thousands of dollars. Thus, your smartphone simply can’t buy you a beer.
SubtleData – an Austin-based startup – is solving this problem. It has created software that integrates with 12 of the major POS systems — including four of the five most-used systems – which gives them the ability to communicate with 60 percent of the POS system market. SubtleData installs a plug-in on local POS servers which translates to the SubtleData cloud platform. The cloud platform speaks the same code language as smartphone app developers – enabling developers to finally build that app which can tell your bar’s register you would like a beer.

Richard Bagdonas of SubtleData

“Our goal is to make it easy for people to build apps that interact with point of sale systems at bars, restaurants, casinos, hotels, nightclubs,” says President and CTO Richard Bagdonas. “The developers that build the actual apps utilize our framework and platform to get to the point of sale.”
This year, SubtleData will release new API technology that provides developers with code shortcuts to create POS related apps even faster — replacing operations that require around 80 lines of code with ones requiring 20. They showed a demo of the new technology at the SubtleData Developer Garage event, which was held yesterday at Bourbon Girl in Austin, TX.
“Mobile application developers can build an app in days, and it used to take them months and years,” says Bagdonas.
Bagdonas says that 550 startups are already using the SubtleData platform. Several such startups attended their SubtleData event and pitched their ideas to venture capitalists.

Pitching to investors

Innovative Delivery Systems President Dietrich Diehl, who pitched his Ordr It product to investors, is using SubtleData to integrate into the POS systems of stadium concessions. Diehl’s product is an app that would let fans at sporting events order food right from their seats instead of waiting at the concession stand.
“If you want to integrate yourself into these POS systems it will cost you like $100,000 to $500,000,” said Diehl. “These guys do it essentially for free and then charge a percentage of revenue.”
Diehl says that using SubtleData helps their sales pitch to companies who own stadiums — who would otherwise need to agree to split the high cost of software integration.
Coupon Media project manager Eric Moore also attended the event, but did not present. Moore does not use SubtleData, but is interested in its potential. Moore’s business helps companies integrate coupon services in their POS while preventing fraud.
“We are looking at SubtleData as a way to kind of streamline our process into some of the newer POS systems,” says Moore. “It’s a huge cost saving if it works.”
Moore said his company spent “tens of thousands of dollars” integrating with their first POS vendor. He hopes that SubtleData will incorporate coding for “shopping cart” style transactions to help his company fully integrate coupons.

: The Panel (From left) Mark Turner, Lyle Worthington, Bryan Menell

The SubtleData Developer Garage event also had a panel of industry operators, who fielded questions about the current technologies in the restaurant and hotel industry and talked about what they would like to see from new technologies that use POS communications.
Restaurant Freedom Owner Mark Turner, who operates 18 restaurant locations, says that he sees potential in the new apps based on SubtleData’s technology but needs them to be integrated in a simple and easy way.
“I don’t want to have a loyalty program that is stand alone, that is different than my ability to checkout, that is different than my interactions on social media,” says Turner. “It’s just a matter of – can they get them all to work together as simplistically as possible?”
Turner says that for a restaurant owner to bite on a new technology there has to be some cost efficiency or certainty of revenue.
“It’s an allocation of my marketing dollars,” says Turner. “I’ve got at budget already that I am planning on spending. If you bring me a way that seems to be cost efficient and have a better return on investment over all, I am absolutely open to looking at that.”
One returning SXSW startup has already decided to use SubtleData for its efficiency. Noom – or Next One’s On Me – is an app that lets users gift small food or drink items to friends or acquaintances. The current version of Noom requires you to redeem gifts by showing the app to an employee at a Noom-friendly establishment. The employee must enter a coupon-like code back at the register before you receive your item. NOOM CEO Sara Rodell is using SubtleData to make the app’s gift redeeming process more elegant.
“With SubtleData, the user gets to choose what they want to redeem,” says Rodell. “Once they make that selection, which is entered into the POS, there’s no interaction that’s needed with the waiter or waitress.”
Soon, Noom users will be able to redeem a gift simply by walking into a Noom-friendly establishment, selecting their item, and entering their table number. The app can either generate an already paid ticket in the establishment’s POS system or can add the gift to an existing bill. Rodell hopes to have the new Noom app ready by this fall.
So thanks to Noom, and SubtleData, we will soon be able to walk into a pub, enter a table number, and have a pint delivered right to our table. Cheers!

Realty Mogul Won the HATCH Pitch Competition at SXSW

March 10, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

It may be good news for the economy that two of the top winners of the HATCH pitch competition make it easier for investors to invest.
Realty Mogul, a company that calls itself “crowdfunding for real estate” won the HATCH pitch competition presented by the Houston Technology Center Sunday. The Los Angeles company, whose impassioned pitch earned it the term “histrionic” by judges, makes it simple for accredited investors to find qualified real estate investments and pool resources with minimum investments as low as $5,000.
Second place was won by Molecule Software, a Houston company that simplifies trading of stocks for small energy companies.
Third place was claimed by Austin company Taskbox, which processes mobile email inboxes into priority tasks according to due dates and other factors. Taskbox also won the audience popularity award, a new feature this year created and managed by Protexting.
Greg Wright, HATCH founder, said the 100 companies that applied for the pitch competition were very diverse in focus and product type including a health IT company—Snap Health—and Lynx Laboratories which created a 3-D camera that measures the object it’s photographing. Last year, the HATCH competition spilled out into the hall with many people standing in line, trying to get in. A number of the audience members were last year’s participants, Wright said.
The HATCH competition, which was staged for the first time at the 2012 SXSW Startup Village, is unique in that all the participants are coached extensively before presenting. Each team has a coach who meets with them either in person or virtually, until the pitch is right.
One of the judges, this year, last year’s winner Distil Inc. CEO Rami Essaid, has done a lot of Google hangouts with various startups and blogged extensively about the pitching process.
“A big piece of what pitches needs to happen is to make the audience relate. What made us successful last year was we told a story about the problem. A lot of the companies don’t engage the audience that well. When you tell a story in four minutes, it’s really hard to be concise with the message. You have to treat it like you have 30 seconds instead of four minutes. That forces you to get the message down.”
Distil found an investor among the judges last year, John Frankel, a partner with ff Venture Capital and closed a $1.8 million deal in December. Frankel was also a judge this year.
Wright said it was largely Essaid’s energy and enthusiasm that sealed the deal last year.
“You just have to watch Rami to understand why they will be successful,” he said. “He was there at everything. I would email the group or send out a Tweet ‘Got a TV opportunity in 15 minutes; be here or miss it’ and he would be the first one there. Or ‘At the Bing lot, one of the investors is here, come and join us,’ and he would be there.”
Each of the 12 judges had a virtual $1 million to invest and whichever contestant garnered the largest share of that investment won. Each contestant had four minutes to pitch with six minutes of questions from the judges.
Judges were blunt, sometimes almost chiding with contestants, calling them out on business models that looked more like features of other products than businesses on their own, questioning their ability to get customers. Joel Yarmon of Draper Associates told Taskbox founder Andrew Eye that he’d be “pissed” if he’d given a seed-round investment to a company—as the Central Texas Angel Network recently did for Taskbox—and the company used it to find more investments. Eye assured him that CTAN recognized the size of the players he was competing against and supported his pitching to which Yarmon replied “Let’s agree to disagree.”
“I don’t think the judges are harsher this year than last year,” Frankel quipped. “I just think they’re grumpier.”

DreamIt Ventures Austin’s Inaugural Demo Day Introduces Nine Startups

March 10, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

On the Stage at DreamIt Austin Demo Day -Photography by Samantha Davis

DreamIt Ventures Austin’s inaugural demo day showcased its first crop of startups at an event Saturday.
After 12 weeks of work at Capital Factory in downtown Austin, the nine startups finally took to the stage at the Bullock Texas State History Museum to pitch their companies to potential investors.
DreamIt Ventures is a startup accelerator similar to the TechStars program – helping startups make over a year of progress in just three months. The program is in Philidephia, New York, Austin, and TelAviv, Israel. It has completed 9 classes since its start back in 2008. The DreamIt ventures program offers qualifying startups free office space, a stipend for living expenses, dedicated mentors, legal and accounting services, and access to tons of potential investors. While the program generally lasts 14 weeks, the following nine startups had to be ready in 12 so they could have their demo day at South by Southwest Inactive.
Doccastor
When trying to put together a big tech conference, getting sponsors and investors to provide funding is crucial. But reeling in those sponsors can be tricky, if there is no proof that people will attend. CEO and co-founder Kyle Christian Steel presented a solution to this problem.

Kyle Christian Steele and Himanshu Pagey of Doccaster

Doccastor is designed to help show investors how much buzz their event is getting. It accomplishes this by creating a virtual locker that holds all the information for a given event. When users log into Doccaster with Linkedin and look at the event information, their activity is tracked to show their level of interest. The event creator using Doccastor can then show potential sponsors how many people are checking out the event and considering participating. Any sponsor or user who posts information in the locker can see the basic profile information of any user who viewed their content – giving sponsors valuable feedback and more incentive to participate.
Doccaster also makes it easy for users to find out about what events are happening around them. The service can be logged into with any mobile device, and users can view all related documents as well as contact the event creator. Additionally, users can see any other doccastor events happening in close proximity.
Doccaster has just started a $1 million round.
NewsTastic
Presented by CEO Eric Paradis, NewsTastic was created to link local journalists with paying local jobs. They have created a marketplace where local companies who need an event covered can sponsor journalists and pay them for an article.
“We were able to see firsthand just how outdated and inefficient existing news organizations are,” says Paradis. “NewsTastic has a better approach”.
Companies have several incentives to do this. First, it’s an easy way for them to find a journalist to cover the company’s local event without hiring a PR agency. Second, the company can get its name out by sponsoring coverage of local events that affect potential customers. Any articles written will have the sponsor information visible to readers.
The service is also a way for local freelancers to build a reputation and earn extra cash. Reporters who are able to establish their credentials will automatically get access to paying jobs. New reporters can have access to jobs that don’t pay, but boost their credentials. Successfully completing those assignments will increase their credentials and unlock paying assignments.
NewsTastic has already signed an agreement with Microsoft to cover events at SXSW. They will receive around $150 per story from Microsoft and pass along $100 to the journalists who covered the story.
Newstastic is now opening a funding round of $800,000.
Pincam

Kevin Taehwa Kim of Pincam Austin Demo Day -Photography by Samantha Davis

Pincam was presented by Kevin Kim, who works with an app development team for South Korea-based SK planet. The Pincam app is a video recorder that lets the user “pin”, or mark while recording, their favorite five second highlight segments to later combine into one highlight reel.
“Pincam is the only app that insures users capture the best moments in their special days,” says Kim.
Pincam can do this while recording an original video or can be used to edit a video the user already has on his iOS device. Edited videos can be grouped together into channels for other users to see. The channels can be open to everyone or restricted to a group of contacts such as family and friends. The app also makes it easy to share the video with Gmail, Facebook, or other outlets.
Seer
Presented by Conall Arora, Seer is a web app that congregates all the important data that a user needs access to every day into one location.
Seer is an intelligent desktop that can pull in multiple kinds of files from Gmail, Google Drive, Exchange, Dropbox, Evernote, and Apple desktops. Once the user gives it access to one of these sources, it will pull in and index to one single personalized desktop. That content can then be organized for easy access. When you select any of those files to work on, Seer pulls up a menu of any content related to it such as emails or word documents.
Seer is also in the process of implementing an intelligence component where the program can figure out what information you need to see first each day you wake and turn on your computer. Arora Claims Seer will be even able to prioritize the most important people in your life. By analyzing words or phrases in your content, Seer will bring you information related to your closest contacts before any other information.
Seer will release a beta in April to the first 700 people on their waitlist. The app will be launched in June.
Trendkite
Presented by CEO AJ Bruno, Trendkite is a media monitoring company. It helps companies find out where their PR efforts are best spent by monitoring the web for articles, Facebook messages, and tweets about that company.
“We are helping organizations understand what the world thinks of them, and act accordingly.” says Bruno.
Trendkite gives companies a dashboard that gives them several different metrics for how often their business is referenced and where. They search and scan millions of articles a day. The metrics can be filtered to include only the data a company wants – such as financial articles or press releases. The dashboard can also help target certain information, such as what the press is saying about a company’s CEO. Additionally, Trendkite allows companies to compare themselves to their competitors on different metrics.
The company has as an annual subscription fee for their service. They have already acquired several bigger clients such as Opentack and Gamefly.
Trendkite has just opened a $750,000 round.
FastFig
FastFig does for math what Microsoft Word does for writing. Presented by Brian Peacock, FastFig is intended to help students learn math more efficiently. His team wants students to spend more time on math and less time crunching numbers.
“The students are spending too much time crumpling up pieces of paper because they missed one number, rather than focusing on how to understand and set up the problem.” says CMO Greg Heller-LaBelle.
FastFig intends its product to be used by freshmen and sophomores in college to more quickly crunch numbers after setting up complex equations. They also see it being used by advanced high school students. The processor can do basic math, algebra, and calculus – and it can tell the difference between math and English so that note taking is still easy. The processor is browser based, making it available on almost any device. The math documents are also very easy to share.
FastFig is currently being utilized at the University of Pittsburg as well as a couple high schools. It is starting a $250,000 round of funding which will enable it to put the technology in 30 schools across the country.
Stereotypes

Jason Keck of Stereotypes

Presented by CEO Jason Keck, Stereotypes is trying to make music personal again.
“It’s a group messaging app that lets you have real, two-way conversations with your friends around music,” says Keck.
You can share different music with different groups of friends. The app is designed to push messages with memorable songs to groups of people, letting them somewhat relive memories of listening to the song.
According to Keck, test users stay on the app for an average of 8 minutes and messaged groups have an average of 8 friends. They will take advantage of this by offering the app for free and then using established revenue models such as ads and in-app purchasing. Keck also sees the app being used successfully by different music groups to connect with their fans.
They will open a $500,000 round this summer.
Yevvo
Yevvo is a video sharing app presented by founder Ben Rubin. The company is based in Israel. Yevvo allows its users to share live, raw video from their mobile phones almost instantly. App users just press one button and their phone is a live camera.
Once a Yevvo user is live, any other users linked to him gets an alert that there is a live stream happening and can follow that stream by accepting the alert. The video is not saved – it’s designed to be a one-time opportunity to glance into the life of another user wherever they are.
“The power of video is in the feeling of drama, anticipation, uncertainty. This unfiltered intimacy we have with the audience,” says Rubin.
There is currently a real-time lag of about 7 – 12 seconds, but Yevvo is working to cut that time down. The person serving the live video can see the number of viewers grow in real time and will be able to identify what friends are tuning in.
Yevvo has just finished a closed beta of 300 users. Of the 100 sampled, users spent an average of five minutes using the app each day.
Yevvo is now available for iOS devices in the app store. Rubin claims the app is currently registering 10 users per minute right now.
Planana
Planana is a rewards platform designed to help brands maximize visibility during the events they sponsor by interacting with attendees.
“We turn event attendees into brand advocates,” said presenter and CEO Anna Sergeeva. “And we convert that social momentum into actionable data for brands to use events as a viable way to increase their sales.”
With Planana, a user who signed up to go to a sponsored event is given incentives to reference the sponsor in social media for a reward. By tweeting that they are at a Microsoft event, for instance, a user might receive special seating or a free drink. Users can tweet a default message but can create their own as well. Planana also tracks who attends events and whether their attendance resulted in a conversion – or a purchase of some sort. They can even track some conversions weeks after the event – creating extremely useful analytics for brands.
Planana has been generating revenue for 5 weeks and claims to already be profitable. Six major companies have already signed on. They are starting a round of $500,000 in order to scale up their services and sales team.

Flying High with Interact ATX! (Adventures in Austin, Part 3.2.1)

March 10, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY IAN PANCHEVRE

Wow, wow, wow.
What a whirlwind has #SXSWInteractive been so far! I’m not even half way in and I’ve already had the pleasure of hearing addresses from Bre Pettis (CEO @ MakerBot), Travis Kalanick (CEO @ Uber), Joe Zadeh (Director of Product @ Airbnb), Scott Chacon (Vice President of R&D @ GitHub), Steven Blank (Author of Four Steps to the Epiphany and Startup Owners Manual) Elon Musk (PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Solar Cities), and former Vice President, Al Gore.
I’ve also been able to play with some amazing new technologies like 3D Printers at UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering and motion-control software/hardware at Leap Motion’s promotional tent.
Not to mention, I’ve managed to score bunches of free t-shirts and get a few books signed – all while cluttering my pockets with flyers, cards, and stickers from plenty of early-stage startups. Oh, and my phone battery is dead for the what feels like the tenth time in the past two days.
But I wanted to take a brief moment to reflect on some of the amazing people I’ve gotten to know over the weekend. I’m at SXSW solely because of an organization, Interact ATX, that has sponsored badges for a youthful few in hopes of creating a community of entrepreneurial students from around the country.
Interact ATX was founded by Maran Nelson, a current senior at the University of Texas, who has been working with startups for the past few years. Nelson recently spent a summer in New York, where she came to appreciate the exotic appeal that Austin evidently had on the rest of the country.
“I was pleasantly surprised that a bunch of people thought Austin was the coolest city ever. Whenever I told people that I was from Austin, they would go crazy,” explains Nelson.
Nelson continues, “I asked myself, ‘What is the coolest thing that Austin has to offer each year?’ Clearly, I thought about South by Southwest. And then I asked, ‘what can I do to make something happen?’”
Nelson then got to work, reaching out to contacts at various universities as well as potential financial backers. The work, Nelson admits, “was a lot, especially for the first year for something to exist.”
But Nelson didn’t let logistical difficulties hold her back. At first, Nelson was told that having 25 or 40 participants would make the endeavor successful. “I said no, we are doing 100.”
Ultimately, Interact ATX received over 500 applications.
Admitted students represent a wide range of universities, including: MIT, Princeton, Brown, The University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale(!), Harvard, Rice, and The University of Texas.
Interact ATX sponsors – whose financial contributions subsidized badges, operations, and events – include Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s 20 Under 20 Fellowship, Balderdash, Capital Factory, Highland Capital Partners, the Cockrell School of Engineering, Readyforce, Bain Capital Ventures, and many more.
“It’s been a great experience, interacting with like-minded people who are working on projects that are trying to change the world,” comments Param Jaggi, a student at Vanderbilt.
Jaggi has built upon his high school science research – an endeavor which took him all the way to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) – to begin commercializing an inexpensive and disposable green technology. Jaggi’s algae-based technology can filter carbon emissions from the exhaust of cars, which contribute to over 25 percent of global carbon admissions.
Thomas Sohmers is another gifted mind. Sohmers, currently working on embedded cluster computing, has cracked the code for retrofitting raw processors from cell phones and tablets to create high performance computers. Sohmers hopes that his technologies will eventually replace current servers and mainframes with more powerful systems that use less power. As a seventeen year-old high school student from Hudson Massachusetts, Sohmers is a finalist competing for $100,000 in seed capital from Peter Thiel’s 20 Under 20 Fellowship.
“It’s been really fun, I feel really honored to be a part of this group,” says Sohmers. “I really like Austin, it’s a lot better than three feet of snow.”
And then, there are the Longhorns.
Albert Rondan, Jeff Mahler, Chris Slaughter, and Dustin Hopper have teamed up with their professor from the University of Texas, Dr. Srirarm Vishwanath, to start Lynx Laboratories, a company which is producing a handheld 3D structural capture camera. For the laymen among us, their device is used like a traditional camera to capture and render objects or rooms in 3D.
“It takes the point and shoot experience of a 2D camera and applies it to a 3D concept,” explains Rondan, as he demoed a 3D image of an Interact Fellow’s face on his computer, using the software to circle around the face in surprising detail. The technology is impressive and is currently looking for funding through a recently launched Kickstarter.
In the words of Nam Chu Hoai, a student at Boston University, “The amount of energy at South By is overwhelming!” Indeed it is.
Fortunately, a select group of young entrepreneurs have each other to rely on as they navigate the brave new world of South by Southwest.
Please stay tuned for the next segment in Adventures in Austin!

Previous segments:
Apparently there’s this conference happening in Austin?? Adventures in Austin, Part 1.0.0

Adventures in Austin, Part 2.0.5: SXSW = big fun and big business.

AuManil Wins the Austin Startup Fast Pitch Competition at SXSW

March 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Bart Bohn with AuManil pitching at the Austin Fast Pitch competition at #SXSW

The free to play model dominates the multi-billion dollar video game industry.
So a lot of game makers capitalize on that by selling things to players in the game to make money.
AuManil, which creates software to manage the customer relationship market for video games, wants to make sure the game makers capture the most revenue possible.
AuManil won the Austin Startup Fast Pitch competition Saturday afternoon. The Austin Technology Incubator and the Central Texas Angel Network sponsored the event in the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s offices at South by Southwest Interactive.
It was a close race said Kyle Cox, director of wireless at the Austin Technology Incubator. He reported that AuManil won with 74 out of a possible 100 points. It was just two points in front of the next competitor, he said.
The other companies presenting included Circle Media, Dejaset, Ridescout and Tenduit.
As the winner of the competition, Bohn received a free entry into a funding cycle for CTAN and a six-month membership into the ATI portfolio.
Five Austin-based startups pitched to a panel of judges including John Stockton with Mayfield Fund, Krishna Srinivasan with Live Oak Venture, Bril Flint, chairman of CTAN and Pat Noonan with Austin Ventures.
“We’re AuManil, CRM for Whales,” Bohn told the panel as the first company to pitch.
Bohn explained that 70 percent of a video game’s revenue comes from whales or big fans, 20 percent from dolphins, moderately engaged fans, and 10 percent from minnows, fans that aren’t that engaged. AuManil’s software targets whales and allows the video game makers to use analytics to cater to their best customers.
“We’re taking game play data and mixing it with predicative and social analytics – acquiring, converting, retaining and migration from game to game to game,” Bohn said.
The company already has four games under management with its first product that targets increasing repeat business from engaged customers.
AuManil is seeking a $500,000 seed round of investment and already has 40 percent committed, Bohn said.
“We bring the measure to unmeasured media,” said Mark Piening of Circle Media. His company focuses on measuring brand engagement at events.
“We want to help brands understand what audiences want,” he said. It has created a software program that includes an “audience intelligence dashboard” that gives brands insights into consumer engagement.
Matt Peterson, founder and CEO of Dejaset, pitched his music app for bands to produce and sell live performances of songs to consumers. Dejaset is capturing more than 100 live performances in the next 10 days at SXSW. With the Dejaset app, bands can make their recordings available instantly for consumers to buy. Dejaset expects to have up to 3,000 artists signed up by this summer. The company takes a 50 percent cut of each song sold and provides a 10 percent cut to the venue hosting the band.
Ridescout aggregates transportation available to consumers in real time, said Jospeh Kopser, the company’s founder.
“Aggregation is the way of the future” Kopser said.
Kayak is focused on airlines and hotels and Ridescout is focused on transportation, Kopser said. It gets real time feeds of availability from pedicabs and other drivers that self report. It does not include services like Sidecar, which are not legally approved by the city of Austin, he said. The app also enables friends to get rides from friends for free, he said.
Lastly, Dave Perry, CEO of Tenduit, pitched the company that makes datacenters “more reliable and more efficient” with its software.
“Data centers suck,” Perry said. They require more energy than the entire airline industry, he said.
But most data centers operate at 50 percent or less of their capacity, Perry said. That’s due to lack of effective tools to manage all the computer servers inside, he said.
“It’s a huge problem and Tenduit is going to be part of that solution that makes that problem go away,” Perry said. The company raised $1.3 million in a seed round from friends and family and is seeking a $3 million Series A funding round to scale up sales and marketing, software development and operations.

Why Austin? At #SXSW

March 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
The Austin Startup session on Why Austin skewed aspirational Saturday morning as Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin and Kevin Koym of Tech Ranch explained that Austin is the city where you can “be yourself,” where people “look you in the eye and smile at you” and where the culture invites diversity of ideas and interests.
To make that last point, Koym discussed different technologies being explored in Austin from Arduino to Wiki Weapon to E-nose which detects and analyzes the chemical makeup of an odor to self monitoring devices.
“There are so many ideas that you wouldn’t see in Silicon Valley because it’s so expensive there you can’t take the risk,” Koym said. “Someone comes up with great idea and you have five teams doing the same thing. What a waste of effort.”
Goswami pointed out that, in Austin, there are myriad experiences to sample and, “if you like it, you hold onto it. If you go to the Continental Club and try two-stepping and you like it, the next time you go back you have a community.”
The session wasn’t entirely aspirational. Susan Davenport of the Chamber of Commerce and Jim Butler, manager at the City of Austin shared all the statistics so often quoted about the strength of the local economy and the growing resources for the entrepreneurial community.
One attendee expressed interest in moving his 12-person company to Austin and asked what first steps would be. Davenport explained that the Chamber can walk new businesses through all the steps from getting registered with the state, looking for office space and real estate for employees as well as introducing business owners to the community, which includes 75 organizations to support entrepreneurship.
“We find out what your needs are and come up with a strategy to meet those needs,” she said. Butler added that part of the city’s job was to help entrepreneurs with information about mentoring and financial resources.
Another question was posed by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur inspired to possibly move to Austin but wondering about VC opportunities and recruiting of talent. Davenport talked about the chamber’s effort to recruit talent and the fact that 72 countries attend SXSW and “we’re taking resumes all through the conference.”
Koym pointed out that Austin is six hours from Monterrey Mexico where development help can be found for $10 an hour and, from his experience, “Mexican developers kick ass.”
The VC question received a more fudged answer.
“We don’t have as strong a picture in the VC class,” Koym said. “I do believe we have more millionaires here per capita than almost anyplace else…if you’re looking for angel investment you can find that. It’s not necessarily in a formalized group…but you can find the guys who say ‘I’m going to take the risk with you.’”

A Visual Feast at #FEED Powered by Twitter at #SXSW Interactive

March 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

The second annual #FEED powered by Twitter at SXSW Interactive opened last night with a gala preview party.
“The five days of events focuses on “interactive social media feed art” created
by visual design artists from the The Meta Agency, telling the story of SXSW by merging social media, art, technology and wellness into an engaging offline experience,” said Len Stein, spokesman.
The first video “Generating Synchronciity” is by Justin Bolognino with Learned Evolution, producer of the events, parties and dances at the AMOA-Art House at Jones Center at 700 Congress Ave. He’ll be producing a new video every night, which we’ll post here.
To get the schedule for #FEED powered by Twitter, please visit Learned Evolution.

#FEED Powered by Twitter @Night 1 – “Generating Synchronicity” from #FEED on Vimeo.

Living the Life at Geeksta Paradise with Uber, Github and Airbnb at SXSW

March 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Uber, a ride-sharing app available in 30 cities nationwide, wants to change the way you get around.
Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, quizzed Travis Kalanick, CEO of San Francisco-based Uber during a morning session Saturday at South by Southwest Interactive titled “Geeksta Paradise: the ballers of Uber, Airbnb and Github.”
They kicked off the morning by playing the Harlem Shuffle and serving up Mimosas. More than 500 people packed into the A B and C conference rooms at the Hilton Austin downtown. It’s part of a day-long conference within the mega conference of SXSW, focused on Lean Startup methodology, based on the book by author and entrepreneur Eric Ries.
During the morning session, Kalanick discussed the challenges and opportunities of disrupting an incumbent industry: taxi cabs. He said Uber has received cease and desist orders in most of the markets in which it now operates. But it sued and won the right to operate in the those markets.
Still, Uber faces challenges expanding in the United States.
“It’s easier to do business in Paris than it is Colorado,” Kalanick said.
Uber is available in Dallas and Austin. It plans to expand to San Antonio and Houston in the future.
Kalanick also didn’t directly answer a question from an audience member about whether the company planned to go public.
“There’s so much money in the private markets right now,” said Kalanick.
So Uber isn’t looking at the public market right now, he said. It has raised $49.5 million from investors since Uber’s founding in 2010.
Uber is part of a movement called the shareable economy. Entrepreneurs have launched several businesses in the past few years focused on the transportation industry.
SideCar, which is operating in Austin, recently acquired HeyRide, a ride sharing app which received a cease and desist order from the city of Austin. Lyft is also chasing the ride-sharing market.
Other industries have found success in sharing consumer resources. Chief among them is Airbnb, a site that allows people to register their spare bedroom, cottage or house or even Airstream trailer to others. It’s a marketplace for people to find alternatives to a hotel or motel room.
Joe Zadeh, director of product at Airbnb, which launched in 2009, and Scott Chacon with Github, a social network for programmers, also shared their experiences with their companies in the shareable economy.
“Airbnb has to be everywhere where you are not,” Zadeh said. Thus, Airbnb has to be an international company to be successful, he said.

Hungry? Do #SXSW Like a Local, by Flow Nonfiction

March 8, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Lots of people from far flung places have descended upon Austin for the annual geekfest, film and music festival known as South by.
But amid all the mayhem of panels, meetups, parties and more, people get hungry. They get mighty hungry so that’s why this video by Flow Nonfiction is sooooo good when you’re soooo hungry. Flow Nonfiction created a 2013 SXSW: Do It Like a Local Guide. Go watch it now and then visit one of the places they recommend like: Hopdoddy, Home Slice Pizza, Barley Swine, Ramen Tatsuoya, Uchi, Uchiko, Justine’s Brasserie and more.
They also give tips on some of the best bars and venues in town to see live bands. And have you ever heard of Mouth by Mouthwest? Yes, it does exist and yes, it’s in a dental office.